Son of Cayn

by Jason McDonald

  Growing up in northeast Alabama, Alan moved north to South Carolina for college. He fell in love with the Upstate of South Carolina and forgot to go home afterward. While initially majoring in Physics at Furman University (Go Paladins!) and then moving on to Clemson University for additional studies in Civil Engineering (after deciding that his options for a Physics career were decidedly thin), he became a licensed engineer and now works for an international Engineering-Procurement-Construction company. During all of this he served a number of years as a soldier with the Army National Guard. Each of these careers, as well as a multitude of hobbies, helps bring depth and creativity to the characters and worlds he brings to life.

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  About Stormy McDonald

  Born in the midst of a thunderstorm in the darkest hours of a solstice morning, Stormy has been told she has a personality to match – full of sound and fury, and highly unpredictable. She come from a family of storytellers – traditional, oral storytellers, that is – so she supposes it’s little wonder that she’s driven to weave words as well. She can’t re-member a time when she didn’t love all things books – from the feel and smell of the pages, to the information they hold, to the tales that they tell – but storytelling is a labor of love, which doesn’t always pay the bills. Over the years, she’s worked a ridiculous variety of side jobs to support her writing habit, including waitress, security guard, library minion, sales person, hair dresser, handyman, and engineering drafter.

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  The following is an

  Excerpt from Book Two of The Cayn Trilogy:

  City of Cayn

  ___________________

  McDonald, Isom, and Stormy

  Available Soon from New Mythology Books

  eBook, Paperback and Audio

  Excerpt from “City of Cayn:”

  Standing in the clearing surrounded by the teamsters, Jasper knew of only one place to get help—The White Circle. He concentrated on his teleportation spell fueled, by the hope he would find answers to both the mystery of the Blood of Cayn and to the gems found in Gregori’s desk—gems designed specifically to trap a person’s psyche.

  As soon as he finished the incantation, Jasper knew something had gone awry. He felt something inside him take his magic and alter it. With some arcane magic, it might not have mattered, but with this spell, accuracy was paramount. A wave of nausea hit him, and, for an instant, he felt his feet materialize inside stone just before the failsafe triggered. Wrenched from death, the failsafe hijacked Jasper’s spell, and he found himself guided like a novice.

  Helpless and not a little embarrassed, Jasper arrived safely inside a dark, round chamber. Breathing a sigh of relief, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the low lighting. Set in the stone floor immediately surrounding him was a narrow band of gold intricately engraved with arcane symbols of both protection and guidance.

  Just outside the circle stood two men dressed in dark robes, each carrying a tall, wooden staff. Their hoods were up, hiding their faces. Not good for two reasons: one, he couldn’t recognize who they were, and two, he couldn’t see their eyes. Magic originated there, and it gave him an edge if he could see what type of spell was being cast.

  Raising their staves in unison, they whispered something, and Jasper felt a binding spell weave around him. Not having much choice, he didn’t resist; it wouldn’t do the teamsters any good for him to get killed now. When they finished, Jasper couldn’t move, let alone talk; he watched one of the mages reach over, pat him down, and take his belt and sporran.

  Next, the dark mage rifled his belongings and pulled out the small sliver of soap. Evidently satisfied, he dropped it back in the sporran and left the room with Jasper’s belongings in hand while the other mage stood guard.

  This was not the reception Jasper had anticipated.

  The only thing he could figure was they must have known about the soap and set up some sort of detection grid. Either they had discovered it was the cause of the sickness—or they had known all along. The more he thought about it, the more concerned he became. These men had used their magic to bind him. Thankfully, they hadn’t used the circle.

  Beyond the guard, he noticed fresh scorch marks on the wall.

  Jasper didn’t have time to waste; he needed to find Marcus. Reaching deep inside, he called upon his magic and used it to probe the binding spell, searching for any weakness that might help him. The two mages had cooperatively cast the spell, so the binding was exceptionally strong, but he noticed a few weak spots around his staff. The magic in the wood apparently interfered with their spell; maybe it even absorbed some of its energies.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead as he concentrated on his staff. He layered magic upon magic into the staff, using it as a conduit. The staff, in turn, focused and amplified his power until the binding spell developed tiny cracks. He would have to be quick if this worked because both casters would instantly know when their spell failed. Pushing more magic into his staff, the binding collapsed with a flash of light and a haze of ozone.

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  Find out more about the authors and the “The Cayn Trilogy” at:

  https://chriskennedypublishing.com

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  The following is an

  Excerpt from Book One of The War for Dominance Trilogy:

  Can’t Look Back

  ___________________

  Chris Kennedy

  Now Available from New Mythology Press

  eBook, Paperback, and Audio

  Excerpt from “Can’t Look Back:”

  John Gatsby hurried into his hotel room and checked the hallway behind him. He wasn’t being followed. Slamming the door, he looked back through the peephole, but still couldn’t see anyone. He started breathing again.

  John usually loved FanCon. “A convention dedicated to fantasy in all its forms,” it was a chance to catch up with some of the friends he hadn’t seen in a while, dress up as his favorite character and generally get to be someone that he wasn’t for a weekend.

  Not this time.

  John sat down on the bed and took a few more breaths to calm himself. The day had started out so well. He didn’t have any problems crossing the border into the United States or driving to his hotel in Buffalo. It wasn’t until he reached the hotel that things got weird. When the lady at the desk handed John his room key, she said that he was in luck; the hotel had been able to give him the room he asked for. He took the key the lady offered, although he didn’t remember asking for a specific room.

  The room seemed normal enough when he walked into it, and he forgot all about the lady’s comment. Happy and excited, he changed into his costume and went down to give his presentation. He was responsible for three panels during the weekend, but this was his favorite: “How to appear as someone or something you’re not, using only the things in your closet.” He loved being successful, charming and witty in his presentation...all of the things he normally wasn’t. On a normal day, he was short, thin and nerdy-looking, with stringy brown hair and glasses. He had aspirations to do more than deal cards at the Niagara Falls Casino; he just hadn’t done them yet. Maybe he would next year.

  He had given this presentation several times before, and it went flawlessly. Except for the weirdoes in the audience. It takes a lot to be labeled a weirdo at a fantasy convention, as everyone in attendance generally has at least a few idiosyncrasies. There were, however, three people in the audience that were obviously weird, and it wasn’t because of their costumes. The first seemed relatively normal, although he was either a midget or really young and extremely short; John couldn’t tell which it was. Regardless, the person was tiny, and his costume was nothing out of the ordinary. John routinely did better with the odds and ends in his closet.

  The other two were incredible. The second person was dressed as some sort of orc or half-orc. Almost six and a half feet tall, she was pale green and had what looked like tusks sticking out from both the top and the bottom of her mouth. The makeup
job was outstanding; John couldn’t see a single spot she had missed. She was also covered in coarse body hair. He didn’t know how she got it to stick straight out like it did, but it was better than anything John had ever been able to do.

  The third person was dressed as a devil, and it was by far the best costume John had seen in several years of attending conventions. Not because it looked like what you’d expect, because it didn’t; the colors were way too garish. Purple eyes and purple hair? Those weren’t normal eye or hair colors; the person had to have picked them to stand out. Like the orc, the devil’s makeup was perfect. He was a uniform brick-red all over, without a smear, smudge or missed spot, but what really made the costume were the accessories. The horns were awesome; John couldn’t see the line where they joined his head, nor did they ever appear to wobble. Even better was his tail, which gave every indication of being prehensile. John had no idea how the guy (at least he thought it was a guy) controlled it. He didn’t appear to have a transmitter in either hand; the tail just seemed to move on its own. Barrel-chested and heavily muscled, the devil easily out-massed the orc by 50 pounds, even though he was almost a foot shorter.

  The three watched John the whole time he was giving his presentation, and the way they stared at him made him very uncomfortable. It was almost like they were dissecting him with their eyes; they only looked away from him to talk to the others, and then they immediately looked back at him again.

  As bad as it was to have them staring at him during his presentation, it was worse having them following him around the rest of the day. All afternoon, no matter where he went, he could always find at least one of them in his general vicinity. Although they glanced away when he looked at them, he could feel their eyes on him as soon as he looked away.

  He didn’t think it could get any worse, but when he finally went back to his room at the end of the day, it did. Approaching the elevator, he looked back across the hotel’s open atrium and saw all three of them following him. Although they didn’t get into the elevator with him, he saw the one that looked like a devil staring up at him as he walked to the door of his room. John didn’t know whether to go past his door to keep them from finding out which room was his or to hurry in and lock the door. Having nowhere else to go, he went into his room and locked the door, figuring that he could call the front desk if he needed help. Happily, it didn’t look like they had followed him.

  John checked his watch. He would have to hurry in the shower if he was going to make it to dinner with his friends. Unlike a number of the convention participants, he had a sense of cleanliness and didn’t like to smell his own stink. Some of his friends liked to play games at the convention, and they would sit at the tables for days without leaving. They reeked.

  He had just taken off his pants when a large crow landed on the white molded-plastic table on the balcony. It hopped around on the table flapping its wings, almost as if it wanted his attention. The crow looked into the room, and their eyes met. John could feel an intelligence in the crow unlike anything he had ever seen in a bird. The bird hopped to the side and lifted a towel off something on the table. John knew that he hadn’t left anything on the table because he hadn’t even been on the balcony.

  What could it be?

  He glanced quickly out the balcony door to make sure that no one was around to see him without his pants and then opened the door. With a loud ‘caw!’ the bird took flight, leaving a collection of things on the table. With another furtive glance at the rooms around him, John stepped out onto the balcony, picked up the objects and brought them back into the room. Setting them on the bed, he inspected each of them.

  The first object was a crown. It appeared real, but it couldn’t be, or it would have been in a museum or a castle somewhere. It was incredible the way the jewels sparkled in the hotel room’s lights. Although he didn’t know much about jewelry, the gems appeared real to him, and his eyes widened in shock. If they were genuine, this crown was more valuable than...he couldn’t decide what. Certainly it was more valuable than anything he or his mother owned.

  How could someone lose something that was obviously so valuable?

  He looked at the other two objects he had brought in, a mirror and a small bag with a drawstring on top. The bag looked like the bags that gamers used to carry around their dice. He picked it up and found it to be far heavier than if it held plastic dice. It also jingled with the sound of metal as he lifted it. Metal? Coins? If it was filled with coins, there would be a lot of them.

  He dumped the bag onto the bed and was amazed to see that it was full of coins, although they were unlike coins he had ever seen. They appeared to be gold, and there had to be at least 100 of them. If they were solid gold, they would be worth a fortune. Maybe even more than the crown. What the heck was going on?

  Dropping the bag onto the pile, he picked up the last object, a mirror. Three feet square, it looked cheap compared with the other two objects. The frame was some kind of light metal that had pieces of colored plastic in the shape of small gems in it. He touched one of the plastic gems and it depressed. He didn’t get it. Why would someone make a mirror that looked so cheap, but had working pushbuttons? How did the mirror fit with the other two items?

  He shook his head, not understanding where the things had come from or how they fit together. Putting the coins back into the bag, he decided to take a shower and then ask at the hotel’s information desk if someone had lost the things. He pulled one of the gold coins back out of the bag to show the hotel staff so that they’d believe him; he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. He glanced at the coin as he was about to drop it into his pants’ pocket, and then stopped himself. What the...? The words and numbers on the coin weren’t in English! They weren’t in French or Spanish, either. He had taken a couple of years of both in high school, not liking either one, and knew that both of those languages used the same letters and numbers as English. The coin had letters that were unlike anything he had ever seen. If there were numbers on it, they were as strange as the letters and equally indecipherable.

  That’s it, he decided. They must be in Arabic, or whatever the Middle East used as its language. He had seen it once, and it had only looked like squiggles to him. Even some of the numbers looked like squiggles. The coins must be from the Middle East, he decided; the crown made sense then, too. Some Saudi prince must have stayed in the room before him and accidentally left the stuff on the balcony. No, a prince would have had a bigger room. It must have been one of his servants that stayed in the room...one that was going to be in HUGE trouble when the prince found out that his crown and gold coins were missing. The cheap mirror would have belonged to the servant; the rest of the things to the prince.

  Having solved the mystery, John hoped that the servant didn’t get in too much trouble for leaving the prince’s valuables on the balcony. After considering it for a couple of minutes, he also hoped that there would be a big reward for the items’ return. Satisfied that it all made sense, he put the coin into the pocket of his jeans so that he wouldn’t forget it when he went downstairs. Taking off his shirt, he walked toward the bathroom, dreaming about how he would spend his reward.

  As he turned on the water, he heard a knock on the door. It was too early for his friends to be coming by; they had agreed to meet in an hour. He walked to the door and looked out the peephole. There stood the creepy-looking devil and the orc from his presentation earlier. He looked down. The midget that had been with them was also outside his door. He was definitely not letting that group into his room. He was all for fantasy or he wouldn’t be attending the convention; however, some people didn’t know when to stop. Those three looked like they took it way too seriously, especially the devil, which looked like something from a freak show. Although the horns looked real, John still didn’t understand why he had purple hair. What devil has purple hair? The devil was just doing it to get attention, John decided, although he wished the devil would do it somewhere else.

  “I’m busy,” he ca
lled, walking back to the shower.

  The knock came again, harder this time. It was loud enough that it had to be the devil knocking, although the girl was big and could probably knock pretty hard, too. Knock as hard as you want, John thought, I’m not letting you in.

  “I’m busy,” he called again, a little louder this time. He turned again for the bathroom, but was interrupted by a sustained pounding on the door.

  Oh! John realized, the stuff on the balcony must be theirs. If it was his, he would want it back pretty badly, too. He would probably want it badly enough that he would follow someone around all day and then keep banging on his door until the person answered in order to get it back. He knew they wouldn’t go away empty-handed. With a sigh he went back to the door and put the chain on it.

  He opened the door a crack. “Hey, I’m taking a shower,” he began, but was hurled backward as the devil slammed open the door. Although the devil wasn’t that tall, he was built like a bull and enormously strong; the force he used to push the door open tore off the chain and threw John to the floor.

  Before he could move, the orc said “Vincula!” and something fastened him to the floor. Unable to move, he looked at his wrist and saw some sort of glowing shackle. John had no idea what it was made of; he was able to see through it, but it held him in place like it was made of steel.

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  Get “Can’t Look Back” now at: