The Broken Bell

by Frank Tuttle

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  The Mister Trophy

  The Cadaver Client

  Dead Man's Rain

  The Markhat Files

  Hold the Dark

  The Banshee's Walk

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  Brown River Queen

  Demons in a feeding frenzy drive the world-weary Markhat to the brink…

  Hold the Dark

  © 2009 Frank Tuttle

  A Markhat Story

  Quiet, hard-working seamstresses aren’t the kind that normally go missing, even in a tough town like Rannit. Martha Hoobin’s disappearance, though, quickly draws Markhat into a deadly struggle between a halfdead blood cult and the infamous sorcerer known only as the Corpsemaster.

  A powerful magical artifact may be both his only hope of survival—and the source of his own inescapable damnation.

  Markat’s search leads him to the one thing that’s been missing in his life. But even love’s awesome power may not save him from the darkness that’s been unleashed inside his own soul.

  Warning: This gritty, hard-boiled fantasy detective novel contains mild romance and interludes of suggestive handholding.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Hold the Dark:

  I picked up the candle and followed.

  The door wound down a long dark hall. Walls, floors and ceiling all bore water damage, but the warped pine wood floor had been repaired in two places. Recently, too, the nail-heads shone of new-beaten iron in the light, which meant they hadn’t had time to rust.

  The hall abruptly ended. I stepped down, nearly stumbled, onto a cobble-brick floor, and my candlelight lost sight of any ceiling, and all the walls. It did illuminate the backs of four black-clad halfdead, who stood in a small circle a dozen steps away.

  Evis and his dark glasses turned to face me.

  “They are friends. They do not see you.”

  “Wonderful.” My mouth was so dry I spoke in a ragged whisper. My new friends didn’t turn, didn’t leap, so I licked my lips and took a step toward them. “What is it we’re seeing?”

  I wasn’t seeing a thing, aside from vampires and a flickering ring of shadows and floor-bricks.

  “Blood was spilled here. Spilled in such quantity that it rushed onto the floor.” He indicated the area, which the halfdead surrounded. They pulled back a few steps, and Evis motioned me forward. I took my guttering candle and went.

  All I saw were bricks, just like all the others—black and smooth and rounded over with age and wear. Half the old buildings in Rannit were built over even older roads, just like this one. The builders merely scraped the dirt off the cobbles and called it a floor.

  I knelt down, put my nose near the cold baked clay. If there was any blood there, it was too old and too faint for human eyes and a stub of a candle to see.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, rising.

  “Do,” said Evis. “You see no trace because soon after the blood was spilled, the floor was cleaned. I suspect they used a mop and tanner’s bleach. My associates and I can still smell the traces though. Some must have run between the cobbles.”

  “Rannit’s got more blood-stains than pot holes,” I said. “What makes this one special? What does it have to do with Martha Hoobin?”

  Evis sighed.

  Then he frowned.

  “Mavis. Torno, Glee, come here.”

  Three new vampires appeared and glided near, their ghost-white faces turned down, their dirty marble eyes turned away from my light.

  “What the—”

  Evis raised a hand and the halfdead stopped still, faces down, beside me. I shut up.

  A moment passed. I strained my ears, since my eyes were proving useless. I heard nothing at first—then, faintly, I made out scratching, like a mouse in a wall, chewing away. I held my breath but couldn’t locate the source.

  Evis put his dark glasses away. “Dear God,” he said, in a whisper. “Dear God.”

  A fourth vampire appeared at my right elbow. Evis nodded at it.

  “Go now, Mr. Markhat. Sara will take you to safety.”

  I opened my mouth. The scratching grew louder. Was it coming from the floor?

  “Sara!”

  Sara reached out, put both cold hands on my waist and hefted me a foot off the floor.

  She’d taken a single gliding step toward the door when the brick floor at our feet exploded and a long bubbling scream broke the silence.

  A scream and a smell. A stench, really, louder in its way than any noise—rotting flesh, warm and wet, thrust suddenly up out of the earth.

  A brick struck Sara in the side of her head, and she faltered, tripped and went down, and me with her.

  I heard Evis shout something and felt whips of motion around me and in that instant before my dropped candle flicked out I caught sight of the thing that we’d raised. It leaped toward me, a thing of loose and rotted flesh, slapping Evis casually aside when he grasped its right arm. There was no face upon that head, which was itself only a dark, swollen mass that sent sprays of thick black fluid flying with every movement. It had no eyes, no ears, no lower jaw—but it saw me, somehow, and it raced toward me, arms outstretched, ruined belly burst open and trailing shriveled entrails as it came.

  The candle went dark. I scrambled up, and I ran. Behind me, I heard a thud and a gurgle as Sara rose and grappled with the dead thing. Evis shouted again and a pair of crossbows threw, thunk-whee, thunk-whee.

  I charged across the cobbles. I couldn’t see the door. I couldn’t see the wall. I couldn’t see the thing behind me, but I could hear it, hear Evis and his halfdead as they grappled, leaped and struck.

  The ruined thing screamed again, so close I smelled its foul exhalation, felt cold spittle on my back.

  I slammed face-first into a wall that might have needed new plaster and new paint but hadn’t suffered much loss in the way of structural integrity. The room spun. Blood spewed out of my nose.

  It shrieked at the scent, maybe a dozen steps behind. I put the wall on my left and charged, arms groping for a door, any door.

  More crossbows threw. A bolt buried itself in the wall a hand’s breadth from my head. I ducked and kept moving—had I turned the wrong way? Was the door behind me now?

  Something hissed. Something cold and wet laid itself on the back of my neck. I bellowed for Evis, lashed out with a back kick that sank into something soft. The smell hit me anew. I whirled and kicked again and it screamed, wet and triumphant, nearly in my bloodied face.

  I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, but I felt the air rush past me, heard the pair of grunts and thuds as a pair of vampires dived into the creature and pinned it to the wall. A thick, foul spray of fluid caught me square in the face when the halfdead hit, and I retched and stumbled away, pawing and spitting.

  A cold hand gripped my shoulder. “This way,” said Evis, shoving me forward. “Go. Find the carriage. Tell Bertram and Floyd to wait with you.”

  Behind me, I heard shrieks and blows—short wet shrieks punctuated with fast, hard blows. I assumed they had the dead thing pinned and when Evis let go, I moved.

  I wasn’t followed. The gurgling shrieks behind me grew fainter and shorter. I heard the faint sound of steel slicing the air and, suddenly, all was silent.

  I found the ruined door, cut my hand on the splintered doorframe, darted through it and was down the hall at a run. My footfalls were loud in the dark, and all the way out to the street my mind played tricks on me, hearing the sounds of pursuit behind me, hearing a faint growl that crept from a bloated, gurgling throat.

  But I made it. I stumbled whole into the street, mopped blood from my nose, tried to pick out my rights and my lefts from the shadows and the warehouse fronts. That way, I decided. Right. Right for Evis’s carriage. Left to just skirt the whole mess and head for the country and raise a crop of sheep or do whatever it is they do out there.

  I’d taken a single step that way when hands
—gentle hands—fell on my shoulder. “That way,” said a voice, and I was turned around, and a clean white linen handkerchief was placed in my hand. “The carriage awaits.”

  I mopped blood and blinked.

  The street was full of halfdead.

  Ten or more glided past, quiet as ghosts. My giver of handkerchiefs joined them, gliding toward the warehouse like a black-clad puff of wind.

  I shuddered, but I held the cloth tight to my nose and marched toward the carriage. More halfdead popped out of the shadows. Each and all ignored me, though I tottered and stank and dripped their favorite beverage liberally out onto the street.

  There’s a metaphor there, somewhere. Something about bleeding profusely at a vampire parade. One day I’ll finish it and tell Mama it’s a Troll saying. But that night I just clamped the cloth to my nose and headed for Evis’s carriage.

  I found it easily enough, though the coachmen had lit their lanterns. They were both on the street, and both bore crossbows and nervous frowns.

  They backed up and wrinkled their noses at my approach.

  “We’ll never get the smell out,” said one to the other.

  “Just be glad you aren’t wearing it,” I said. The driver, bless him, produced a clean handkerchief and stepped close enough to hand it to me.

  “The boss said you found a bad one,” he said, quietly.

  I mopped and nodded, not asking how the Boss had communicated this to the driver. I figured House Avalante could afford the finest sorcerous long-talkers.

  The driver’s friend opened the door. “Best get in. We’ll be leaving soon, and in a hurry.” He squinted at me in the lantern light. “It didn’t scratch you, did it?”

  Hell. Had it?

  I shook off my old Army jacket, kicked it into the gutter when I saw the thick black stain all down the back. I rolled up my sleeves, checked my arms and waist and legs.

  All the fresh blood was from my nose or my right hand. All the other—well, it wasn’t mine.

  “No,” I said. My voice shook, and I was getting weak at the knees, so I climbed into Evis’s fine carriage, leaving black stains as I went.

  Bertram and Floyd—I never learned which was which—watched me go, then turned their frowns and their crossbows back out toward the night.

  I sat and I panted and even with the door and window open I gagged at my smell. My heart still rushed, and memories of the thing’s bloated, eyeless face, I knew, would haunt my dreams for years.

  “The boss said you found a bad one.”

  That’s what the driver had said. A bad one. The flip side of Evis and his well-groomed friends. Halfdead in the raw—a hungry corpse, rotted and foul, still driven to a grim parody of life by a hunger that drove it from the grave.

  She holds the key to unlock his past—or unleash hell.

  Love’s Alchemy

  © 2009 Ciar Cullen

  Sidra Patmos has the ability to see the real underbelly of lower Manhattan—a horrifying world where wraiths, demons and a few quirky mortals battle for supremacy. Desperate, she seeks out a paranormal researcher to tell her why her life is a waking nightmare.

  Instead of answers, her meeting with the dark and irresistible Van Barlowe unleashes a chain of events far more dangerous than her blackest visions. And a desire she can barely manage to hold at arm’s length.

  After three desperate centuries, Van has finally found the Alchemist. Sidra. Somewhere locked deep inside her lies the knowledge that will rescue his family from ruin. The only way to reawaken her abilities is to hold his enemies at bay long enough to convince her to step through the mists of time.

  Redemption waits there, and a timeless bond ignited by the undeniable pull between them. The missing ingredient: Sidra’s willingness to risk that Van’s attraction runs deeper than sexual chemistry…

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Love’s Alchemy:

  Sidra sat on the bed and thought about the intense longing for Van that pulled at her, longing older and deeper than possible in the few days she’d known him. She rubbed her palm across the shades of brown silk artfully covering the enormous bed.

  “I think he’s still in love with you, Van. I think part of me feels his pain, his fear, his excruciating need for you. I don’t think it died with his body.”

  “You finally believe, then?”

  Sidra nodded. Since her vision of the past, the evening before, tiny flickers of memory beckoned to her, but she’d been pushing them down. She lay back on the bed, closed her eyes, and with a quick prayer for protection, opened herself to the realization that she was really remembering another person’s life.

  “Do you remember any more?”

  “Bits and pieces. Nothing important, I’m afraid. The smell of wood burning, the sound of heavy glassware, the laughter of men. Utter exhaustion. The feel of a pen in my hand, my arm shaking from tiredness, my eyes burning from sleeplessness. I feel pangs of unfamiliar pain, emotional pain, as if life itself had become such a burden as to be intolerable. Right before I woke this morning I thought I saw men and women gathered around me as I lay in bed. They were crying.”

  “That all makes sense to me.” His eyes looked strained, and Sidra wanted to ease his troubled heart.

  “Do you want me to try to understand him, to reach out to him for you?”

  Van sat by her side and squeezed her hand. “No, not now. I want you, Sidra. Whatever you might feel for me.”

  Sidra opened her eyes. “You only have feelings for your Maker. This has nothing to do with me.”

  “I can’t separate the two, love, I’m sorry. I only know that I haven’t felt this way before in my life, and that this is not what I felt for Isaac. I’m desperate for you, Sidra. I know I come with a heavy price tag for a woman who’s lost too much already. Maybe it’s not worth it to you? I can’t promise I won’t die, that we’ll figure this out.”

  “We’ll figure it out. We have to.”

  “Why?” Van leaned in and kissed her on the lips, moved to her neck, nibbling his way down her cleavage. “Tell me. Say it, Sidra.”

  “Let this be enough, Van.”

  “I need to hear it from you.”

  Sidra fought to keep the last thread of resistance alive. “I’m sure enough women have told you they were in love with you.”

  “Many. I wasn’t in love with them.”

  “You’re not in love with me. You’re all caught up in your past.”

  “Don’t deny me my own thoughts, Sidra. Isaac gave me life, but he also gave me free will. I’m asking for both from you. Tell me you love me back.”

  “I love you back,” she muttered.

  “You’re really annoying.”

  Sidra pulled off her shirt and bra and stepped out of her shoes and jeans.

  “Get back here,” he gasped through clenched teeth.

  “You’re pretty impatient for a guy who’s been around a couple hundred years.”

  “I feel like I’ve had this hard-on for a couple hundred years.”

  “Let’s see what we can do about that, impatient one.” Sidra helped him out of his slacks and boxer shorts. Sidra ran her palm along the taut length of his shaft, tracing her fingers over the large veins pulsing with his life’s blood.

  The Broken Bell

  Frank Tuttle

  Ask not for whom the wedding bells toll…

  The Markhat Files, Book 6

  There’s no way Markhat can turn away his newest client. Who is he to refuse the woman he loves—especially when she bribes him with breakfast?

  This time it’s Darla’s friend Tamar Fields, whose fiancé vanished days before the wedding. His wealthy family insists Carris Lethway is simply away on urgent business. Tamar smells a lie, and she needs Rannit’s most famous finder to figure out if the source of the suspicious aroma is a conspiracy, or the groom’s cold, sweaty feet.

  As if his plate isn’t piled high enough, Mama Hog’s slip of the tongue has landed him in the middle of a good old-fashioned Pot Lockery clan feud
. Plus, Rannit’s streets are abuzz with rumors of war—and Tamar’s case has his own lady love hearing wedding bells of her own.

  As Rannit arms for battle, Markhat finds himself torn between old alliances and new commitments, and a growing, awful fear that no matter which way he turns, all he loves is about to go up in flames.

  Warning: This work of fiction is known to contain dangerous vowels and at least two instances of provocative folk dancing. Readers should be prepared to produce fresh emus for inspection at any time while reading pages 78 or 134. Neither the Publisher nor the Author condones the formation of covalent hydrogen bonds, although the Author does wink at them when his attorney isn't looking.

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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

  Cincinnati OH 45249

  The Broken Bell

  Copyright © 2011 by Frank Tuttle

  ISBN: 978-1-60928-569-2

  Edited by Bethany Morgan

  Cover by Angela Waters

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: December 2011

  www.samhainpublishing.com