Our Lady Chaos, page 59
part #5 of Bloodletter Series
For the briefest moment, Lily’s dissonant desert song played in Toby’s mind to the exclusion of everything else. He raised his head as though it were the hardest thing he’d ever done. He looked Sean in the eye and nodded.
“Okay,” said Sean. “Ready?” Sean flipped the bowl over and set it on the ground. He lifted his foot and held it over the upended bowl.
Sean brought his foot down and smashed the bowl. Eddie helped him climb out of the hole as Mike stepped forward with a brown paper sack in his hands. He upended the bag, dumping two lumps of bronze, several clumps of fused and melted glass, and a handful of lead nuggets.
Sean nodded, and together they chanted the Akkadian words inscribed on the interior of the bowl. Words that meant:
“Hail Lilitu, Bearer of Chaos. Hail Lilitu, Harvester of Sorrow. Hail hag and ghoul, I adjure you by the timelessness of Tiamat, by the power of Shamash, and by the magic of Ea, here is your divorce and writ and letter of separation, sent through the will of Marduk.”
The sky rang with violent thunder, and the earth below them rumbled and shook as Lilitu’s link to the world shattered.
When the noise faded away, a shroud of silence descended on the basement. After a moment, Toby broke the silence with a sigh, then turned toward the stairs.
“What now, Toby?” asked Benny.
“Now we go back to Oneka Falls and make sure the spell Mike cast sent every single mazzikim back to Hell.”
“It did,” said Greg. “And with Lilitu gone, they won’t be coming back.”
Toby nodded, a look of infinite sadness and loss etched into his face. “I want to be sure.” He shrugged, not looking at anyone. “Plus, all of this started there for us, not in this basement.”
Without another word, Toby trudged up the stairs, and his family followed him.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this twisted tale of demons and madmen from start to finish. If you are interested in reading more of my work, The Blood of the Isir series is also available. Errant Gods, the first novel of the series, can be found at https://ehv4.us/4errantgods. Books two and three, Rooms of Ruin, and Wild Hunt, respectively can also be found on Amazon—please visit https://ehv4.us/4boti for the series page.
If you’ve enjoyed my work, please consider joining my Readers Group by visiting https://ehv4.us/join. Or follow me on BookBub by visiting my profile page there: https://ehv4.us/bbub.
For my complete bibliography, please visit: https://ehv4.us/bib.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Written on the completion of Blackest Crow:
Here you are again, friend. A guy could start to think you’re stalking him…but, what the hell, you seem like good people!
I can see the conclusion of this series as plain as day, and, truth to tell, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want the story of our intrepid demon hunters to draw to an end. A part of me thinks the account should span at least a few more novels, but for now, I can’t find the thread that will take us to them.
That’s not to say the last book planned marks the end of The Bloodletter tale. I mean, the possibility exists Mr. Story will call on a fine gentleman named Noah to make a boat, and then… At the same time, Mr. Story might inform me the tale continues. You never can tell with that guy.
But the last planned book marks the end of the tale for now at the very least. I know a bit of what happens in the last two or three hundred pages of the series, but I can’t see what happens in the final fifty with any kind of precision. There will be a satisfactory ending to the story.
People may perish. Demons will die, and not the “Oh, gee, I’m sending you home” way of dying. At least one more demon will die dead. Mr. Story keeps hinting the hunters are not safe, either, as you may have worried when this book ended with Greg in the hands of two twisted, serial-killing human rats.
You see, friend, surprises have patiently waited in the wings for their time in the sun, and not all of them are pleasant. Our fiendish friends have been keeping things from us. Quite a lot of deadly things, to be honest, and many of those secrets are itching to leap off the page at you.
I hope you survive them.
Hell, I hope I do, too.
Written on the completion of Nightshade:
To quote Dave Mustaine again, “Somewhere there’s a reason why things go like they do.” Approaching the end of this novel, I found myself reflecting on the nature of the series as a whole and asking myself whether I am ready for this series to end.
It’s a strange feeling to be excited about something but dread it at the same time. I’ve gotten used to Toby and the gang. I’ve grown to enjoy fleshing out the demons of Oneka Falls. Plus, Harvester brings Lily to the tale, and she has a way of messing everything up (she and Mr. Story are related, I think), and she absolutely hates to lose.
It’s easy to dive down the rabbit hole into their world, to escape the aches and pains of my own for a bit. I’ll miss writing this series when it’s finished, but on the other hand, I’ve got a lot of ideas kicking at the back of my teeth.
What comes next (at the conclusion of Harvester)? I wish I knew. Usually, the ideas sort themselves into a nice ordered queue, and I take the first one and run with it. This time, the ideas are an unruly mob, stacked up behind the gate, screaming their fool heads off. I think there might even have been a fist fight in the back.
Whatever I write at the end of this series, I hope you’ll be there with me.
Written on the completion of Harvester:
For Supergirl, Real Sig™, and me, this year started off horribly. I found out about a nasty little disease I’d never heard of. Supergirl learned how well she can juggle everything—including a full-time job, our entire life, and keeping me sane during the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.
We muddled through it, though it meant having a significant gap in my publishing schedule. I’d planned to write a stand-alone same-universe book, then write the rest of The Bloodletter Saga story.
As fate would have it, I took a different path—the path you’ve just finished reading. The best parts of that stand-alone book ended up incorporated into Blackest Crow and Nightshade—Eddie Mitchell’s story line.
This is the point where you should stop reading if you are the kind of reader that jumps to the Author’s Note first. Spoilers incoming!
Lily made her grand debut in the title novella (The Devil) for my collection of shorts (Devils: A Collection of Devilish Short Fiction), and I must admit, I fell in love with the character. Her reckless evil, her silly nickname fetish, her obvious abandonment issues, even her brutal vengeance, they all made her so much fun to write. I spent a lot of time thinking about her and how she fit in to the Oneka Falls story, and it seemed like a perfect fit until I realized that she would kill our heroes without batting an eye unless her emotions got in the way…
It was Lily that led me to the solution. Lily likes to tell people she’s the devil, and she certainly has the chops for it. When I explored how Lily might deal with a group of demon hunters hassling her daughter, a lot of things fell into place: LaBouche’s demise, why Brigitta/Naamah would hang out with the mazzikim, why Abyzou would care about a silly lamp, the three parts of this novel I call “the temptation of Toby, Mike, and Benny.”
But the thing I couldn’t bring myself to do is permanently end the story here, and this ending works better, anyway. After all, the devil is always waiting for the next sucker who wants to make a deal.
“What’s next?” you ask.
It seems this year will end as it started. I found out a few weeks ago that the avascular necrosis I had in my left hip had jumped to the right hip, and that I had a subchondral fracture of my right femoral head. It’s not as bad as the left, and thankfully, the left has remained stable since the middle of the year.
So, yeah, what’s next?
I know for sure that there will be a new series (and think there may be two) rolling out in the first quarter of next year. The first series is an urban fantasy delivered with short novels, and the second is another old-school series of horror novels of the longish variety. Then again, I’ve also got a post-apocalyptic story kicking at my temples, another dark fantasy, and a more “straight-up” serial killer story line.
To find out my plans before most everyone else, keep your eye on social media—either at my blog: https://erikhenryvick.com or in my Facebook group: https://ehv4.us/fbog.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erik Henry Vick is an author who happens to be disabled by an autoimmune disease (also known as his Personal Monster™). He writes to hang on to the few remaining shreds of his sanity. His current favorite genres to write are dark fantasy and horror.
He lives in Western New York with his wife, Supergirl; their son; a Rottweiler named after a god of thunder; and two extremely psychotic cats. He fights his Personal Monster™ daily with humor, pain medicine, and funny T-shirts.
Erik has a B.A. in Psychology, an M.S.C.S., and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence. He has worked as a criminal investigator for a state agency, a college professor, a C.T.O. for an international software company, and a video game developer.
He'd love to hear from you on social media:
Blog: https://erikhenryvick.com
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Amazon author pages:
USA: https://ehv4.us/amausa
UK: https://ehv4.us/amauk
Goodreads Author Page: https://ehv4.us/gr
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Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Erik Henry Vick
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Ratatoskr Publishing
2080 Nine Mile Point Road, Unit 106
Penfield, NY 14526
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Our Lady Chaos / Erik Henry Vick. -- 1st ED.
Erik Henry Vick, Our Lady Chaos
