The long-awaited day has finally come! The Nameless is now available on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)! I am so excited to share my boys with the world. This story is a unique blend of my noir-influenced style, Fae slow-burn head games, and my adoration of the live music scene. I hope someone out there loves it as much as I do.
Excerpt:
It’s about three in the morning. Johnny is asleep on the back seat of the van, which is parked at the edge of a Walmart parking lot a little way out of town, beneath the cover of a few overhanging trees. Chance is sitting in the grass in front of the van, leaning back against its nose, staring off. There’s a pile of spent cigarettes beside him and when I sit next to him, he ignores me.
I’m still riding a decent buzz from the bar, but I can tell he’s not in the mood for any theatrical shit or troublemaking. He gets like this occasionally. He’ll be surly for a few days, dark and damn near unbearable, but it will pass. It always does. One thing I can pretty much guess is that meeting a woman with a little depth isn’t helping the situation. I get it. Really, I do. That brand of loneliness isn’t easy to come to terms with and it’s definitely not new. Still, after so long, you’d think he’d have learned to cope with it a little better.
I snatch his pack of smokes from beside him and shake one out. I use his lighter to spark it. Usually, he says something shitty when I steal his cigarettes but, right now, he keeps ignoring me. I blow a thin stream of smoke into the early morning and say, “Maybe you should try to get some sleep.”
“I hate this place,” he answers. It’s more of a response than I was expecting and not at all what I thought he would say.
“We haven’t even been here a full day, how can you hate it?”
He smokes quietly for a while then sighs. He says, “I can feel it siphoning off energy, like it wants to keep us forever. It doesn’t feel right.”
Ah. His bad mood is starting to make a little more sense now. Over the course of our long years, he has developed a sensitivity to – for lack of a better term – magic. There’s a ninety-nine percent chance that if someone is a practicing witch, he’ll know. If there’s a strong concentration of a viral religion, he’ll feel it. I’ve seen him spook over a street oracle so hard he started shaking and bolted when she touched his arm.
Not me. I couldn’t pick up on a spell if it kicked me in the balls. Nah, instead I’m the one who feels our power activate. I feel us trigger fortune like a line of dominoes. If there’s someone whose life we can change for the better, I know it. I can tell when our presence starts tugging on the lines of someone’s fate. He would have no idea if I didn’t tell him, which reminds me …
“Someone in that bar needed us to be there,” I say. It occurs to me after the words are out that they may not be something he wants to hear right now, or ever again.
I can practically feel him gather his tension along his lanky lines, into his muscles and his aura. He crushes out his cigarette and swears under his breath in Irish – a language we learned as kids from immigrant parents, a language we rarely speak anymore. To hear it actually raises goose bumps along my arms.
“Don’t fuckin’ say it,” he says and I can hear traces of an accent we both lost decades ago. “Don’t tell me it was her.”
It doesn’t work that way. He knows I can’t really pinpoint the source, not spot on anyway, but I’ve gotten pretty good at making educated guesses. I don’t say it, though, which is a pretty good admittance that he’s right. He immediately lights another smoke.
I fold my legs up so that I’m sitting cross-legged and take a drag of my own. I could see it on his face at the bar that something was getting to him. Now I understand that it’s a grand mixture of several things that all stem from our unique roles in this fucked-up world.
He rests his head against the van’s bumper, staring forward, and sighs. He softly says, “I’m tired. Of all of this.”
“What choice do we have?” I say with a shrug. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation.
“There has to be a way to end it,” he answers in a growl.
I haven’t thought about that night in a long time. I can usually distract myself with an array of mind-altering substances. Tonight all I have is a fading blood-alcohol level and my brother, being absolutely wretched.
“The problem here, dear brother,” I say, dropping into full Irish-accented English, “is that we pissed off the Summer Queen.”
Now I’m the one staring off at the vague darkness where the river winds through the area. I can still see the movement of him turning his head to look at me. Having a twin for a hundred years is … exhausting. I don’t need to see him. I can feel the giant hole I just carved in him by speaking the way our parents taught us to when we weren’t at home. It happens so little that the words feel strange to me.
He looks away before he says, “Maybe we can find her.”
Aj Elmore, Author 