Scheduled for release to Kindle bookstores in April 2014, Sin Eater is a Young Adult novel about a socially isolated young girl who discovers she’s a sin eater. Here’s the first chapter:
Chapter One
He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, ‘Am I not annoyed with them?’ I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. ‘I have seen it,’ he said, ‘down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.
~ W.B. Yeats
The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore, 1893
Se’ heard the wail of the bean-si’ – the Banshee – faintly, echoing in the chambers of his brain, as he slept. So faint, almost past notice, but it was there. He’d heard the Banshee’s wail many times over the centuries, but it had been a very long time since he’d last heard her call.
He was close. Closer than Se’ had been in nearly two centuries. He strained to sense its direction, to catch a whiff of the scent of the Banshee. North, Se’ decided, focusing his sleeping mind on the Banshee’s wail. And there it was, the unmistakable cinnamon scent of her flesh. And as the scent sharpened in his nostrils, Se’ was pulled from his sleep.
He unfurled his long, thin limbs, the emaciated strings of grey flesh hanging loosely from his bones. Se’ had slept for too long; he felt weak as a kitten. He yawned deeply, unhinging his jaw and stretching his arms skyward. Se’ had chosen a shallow cave to rest. It had smelled of bear then, but it smelled of Se’ now. He shuffled over to the small pile of bones – all that remained of the cave’s previous tenants, a mother bear and two cubs – and pulled a handful of small metatarsal bones from it. He’d sucked out the marrow from the bones before he’d gone to sleep and contented himself now with the crunch of the bones between his teeth, remembering the fight for the cave. The six hundred pound black bear defending her squawking cubs, raised on her hind legs, teeth bared, two-inch claws extended and ready to tear Se’ apart.
He had eaten her heart first, as the two young cubs supped from the blood pooled beneath their mother.
He would need flesh soon. It was the flesh of the Banshee Se’ craved. Her flesh and the flesh of her kin, tender and ripe with knowledge and power. His nostrils flared and Se’ sniffed the air again. Yes, definitely North.
