The Skeleton Faerie: Chapter One

Hey there! As promised on my social media channels, I'm sharing chapter one of The Skeleton Faerie with you today. The Skeleton Faerie is the first installment of Children of the Death Gods, my new dark fantasy book series where Celtic mythology and faerie folklore meet a nuclear postapocalypse.

In case you missed it, here's the book's synopsis:

"Faerie folklore meets a nuclear postapocalypse in this dark mythological fantasy woven with secrets, treachery, and star-crossed love.

Ninety-nine years after the Nuclear War of 1989, twenty-one-year-old Gus Brandon should only be interested in the survival of humanity and the expansion of his compound. But he’s obsessed with legends from the distant past, superstitions of an expired people.

While searching forbidden ruins for the scraps of stories lost to time, he stumbles upon a mysterious young woman covered in scars. Her name is Saoirse, and their meeting sets off a bloody chain of events—one in which Gus discovers that the folklore he loves just might be real, and that it’s tied to mankind in ways he could have never imagined.

Soon the lines between myth and reality blur, as do the lines between realms.

Gus will have to rely on his knowledge—and Saoirse—to survive the horrors awaiting him… in this world and the next."

Now, let's dig into that first chapter, shall we?

ONE

Long ago, there was a cauldron that revived the dead.

The cauldron was called the Pair Dadeni—the Cauldron of Rebirth—and it had various owners over the years. Eventually, it found itself in the hands of an Irish king.

The king was cowardly, spiteful. In his weakness, he brought a war upon himself, and during that war, he used the Pair Dadeni to reanimate the corpses of his fallen soldiers.

When the king’s enemies discovered what he was doing, they destroyed the cauldron, rendering its powers useless. By all accounts, that was the end of its story.

Until now.

* * *

EARLY AUTUMN, NINETY-NINE YEARS AFTER THE NUCLEAR WAR OF 1989

Trips to the library (or anywhere else within the ruinous cities, for that matter) were risky and reckless. Gus Brandon’s compound elders forbid them, unless under certain circumstances.

But Gus was desperate enough to break the rules.

At twenty-one years old, he shouldn’t have been obsessed with anything other than surviving, continuing humanity, and restoring the world to the glory of the Golden Era. He especially shouldn’t have been obsessed with something as trivial as old folklore.

Yet here he was, ditching his scavenge-duty so he could scour a relic for the scraps of stories lost to time.

Again.

These woods offered little shade, the sun baking the air around him. As he darted through aspen and birch trees, sweat poured from his skin, and his throat felt drier than a crater left in the wake of a bomb. To make matters worse, the water in his canteen was already more than half gone. He paused, pulled it out, and took a swig anyway. The cool liquid spilled down his esophagus, offering temporary relief.

Soon the trees grew even more sparse. He crested a hill, and mountains of debris became visible in the distance. Although these ruins were less than six miles from the compound, he couldn’t visit them often—because of his elders’ rules, of course. “It’s too dangerous to visit a relic for recreational purposes,” they said at assemblies. “A waste of time and resources as well.”

If his teammates discovered where he’d been sneaking off to and told the military police about it, he’d most certainly receive a lashing in punishment. But even as he thought of whips shredding his flesh, he couldn’t stay away.

He picked up the pace, sprinting toward the destroyed city ahead. Once he reached the wreckage, he was safe to slow down and catch his breath, hidden from sight by mounds of fragmented wood, brick, and concrete. He dove deeper into the ruins, his combat boots scraping against dry soil and splintered glass, and dozens of automobiles rusting with age began to crop up, dispersed all around him.

Human bones—skulls, rib cages, spines, femurs—started to appear as well. Sprawled-out skeletons coated with grime, their jaws hanging open in soulless smiles, were scattered across the destruction, and the farther he went, the more of them he saw.

He wondered who they’d been in life, and what it’d been like to live and die in the Golden Era. They must have been terrified when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a boiling point—when soldiers left home for the battlefields, when fights broke out in the streets, when explosives rained down on civilians.

Try thinking of something less bleak, he thought. And, in a way, it was easy. After all, how could he consider the horrors of reality when stories of fair folk danced in his mind?

Finally, he approached the library. It was a plain two-level rectangular structure that had (somehow) withstood the Nuclear War. Damage to the building consisted of shattered windows and doors, cracked flooring, knocked-over shelves, and a collapsed section in the back. Other than that, it was intact.

Gus had always found the library’s stability to be strange, especially considering that everything around it had been so utterly demolished. Not that he was complaining; the building’s survival meant he got to read something other than compound manuals and historical textbooks. It was just weird, and if he were more interested in his job as a construction worker, he might have investigated how it could have happened.

Too bad he hated the job he’d been assigned . . . Not that any job in the compound sounded particularly swell.

He glanced down to check the time on the black watch around his wrist—which Ronnie had given to him years back, when he’d gotten old enough for scavenge-duty—and cussed under his breath. It was half past three. He only had until six thirty before his scavenge-team would return to the meeting point and start the hike back to the compound. I’d better make this quick. I still have to catch something. He hastened up the concrete stairs, leapt through the broken doors, and jogged toward his section of choice.

A smile turned up his lips when he saw the sign that read “Fantasy: Myths, Folktales, and Faerie Tales.” It was discolored and hung crookedly from the sagging ceiling, the tome-lined shelves beneath it overrun with the twisting, gnarled vines that grew up out of the fractures in the wooden-plank floor. At the back of the dilapidated section, an oak tree had even broken through the floorboards, its tallest branches brushing the ceiling.

Adjusting his aviator eyeglasses, he inspected the books’ spines for compelling titles. He only had room for one or two in the secret sleeve he’d sewn on the inside of his backpack, depending on their trim size and length, so he had to decide what sounded the most interesting and narrow down his choices from there.

Several “modern” fiction titles (that is to say, published within the last two centuries—to his knowledge, no new novels had been produced since the Nuclear War) caught his eye, but what he most wanted to read were books that documented the beliefs and superstitions of the cultures that came before his own, not stories inspired by said beliefs and superstitions. Maybe someday, after he’d exhausted his nonfiction options, he’d move on to fiction.

Soon he found more of what he was searching for and narrowed it down between a collection of “real-life” encounters with changelings and an illustrated encyclopedia of Celtic deities. Oh boy, what would the elders think if they saw me reading this?

The elders had always asserted that there was no such thing as God or gods, that it was pointless to even contemplate ideas such as reincarnation or life after death. “Focus on the here and now, what you can see and touch and know to be real,” they urged, again and again. “Focusing on anything else is a waste counterproductive to the compound’s survival.”

Ultimately, Gus chose the book on changelings, and as he slipped the treasure into his backpack, there was a chittering noise nearby, then the familiar scurrying of tiny paws. He smiled. “Is that you, Rem?” More chatter, this time to his left. He turned that way.

The black-furred squirrel that seemed to live in the library—Remington, Gus called him—stood atop the shelf before Gus. The creature cocked his head, twitched his tail, and scampered forward.

With his free hand, Gus brushed some unkempt chestnut hair out of his eyes and stroked Remington behind the ears. Many animals in the area suffered from genetic deformities, their ancestors’ DNA damaged by fallout, but Remington appeared to be a normal, healthy squirrel, identical to the old photographs Gus had seen in school.

“Hey, little guy,” Gus said. “What’s up? Haven’t visited you in a while.” In fact, he hadn’t been here for months. He had scavenge-duty once every five weeks, and during his last two duties, he hadn’t managed to get away from his teammates at all.

He’d missed picking out books, but he’d almost missed talking to and petting Remington more.

Almost.

The creak of floorboards sounded behind him. “You got a friend I don’t know about?” he asked Remington, chuckling. He pivoted, sure he was about to see another squirrel, but was met with something much more surprising.

Shrouded in shadow, a woman stood less than twenty feet away. He couldn’t make out her facial features, but he could tell she was on the shorter side. Her long-sleeved dress hugged her pronounced curves, the hem stopping just past her mid-thigh. For some reason, she was barefoot.

Gus dropped his backpack, his pulse quickening. Years of survival training kicked in, and he reached for his gun, ready to shoot, ready to—

Wait a second.

She was just standing there, wasn’t attacking him.

Not yet anyway.

What if she doesn’t? What if I scared her as much as she scared me?

His palm hovered above the worn leather holster at his belt. He cleared his throat. “Uhh, hello?”

Hesitantly, she stepped into a ray of light shining in through a break in the ceiling, and Gus got a better look at her. She was young, probably his age. Her straight platinum-blonde hair framed her full cheeks and reached a little past her collarbones. She watched him with large round eyes, her irises the same shade of green as her dress, her top lash line drooping as if she’d always been sad, as if she’d been cursed to a lifetime of sorrow.

“Hello,” she said. She spoke differently from anyone he’d ever met—was that what they called an accent?—her voice high and melodious. “Who are you?”

“I’m, um—I’m Gus Brandon. And you?”

“Oh, what a nice name.” She paced forward, slowly and carefully, and Gus’s lips parted as he noticed her pale skin was covered with scars. Raised and pink, they must have come from surgical stitches, and they wrapped around her flesh like chains. No exposed part of her body was free of the marks—not her face, not her neck, not her hands or legs or feet.

How in the world had she gotten those scars? Had she been operated on by the deranged scientists the elders warned people on scavenge-duty about? If so, how had she survived such intense surgeries?

Not only that, but where had she come from? She couldn’t belong to the compound. Hardly anyone there owned a dress, let alone garments in colors other than black, white, and gray. Also, nobody went outside without a good pair of boots. How was she supposed to protect her feet?

None of this was adding up. Something horrible had happened to this young woman. Does she need help? The elders accepted Ronnie even though he was an outsider. Would they take her in too?

“Thanks, I think.” He dropped his hand to his side. It didn’t seem there was anything to be afraid of. “What did you say your name was?”

She paused, her face brightening by the slightest of margins. Wait a second—was she smirking at him? “I didn’t give it to you.”

Okay, yeah, she was definitely smirking at him, but two could play that game. He did his best to mirror her expression. “Would you? It’s not every day I get to meet someone in my”—he gestured at the bookshelves around him—“favorite place of all time. This is groundbreaking for me, really.”

She giggled, her lips turning up in a full-on smile, and Gus’s breath hitched. She’s . . . really pretty.

Several moments passed before her laughter subsided, and she replied, “You can call me Saoirse, Gus Brandon.”

“Sear . . . shah? Is that what you said?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“How do you spell that, exactly?”

“S-A-O-I-R-S-E,” she said. “Saoirse.”

“Saoirse,” he repeated. “That’s beautiful.”

A reddish-brown insect flittered in his peripheral, and he looked that way. It was a moth, one bigger than his palm, the kind he saw in the forest sometimes.

The moth flew straight over to Saoirse, and she lifted a hand toward it. It landed on her index finger, and she smiled sadly at it, then at Gus. “How kind of you to say.” Glimmering, flickering movement winked all around her.

And then she disappeared.

It was as if she’d melted into the air, and Gus stood there, dumbstruck. What had happened to her?

He reached for his gun again. “What the hell?” He glanced around, but nobody else was in the library. I’m alone.

The moth fluttered past him, back from where it came, and he took deep breaths, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes with trembling hands. Was he going crazy, seeing things? Had his “overactive imagination” finally “gotten the best” of him, just as Beverly always said it would? Or had his parents’ passing, combined with Beverly breaking things off with him and moving on, become too much for him, and he’d snapped?

Sure, his relationship with Mom and Dad had been nonexistent at best, abusive at worst, and he and Beverly had wanted different things, so it’d had to end between them.

But still . . .

He sighed and put his glasses back on. So what if he were going crazy? Tons of people had lost their minds after the turmoil of the Nuclear War, and he wasn’t convinced that even after all these years, every person in the compound was entirely sane. A bunch of folks probably saw people that weren’t there, right? Constantly. I bet they see people that aren’t there constantly.

He shook his head. There wasn’t time to stand here and worry about it anyway. Now that he had his books, he needed to catch a hog or a deer or a goat or something so that he wouldn’t get in trouble. So that there would be more animals in the compound to breed, to eat.

Chittering sounded on the ground next to his feet. He looked down to find Remington nuzzling the side of his boot. “I’ll see you next time, okay, Rem?” He knelt and quickly petted the black squirrel, then retrieved and zipped up his backpack, threw it over his shoulder, and left the library.

All right, that's the first chapter! Interested in reading the rest of the book? You can find it here.