Polishing Saber is my novella in the upcoming Liquid Silver Books vampire anthology “Of Flesh and Blood.” Polishing Saber is not your traditional vampire story. No Carpathians or Urban Angsty vampires here! Mine is an environmentalist vampire on a mission to save Iceland from greedy developers. He finds his champion in the form of Saber Evangelista, the woman with the key to the developers’ dreams–but before he can enlist her aid, he has to put a shine on her attitude…
Excerpt, Chapter Four (with apologies to my own sweet mini-dachshund, Lyle)
The security guard didn’t know what to do. He’d never had trouble of this kind at the Pearl before. In fact, other than the occasional tourist shoplifting a trinket from the souvenir shop, his job was fairly uneventful. He placed his strong arm around the shaken woman. With a heavy German accent pervading her attempt to speak English to the guard, she described a horror he found hard to grasp. Had she been drinking? He sniffed her hair as she sobbed. No. There was no alcohol on her person. He cautiously peeked under her shawl. Sad brown eyes looked up at him, and a little tail wagged slightly—below what clearly looked like a human bite mark.
“I put his little leash around the pole and used the restroom ever so briefly. When I returned, he was gone. My little boy was gone.”
A miniature dachshund. Her little boy. The guard rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “And then you found him behind the potted plant?”
“Yes. With the horrible wound on his back!” the woman sobbed.
The guard stroked the red-coat dog’s smooth coat. “He seems fine, but you had better take him to the animal hospital on Langholtsvegur.”
“Someone bit my dog! He is not fine!”
“I have alerted the police, Mrs.—one will be here shortly. I must go examine the area where you dog was injured now. Will you be all right alone for a moment?” the guard asked.
The woman nodded and held her dog closer to her chest. There was a very miniscule ring of blood on the shawl above the dog’s hind end. Who would bite a dog? He thought immediately that a small child had stumbled across the hound and teethed upon the friendly little beast—but the bite marks were too large for a child. It was an adult. A lunatic. A lunatic at the Pearl. Or perhaps one of the Hidden Folk—the Yule Lad, Bjúgnakrækir, the sausage pilfer, came six months early and thought the little wiener dog was food. The guard chuckled. That would be something, indeed.
Long story short: I was regressed by a hypnotherapist because of an irrational fear of a ditch at the end of our alley when I was a kid. While “under” I relived a past life where I was a little Jewish girl in Poland, gassed and buried while still alive in a mass grave–in a ditch. I began speaking German (which I did not speak at age 13) and gave incredible details about the place and the people around me. My mother still has the cassette. I “woke up” no longer afraid of the ditch.
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