Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

On Saturday, December 8th, my Steampunk Fantasy Novel Daemon will be offered for free on Amazon in the Kindle format. This will be my last promotion of the year, though I will have one in January of the new year for my hard science fiction novel Afterlife. So far the promotions have helped, and sales of every book has picked up after the promotion, with the exception of The Hunger. Not sure what happened there. And Exodus: Book 1 has sold very well without any kind of promotion, over a thousand copies in six weeks, but I am pretty sure that the promotion of other scifi books helped it out as well. I think that Daemon, and Afterlife as well, are two of the better books I have written. Both are stand alone, not series, though they could be turned into such if that seems the way to go. I believe if I can get people to read them and comment on them they will also do very well. If not, then they will just sit on the electronic bookshelf and sell a few here and there while I go on to other projects. The great thing about the electronic bookshelves, as versus the ones in the physical stores, is that there is infinite room, so a book can sit there without great sales, waiting to be discovered.
Daemon was written in 2010, my most productive year of writing to date. I also wrote the rough drafts of Exodus and Refuge books 1 and 2, Afterlife, and a fantasy called Aura, which will be coming out within the next month or two. I had hit on the idea of doing a steampunk novel after reading a couple and finding out they really didn’t have to be in the scifi genre. I started out with the idea of a culture that had stagnated technologically because they had discovered the easy way to do things, with magic. So steam has been the technology of choice for the last two centuries. Now the problem with the easy way is it often causes more problems than it solves. And such is the case here. The world has been sapped of its energy, fertile lands turned into deserts, and mankind is now reduced to the last sixty million people on the last million square miles of living land. And the dark is haunted by the Shadows, the negative energy remains of the animals that once walked the earth, stalking the darkness to get what energy they can from the living. The Shadows are afraid of light, magic is the great creator of light, so mankind must continue to use magic to keep the Shadows at bay. The human race is trapped in a corner, and even the living world is an unhealthy reflection of itself. But Daemon Corporation may have found the answer, another source of life energy. Unfortunately, as often happens, there is a very big downside, as in something that is now stalking the employees of the corporation and killing them in horrible ways. It works its way up the corporate food chain until…. Well, let’s just say you will have to read the novel, which will be free from Saturday 12/8 till Wednesday 12/12 on Amazon. And as always, a review is welcome. Remeber to pick up Daemon during the promotion. The trailer link can be seen here on Youtube. And now for an excerpt:

Sondra took a large swig of her whiskey and admired the view, enjoying the relaxing feeling that went along with the bite of the alcohol. She was thinking about how good she had it, when so many others didn’t have the safety of a strong house soul and protective wards, like those who lived on the streets, when the clock on the mantel struck midnight with a loud bong. It counted through the twelve gongs of the traditional witching hour. On the last gong the house soul screamed out in alarm, and Sondra knew that something was very wrong.
She felt the chill run over her as the cityscape blurred behind the blue glowing field of the building defensive system that appeared outside of the large window. It only appeared in the visual range when it activated, and something had just done that. She knew of no shadow creature that would attempt to breach that defense, which could draw on the city energy supplies if needed. The field grew brighter while she watched, indicating that it was in fact drawing on those reserves.
Sondra used her abilities then, shifting to her second sight, the vision she used to trace magical energies at work. She felt confident, on the surface, that the defensive shield could handle anything that was thrown at it, outside an attack by one of the adepts of the Mages’ Council. And none of them would launch an attack at a tech of Daemon Corp. She was both too inconsequential and too well protected for such an attack.
The red energy appeared now to her second sight, an angry shade that interacted with the defensive shield, and seemed to be seeping through it. The shield strengthened again, and the red was stopped for a moment, trapped in the blue energy of the defense. Then it flared and continued to flow through it like water through a membrane. It was like nothing she had ever seen, though it reminded her of something she had seen before. She couldn’t place it, but it nagged at her mind through the almost paralyzing terror. It built up on the other side of the building screen, and then began to attack the house screen that flashed blue on the other side of the window.
Then the window blew in, and she had thought for little else as a hot wind moved in with the shattered glass that cut her on the arms and face. The house soul continued to scream.
“Mommy, mommy,” yelled the small voice of Matt.
Sondra felt a new terror hit her in the solar plexus. She turned her head, feeling blood rolling down her face, to see the children huddled at the entrance to the hall. Their eyes and mouths were wide open, and she felt her fear grow, forgetting about herself and concentrating on her offspring.
“Get back to your rooms,” she yelled in the voice that she hoped the children would obey. She wiped the blood on her face with the back of an arm, turning her head and looking back at the entity that was flowing through the shattered window. She glanced back at her children, saying a prayer to the God she was not sure she believed in, the God of her own childhood, and hoping that the blessing of the homeless man might be helpful. Hoping that the blessing might save her children, if not herself. The children continued to stare, their eyes glancing back and forth between their mother and the broken window.
“House,” she shouted, hearing the roar of something building in the room. “Move them back to their rooms. Form a barrier.”
The little bodies were lifted by a gentle force from the ground and moved away. Sondra knew that the house would concentrate all its energy in a barrier to protect the children. It would maybe slow down anything that came after them. Maybe long enough for help to answer the screaming alarm.
She turned back in time to see the red energy coalesce into a demonic face, glaring at her with a hateful anger, the glowing eyes expressing no mercy. Sondra tried to call up a spell that might allow her to fight the thing. All she could think of was the small combat spell she had learned years ago to fight a rapist, if one ever attacked her. Not something she thought would work on this thing. Still she opened her mouth to shout out the words, when the hot wind slammed her into the back of the couch and over. Her head hit the floor, and she looked up in pain and confusion as the force grabbed her and jerked her into the air.
The pain in her head was forgotten when searing agony gripped her body. Forces were pulling on different vectors, and she felt parts of her body rip and tear. She felt another agony that had nothing to do with her body, a hollow pain that started in her chest and moved outward into her limbs, and realized that her soul was being ripped from her, devoured by the demon that held her in its grip. Her scream of terror cut off as her body flew across the room in a dozen pieces and smacked from the walls with great splatters of blood. Her soul continued its silent scream while it was sucked into the creature and became part of its energy, obliterating her presence from the Universe.