Because the first chapter is a nice little addition to Shade Fright, here’s an  excerpt from Funeral Pallor – Book Two in the Valerie Stevens series:

“There it is again,” I whispered, as I crouched behind the garbage bin. I was knee-deep in torn-open trash bags, and I could have sworn I felt a something scurry across the back of my legs.

Rat-free Alberta, my ass.

The evening started out alright. I’d been downtown watching a new cellist’s debut at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, alone I might add, because my ever-lovin’ boyfriend Dave was up in Fort McMurray working on a new oil sands development. (Yeah, the evil global-warming oil sands that environmental groups and half the staff of the CBC complain are the greatest threats to human life as we know it. I deal in more immediate human destroying threats like demons, dark magic and plain old bad juju.)

We’d been arguing for two weeks since he announced he was going, and though I’m not the kind of person to tell someone how to run his life, Dave’s reasons for working up in the back forty for six weeks simply didn’t make sense. There was plenty of work at the Demarco construction company, and, sure, I know there’s a quick buck to be made up in Fort Mac, but Dave doesn’t need the money. He owns his house free and clear; his only debt in the world is for a home renovation loan for about $30 thousand dollars, and even that was about eighty percent paid off.

Still, he was insistent about it to the point of walking out on an argument and not calling me for a day and a half.

Was I mad at him for going? Well, yeah – but what really bugged me was that he just arbitrarily laid down the law, and that was a side of him I’d never seen before. It was a side to a lot of men I’d dated in the past, and that’s one of the reasons I’d dumped them. But Dave is supposed different. He’s the only guy I’ve ever been with who isn’t afraid of me, and that jettisons him to the top of the list in the quality male department, because there’s a lot about my life to be afraid of.

I’m Valerie Stevens, and I’m an alchemist, or apprentice mage, or something in between the two – I’m still trying to figure out which one it is. I work for the federal government in a benign-sounding ministry called Government Services and Infrastructure Canada, and I deal with the things that go bump in the night and eat your face.

I’d just hopped in my car in a parking garage about a block and a half away from the abandoned warehouse when my ghostly accomplice informed me about the creature, so I grabbed my staff and the rifle bag from the trunk and shrouded myself behind a magical veil, since I was pretty sure the Calgary City Police might take issue with someone creeping around the crummy section of town with a loaded weapon.

Fifty-Dollar Bill’s spectral eyes squinted behind a pair of vaporous, wire-rimmed glasses. “Are you quite certain, Valerie? It could well be a homeless person, you know. There have always been homeless people in Victoria Park, even back in my day.”

I gripped my staff tightly in my right hand and adjusted the shoulder strap of my rifle. I’m not big on guns, but it was a gift from the past President of the Bow Valley Sharp Shooter’s Association, and she’d been giving me lessons near my sanctuary at the Orlowski farm. Her name is Caroline, by the way, and not only can she can fire a bullet into the neck of a beer bottle from five hundred meters away, she also packs her own ammunition.

Oh, and she’s a zombie — sort of like the guy Fifty-Dollar Bill and I were watching as the pile of trash I was standing in seemed to come alive with rodents scurrying across the toes of my Danner boots.

“You’re a ghost, Bill,” I grunted. “And frankly, I think your homeless person is as dead as you are.”

“Because he’s staggering around like a drunkard?”

I pointed with my staff. “No… because there’s a dismembered human leg on the ground beside him, and from the look of it, I’d say that about sixty percent of the flesh has been chewed off.”