Sneak peek

Hey!

Do you remember By Blood Moonlight? Of course you do!

Do you remember when I hinted that there would be two sequels? Well, you might not; I didn't exactly make a big deal about it. There's a lot going on in life right now, so I'm not exactly working on it with any degree of speed, but I am working on it. Perhaps you'd like a sneak preview? Of course, some bits have been edited so as not to give away too much too early.

By the time Velvet had reached the old courthouse again, she knew that she was not ok. She felt fire burning all around her and her skin was being stretched in every direction at once. The stench of blood filled her nose and her tongue was coated with cinders and ash. She walked unsteadily through the film the stretched out in front of her, and when she finally stepped back inside, she found she couldn’t remember Dawn being so bright or so tall.

She thought it was Dawn. Maybe it was Runic, or a beast she’d never met before. Everything was the same to her.

Something pressed into her side and pushed her forward, and then pushed her down into a pile of scratchy hay. A stone was shoved into her mouth that burst into sand on her teeth. She tried to spit it out, but her mouth was so dry that she couldn’t. So dry that when she felt kerosene splash on her tongue she drank and drank until there was no more to drink.

She fell then, through a blistering kaleidoscope of Moonlight. The stars whispered to her from beneath the Lake and gave her insight she didn’t want, telling her how she might find the Nightmare and what she might say to it, and she knew then that the sun was ready to rise, if she would only tell it to. A thousand thousand voices collapsed inward and became the frightened, tear-streaked face of Dawn Walker.

Velvet blinked.

She blinked again, and then turned her head. She was in the courthouse where everything had turned sideways on her, wrapped up in an itchy red blanket and laying on her back beside a pile of blood- and ichor-soaked rags and a half-finished bottle of brandy. She realized then that the rags were the shirt she had been wearing when she left Old Canterlot. In the next instant, Dawn was upon her with a crushing embrace.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, on the verge of crying.

“Of course I’m not dead. The sun’s not up yet, is it?” Velvet replied. She worked a hoof between herself and Dawn and gently pushed the other away. “How long was I like that?” she asked.

Dawn was momentarily perplexed. “A half-hour?” she suggested. “An hour at the longest. Nothing outside’s any different.“

Velvet let her head roll back just slightly. “Of course it isn’t,” she hissed. “Runic, what happened to me?”

“Ashen blood!”

Velvet turned her head towards the voice, and saw Runic in all of his inappropriately excited impropriety, bouncing towards her as if he’d just opened the Very Best Birthday Gift. “I’ve never seen anypony with ashen blood before. I didn’t know ponies could still get ashen blood! Tell me about it! How did your naughty bits feel?”

“Not now, Runic. I’m having a bad day.” With a muffled groan, Velvet rolled off her back and shook herself free of the blanket. “Give me blood.”

“Blood? I gave you two injections already!”

Velvet grit her teeth. She hurt everywhere, and blood would fix it. She wanted blood. She needed blood!

She knew also, however far in the back of her mind, that it was bad to take too much too quickly.

He had taken blood; two injections during the fight on the bridge, at least one more in the half-hour before she found him in the cemetery, a beast that she had to put down. Too much, too quickly.

She didn’t need blood.