66. THE KILLING MOON – Adult Urban Fantasy

Mentor Name: JC Nelson

Mentee Name: Elinor Sattler

Title: THE KILLING MOON

Category: Adult

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Word Count: 100,000

Pitch:

Anna Marlowe fled the world of magic years ago, hiding from her old coven and the nightmares in her past. But when Anna finds a woman slain by poisonous magic, she’s forced to confront the powers, both human and less so, who make Atlanta their home. Someone is brewing a plague which feeds on magic, and if Anna and the police can’t stop it, the people of Atlanta will be the first to die, and with them, Anna’s only family.

Excerpt:

Atlanta’s Piedmont Park was a place to commune with nature. The dead woman hanging in a tree ruined it for me.

Raw poisonous power infected her body, leaving a quicksilver shine to her skin and an angry shimmer in the air like a magic bomb had gone off in her heart. I breathed in death, tasting ashes and tears. She had been tortured.

Man, I am so screwed. Dinner wanted to abandon my stomach for the safety of some tall wet grass.

Tonight I’d planned to throw a spell to keep me from going back to stripping or waiting tables. Some extra luck getting a job with a dental plan and without guys grabbing at me. Instead I sat on the back bumper of a police car at four in the morning while cops decided whether or not handcuffs matched my hot-pink gym shorts.

The medical examiner took pictures of the dead woman. His hands kept twitching the same way a kid at a museum tries to resist fondling the statues.

“Don’t do it,” I muttered under my breath. His plastic gloves wouldn’t keep him safe, but warning the cops about dirty magic required answers I didn’t want to give. I’d walked away from necromancy five years ago and wanted nothing more with the world of ghosts and death.