Monday, March 26, 2012

Surprise Agent Invasion #15


Title: WICKED SPIRITS
Genre: urban fantasy
Word Count: 80,000

Query:

Demon bartender Vess hasn’t been able to love in over four millennia,
and it’s her own damn fault.  She goes on blind dates with no hope of
falling into love or falling into bed, and she has had enough.  One
night, she discovers the only way to break her 4,000 year loveless
streak is to trigger the apocalypse.

No big deal, right?

Only, Vess is a Promise demon—a supernatural notary—not a freaking
harbinger of death!  She enlists the aid of her rag-tag group of
barfly friends—an ailing muse, an elderly restaurateur with
supernatural vision, and an amorphous blob who sells magic rocks.
Together, they concoct a plan which could trigger the end-times. But,
just as the gang starts to wrangle some relics, Vess gets a wakeup
call in the form of a samurai assassin sent to kill her.  Too bad he’s
insanely cute and Vess can’t tell if he wants to kill her or kiss her.

Vess has to jump through a million flaming hoops to put the pieces of
the apocalyptic puzzle together.  She has to infiltrate a demon
mega-corporation that sucks human stupidity through reality TV.  She
must bring down the house in Vegas, attend a human senior prom, and
even work a shift at a strip-club just to assemble her artillery. With
a little help from her drunken demon cohorts, Vess fumbles andcarouses
her way towards the big, shiny red button.

But when the time comes, can she bring herself to push it?

First 250:

If my best friend wasn’t already dying, I’d kill her for this. The man
in front of me eyed me with a cold glare, his gaunt face a mask of
displeasure.  I inhaled slowly and tried to center myself with some
yoga breathing.  He noticed my discomfort and smirked.

I wondered at the cruel jest my life had become as I stared down one
of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  My body tensed, deciding
between fight or flight.

Then I remembered my promise to her and mustered the courage to give it a shot.

“Diah didn’t mention your name when she set this up,” I said, busying
my hands with the napkin in my lap.  “I’m Vesshana—Vess for short.”

“My name can only be properly pronounced in the throes of agony,” he
answered, taking a sip from a sweating glass of ice water.

“Oh,” I answered, suppressing a cringe.  I certainly didn’t plan on
ending up in any throes tonight, let alone agony.  “So what do you go
by?”

The ice clinked against his teeth before he answered, “Walter.”

“Ok, Walter.  So what do you do for fun?” I asked, despite my
hundreds of misgivings and millennia of rejection.  Diah wanted me to
make another attempt at a date, and so once again, I relented and let
her set me up.

And she only gave me a half-hour’s notice to get ready.

3 comments:

  1. Hi, I just wanted to say I'm enjoying your manuscript!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Would love to see more. Please send query, synopsis and full to Esubmissions (at) SarahJanefreymann (dot) com.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would love to see more of this!

    Could you please email the full manuscript in .doc form to suzie at nancycoffeyliterary dot com. And if you could paste the query into the first page of the document and put REQUESTED MATERIAL in the subject line of the email, that would be perfect.

    ReplyDelete