105 000 words. Sekrit project aka the sort-of-urban fantasy set in Paris. Of course, it’s a first draft and more full of holes than a colander, and my next task will be to fix those before lobbing the draft to my kind crit group so they can deservedly savage constructively criticise it.

But for now I will bask in the knowledge of a job well done.

Here, have a snippet:

It was Ninon who first saw her. Philippe, though, felt her presence first, but hadn’t said anything. It wasn’t a wish to protect the young Fallen so much as to protect himself–his status in the Red Mamba gang was precarious as it was, and he had no desire to remind them of how much of a commodity he could become, given enough cruelty on their part. And Heaven knew, of course, that those days it didn’t take much for cruelty or despair to get the better of them all, when life hung on a razor’s edge, even for a former Immortal.
They’d been scavenging in the Grands Magasins–desperate and hungry, as Ninon had put it, because no one was foolish enough to go down there among the ruins of the Magicians’ War, with spells that no one had had time to clean up primed and ready to explode in your face, with the ghosts and the hauntings and the odour of death that still hung like fog over the wrecks of counters and the faded posters advertising garments and perfumes from another, more innocent age.

(picture via Patron of the Arts)