Image borrowed from Wily Writers.

I’ve been writing stories about my magical monster hunter Alondra DeCourval for many years.  Her adventures have appeared most recently in Fright Mare: Women Write Horror, where she met a possessed doll in Tokyo, and nEvermore!: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and the Macabre, in which she unravels an ancient vendetta in Venice.

In Instant City, she walked with a vampire in Golden Gate Park. In the first Haunted Mansion Project book, she wrestled with ghosts.  She’s practiced alchemy in Prague and befriended a fox spirit in Ueno Park and made the ultimate sacrifice in New Orleans.

The only story that’s been podcasted was a dark “Valentine” that appeared on Wily Writers.  You can read it or listen to it here.

An excerpt:

Alondra had never done this kind of magic before. It felt awful, dirty. Her head ached from the concentration it took. Still, she sat in the quaint café, drinking peppermint tea. Teeth gritted, she traced sigils for summoning in the moisture her glass left on the birch tabletop.

She’d never been to Oslo before, spoke almost no Norwegian, but that hadn’t posed a problem. Scandinavians all spoke lovely English. It shamed her to not have more vocabulary. She’d scarcely prepared for the trip and didn’t know how long before her quarry moved on.

And he traveled a lot. Alondra wasn’t sure if he fled something or searched for something. Not that it mattered. She didn’t want to know more about him than his regular habits in this place. She needed to know enough to find him. Meet him. Get him alone and kill him.