Coming later this year from LooseId LLC, our book currently titled Bound By Fire features a villainous sorcerer by the name of King.  What’s fun writing about villains is that we get to give them all the worst character traits that we see in everyday life.  There’s something cathartic about writing about villains and their punishment.

Here’s a snippet from the very beginning of the book, where we introduce King and our hero, the young sorcerer’s apprentice, Vanya Demidov.

Vanya tried to swallow but his throat burned from the smoke. Mr. King called it ‘incense,’ but it stank – some sticky sweet something-or-other he found at an occult shop.

“Get on the altar.” King’s voice sounded more harsh than usual, as though his excitement made him want to yell at Vanya.

The stone surface burned with cold and Vanya’s skin flinched from it. Already nude, his ass muscles threatened to cramp as he sat down. He tried to ignore the chill crawling up his crack toward his balls and squeezed his legs together to protect himself.

“Now lie back.”

“What?”

King’s hand whipped across Vanya’s face. It hurt, heavy and stinging, but more, the look in King’s brown eyes brought bile to Vanya’s throat.

“Don’t argue with me, boy. Lie back!”

King clenched his hand in the air and pain erupted along Vanya’s skin from his neck to his balls. He smacked his elbow on the stone’s edge in his haste to lie flat. His voice, begging for mercy, got drowned by King’s chanting and a rushing sound grew in Vanya’s ears.

Smoke from the brazier on the far end of the altar, near Vanya’s feet, filled the air. It billowed in a black cloud and boiled like a storm, writhing in midair. It slithered, snakelike, to the right and down toward Vanya’s body.

But when Vanya tried to move, his body lay like iron enclosed it.

“Master, please!” Vanya’s muscles cramped from the effort of moving, all to no avail. “Please, I can’t move.”

The steady chanting continued without break and Vanya caught enough of the Latin to understand the invocation called on the Element of Fire.

His stomach jolted. Not the Element of Fire. A fire elemental. And King offered Vanya as the sacrifice.

Vanya threw everything he had into his struggle. He screamed, over and over, but King didn’t stop his steady chant. Even Vanya’s terrified sobs did nothing to move him. Vanya’s body, exhausted, stopped finally, and he lay against the stone with tears on his face and sweat drying on his skin.

“Ignatius, I summon thee.” King’s voice sounded triumphant and assured of itself. He lowered a lit candle into an iron dish on the small altar in front of him, his eyes on the candle’s flame.

Then all hell broke loose.

The bowl exploded and took half the table with it. King shrieked and clapped a hand to his face, blood oozing from between his fingers. The table toppled, moving slowly, and spilled all the carefully prepared objects every-which-way across the stone floor. The spell holding Vanya to the table evaporated like a soap bubble but King didn’t seem to be looking at him.

Without warning, King scrambled for the hidden door, pushing it open and rushing outside without looking back.