The evil blogger is back.....cue music!
heh
I return with the promised excerpt from Ezra Barany's biblical suspense novel, The Torah Codes. Be sure to check out yesterday's guest post and review! Here is the lead in section from the guest post explaining the excerpt:
· Create Subtext
A simple boring dialogue can be made exciting by having one character not know what the reader or the other character knows. If a boyfriend and girlfriend meet for lunch, the dialogue won’t be nearly as interesting as knowing that this is the day she is working up the courage to break up with him. Now the dialogue is compelling. Every time she simply says to her boyfriend that she’s “fine,” and that her food “tastes okay,” brings us closer to yelling at her either “Do it! Do it!” (Break up with him) or “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” In the excerpt from my book The Torah Codes below, the antagonist Luke McCourt meets the protagonist’s friend Sophia on a train. Though the protagonist, Nathan, has told Sophia about Luke, she has never seen him before. So while Luke knows who she is, she doesn’t know who he is. And as we have already read about Luke’s deadly activities, all we know is that Luke has something horrible planned for Sophia. In other words, the Cat is playing with a Mouse.
Sophia wasn’t sure what an Indonesian looked like. “Are you from Indonesia?” She asked.
“Sorry?” the gentleman shouted over the din of the train.
Sophia repeated her question louder.
“No,” he said and laughed. “New York. And you?”
“Well, my mother was born in Switzerland, and my father’s parents were from Hungary, but he was born in the Bronx. They met in the Bronx, but I was born in San Francisco. I guess you could call me cosmopolitan.” She said.
The gentleman smiled and asked, “And where are you just coming from, if I may be so bold?”
“Oh, yeah, no, I’ve got no secrets. Ask me anything you want,” Sophia said waving it off with her hand. “I read tarot.”
“Tar—?”
“Tarot, you never heard of tarot?”
“Please forgive my ignorance,” the gentleman said with a smirk while raising an auburn eyebrow.
“Oh, no, don’t worry about it. I’m just surprised, is all,” Sophia said. “Tarot is a method of divination used with a certain deck of cards…Have we met before?”
“I think I would have remembered a face like yours,” he said.
Sophia felt herself blush. “It’s just, there’s something about your face that I’m picking up, but I’m not sure what it is.” Sophia studied his face closely. The cards could tell her. She opened her backpack purse. “Why don’t I give you a reading!”
“Oh. Thank you very much. But I’m not a big believer in divination.”
Sophia closed her purse and set it down beside her. “Yeah, neither is Nathan.”
“Nathan? Is that you’re boyfriend?”
“No,” Sophia laughed. “Well, not yet, anyway.”
The gentleman chuckled as if they just shared a secret. “So what’s stopping you two?” he asked.
“It was never really a matter of whether we’d be friends enough to become boyfriend-girlfriend. We didn’t really start off as friends. He just needed me to help him out with some weird thing that happened to him which I won’t go into, but I’m telling you,” she patted the air to emphasize her words, “it’s really weird.”
The gentleman listened carefully.
“Anyhow,” Sophia said, “he just needed me to be there for him.”
“Isn’t that what loved ones do for each other?”
“I suppose. And, yeah, you’re right. I guess I do like him. I mean, he’s handsome, he’s smart, and he’s so funny,” she laughed.
“You just like him?” the gentleman asked.
“Okay, okay. I love him.” She shook. “Ooh! I just got chills all over. It’s one thing to feel it, but actually saying it. Announcing it. Putting it out there.” She sighed. “It makes it so real.”
“Does he know your feelings for him?”
“Yeah, I think it’s pretty obvious.” Sophia looked down at her bracelet with a stainless steel design of two hearts and fiddled with it. “But if he liked me the same way, I guess he would have told me by now.”
“Not necessarily,” the gentleman said. “Several years ago I was madly in love with an exotic Indian woman. She was a photographer, like myself, and we met at a photography expo. I had seen her work on tulips, and was struck most by one of her pieces. It was a stunning image of two blue tulips—just the tops—nested in a porcelain teacup. I spoke to her about it and one thing led to another, turned out we spent more time with each other than at the expo. I even managed to buy her blue tulips, and believe me, they were not easy to come by.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet.”
“She made her feelings for me very clear. Unfortunately, I had a, oh, shall we say, family mission that wouldn’t allow me the freedom to make the kind of commitment she was looking for.”
“What kind of mission?”
“It’s very complicated so I won’t go into it, but let’s just say,” he patted the air, “it’s very complicated.”
Sophia laughed.
“In her hotel room over tea, I explained to the best of my ability how I wanted to be with her but the reality of it was impossible. We parted that evening having made plans to meet for breakfast before she left for the airport. She even gave me her spare room key in case she was in the shower when I arrived.” He smiled.
Sophia returned the smile.
“That evening, I returned to my room, and I’ll tell you it was the longest evening of my life.”
“Why’s that?”
“For hours I debated whether or not I should commit my life to this wonderful woman, or should I stay true to the family mission. My conclusion was that my family be damned, I was going to give everything of me, body and soul, to this woman. And I couldn’t wait to tell her so at breakfast.”
“So what happened?” Sophia’s eyes widened.
“I couldn’t sleep the rest of the evening. But I didn’t want to ruin her rest, so I waited for the agreed upon hour to arrive. At six o’clock, I knocked on her door. No answer.”
“Oh, no.”
“I tried again. Still, no answer. Perhaps she was in the shower. I used the key she gave me and opened the door. The room was empty. No clothes, no items in the bathroom. Only the two teacups from the night before. And in one of them, two blue tulips.”
Sophia sighed.
“There was a note from her beside the teacups.”
“What did it say?” Sophia asked.
“She apologized for missing our breakfast but chose to take an earlier flight because the idea of spending time with a man she could never have was too much for her to bear.”
“And you didn’t call her?”
“I had no contact information on her. I could have easily found it, but I took her leaving as a sign.”
“A sign?”
“A sign to stay true to the family mission. But the point I’m trying to make here is that Nathan may soon realize just how much he needs you. Don’t be surprised if he comes over one day with a ring. All you need to do is be there for him.” The gentleman leaned close to her. “And does he have your cell phone number?”
Sophia laughed. “He does.”
“Good.” He smiled.
Sophia’s fingers itched and tingled. Her tarot cards were so close, and they could help her decide what it was about that smile that seemed off. “I’m Sophia, by the way.” She extended her hand. “What’s your name?”
The gentleman looked up to his right. “Charles,” he said, taking her hand.
Sophia felt her stomach tighten. The man had made up his name. A family mission? A photographer?
“Oh, dear,” the man said holding her hand tighter. “It seems you caught me in a lie. I can always read fear in a face. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Luke McCourt.”
So there you have it!
Intrigued?
You should be!
The Torah Codes is a rousing read.
You can find out more at The Torah Codes on Facebook
You can buy The Torah Codes on Amazon.com
Disclosure: I received a copy of The Torah Codes gratis. Any opinions expressed are my honest opinions and were not impacted by my receipt of the free e-book. I received no monetary compensation for this post.
