Civil War Vampires -and not the sparkly kind!

THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS

My horror short story "The Blood of Patriots" is now available as an ebook: Link to Amazon listing
 Description and brief excerpt below:


A SHORT TALE OF TERROR by award-winning author Troy D. Smith

Colonel Jeffords has more to worry about than the Confederate Army. He has chosen to employ an infamous Union guerrilla band led by the mysterious Captain Vincent Caine -a band so bloodthirsty that the enemy may not be enough to satiate them. Vincent Caine has a secret, you see -a terrible, terrible secret. And a terrible hunger...

EXCERPT:

There was something about Vincent Caine. Something which –from the first moment I saw him outside Fredricksburg –told me that the Englishman was no ordinary fighting man. I could not place it at the time, the odd feeling which crept into my gut on each occasion I saw him. There was a coldness in Caine’s features, you see, which slithered at you in the pale moonlight like a serpent.

Of course, Caine was not an ordinary fighting man –he was an irregular, or scout. A guerilla. That breed of man is often cruel and independent –even arrogant, not used to submitting to military discipline.

And Caine was one of the more infamous Union guerillas. He and his band struck fear into Rebels, and anyone else who crossed them.

Looking at him for the second time, just before Chancellorsville, I could understand why. A buzz of irrational fear pricked at the base of my skull when the man reported in to me, and the sensation heightened when Caine smiled.

“Good morning, Colonel Jeffords,” he said. I had never quite been able to trace his accent –having traveled Britain in my youth, I prided myself on placing regional inflections.

I rubbed my bleary eyes and brought my tin coffee cup to my mouth with both hands.

“Morning!” I said contemptuously as I sat the cup back down. “It hardly qualifies. Two hours till sunrise, I call that night. I definitely didn’t sleep long enough for it to qualify as a new day.”

Caine’s grin grew colder, somehow. “Just one more sacrifice we make to the god of war,” he said. “Many of our actions in his service look better outside the rude gaze of the sun, I think.”

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