Marco and the Angel: A Prep School Blues Story - Preview

Greetings, friends! Hope everyone is holding up well during this difficult year. My awesome editor Eva has recently finished the last of her notes on the final PSB novel "Prep School Passion," and I am putting the finishing touches on the revisions. So hopefully I will be publishing early this summer! Meanwhile, here's a little preview for another short story set in PSB-verse. "Marco and the Angel" picks up with some of our characters the summer after high school and provides a coda to the series...

"Years after the death of his beloved Richard Alexander, Marco Stieber has a new life in Florida working at a diner. Then, Richard’s brother Edgar breezes into town along with Toby Smith, his new boyfriend. Toby once worked with Richard at the strip club called Flesh and the Devil. As Marco and Toby bond over shared memories of Richard, they feel haunted by Richard’s presence and by his terrible secret."

Check out an excerpt after the jump! 

Marco and the Angel: A Prep School Blues Story 

Walking home in the early hours of dawn from his customary night shift at the diner, Marco Stieber could have sworn he saw a ghost. 

Not that he believed in ghosts. Growing up, his mother taught him souls either went to heaven or hell. The concept of purgatory was for Catholics, who she insisted would end up in hell unless they converted to her preferred strain of Evangelical Protestantism, and ghosts were just demons sent up by the devil to trick gullible fools. Given that this was the same mother who sent him one summer to an Apocalyptic conspiracy cult and the following to a conversion therapy center, Marco did not entirely buy into her theories of the supernatural. He did not even follow her advice to cast away the spirit with the injunction: “In Jesus’s name!” Instead, he crossed the street and pursued the fleeting specter around the corner. He could not help himself. He was sure he saw the face of Richard Alexander. He could never forget that face as long as he lived. 

By that time, Richard had been dead for more than two years. 

Marco sped up as he lost sight of his target. Even though he broke into a run, by the time he turned the corner, Richard, or whatever looked like Richard, was gone. He panted, struggling not to break into the hyperventilation fits of his younger days. He looked around the deserted street, desperately searching for some sign of Richard. He did not see anyone. He did not hear the retreating footsteps of a man evading him. He only heard the squeaking of seagulls and the rhythmic thrumming of the waves from the beach a few blocks away. No early morning joggers or dog walkers disturbed the eerie calm of that hour. 

After a fruitless search, he chalked up the whole experience to the result of too little sleep and too much coffee over the previous twenty-four hours, working a double to cover for a sick co-worker. As he turned around towards the direction of his apartment building, he saw a curious flier taped to a telephone poll. He ripped it down and held it close to his eyes to make sure he was reading it properly. 

The flyer read: “Die Daddy Die at The Beach Shack, One Night Only.” Checking the date, he realized with a start that the band was preforming that very night, just a few hours before his next shift started at the diner. 

Marco had travelled a long way to escape his past, but from the looks of things, ghost or no ghost, his past had come after him. As much as he wanted to forget every terrible thing that had happened during his high school years back in Beaumont, Illinois, he felt an inexplicable, irresistible urge to go to the show. Maybe he was looking for closure or maybe this was just fate. Either way, he needed to go crash and get some sleep before he came face-to-face once more with Edgar Alexander. 

COMING SOON exclusively to Amazon Kindle!