About The Amethyst Eye
Author: Julia Talbot
Word Count: 10100
Page Count (pdf): 36
ISBN: 978-1-942831-74-7
Price: @2.99
Pairing: MM
Genre: Paranormal
Date Published: 2nd ed 07/26/2017 1st ed 2010
Publisher: Turtlehat Creatives
Heat Rating: 
File Types available: pdf, mobi, epub
Summary:
Jared might be physically blind, but he has the amethyst eye his granny gave him, and there are things he can see perfectly well. When a mysterious stranger starts following him around the city, Jared knows that changes are coming, and he might just be looking forward to the excitement. Dante is more than willing to give Jared what he needs. It’s been a long time since anyone has seen Dante for what he really is, and he knows it might be Jared, not the eye, who has all the magic he wants.
This is a previously published novelette. The publisher has changed
Excerpt:
There was something about the blind guy. Dante watched him walking down the street, cane tapping rhythmically. There was nothing of the searching head movements you saw on TV, none of the strange lip pursing or flailing free hand, just the confident side to side movement, the feet moving as if the man could see every step.
It fascinated Dante to the point that he followed the guy down the block, watching, waiting to see if the man faltered, if he ran into something, but there was never so much as stumble. The man walked three more blocks before turning into a building that had a doorman. No fumbling with the revolving doors for this man. Dante stopped before he reached the portal, not wanting to draw attention to himself. He memorized the address, though, as well as all of the landmarks around the building.
He’d be back to watch some more. Nothing had interested him this much in years.
***
Someone was following him. The same someone who had been following him for weeks. Jared knew it, just like he knew that the man over behind the dumpster was shooting up heroin, even though he couldn’t see it.
His hand automatically went to the amethyst pendant he wore on the chain around his neck. His granny had called it an amulet, an eye, but Jared was always careful to just call it a necklace when anyone else was around. Blind people made folks uncomfortable as it was; blind people with hoodoo made them wicked scared.
He turned the corner, heading for the Steaming Mug. He loved the place; it was the only twenty-four hour coffee house in his neighborhood, and he got a hankering for a caramel brulee latte at three a.m. more often than he’d like to admit. He also liked the late-night barista, Katy. She was a rough-voiced lesbian who teased him unmercifully and without any hint of worry about offending his blind self. Worry was pale lavender, and Katy was never that color. Generally, she was more cinnamon.
The follower was bright crimson. Or at least what Jared called crimson in his head. He’d been born blind, so he had no real idea what crimson, or any other color, actually was. He went by taste, by smell, forming an amalgam for each degree of the spectrum.
The eye probably helped, probably made the colors in his head more like what they were in nature than not. Granny had given it to him when he was born; she always told him she’d known he was going to be blind and that amethyst was good at helping the spiritual sight, the hoodoo. That way he’d be safe.
Granny had been dark, dark violet with a shimmery light that outlined her as plain as anything in his sightless world. She’d fucking glowed.
So. Bright crimson, with a scent that was metallic and spicy and somehow more intriguing than the rich, earthy smell of the coffee house, which was only half a block away now, and not even the least bit obliterated by the Indian restaurant that sat between Jared and his latte.
His cane hit someone’s foot, the guy muttering something that sounded like, “Get a fucking dog.”
Jared just smiled and shook his head. Granny had also believed, and had been proven right more than once, that cheerfully accepting that other people could be downright assholes would lead to a long life and a general lack of frustration. Start out with no expectations of behavior, and you were rarely disappointed.
He’d thought about a Lhasa Apso on more than one occasion, just to fuck with people.