Evelyn Klebert

He felt it all over her as though she’d touched it, touched the crystal he sought. His mind, however, told him how highly unlikely that was. It, the crystal as he called it, although he had no earthly idea what form it took, had been for lack of a better word created over five hundred years before by an alchemist deep in Southern France in the city of Provence. This remarkable clarifying crystal’s existence was only known from the diaries of mystics. But it was not a mythology, it was real and in this city.

In the distance she could hear a buzzing, like a cicada or other insect but all around her was darkness except the moon, the stars, and the cathedral which continued to gleam before her.

“You shouldn’t be up.”
She clutched the drape in shock at the sound of the sudden intrusion. Slowly she turned to the doorway and her heart clutched for the second time in a matter of seconds. The man standing in the doorway, staring at her was dressed in a suit, in fact a rather antiquated dark grey suit, a style that clearly belonged in another time. “Where am I?” she whispered with evident fear wondering for the first time and perhaps belatedly whether she should have armed herself with some kind of weapon. Her eyes flew over to the large ceramic pitcher across the room. He took a step further into the room and she instinctively edged backwards against the drapes. Her eyes again were mesmerized by his odd garb, she followed a long chain that was attached from a button and disappeared into a pocket – a pocket watch? Did anyone still use those things?

It was late and he waited outside on the plantation’s vast gallery to see if she would come to him tonight. It was selfish of him. He was putting her in terrible danger. He knew for a fact that Philippe considered her of no more value than anything else he possessed and what he possessed he would defend his right to, even if that meant destroying it. But that didn’t stop Antoine. It was clear nothing would stop him. He waited in the semi-darkness hearing soft footsteps. Finally after a stretch of endless moments she appeared out of the shadows dressed in a long white nightgown. Her face was as pale as the moonlight, filled with worry, indecision. She stopped in front of his chair. “I have to talk to you Antoine. We can’t go on with this. We must put an end to it before something terrible happens.”
He heard her words, but felt the drumming in his head, the sound of the river, of his blood like a dull roar. Nothing had awakened him to life as she had; nothing had rallied his emotions in such a way. He stood up grasping her and pulling her aggressively against him. “No,” she whispered but then he silenced her with his mouth against hers. It was hopeless, hopeless for both of them but never before had he felt such hope.

“And I found all of the sudden he was making progress. The energies had shifted. What was secure was no longer, frankly because of you.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said pointedly.
He shrugged, “You don’t have to understand. Sometimes life simply thrusts things upon you when you have a role to play. In India they call it karma, unfinished business from past lives. People’s lives are intertwined for inexplicable reasons to them, but linked in the grand scheme of things.”

For Julia Moreau life seems complicated. Emerging from a failed marriage and managing a lifetime of diabetes, she lives alone in her childhood home where she communicates with the spirit of her Great Aunt Lilia.

But Julia doesn’t have a clue what complicated is until she is thrust into being the key chess piece in a match between two powerful men of extraordinary abilities on the wild hunt for a mystical creature hidden in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter. Will Julia lose her soul to the karma of a devastating past life or her heart to the love of a man driven by dark forces? What is clear is that whichever way she turns she is Treading on Borrowed Time.

6×9 Softcover 198 pages
Retail Price: $16.95
ISBN 1-613420-22-6

Now available at Cornerstone Book Publisher’s, Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble and all other major on-line retailers.