Chapter One

So this is the start of my novel.  This is only an early rough draft of Chapter One, as I need to extend it and enter more details, but I figured I would get it out and see what the reaction was.  

One

            It was time.  The darkness was once again washing over the mind of Samael, and with his unholy victim with her holier than thou attitude bound and beaten, he was ready to show her the price for ignorance.  With only a slight hesitation and shudder, he plunged the knife deep into the heart of his victim. 

            “Unhallowed be your eyes because they did not see, and your ears because they did not hear,” he breathed into her ear as she gasped for her last breath. 

            The scene before Detective Phillip Hartley was by far the most gruesome he had ever seen in his tenure in law enforcement, even during the time he had spent with the Dallas Police Department.  Nothing this grotesque had ever happened in Rankin, being a small west Texas town of around 800 people.  The town itself was only a little over a square-mile and the closest thing to a big city was Odessa which was over 50 miles away.
 

            “Sir, you need to have a look at this.” 

            Phillip strode to where Officer Colin Gallagher was standing, and thought that if the circumstances were different, Gallagher may have seen a ghost.  Being of Irish descent, Phillip knew that Gallagher was pale anyway, but his skin color was unnatural. His fiery red hair usually stood out against his complexion, but it looked as if his whole scalp was on fire.  This all occurred to Phillip in the eight steps it took to reach the officer, then his stomach turned when he found the reason for Gallagher’s ghostly complexion. 

            A young female, probably between 18 and 25, lay on her back posed in the corpse position – a position familiar to Phillip from his years instructing yoga.  Her clothes, or lack thereof, were ripped to blood-stained pieces, and her stringy blonde hair was matted and soaked with blood.  He stopped cold when he looked at her face, and instantly understood Gallagher’s reaction to the victim.  Her eyes were missing from both sockets, and her ears had been lopped off, all of which, Phillip assumed, was done rather hastily.

            If that wasn’t disturbing enough, Phillip and Gallagher realized at the same moment that they were not dealing with any killer.  

            “Gallagher can you make out what is written across her forehead?”

            Short of breath, the officer merely replied, “Ezekiel.”

            “12:2, written across the stomach,” then turning to Officer Gallagher, “we have a religiously motivated killer on our hands, Colin.  I fear this is only the first of many.  Get the forensics team in here now, we need to collect any evidence the perp may have left behind.”

            Gallagher only nodded and ran out of the room.  Phillip flipped open his cell phone to call an old friend, one he hadn’t spoken to in years.