Book Blurb & Info
When good fails, chaos rises to the challenge.The daily life of a chaos demon is delightfully sinful—overindulging in Sri Lankan delicacies, trespassing on private beaches in Hawaii, and getting soused at the best angel bar on the planet. But when Bedlam learns that the archdemon Azrael has escaped from the Abyss in order to wreak vengeance against the person who sent her there—Bedlam’s best friend, Khet—he can’t sit idly by.
Only one relic possesses the power to kill Khet, who suffers immortality at Lucifer’s request: the mythical Spear of Destiny, which pierced Christ’s side at His crucifixion. Neither angel nor demon has seen the Spear in two thousand years, but Azrael claims to know its location. Bedlam has no choice but to interpret woefully outdated clues and race her to its ancient resting place.
His quest is made nearly impossible by the interference of a persnickety archivist, Keziel—his angelic ex—and a dedicated cult intent on keeping the Spear out of the wrong hands. But to Bedlam, “wrong” is just an arbitrary word, and there’s no way he’s letting Khet die without a fight.
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Bedlam – Monday, 12 a.m. GMT
Characters We Don’t Want to Know
Elizabeth Corrigan has degrees in English and psychology and has spent several years working as a data analyst in various branches of the healthcare industry. When she’s not hard at work on her next novel, Elizabeth enjoys singing, reading teen vampire novels, and making Sims of her characters.
She drinks more Diet Coke than is probably optimal for the human body and is pathologically afraid of bees. She lives in Maryland with two cats and a purple Smart Car.
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/raising-chaos-elizabeth-corrigan/1118480314?ean=2940148358374
Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/oracle-of-philadelphia
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20726830-raising-chaos
Book Excerpt
Chapter 1
Bedlam – Monday, 12 a.m. GMT
I bopped my head in time with
Billy Idol dancing with himself as the song pealed from
the juke box. I’d picked the
track in hopes that Khet would take the hint and dance with me, but
it didn’t work. Before the song
was half over, I got tired of waiting and bopped over to the
counter, where she was poring
over a triplicate form.
“Khet, put the money stuff away
and come dance! You’ll still have trillions of dollars
even after you subtract whatever
you lost on this money pit this week.”
I didn’t mean to insult the
diner. Well, I kind of did. The diner was a money pit, but still,
I loved it. My attachment had no
rational explanation. I mean, what I generously referred to as a
restaurant was a lackluster
eatery in a crappy part of a city—Philadelphia—that might once have
been a pearl of American society,
but now was more a flawed cubic zirconium of people
obsessed with sports teams that
had seen better days. Yellow foam stuck out from between the
cracks in the teal vinyl benches,
looking like some kind of bulbous mold, and the silver tables
always had some kind of film on
them. The air smelled of slightly rancid grease and too-strong
coffee that had been sitting in
the pot since Khet brewed it yesterday morning. And as for the
food… Well, Khet had a habit of
hiring cooks who’d never even seen a griddle before they
started employment.
But the thing was, the diner was
Khet’s. She had never owned anything like it, not in the
three thousand years I’d known
her, until a few decades ago. And if it belonged to her, it
belonged to me too, because she had
figured out a long time ago that life was easier if she let me
do what I wanted. So this was
more than a diner of hers and mine. It was our home.
I expected her to give me one of
her usual responses about how she was “being the
responsible one” and paying the
bills so the gas didn’t get shut off, but she remained silent.
“Khet?” I waved my hand in front
of her face. “Are you listening to me?”
Her brown eyes met mine, and I
wondered if she could read anything in their demonblack
depths. Not that she had to. She
was the all-powerful Oracle who could read my mind. And
also the inspiration for the
Biblical myth of Cain, though in a bizarre way that led to her
accidentally destroying a town
rather than murdering a brother.
“I’m sorry, Bedlam,” she said. “Did
you say something?”
I swiped the piece of paper out
from under her pen and beheld what appeared to be a
shopping list written in
cuneiform. “What in Mephistopheles’s tomb is this?”
She tilted her head to the side. “Mephistopheles
has a tomb?”
I waved my hand. “Tombs,
archives, sepulchers. Same difference.”
“I don’t think—”
“Not the point.” I sat down on
the stool facing her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” She smiled as
she spoke. Someone who didn’t know her that well
might have bought it, but not me.
“Wait, so something’s wrong, and
you won’t tell me what?”
That could be
one of two things.
No, one of one
thing. I’m the one that
never wants to talk about a certain brown-haired
angel.
I had this epic love tragedy
going with Keziel, the angel of balance. To make a long story
not quite as long, Kezi created
the world with some help from me and Jophiel, the angel of
service, and when we were done,
she granted us each any boon within her power. Since I had
fallen in love with her, the only
thing I wanted was to stay with her forever, but Jophiel beat me
to the punch. He made her promise
to marry him and serve with him forever. And since angels
can’t fall out of love, I was
doomed to be unhappy without her forever. And she still owes me
that boon.
But Kezi hadn’t been around. I
could tell. I could always tell. Which meant Khet’s
problem had to concern the angel
of joy, Gabriel.
I liked Gabriel. Everyone did. He
had some kind of magic angel power that made
everyone adore him. Even Lilith
never had a bad word to say about him, and she hated all men
on principle. But for someone who
got along with everyone, Gabriel could be extremely clueless
about other people’s emotions.
More oblivious than me, and I had once given Khet a dead
puppy. Long story short, no
inside joke can survive the giving of a long-deceased canine, and I
probably should have known that
beforehand.
Khet was in love with Gabriel and
had been since she’d met him two thousand years ago.
It made sense. She could peer
inside people’s heads and uncover their deepest secrets and
desires. And Gabriel saw the
world as a place full of joy and life and people trying to do good
things. He had sought out Khet
because he had faced concrete evidence that the world did not
adhere to his sunshiny ideals. So
he spent two thousand years helping people in the worst
situations he could find as if
his own ideals could somehow diffuse through the population, like a
celestial air freshener.
Then Keziel lured him back under
Michael’s thumb by telling Gabriel that Heaven
needed his help to restore the
balance of the universe. And Khet surprised me by seeming okay
about it, but humans are bizarre
about love. Angels had romance easy. We met someone, fell in
love, and got stuck that way. The
connection didn’t change or get replaced by loving someone
else. Other emotions could be
added to it, like deep and abiding resentment and a constant desire
to rip the beating heart out of
her chest. But the love remained too.
But humans fell in and out of
love all the time. They could love more than one person at
the same time. So Khet seemed to
get over Gabriel quickly, but if she had taken a year or ten
years or a hundred years to get
over it, it would have seemed fast. This whole time she might
have pretended to be over it, and
she had entered some new phase in the human getting-overlove
process. Maybe it went tears,
denial, weird silence, and then… Well, I don’t know what
would come next.
Regardless, taciturnity and
distractedness and cuneiform were not signs of a good phase
for a number of reasons, not the
least of which was having to explain to the people who supplied
the diner with truckloads of food
why the orders could only be processed by someone with
fluency in a long dead script.
I placed the paper down. “Khet, I
know there’s something wrong. You have that little upand-
down line between your eyebrows.
And it’s been at least three days since you made me go
on a historic tour of some brick
building whose architectural style was unimpressive when it was
built and remains so.”
“Bedlam, you know you don’t have
to go with me if you don’t want to.” Anyone else
would have snapped those words at
me, but not Khet. She saw my decision to accompany her on
lackluster adventures as
something she needed to atone for.
I gave an exaggerated sigh. “That’s
not what I meant. As you may or may not recall, I am
perfectly capable of acting on my
feelings when necessary. I was wondering what caused the
change in activity.” I looked
more closely at the paper I had set down. “Also, I don’t think that
your suppliers are going to bring
you three whole goats and a hundred barley cakes.”
Because someone’s going to have to eat the barley cakes,
and you know it’s going to be
you.
Please, dear
God, anything but that.
I sometimes wondered if everyone
else had conversations in their head. I thought about
asking Khet, but I didn’t want to
add her answer to the mounting evidence against my sanity.
Khet frowned and squinted at the
symbols on the form. “You’re probably right.” She slid
the paper over to herself and
crossed out the last three lines. “Do you think barley paste would go
over better with the clientele?”
Ha! The mere
existence of barley paste is a nuclear attack on the human taste bud. Even I
think so, and I’ll eat anything.
Oh, no. She’s trying to distract you with humor. You
promised you weren’t going to let
her do that
anymore.
The scars on her face—and
probably the rest of her—from her encounter with the Beast a
couple of months ago had finally
faded, thanks to some rapid healing, but for most of the last
several weeks they had served as
a reminder to both of us that for all her immortality, Khet could
still be harmed and could not
always be counted on to take care of herself. Case in point: Last
time I left her to herself, she
ran off to Hell to sell her soul to the archdemon Azrael, demon of
love and lust. Lucifer had
forbidden Azrael from collecting on that deal, but Khet still bore the
demon mark on her hand.
I shaped my features into what I
hoped was a stern look. “Attempts to distract me will not
work. I am going to stand here
and play irritating music until you tell me what’s wrong.”
Ooh! What was that
song you played all the time when you were supporting Ohio State?
Ha! She still
grinds her teeth every time she hears “Hang On Sloopy.”
But that didn’t mean she was
going to tell me. “There isn’t anything wrong.”
I raised my hand, making a show
of considering which of her least favorite songs I would
select to assail our ears. (FYI,
I would have picked “The Safety Dance.” For some reason beyond
me, she hated it.)
She shook her head. “Fine. It’s
nothing big. I’m thinking it might be time for a change of
scenery.”
I brightened. Only Khet could
make something as exciting as a vacation seem dreary as
barley. “Ooh, where do you want
to go? I support anywhere with beaches. Or ski slopes. Or
earthquakes.” I clapped my hands.
“Or it’s college football season soon! We could go on tour!”
Her black brows creased over her
brown eyes. “Bedlam, if you think I am going to set
foot again anywhere near
Columbus, OH, with you in any year that begins with a two, you are
sadly mistaken.”
I expected her to discuss her
location preferences, but instead the silence lasted so long
that I felt lost.
My mind leapt to my biggest
insecurity. “Do you… do you not want me to come with
you?”
“Bedlam, have I ever not wanted
you to come with me anywhere? Other than to the
bathroom, and we’ve discussed
that.” The slight irritation in her voice assured me more than
anything else that she wasn’t
trying to get rid of me.
And she was right, of course. She’d
never sought my absence, not once in thirty-two
hundred years, but I figured she
would in time.
“Then what is it?” I hoped I
sounded less whiny to her ears than it did in my head. “I
can’t see why you would be upset
about a trip. Unless you were, like, going on a trip to some
theme park that made you pretend
you were in a Puritanical society where they, like, whip you
for wearing color or showing your
ankles or thinking about anything that’s not the Bible.
Because I probably wouldn’t be
okay with that. You know how places like that always accuse
you of being a witch, and you get
put in the stocks for looking at Goody Threadwell’s cow and
curdling its milk. But I’m pretty
sure that a place like that doesn’t exist, because if it did, no one
would make any money off it
because no one wants to be punished on their vacation. Well, some
people, but we won’t discuss
that. Plus, there probably would have been an article in the paper,
though I guess I could have
missed it since it’s not as if I read the Inquirer every day—”
“Bedlam!” Khet interrupted my
train of thought—which, now that I thought about it,
might have been kind of ranty. “I
have no intention of taking a trip to Puritan Land, if and should
such a place ever exist. And if I
did win tickets for two, I certainly would not expect you to come
with me.”
I bounced on my toes as the juke
box changed songs, and Madonna began singing “Into
the Groove.” “Then what are you
upset about? Come dance, and we can talk about where you
want to go.”
She put down her pencil, and I
took that as surrender. “I told you, I’m not upset.” She
twirled around the counter and
grabbed my tanned hand in her dusky one. “But I will dance if
that is the only way to convince
you.”
Khet and I were the most awesome
of dancers. We’d been practicing for about forty
times the average human lifespan,
and we’d had the same partner since the concept of dance
partners. I kept telling Khet she
had to find some way to become famous so that we could go on
that celebrity dancing show. She
said that it would be a bit extreme to go through all the hassle of
being famous to win a
competition. And she would know; she’d been famous. The best I’d ever
been was infamous—had a mental
institution named after me, that sort of thing.
After an hour of spinning her
around the diner, I’d convinced myself that I had
overreacted to the cuneiform. She
was smiling as she collapsed breathlessly into one of the
cracked foam benches and declared
that she needed to stop and fill out the order form if we
expected to eat anything next
week. As a demon I didn’t need to eat, but now that humans could
make a variety of non-barley
foodstuffs, cooking was fun. You could come up with infinite
combinations of flavors that
could complement each other in all different ways. Plus, if I stayed
in human form for more than a few
hours, I got hungry.
While Khet pulled out a new order
form and began to fill it out, I went up the stairs to
engage in another
unnecessary-to-me human habit. Sleeping was even more fun than eating. An
unconscious brain could “dream up”
with the most random situations, and even I, who was no
slouch when it came to the
absurd, could only sit back and admire.
In the middle of a particularly
fascinating dream that involved the optimal way to cook a
kiwi bird (frying had my vote,
though I couldn’t deny the advantage of barbecuing), Khet woke
me up to tell me that I was
hogging the bed and muttering about “kiwi on the barbie.”
I shifted to make space for her,
and mumbled something about her needing to get a
California King, but I didn’t
mean it. Khet and I didn’t have a romantic or sexual relationship.
She wasn’t Keziel, and I was
incapable of thinking of anyone else in those terms. But despite my
involuntary faithfulness, and my
penchant for annoying everyone I met, I hated to be alone. And
in those few uncertain moments
when I first woke up, I liked to have someone close to me. I
wasn’t sure why Khet indulged me
in this, but even when we had lived in larger quarters, she
never made me stay in my own
room.
She climbed into the bed next to
me. “Love you,” she whispered to me as she did every
night, never seeming to mind that
I couldn’t respond in kind.
I wrapped my arm around her head and drifted back to
sleep.
Guest Post
Characters We Don’t Want to Know
I’m a big reader of urban fantasy and young adult paranormal romance, and if there’s one thing I can say for my fellow readers as a whole, it’s that we love our bad boys. Give us a man in a leather jacket with stubble on his chin and a tough guy attitude, and we’re swooning. The only thing we like better than a love triangle between the sexy bad boy and the saintly good boy who doesn’t measure up is a love triangle with two different types of bad boys.
I gave an early draft of my current work in progress, the first book in a new series, to a few readers, and they immediately shipped the characters I wanted them to. So I settled into editing, content that I was doing my job effectively. Then after much polishing and rewriting, I handed the book to another set of betas, and they weren’t sure who I intended to pair the main girl with, but they were leaning toward a completely different guy.
I didn’t understand what had happened. Were my initial readers relationally dense?* What had I changed? I couldn’t think of anything. And then I realized. The new guy. In my early drafts, he was niceness personified when he met my main character, and in the later ones, he was horribly rude to her. Which ties into my eternal theory that we really want all men to be Mr. Darcy. With a motorcycle.
Bedlam is by far the favorite character in my Earthbound Angels books. He’s not really a bad boy, but he’s definitely a chaotic boy. I have a couple of readers who don’t like him, though, or who like him with reservations, and they all give the same reason: He would be really irritating in real life.
I have to concede that this is a fair and valid point. Bedlam is irresponsible and self-centered, and he eats really vile-looking things in public. I’ve actually had some passing experience with the annoyance he causes when I make a Bedlam character in Sims. I give him the “inappropriate” and “absent-minded” traits, so when I leave him alone for five minutes, he’s insulting a stranger, proposing marriage to someone he’s just met, or playing video games because he forgot to go to work. I have to yell “Bedlam!” at the screen on a regular basis. Real life Bedlam would drive anyone mad.
I think the same principle applies to a lot of the bad boys. My friend is watching Vampire Diaries for the first time, and we’ve been discussing how we love Damon better than all the other characters. But sometimes he gets bored and kills people. I was always Team Adrian in the Vampire Academy series (which is why I like Bloodlines so much better), but in real life I can’t see myself giving such a slacker the time of day. And Kelley Armstrong has only written one hero who didn’t have at least one major failing along the lines of being a compulsive liar or a borderline sociopath.
These boys. They are deeply flawed. They would not fit in our daily lives at all, and if we met them they would probably drive us mad. But in books, in movies, in televisions shows, we love them. So why is this? I think on some level it’s because in fiction, we can see beneath the surface of people in a way we can’t in real life, so we know that, in spite of their off-putting surface, they are good inside. And since nothing can ever be how it seems, it often makes for a better twist if the scruffy guy is the one with the heart of gold. I think we can also trust that fictional characters, at least in your average happily-ever-after romance, are going to do the right thing in the end. Plus, stories are an escape. We don’t have to worry about whether we’re in danger associating with the 6’2” blue-eyed man from the wrong side of the tracks.
Okay, so on some level, I’m not sure this love of bad boys doesn’t reveal something messed up and anti-feminist in our psyches. But you know what? I’m going to continue to read about them. But probably keep associating with sedan-driving, polite men in real life.
*Actually, I haven’t ruled the “relationally dense” theory. One of them took until the fourth book in the October Day series by Seanan McGuire to figure out that Tybalt was a love interest. The other one reads a lot of non-fiction.
Author Info
She drinks more Diet Coke than is probably optimal for the human body and is pathologically afraid of bees. She lives in Maryland with two cats and a purple Smart Car.
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Author page on RAP: http://redadeptpublishing.com/elizabeth-corrigan/
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Author page on RAP: http://redadeptpublishing.com/elizabeth-corrigan/
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Tour Info
Interesting book
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