The Thief and the Sacrifice by Kevin C. Bennett Book Blitz!

Title: The Thief and the Sacrifice

Author: Kevin C. Bennett

Synopsis:

Captured by Nazis fresh from plundering ancient ruins for occult artifacts, GI Floyd Sandburg finds himself dragged behind an overloaded caravan of harried shock troops and POWs.  Among flotsam from antiquity strewn haphazardly across the desert by careless Third Reich-ers, he discovers a relic.  A very special relic; one that seems to give him the ability to travel through space and time.  Using the relic Floyd escapes, and soon finds himself hypnotized and unaccountably obsessed with his unexpected deliverance.  Deliverance at the hands of a pen-sized artifact shaped like a spear, with strange lettering on the side.  An artifact that is somehow both thrilling and repulsive at the same time.  It is too much for Floyd not to follow the Siren call of his curious soul.  He uses the relic and is taken to the world from where it came.  A world where the relic is stolen, and Floyd Marooned.  Marooned where the land is crazy and men are giants who tame all beasts, Floyd merely a curiosity to be exhibited.  But imprisonment isn't the kind of gig to keep Floyd Sandburg licked.  He soon escapes into that realm of undiluted lore, where he is snatched up into a plot of kings to topple a hegemony and liberate the nations.  A plot stretching across eons, and with an intimate part in the politics and world-shaping of our own modern era, where the puppetmasters hide in darkness and aim to make us sheep.  With the power of the ancients, will Floyd save the world, or lose himself?
Blood and cries, thunder, fire--and the demons of the mind, or are they really real?  The Lens is calling, the focus tightens, and what was then has always been, when jets of steam burst through the starry night...

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Good Reads Link:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25951052-the-thief-and-the-sacrifice?from_search=true&search_version=service

Amazon.com Link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Thief-Sacrifice-Kevin-Bennett-ebook/dp/B00YK3UFQW

Excerpt:

The Journal of a Man Called Pike

There is an entry dated February 10th, 1923. The words are crossed out, but the date remains. The next readable entry is the one below.

March 10th, 1923.

I killed a prostitute…I can’t get it out of my mind, I didn’t mean to, and now this journal is incriminating me, but I don’t know what else to do…I can talk to people now, that’s the whole big irony of it; but I can’t say anything about this. I didn’t even mean to pick her up. A black guy dressed like something out of the movies came by my motel and she was strung out on his shoulder like you’d expect her to be, and he starts talking about discounts and this that and the other thing, and I didn’t want to take him up, and kept pointing to my throat, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded, and he says he’ll just let her grow on me and check back in an hour. And so she comes in and starts dancing—the woman looked reefered out of her mind, all strung out, that crazy flapper-girl curl of the twenties…glad I wasn’t a teenager here. Anyway, she starts trying to…to do what she does, and finally I just had to tell her to stop with my voice, because she was too whacked out to read my little notes. Freaked her out, and she started crying, and I’d try and talk to her, and it didn’t help because she’d hear me in her head, and so she’s crying on the bed, and whenever I try and say something she won’t listen to me, or if she does it sets her crying again and I can’t do anything but pace and drink beer, so I said, “Look, it’s all a trip, see? Just a head thing!” And she wouldn’t believe it, so I just kept repeating it and repeating it, and eventually she started to believe me—and then she comes on to me again. Can’t have that, you know these hookers are full of the worst kinda diseases…there’s a few things I value from the films I saw in basic. I wasn’t having any of it, so I pushed her off, and she says some snide comment about me being one of these talker-types, and I say, “So what? So I want to talk…”

Then it hits me: she’s a hooker, she’s on drugs, nobody will believe her anyway.

“Hey, this guy talks in my head, he’s telepathic!”

“Right, lady. Shut up and sleep it off.”

“But officer!”

So I start feeling her out—it turns out if I talk like I think I should sound, then she’ll hear me like she thinks she should hear me. She’s still hearing me in her head, but she’s not hearing me like a disembodied voice, or whatever people hear; she’s hearing me like a normal person, because that’s what I want her to hear. Only thing is, I need more than one person to try it on; see if I can’t focus my voice. So I send her back to her pimp—I guess he was a pimp—with fifty bucks. A lot of money in the twenties—and I tell her I want her to come back with one of her friends.

She comes back the next night, same motel, another girl messed up as she was—prostitutes are dumb. Don’t let anybody tell you different. You see these movies about the noble prostitute—well, nobody’s working tricks on the street because they’re intelligent and life’s got them down. Usually it’s nasty broads who got addicted to something-or-other somehow, got mad at mommy and daddy, or decided to make it on their own without working. Lazy, narcissistic, selfish women. That’s what they are.