Work In Progress Blog Tour

 Well I've been nominated by Arie Farnam, author of The Soul and the Seed to participate in the Work in Progress Blog Tour. The idea is to post the first sentence of each of the first three chapters of your work in progress.
  My current work is the sequel to my urban fantasy novel Murder Between the Worlds. This book picks up where the last one left off with my protagonist, Allie, trying to get her life back to normal after her attempt to help the police solve a series of murders in the first book. She's learning that moving on isn't as easy as she wants it to be, especially since things aren't as neatly tied up as the authorities all think they are. There's several mysterious things afoot, from missing girls to arson, and someone is going to a lot of trouble to make Allie's life unpleasant, but the biggest threat might be the one no one sees at all...
  Anyway, here are the first couple sentences/paragraph from the first three chapters of the rough draft. Enjoy!

Prologue
He watched the girl as she got ready to walk to her car, his hands shaking in excitement. She had finished her shift and clocked out five minutes ago but lingered, talking to friends. He wished she’d hurry. He’d waited too long, until the night he needed to do the ritual, and now there wasn't any time for mistakes.

Chapter 1
Allie McCarthy was not having a good day. She was late leaving for work after losing track of the time. When she turned onto Asylum street, the back road she usually drove to avoid Main Street, she was confronted with a wall of construction equipment and a sign declaring the road closed for repaving. By the time she detoured and fought through the weekend tourist traffic – not even a hint of what it would soon be when summer was upon them – it was quarter past and she was late. She parked haphazardly in the lot behind Between the Worlds, her bookstore, and jogged as quickly as her bad ankle would allow to the back door, hurrying to lower the magical wards that protected the building and unlock the door.

Chapter 2
 “Wow, that stuff reeks,” Jason made a face, waving his hand in front of his face.  

Allie stopped walking, the burning bundle of sage leaves held out in front of her. She glanced around her store, the ordered rows of bookshelves now obscured by a haze of smoke. “I like the way it smells.”

Jason wrinkled his nose, then looked up towards the ceiling, “You did remember to turn off the smoke detectors before lighting that thing up, right? Because I’m going to be really embarrassed if the alarm goes off and -”

“And all your firefighting buddies roll up and see you playing witch.” Allie interrupted, rolling her eyes. “Fine Takada, go open the front door and let some fresh air in.”

Here are the rules:

You write a blog post about your work in progress and include the first sentences of the first three chapters (at least as they stand at the moment). You link back to me and you link to several other authors who you nominate. Traditionally, you nominate four.

 I have been trying to decide who to nominate but am being challenged by the fact that the authors I know either don't blog (I'm looking at you James Ferace!) or don't have a current work in progress that's at a point where its ready to discuss (Looking at you now Nimue Brown). So I'm going to nominate Catherine Kane, because I know she's working on the sequel to her wonderfully fun urban fantasy The Land That Lies Between and she blogs, and also Elen Sentier whose amazing book Moon Song is coming out through Cosmic Egg Books and who I'm sure is working on something, and blogs.