Into the Darkbower in paperback
I’m really excited to tell you I’ll be releasing my paranormal fantasy thriller in hard copy format this autumn in honor of everyone’s favorite scary holiday! Enter a world of murky mystery where humans are hopelessly outclassed by the magical forces around them. Where the only thing that keeps us safe if their indifference.
Darkbower is a little bit a mystery, a little bit a fantasy, with a generous dose of spooky to keep you up late this Halloween. The ebook is already available and the trade paperback will go on sale October 15th.
below, an excerpt:
“It was then that Esmerelda chose to do what was, to that point, the stupidest thing she had ever done: slipping into the cathedral, she made for the stairs along the western hemisphere. In that moment, it felt very simple to her. Simple and clear. She knew what was really going on, and the sooner she sorted it out, the sooner they could go on with their lives.
As you get older and spend more time at this job, the Chief Inquirer scribbled in the margins, this is going to happen to you a lot: you’ll think you understand what’s happening and you’ll be wrong. I’ve spelled this sequence out for you in humiliating detail so you can laugh at me. But really, I think it’s worthwhile to see my thought process, see how the pieces fit together, see how it all fell apart when I learned a few new facts. You never stop coming up with wrongheaded theories: the trick is learning not to act on them.
The lanterns lining the subterranean corridor had all been refilled since they arrived and cast a welcome light. Esmerelda made purposefully for the closed door at the end of the hall, telling herself again that this was the right thing to do. The men standing guard on the door looked at her curiously but made no move to stop her when she reached for the handle. She showed herself inside, heart thundering.
The room beyond was well-lit, too, but when she entered, at first she didn’t see the man who ought to be there. She heard his voice, talking quietly, too low for her to make out any words. He was lying on the pallet against the far wall, mostly eclipsed by the table in the center of the room, his back to her. The fact that he was talking to himself felt like confirmation, and she moved forward more confidently. She closed the door, so that what would be a mortifying, deeply personal conversation for this man would stay between the two of them.
By the time she pulled out a chair, Koren had noted her presence. He rolled over enough that he could peer at her over one shoulder. “Hello,” he said, not unfriendly, but in such a way as to make it clear that he found her presence irregular.
“We figured it all out,” she announced, going straight for the endgame before his doubt could infect her.
His brows rose. “Figured what all out?”
“You didn’t actually give your soul to a faerie.”
“Of course I did,” he said mildly. “It hangs from a strand of pearls he wears around his neck.”
“Come on, what would a faerie want with a mortal’s soul? They feel nothing but contempt for us.”
“Which is precisely why they don’t like to admit how fascinating they find our souls, how much they covet them. You can see how that would be a bit embarrassing.”
She felt annoyed. “There is no Bashureth, I figured it out. You and he are one and the same.”
“No Bashu! Where would be the fun in that?”
“This would all be so much easier if you would just tell the truth. I won’t lie and say you aren’t in trouble, but you must know reckless use of wizardry will earn you a lesser punishment than what you have coming if you go on claiming to have wittingly associated with an Elder One.”
Koren pushed himself upright, coming to join her at the table. His movements were slow, face set in a troubled frown that was more in keeping with his age, his long and traumatic life. As he pulled a chair out, he asked, “Tell me why you’re so convinced I’m lying, would you?”
“Your story is such a muddle of humor and pathos,” she began, laying out the pieces, feeling uncommonly relaxed in his presence, almost brave. Unlike her colleagues, she felt as if this man wouldn’t judge and she was truly safe to speak her mind. “It’s so sad what happened to you, your father and your mother. The horrible way your neighbors treated you, like losing both your parents as a kid wasn’t bad enough. You’ve never come out and said anyone took their animosity beyond words but…”
She saw him wince and knew she’d hit her mark: his village hadn’t just muttered about him behind his back, they had acted on their distaste. She didn’t care to speculate on what precisely they had done to him.
“Then suddenly you have this miraculous friend,” she forged on. “He joins your cause for reasons you never explained and from word go he’s telling you exactly what someone should have been telling you all along: these people are garbage, stop trying to make them happy and get far, far away.”
Koren cocked a dubious brow, but the expression wasn’t mocking, just confused. “That proves he doesn’t exist?”
“No one else has ever seen him,” she pointed out eagerly. “Even in your own story, you’re only ever talking to him when you’re alone.”
“He’s shy,” he commented mildly.
“That’s not the way you describe him. He’s indifferent to how he appears to others. He doesn’t even understand how a person can feel obligated to his neighbors, and definitely doesn’t agree they should. He’s everything you wished you could be but weren’t.”
“You believe I wished I was a half-mad fay creature with an idiotic sense of humor and not a thimbleful of common sense?”
“You wished you could stop caring what other people thought and just take what you wanted. But there’s a part of you that does care, very much, and you can’t let go of that. That’s why, at any given moment,” she moved her hands back and forth, trying to express how inconsistent his character was, “are you good or are you bad?”
He thought about that for a while, studying the air over her right shoulder, and she couldn’t guess at his thoughts. Finally, he drew a deeper breath. Settling his forearms on the table, he rested some of his weight, leaning toward her purposefully. “Well, girl, it’s an interesting theory. I don’t deny that, when I was younger, I wished the desire to fit in didn’t gnaw at me the way it did. You’re right that meeting Bashu marked a huge change in my life, because for the first time, someone believed I was perfect the way I’d been made. I think, in time, you’ll find the simplest solution is most often correct. The reason my decisions look so erratic to you is that I’ve been making choices for a long time based on the desires of two different people who almost never want the same thing.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but he had already gone on. “I like the idea that we cast our own fears and desires as characters on our life’s stage, it’s a pretty image, and there’s probably some truth to it. But in this case, I think it’s telling us less about me than about you. Here I am,” he spread his hands, “an enigma that tickles every nerve you most fear. You won’t be daunted by that, you won’t be taken in by my fantastical tales. You’ll hound me down by means of my own words until you have me cornered and then you’ll shine this bright, bright light and reveal what’s really there. Now tell me,” he leaned further forward, lowering his voice, “which of us is that story about?”
“Why are you still stuck in this cell?” she cried, face flaming. He wasn’t supposed to be studying them back, that wasn’t how this process worked!
Koren sat back in his chair and she had the impression that she had disappointed him. “Why was I getting drunk in a tavern amongst other mortals? That’s the question you should have asked. From the very first.”
For a long, still moment, Esmerelda simply stared at him. Then, feeling as though she were edging toward the verge of a precipice, she licked her lips. The question emerged a whisper, she had no idea why. “Why were you in the tavern amongst other mortals?”
“Because we were quarreling,” he replied promptly. “There is no surer way to infuriate a creature of the fay than to fling mortal civilization in its face.”
“He protected you,” she pointed out, keeping her voice down. “Why won’t he let our wizard get near you if you had a falling-out?”
“Oh, well. Faeries.” He made a face she couldn’t interpret, then his eyes flicked onto the table between them. Esmerelda started back in her seat when she realized there was something there: a sword, long and slender, as beautiful as anything she’d ever seen. It looked like steel, but it was as if the metal were translucent, still leaking remnants of the fires in which it had been forged. She had no idea where it had come from or how long it had been there. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it and barely heard Koren when he added, “Someone is certainly going to pay in pain for all this ill-will and unpleasantness. It just isn’t going to be me.”
Then she really heard what he had said. The naked threat. The possibility of a fay confrontation, which they had feared from the instant they received word about the soothsayer. Her eyes jerked up onto the face of the man across the table from her and it wasn’t Koren looking back.
She shoved her chair back from the table, feet tangling in its legs so she almost fell. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off him and she had no idea who he was. It wasn’t Bashureth, not as Koren had described him: this man was pale of skin and blond of hair, with slate-dark blue-gray eyes and a dimple in his chin. There was nothing ethereal or otherworldly about him, he smelled like sweat. He had the robust musculature of a man who’d spent his life at hard labor, but it hadn’t been much of a life so far: he was years younger than Esmerelda even, not much more than a boy. He gave her a grin and a wink, like the two of them were sharing a jest.
It was then that the door burst inward, although ‘burst’ wasn’t dramatic enough a word. It exploded in a cloud of a million splinters, with such force that Esmerelda was flung to the side. She struck the table and experienced a sense of terrifying vertigo as she was upended and sent flying. It ended suddenly and in pain as she smashed into the far wall. She felt things inside her snapping, and after a missing moment in which the world went black, she found herself lying on the floor. There was a shadow looming over her, but when she cast her eyes upward, there was nothing there.
“Not the girl,” she heard someone nearby say. A familiar voice but she couldn’t put a name to it. There was a handsome boy somewhere in his teens standing in the maw where the door had been. Blond, and as maddeningly familiar as his voice. He was holding a peculiar sword, and her eyes fixed on it. “She has her own demons, leave her to them.”
He met her eyes briefly, tapping two fingers to his brow in salute, before vanishing into the hall. This left her alone, and she had no idea whom he’d been talking to. Maybe she had misunderstood; her ears were ringing and felt like they’d been packed with wool.
She lay slumped against the wall in the cell for a blank interval, thinking about how much pain she was in. She couldn’t move: every time she tried, it sent fissures of fire through her back and chest. After a while, it occurred to her that she had come to rest upon the remnants of the prisoner’s straw-packed cot and that jogged her mind awake. The first really coherent thought she had was, Why has no one come to investigate the noise? She laid there in the rubble for a long time, drifting in and out of consciousness while she wondered why she was still by herself.”
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