#Dartmoor Futures: Violet part 2

 A continuation of this from a few weeks ago. Not sure if it's a whole story, or just part of one; might keep it as blog fluff. Contains mild spoilers for The Wild Charge - which is available now! - and is set in the future, when the kids are young adults. 

They kept her in the hospital for three days. She had breaks in her right tibia and fibula that required surgery: bone chip debris that had to be extracted and pins put in. The broken ribs hurt, but it was a pain she’d endured before; the worst was the dislocated hip that had been put back in place while she was unconscious, upon first arrival at the hospital. Even with the morphine, breathtaking pain spiked outward from her pelvis every time she so much as shifted her weight. Her head hurt, too, but it wasn’t her first concussion. Her broken arm was pinned immobile across her chest with a sling. She hadn’t been brave enough to look at her reflection yet, but Emmie’s face, when she accepted the Facetime call, told her it was rough.

Emmie clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes going comically wide…and then glazing over with tears. She rallied admirably with a few blinks and a smoothing of her expression that took obvious effort. “Oh, baby,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

Violet had shed her own tears earlier; had pressed them into the pillow in a stolen moment of quiet after Dad had arrived – Ian had sent him down in the jet while Emmie stayed behind on foal watch – and before her next round of poking and prodding had begun. Dry-eyed now – if wincing as Abbie attempted to comb her hair into some semblance of order – she said, “I’m okay.”

She wasn’t, in more ways than one, but in her world of horses and horse people, okay was eloquent of many things.

Emmie, the barn wall serving as backdrop behind her, dashed quickly at her eyes, took a breath, and was then her normal, no-nonsense self. “Did Daddy get there okay?”

Vi had no doubt they’d already spoken with one another, but she said, “Yeah, a few hours ago. He said Ian already had a car waiting for him at the airport.”

“At first he said he was gonna drive down.” She rolled her eyes. “When I reminded him you wouldn’t enjoy twelve hours in a pickup truck on the way home, he took Ian up on his offer. Is he harassing the doctors yet?”

“No, that’d be Tenny,” Abbie said, separating Vi’s hair in sections so she could French braid it into pigtails. “He’s got everyone terrified he’s going to sue, or go the press. Uncle Walsh hasn’t had to lift a finger.”

“That’s probably because he explicitly threatened to go to the press,” Vi said, sighing.

“Oh, God. Any particular reason?” Emmie asked.

“No. He’s enjoying himself.”

Emmie shook her head, but cracked a grin.

“It’s hilarious,” Abbie said.

Emmie’s look said, your cousin isn’t right, and neither is your uncle. It might have also cast loving aspersions on all of other uncles, too. One had birthed Abbie, after all.

“So how’s Luna?” Vi asked, to change the subject.

“You mean aside from keeping me from my baby’s bedside?”

“Mom.”

She made a sad face again and smoothed the flyaways from her ponytail – but then she shifted into Horse Mode, and was all business, her eyes dry. “She’s doing good. The foal’s shifted back, and she’s only picking at her hay today. Fred and George both think it’ll happen tonight.”

Emmie flipped the screen on her phone and gave them both a shaky, Facetime survey of a very-pregnant Luna, swishing flies and stomping unhappily, ears back and lip curled.

“Oh, yeah,” Vi said. “She looks miserable.”

They ended the call with a little more maternal angst on Emmie’s part, some bitten back sighs on Violet’s, and promises to check in again soon, and tell Walsh that she’d called. By that time, Abbie had finished her hair, two tight plaits that pulled painfully at her scalp, but which Vi was determined to endure.

A swift knock heralded a nurse’s arrival, and she carried in a vase of flowers. The first of many, it turned out.

“Holy shit,” Abbie said, unselfconscious and too loud, as vase after vase was brought in.

There was a delicate purple orchid from Ian and Alec.

An arrangement of pink and white lilies from Millie, Lainie, and Lucy.

Sunflowers from the brothers Lécuyer, with an accompanying message that read Glad you didn’t die, signed Remy, that made both girls laugh.

Mom had sent a rabbit’s foot fern and Maggie had sent a huge arrangement of eucalyptus, lavender, and purple roses that filled the room with heady scent. Every family in the club was represented, sometimes twice over.

They were just about out of table space when Walsh walked in carrying a clear vase of nothing but pink peonies. Vi perked up, surprised her dad had remembered her favorite flower – but when he set them on the last bit of room on her nightstand, he said, “The nurse handed me these in the hall.” He cast a glance around the room and let out a low whistle. “Well. That’s something.”

“I’m so jealous,” Abbie said. “If I ever get runover by a track full of horses, I’d better get as many flowers as this.”

Walsh said something dry in response, but Vi wasn’t listening. She’d reached over, with some effort and a teeth-gritting amount of pain, to pluck the card from the vase. The message was typed.

I remembered these are your favorites. Get better soon.

Ash

She set the note facedown on the table. Despite all the competing floral perfumes around her, she could still detect the peonies’ soft scent when she took a deep breath. When she glanced up, Abbie was staring at her, while Walsh fiddled with the TV remote. Behind his back, Abbie mouthed Was it him?

Vi nodded and glanced away before she had to witness her cousin’s doubtless shit-eating grin.

#TeaserTuesday - A History

Demon of the Dead sheds new light on the mythology and history of the fantasy realm in the Drake Chronicles. It's a history Nali, like all his fellow Northmen, thought he knew well, but the truth of which will trouble them all, and further explain their enemy, the Sels. 

It's also great fun to write 😊

First, the fire we rebuilt, which took some time, and even then, the damp wood smoked and spit and filled the longhouse with yet more noxious gray clouds. Then tea was prepared, and poured into two wooden cups. Náli let the heat of his warm his palms, but didn’t sip at it. The shaman bolted one cup down straight away and poured another before he finally settled on the stool opposite and took a long, deep breath. Though his physical features remained unchanged, he seemed to have aged a decade since Náli saw him last. Strained and gaunt. When his gaze lifted to meet Náli’s through the smoke, his eyes had gone that same eerie, timeless blue again; the eyes of a man who had seen too much.

His hands shook on his cup, but his voice was steady. “You must understand: when I speak of ‘the bloodline,’ it’s far older than you have ever imagined. The truth of it is something you might not receive gladly.”

“An upsetting truth is better than never knowing,” Náli said.

“Even if it upsets the balance of all you now know?”

He glanced toward Valgrind, who’d coiled up just outside the open doorway, snoring lightly in the wash of pale sunlight. “I’ve begun to think, lately, that I don’t actually know anything at all.” He met the shaman’s gaze again. “So, yes. It’s better. Even if it’s upsetting.”

The shaman nodded. Took a long sip of tea, eyes closing; then opened them once more, cleared his throat, and began. “It’s fitting that your king is descended of the first wolves – of the Úlfheðnar, the strongest and fiercest of the clans in the Early Days of the North. But the wolf-shirts are not the oldest clan in our history.”

“No, that’s the Dreki clan,” Náli said, impatient. He already knew this. “That’s why it’s Dreki Hörgr, and not Ulf Hörgr.”

“Yes, but what do you know of them save the fact they were the first settlers of the Waste?”

“They…had drakes. They bonded with them. Rode them. Just as Oliver has done, and the Drake lords of the South before him.”

“But where did the drakes come from?”

“I don’t bloody know that. Am I supposed to know when the first leaf unfolded at the dawn of time?” Náli huffed. “Can you not dispose of the questions and just get on with it?”

Unperturbed by his outburst, the shaman said, “There is a cavern beyond the ancestral seat. Up high in the mountain passes, never traversed by the men of the North.”

In an instant, Náli’s aggravation was replaced by a cold lick of fear. He recalled waking in a cold ice cavern, the way sealed by iron bars. The Fangs with their filed teeth, and their arena full of snow-buried dead men. They’d found Valgrind and his mother there. Strange glowing sapphires. And a verse etched in runes on the wall.

“What sort of cavern?” he asked, though he already knew.

“One glistening with ice, its light blue with the breath of cold-drakes.”

DOTD: Mattias

Back writing Demon of the Dead today - 4k words today and counting, let's goooo - and look, what's this? Mattias POV? 👀

This book has that *special* feel to it. I've enjoyed every scene and every sentence so far. Sitting pretty at 52k words so far, and a way to go yet. 

“Mother?” he inquired, but Father kept him from following her; got down on one knee so they were of a height, and gripped him firmly by both shoulders.

“Mattias,” he said, and his voice was oddly tight. “This is Master Sigismund. I want you to listen to him. Do everything he says.”

“But why?”

“He’s your teacher now. You’re to be a member of the Dead Guard.” And though Father’s smile was proud, his eyes glittered in the slanted morning sunlight, tears that he refused to shed.

Mattias went with Master Sigismund to live in a crude timber longhouse on the back side of the fire mountain. The sky was gray, hazy with a constant layer of smoke, and the ground beneath their feet in the training yard was dried magma covered with sand. When you slipped and went down while sparring, you left wide slashes in the white sand, black of the old magma showing through in jagged, cut-off shapes like runes. There were no girls or women. Their beds were low and hard, their meals nutritious, but not rich. They were woken before dawn each morning, and made to run a long, narrow trail that carved its way through the lowlands. Afternoons were for study: military history, tactics, rudimentary first aid; reading, writing, and sums. Then, later, there came the sparring.

That was Mattias’s favorite part. He was the tallest, and the strongest, and graduated quickly from a wooden practice sword to a steel one – even if it did have blunted edges. In the hours before dinner, he put the other boys on their backs in the sand, again and again.

He didn’t tell anyone, though, that sometimes he missed his mother’s lullabies as he tried to fall asleep. That sometimes he pressed his face into the blankets and let the wool drink his silent tears.

His homesickness eased with time, and his prowess in the ring grew. He licked his bowl clean every night and heeded all of Master Sigismund’s instructions.

“You’ll make a fine captain, one day,” he was told, and struggled to keep the smile from his face. Not just a Guard, but a captain. His young mind could think of no higher honor.

But always there was that underlying strain: being apart from his family, from his boyhood friends. Games had been replaced with exercises; flights of fancy for learning well the weight of armor. They wore mail shirts, gods-awful heavy even if they were boy-sized. And after meals, they scrubbed the wooden bowls and spoons, cleared and waxed the long tables where they ate; banked the fires and raked the hard-packed dirt floors. His life was half sword practice and half maid duty, and it became routine. Became normal and inescapable.

But then he turned ten. And the reigning Corpse Lord died.

A coronation day was announced for the heir, newly born. Master Sigismund brought him a new tunic and trousers in fine gray wool, and he shaved his head for him; braided his hair in the single long tail that was the style of proper Dead Guardsmen. Mattias’s pulse beat drum-quick on the long cart ride around the mountain, to the base of the palatial Naus Keep, home of their lord and master.

Mattias was overwhelmed by the crowded, switchback labyrinth of the Keep, studded here and there with pockets of soaring opulence. All in shades of gray. All of it glittering with diamonds. He struggled to keep his gaze level and his mouth shut, filled with a ten-year-old’s amazement. He’d never seen such wonders as this, the palace of his duke.

But then he was led into a room carpeted with furs and kept warm by two roaring fireplaces. And a bundle was lowered into his arms, swaddled all in gray silk and linen. A baby, small and pink, wrinkled and fussy.

“This,” Master Sigismund said, voice gone grave and heavy, “is Náli, Corpse Lord of the Fault Lands. His life is yours to guard and serve, Captain.”

The other boys were named to the Guard: his strong second, Klemens, and Einrih, the cousins Danksi and Darri. All strong, all quick, all loyal and trustworthy. But from that first moment, when a tiny hand batted Mattia’s nose, and newborn blue eyes peeped up at him, it was Mattias who became the steward of the new lord’s every need and want.

A Fox Retrospective

While I was editing The Wild Charge, I started thinking about the first time we met a character, versus their most recent moment in the current text. I was thinking about just how much time had passed - in the real world, for me, the writer; and within the Dartmoor universe. I love working with such a big cast of characters - except for the times when having that many players on the board gets hectic - and it's always an interesting internal process to go from "I need a character to plug into this spot" to, over time, through writing them and peeling back their layers: "What's this character's deepest fear/love?"

Fox first appeared in Snow In Texas. 

Two men who could only be identical twins sat at a table with longnecks, watching Oklahoma play Tennessee. A third man sat at the bar and turned, taking note of Colin's appearance with a slight nod. His eyes were large and an eerie shade of blue, starkly visible across the distance. Familiar eyes; he'd seen them somewhere else. His bottom rocker read England.

...

He dropped his bags when he reached the stool and stuck out one giant hand. "Hey. I'm Colin. Bob sent me up from NOLA."

There was a beat, a moment of appraisal in which those blue eyes tracked down and then back up him, flat, cool, and giving nothing away. Then the guy accepted his shake, firm grip despite the height disparity between them. "Fox," he said, nationality confirmed by his accent. "You're Mercy's brother." Not a question.

"Half-brother," Colin said firmly.

Fox tipped his head in acknowledgement. "Lots of us have half-brothers, I 'spect. You met mine, I'm sure. Walsh."

That's where the eyes came from. This brother had dark hair instead of Walsh's blonde, and the faces weren't quite the same - the noses, the angles of their jaws. But the eyes were a dead giveaway. And they shared that spooky calm that belonged on a much larger, more physically imposing man.

"Ah. Yeah, I did. You guys aren't in the same chapter."

One brow lifted. "Neither are you and your brother."

"Fair enough."

The book dropped in early 2016 - How has it already been six years??? - and Fox, while a horrid little delight, was very much a background character who I wanted to remain that way. I thought of him as a fun deviation from the other guys, and a useful tool when I needed an spec ops touch in certain situations.

But that was the thing. In making Fox the "spec ops touch," it expanded the Dartmoor world outward a few degrees. It was no longer confined to dealers, criminals, and misfits. Up 'til this point, Michael and Mercy were the only "specialists," so to speak, but their skills were more about willingness rather than any sort of formal training or experience. 

And then here was Fox. Mr. Spy. A character who offered new opportunities...but new risks, too. Each time you expand a universe, you risk taking it in a direction that strays too far off the main course. Not to mention: the more complex a character's background, the more legwork it takes in the writing to bridge the gap between them and the original characters. 

What resulted was several cameos, which led to POV scenes, then chapters. All told, Fox's journey has taken place over several books, and it's one, given his nature, that is very much still ongoing. He's not a happily ever after character; with Fox, it's more about helping him slowly realize where his heart and mind converge - although he'd tell you he doesn't have a heart to speak of, the wanker. 

He debuted in 2016, and this is a snippet from last recorded scene, just last week:

The farmer's market laid out in the narrow, shaded streets of Saumur was a bazaar of every kind of food imaginable: from staples like baguettes and cheeses wrapped in wax, to fresh seafood and local beef, to escargot quiches and piping hot sandwiches and flaky pastries. At a small, streetside table shaded by an umbrella, Fox thumped down baskets of steamed mussels and handed around plastic forks.

"I like the cap," Tenny observed, breaking a loaf of bread into quarters and putting the largest portion on Reese's paper plate. "It's very London cabbie chic."

Fox flipped him the bird without looking over, popped a mussel in his mouth, and scanned the street. "He's late."

Reese sliced two fat hunks of camembert, put one on Tenny's plate, and topped a slice of bread for himself with the other. Added a dollop of plum jam and, after his first bite, quietly swore off American grocery store bread. "Well," he reasoned, "Devin's a little..."

"Stupid?" Tenny offered.

"Annoying as shit?" Fox asked. "Insufferable? Prone to running his fucking mouth?"

"Hey, my mouth does what it needs to do, thank you very much," Devin said, materializing behind Fox and dropping into the chair beside him.

I still marvel over the fact that he became a fan favorite - but I'm encouraged, too. Big, splashy characters like Mercy can feel like they suck all the oxygen out of a fictional room. It's nice to see the sneaky one steal a few hearts. 

Dartmoor Book 9, The Wild Charge, dropped this Tuesday. 633 ebook pages of Fox and his two junior Foxes. You can grab it HERE. 

New Release - The Wild Charge (Dartmoor book 9)

 “Tennyson. That’s your name, yeah? He gave you that name...But you picked your last name, and you picked Fox. You picked my name...And you’re at least half my blood. You’re half that old bastard Devin. So listen to me."

#TheWildCharge

#DartmoorSeries

The Wild Charge is live! It picks up right where "Homecoming" left off, with the club facing down a powerful enemy, and Reese and Tenny facing their own wants and needs as free men. Action, intrigue, violence, romance, and Devin's brood doing what they do best.

Thanks so much for the support over on Wattpad! Reviews are lovely

Grab it for Kindle or Nook.

It's done!

 

It’s done! I did it! It’s finished!

Ah, the short-lived giddiness of finishing a manuscript…before reality hits and you remind yourself that you’re many, many manuscripts behind, there’s millions more words to write, and nothing will ever be enough. Lovely.

Still, you take the little victories where you can, no matter how little. After more than a year of writing – which, admittedly, was filled with long stretches of not working on it at all – The Wild Charge, Dartmoor book nine, is finished. I posted the last chapter on Wattpad yesterday, and, after it’s edited, I’ll post it up for sale on all the sites soon.

Spoiler-free post-writing thoughts ahead.

I said before I wrote it, and while I was writing it, that I didn’t want to write The Wild Charge. The end result is one I’m pleased with, one I’m proud of – one that I think brings something new and interesting and engaging to the series without being a rehash of a previous book with names and hair colors swapped. There are series that do that, to quite successful sales figures: series that are more or less the same story over and over, the same characters, the same conflicts, only it’s Bobby and Jane instead of Robert and Sally, etc. While I understand that this is a smart formula, it’s one to which I cannot adhere because, to put it bluntly, that sort of repetition would leave me so bored and contemptuous of my own work that I wouldn’t be able to continue an ongoing series. The risk, then, in trying to keep things fresh, is straying too far from the earlier works that readers enjoyed more. So am I pleased and proud? Did I accomplish what I set out to with this book? Yes. Do I still wish I hadn’t written it? Also yes. Because it strays too far from what’s been decided upon as the standard “MC romance” subgenre setup, and I can already hear the Goodreads disappointment in the back of my mind.

Speaking of “MC romance”…

I’ve never considered myself a romance author – not because , as I’ve had suggested to me, I hate women or don’t wish to support them (I am a woman; I tend to read mostly women authors, and I have yet to understand why a woman is somehow “more,” “better,” or “the right sort of woman to support” because she writes romance as opposed to sci-fi, fantasy, or mystery; riddle me that one, Batman) but because romance, as both genre and subgenre, are constrained by an incredibly rigid set of writing rules…rules that I don’t wish to adhere to while I work. It’s a matter of classification. Similarly, “MC romance” as a subgenre holds no special significance for me on its surface. It’s a cool aesthetic, but the motorcycles and the tattoos aren’t the reason I’ve written well over a million words in that universe. The MC scene, just like the medieval scene, like the vampire/werewolf scene, the Viking-inspired dragon fantasy scene, the heaven vs. hell scene, is appealing to me because it provides otherwise impossible opportunities for exciting stakes and character growth.

I do so love a cozy story. A Rosamund Pilcher novel full of warm Aga stoves, toddies by the fire, cottage gardens and soft, gentle love. But despite this, and despite being the most sinfully boring person on earth, as a writer, I like to play with big emotions; I like the peaks and valleys, the scary, everything-on-the-line emotions, and you can only get to that through elevated stakes. The motorcycle club setting offers those sorts of stakes: a group of people living on the other side of the law, making their own rules, battling for supremacy against other underworld forces. That automatically lends itself to action, violence, difficult decisions, and skillsets honed in moments of crisis. A setting that allows us to go on much wilder adventures, with life-or-death stakes that bring out the best and the worst in the characters.

I first introduced Reese in American Hellhound. He began, in the early drafts, as a means of explaining Badger’s depravity, a walking testament to this rival club’s brutality. But by the time I’d finished the novel, he’d become, for me, a chance to write a whole new type of character into the series. A new challenge, and a chance to work with a whole new sort of internal, personal struggle within the overall narrative: that of someone raised as a weapon searching for a sense of personhood. Because character is always my main focus, I knew it would be a slow and gradual process, that Reese had much to learn.

There was a moment, writing Prodigal Son, when I leaned a little toward pairing Reese with Cassandra. But the more I considered the idea, the less I liked it. I love a good age gap, but the gap between Reese and Cass was less about age and more about this massive gulf between their lived experiences. There was no way Cass could relate to him in any way, and no way her innocence and youth would help him better understand himself, or the real world into which he’d been plunged. It was a case in which opposites could not and should not attract, the more I thought of it. I hated the idea of Reese being “saved” in any way. I wanted him to learn. And to do that, he would need to learn alongside someone in a similar situation.

Enter Tenny.

Their story together begins in Lone Star and comes to fruition here, all told a tale that takes three books to unfold. TWC is bloody, violent, and, like every book in this series, ultimately an examination of family in all its forms. I enjoyed getting to write both boys, but Tenny has cemented himself as one of my favorite characters in this series. This book marks the first time I got to play inside his head, and it was the sort of creative challenge I find most enjoyable. Writing book nine in a series that long ago lost its shine for me, I found my favorite installment yet, and hopefully the mental energy to stretch the road out a little farther ahead.

I have no idea how the book, when it’s published in the next few weeks, will be received. Some are going to hate it because it doesn’t have the right tone or vibe or what have you. Some will like it. I can’t say “thank you” enough to those of you who came along chapter by chapter. I wrote this book for Tenny and Reese, and for you guys, really. Anything else positive is just gravy, I suppose.

Look for the final version on sale in the next couple of weeks. Up next, I’m diving back into The Winter Palace, Demon of the Dead, and hopefully starting a new standalone with yet another, entirely different vibe.