My Immortal Assassin (28 page)
From the desk of Carolyn Jewel
Dear Reader,
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. If you wait a bit before getting your payback, if you’re calm and rational, you’ll be in a better position to enjoy that sweet revenge. The downside, of course, is what can happen to you while you spend all this time plotting and planning. Some emotions shouldn’t be left to fester in your soul.
Gray Spencer is a woman looking to serve up revenge while the embers are still glowing. She has reason. She does. Her normal, everyday life got derailed by a mage—a human who can do magic. Christophe dit Menart is a powerful mage with a few hundred years of living on her. Because of him, her life has been destroyed. Not just her life, but also the lives of her sister and parents.
After she gets her freedom at a terrible cost, the only thing Gray wants is Christophe dit Menart dead for what he did—before he does the same horrific thing to someone else that he did to her.
I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. A normal, nonmagical human like Gray can’t hope to go up against someone like Christophe. But Gray’s not normal—not anymore. She escaped because a demon gave his life for her and in the process transferred his magic to her. If she had any idea how to use that magic, she might have a chance against Christophe. Maybe.
The demon warlord Nikodemus has negotiated a shaky peace agreement between the magekind and the demonkind. (Did I mention them? They are fiends, a kind of demon. And they don’t take kindly to the mages who kill them in order to extend their miserable magic-using human lives by stealing a demon’s life force.) Because of the peace, demons in Nikodemus’s territory have agreed not to harm the magekind. In return, the magekind aren’t supposed to kill any more demons.
Basically the problem is this: Gray intends to kill Christophe, and the demon warlord’s most feared assassin has to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Uh-oh.
After all that, I have what may seem like a strange confession to make about my assassin hero who is, after all, a wee bit scary at times. He’s been alive for a long, long time, and for much of that time, women lived very restricted lives. Sometimes he is completely flummoxed by these modern women. It was a lot of fun writing a hero like that, and I hope you enjoy reading about how Christophe learns to deal with Gray as much as I enjoyed writing about it.
Yours Sincerely,
From the desk of Sophie Gunn
Dear Reader,
After years living in upstate New York, my husband got a new job and we moved back to my small hometown outside of Philadelphia. I was thrilled to be near my parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins. (Hi, Aunt Lillian!) But I didn’t anticipate how close I would be to quite a few of my former high school classmates. Didn’t anyone ever leave this town? My life had turned into a nonstop high school reunion.
And I was definitely still wearing the wrong dress.
One by one, I encountered my former “enemies” from high school. They were at the gym, the grocery store, and the elementary school bake sale. It didn’t take long to realize two things. First, we had a blast rehashing the past. What had really happened at that eleventh-grade dance? What had become of Joey, the handsome captain of the football team? (Surprise, there he is now. Yes, he’s the one walking that tiny toy poodle on a pink, blinged-up leash!) Second, we were still terrifically different people, and it didn’t matter. We were grown-ups, and what someone wore or whom they dated didn’t feel so crucial anymore.
Cups of coffee led to glasses of wine, which led to true friendship. But friendship that was different from any I’d ever known, because while we shared a past, our presents were still radically different. My husband started to jokingly call us the Enemy Club, and it stuck.
That was what we writers call an aha moment.
The Enemy Club would make a great book. Actually, a great series…
The rest, as they say, is history. Each book of the Enemy Club series is set in small-town Galton, New York. Four friends who had been the worst of enemies are now the best of friends, struggling to help one another juggle jobs, kids, love, heartbreak, and triumph as seen from their very (very!) different points of view.
HOW SWEET IT IS is the first book in the series. It focuses on Lizzie, the good girl gone bad. She made one mistake senior year of high school that changed her life forever. Now she and her teenage daughter get by just fine, thank you very much, with a little help from the Enemy Club. But then Lizzie’s first love, the father who abandoned her daughter fourteen years before, decides to come back to town on Christmas Day. Lizzie imagines her life as seen through his eyes—and she doesn’t like what she sees. She has the same job, same house, same everything as when he left fourteen years earlier. She vows to make a change. But how much is she willing to risk? And does the mysterious stranger, who shows up in town promising to grant her every wish, have the answers? Or is he just another of life’s sweet, sweet mistakes?
I’m really excited about these books, because they’re so close to my heart. Come visit me at
www.sophiegunn.com
to read an excerpt of HOW SWEET IT IS, to find out more about the Enemy Club, to see pictures of my cats, and to keep in touch. I’d love to hear from you!
Yours,
From the desk of Sue-Ellen Welfonder
Dear Reader,
Wild, heather-clad hills, empty glens, and the skirl of pipes stir the hearts of many. Female hearts beat fast at the flash of plaid. Yet I’ve seen grown men shed tears at the beauty of a Highland sunset. So many people love Scotland, and those of us who do know that our passion is a double-edged sword. We live with a constant ache to be there. It’s a soul-deep yearning known as “the pull.”
In SINS OF A HIGHLAND DEVIL, the first book in my new Highland Warriors trilogy, I wanted to explore the fierce attachment Highlanders feel for their home glen. Love that burns so hotly, they’ll even lay down their lives to hold on to the hills so dear to them.
James Cameron and Catriona MacDonald, hero and heroine of SINS OF A HIGHLAND DEVIL, are bitter foes. Divided by centuries of clan feuds, strife, and rivalries, they share a fiery passion for the glen they each claim as their own. When a king’s writ threatens banishment, long-held boundaries blur and forbidden desires are unleashed. James and Catriona soon discover there is much pleasure to be found in each other’s embrace. But the price of their yearning must be paid in blood, and the battle facing them could shatter their world.
Fortunately, true love can prove a more powerful weapon than any warrior’s sword.
There are a lot of swords in this story. And the fight scenes are fierce. But passions flare when blood is spilled as James and Catriona showed me each day during the writing of their tale.
It was an exhilarating journey.
Catriona is a strong heroine who will brave any danger to protect her home and to win the heart of the man she never believed could be hers. James is a hardened warrior and proud clan leader, and he faces his greatest challenge when his beloved glen is threatened.
Because SINS OF A HIGHLAND DEVIL is a romance, James and Catriona are triumphant. Their ending is a happy one. Numberless Highlanders after them weren’t as blessed. Later centuries saw the Clearances, while famine and other hardships did the rest. Clans were scattered, banished from their glens and hills as they were forced to sail to distant shores. Their hearts were irrevocably broken. But they kept their deep love of the land, their proud Celtic roots remaining true no matter where they settled.
Their forever yearning for home still beats in the heart of everyone with even a drop of Scottish blood. It’s the reason we feel “the pull.”
I hope you’ll enjoy reading how James’s and Catriona’s passion for their glen rewards them with a love more wondrous than their wildest dreams.
With all good wishes,
Blood-Twin:
A bonded pair of fiends who share a permanent magical connection. They may be biologically related and/or same sex. Antisocial and prone to psychosis.
Copa:
A plant derivative, of a yellow-ochre color when processed. Has a mild psychotropic effect on the kin who use it for relaxation. On mages, the drug increases magical abilities and is highly addictive.
Cracking (a talisman):
A mage or witch may crack open a talisman in order to absorb the life force therein and magically prolong his or her life. Requires a sacrificial murder.
Demon:
Any one of a number of shape-shifting magical beings whose chief characteristic is, as far as the magekind are concerned, the ability to possess and control a human.
Fiend:
A subspecies of demon. Before relations with the magekind exploded into war, they frequently bonded with the magekind.
Kin:
What fiends collectively call each other. Socially divided into various factions, constantly seeking power over other Warlord-led factions. The kin connect with other kin via psychic connections. They typically possess multiple physical forms, at least one of which is recognizably human.
Mage:
A male who possesses magic. A sorcerer. See also
magekind
.
Magekind:
Humans who possess magic. The magekind arose to protect vanilla humans from the depredations of demons, a very real threat.
Mageheld:
A fiend or other demon who is under the complete control of one of the magekind.
Sever:
The act of removing a mageheld from the control of a mage or witch.
Talisman:
A usually small object into which a mage has enclosed the life force of a fiend, typically against the fiend’s will. A talisman confers additional magical power to the mage who has it. Sometimes requires an additional sacrifice. See also
cracking (a talisman)
.
Vanilla:
A human with no magic or, pejoratively, one of the magekind with little power.
Warlord:
A fiend who leads some number of other fiends who have sworn fealty. Usually a natural leader possessing far more magic than others of the kin.
Witch:
A human female who possesses magic. A sorceress. See also
magekind
.