The Midnight Breed Series Companion (12 page)

It all sounded great to me…until they mentioned they wanted me to give them Gideon and Savannah’s story to use as the ebook original novella.

Well, no way. Out of the question. As longtime readers of the series know, Gideon and Savannah met and fell in love thirty years before the timeline of
Kiss of Midnight
. To release their story on its own toward the big finale in Book 10 would make no sense in the fabric of the series. And on top of that, I wasn’t about to pull their story—a true series prequel—out of the Companion, which is where I felt it belonged for many reasons.

I said no, and I figured that was the end of the ebook original conversation. But Random House really wanted me to write something to fill that void, so I started thinking about secondary characters and storylines that could exist if not within the overarching plot already in progress, then running parallel to it.

My first choice was Danika. And since the ebook novella would be coming out in early December, I decided to write a holiday story and set it somewhere other than where the series had been so far. Naturally, that sent my imagination to Conlan MacConn’s homeland of Scotland. Edinburgh, to be specific.

In
A Taste of Midnight
, I wanted to craft a story that I hoped would respect the relationship Danika and Conlan enjoyed while he was alive, yet introduce a passion that readers could believe in, especially considering the short storytelling timeframe a novella dictates. Danika had to fall in love fast and deeply, so I decided to give her Malcolm MacBain, a Breed male she and Con both knew very well, a very long time ago. Both Danika and Mal had lost people they loved, so giving them a happily-ever-after together seemed fitting to me.

In
A Taste of Midnight
, we also meet a new and intriguing Breed male from the Enforcement Agency named Thane. Although I don’t have a storyline in mind for this black-haired, ruggedly handsome and mysterious man, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of him.

A Taste of Midnight
released in ebook December, 2011. It is the only Midnight Breed story not available in print on its own in the United States. Readers can only find this story in ebook, and in the back of the mass market paperback of
Darker After Midnight
. Danika and Malcolm’s story is available as a standalone in Germany through Egmont LYX in both paperback and ebook.

Darker After Midnight

BOOK 10

Romantic Leads

Sterling Chase

Tavia Fairchild

Plot Summary

Separated from his brethren of the Order and struggling with an addiction that threatens to consume him, Sterling Chase has fallen far from grace—but he soon finds his best hope for redemption in beautiful, mysterious Tavia Fairchild, a woman unlike any other the world has ever seen.

Primary Story Locations

Order's compound headquarters in undisclosed location in Boston

Lazaro Archer's Darkhaven in northern Maine

Dragos's island lair off coast of Maine

Various locations in and around Washington, D.C.

Playlist

Down with the Sickness
by Disturbed

One Last Breath
by Creed

Awakening
by The Damning Well

Bodies
by Drowning Pool

In Your Eyes
by Peter Gabriel

Story Background

After plotting out the bones of this story, the tenth of the series, back around the time I was writing
Midnight Rising
, when I finally approached the first chapter of
Darker After Midnight
it was with a mix of excitement, pride, trepidation, and even a bit of sadness.

As Lucan, Gideon and Tegan—the Order’s longest-standing members of the cadre based in Boston—began to detonate the explosives that would seal the compound forever, I was right there with them, knowing it had to be done, yet not really sure what the future would hold for the Order and their world once this chapter closed.

I knew the series would continue because I had just signed with Random House for the next two books, but I didn’t know if readers would be interested in a new generation of characters and a twenty-year leap into the future where the Breed no longer hid from mankind, but was struggling to find a place of peace among them. Nevertheless, the first arc of the Midnight Breed series was drawing to a close right here and now, and I had a lot of threads to finish off in
Darker After Midnight
.

Chief among them was the resolution of Sterling Chase’s fall from grace and his ultimate redemption and healing. Things with Chase had gone from bad to worse as his story opened here. Through his bad attitude and reckless behavior, he had lost the respect and friendship of his brethren in the Order. His spiral toward blood addiction was dancing him closer to the edge of going full Rogue. And of his own volition, he was now in human police custody, being charged in a shooting at a prominent Massachusetts senator’s private residence.

The very last thing Chase needed was to race to the rescue of a beautiful young woman who had stepped into the crosshairs of Dragos’s escalating war against the Order. Then again, maybe that’s just what he needed. And I’d been waiting all this time—six books’ time—for Chase to come face-to-face with Tavia Fairchild and the big secret that her very existence would finally bring to light.

One thing I felt had been sorely missing from the Midnight Breed series from fairly early on was the possibility of a female Breed. Going into the series as first a trilogy, then a sextet, it wasn’t long before I started chafing against my own world rule that all of the Breed were born exclusively male. But I’d also had a world rule stating that the race as a whole forbade biological and technological interference when it came to conception and birth. Aha!

So natural births produced male babies every time, but had anyone ever attempted to fiddle with biology? Certainly someone like Dragos would not be opposed to breaking Breed law to further his own mad plans….

So, back at Book 4, when I took a leap of faith and assumed the series might run as long and as far as I wanted to take it, I decided that one of the final twists in the overarching story arc would be the existence of a female vampire. But not just a female Breed, a genetic splicing of Ancient and Breedmate DNA, which would give this first-of-her-kind female the ability to blend in among humans—so long as she maintained strict medical monitoring and treatments.

She would be as strong and as powerful as any Gen One, yet have the ability to walk in the daylight and consume human food. And if she reproduced, it opened up the very real possibility of more females among the Breed—perhaps even a daywalker or two in the future.

Introducing Tavia to the series—writing the scene where Chase first realizes what she is—was one of my favorite parts of
Darker After Midnight
. And it was awfully fun introducing Tavia to the other members of the Order in all her hissing, vampiric glory, when Tegan, Hunter, Niko and Renata arrive at Mathias Rowan’s Darkhaven in Boston to haul Chase in for some Breed-style intervention back at headquarters.

But Tavia wasn’t the only big surprise in store as the series rolled toward its climax.

In
Darker After Midnight
, Jenna reveals through her link to the Ancient’s memories that the otherworlders were not the only preternatural beings on Earth at the time of their crash-landing thousands of years ago. There was another powerful race of immortals—Atlanteans—with whom the Ancients had been fighting in a private war of their own. Some of these Atlanteans, despite being forbidden by their queen to mate with humans, had produced hybrid offspring of their own on Earth….

Daughters born with the Atlantean symbol of a teardrop falling into the cradle of a crescent moon.

This explanation of the Breedmates’ origins was, I’ll freely admit, an afterthought that came to me only when a reader at one of my events in Germany during my first book tour there pointed out the lack of logic in this part of the series. It bothered her, the fact that Breedmates were somehow, inexplicably
special
and could be born with different genetic makeup than any other human female. This reader wanted the “why” of it, and I came home determined to find an answer that not only made sense, but that would fit within the already established lore and text of the series.

Now, you might be scratching your head and thinking, Altanteans?

But go back to
Kiss of Midnight
. You’ll find a line in the book mentioning the various civilizations that the Ancients wiped out after their arrival on Earth. One of them was Atlantis. All I had to do was find a way to connect Atlantis to the Breedmates, make sure I hadn’t written myself into any corners with the histories of the Breedmates already introduced in the series, and also figure out why no one in the story world thus far would know about this connection.

The answers to all of those questions finally came to light in
Darker After Midnight
. Even more exciting to me, as I was putting those pieces together a few books back, I realized I also had the basis for some intriguing new characters and storylines—even a powerful new enemy, once Dragos was given his just desserts. I imagined all kinds of possibilities for the continuation—the evolution—of the Midnight Breed series, taking it in a whole new, exciting direction.

Which brings me to what I feel is the biggest twist in
Darker After Midnight
: the outing of the Breed to mankind.

This is another of those events in the series that I’d been writing toward since around the fourth book. One of the worst things to happen to a long-running series is stagnation. While I hadn’t gotten bored writing Midnight Breed books yet, and certainly not when I was just halfway through the eventual ten-book storyline, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of keeping my series on artificial life support just because it was a success and readers wanted more.

So, I started planning early for a way to shake things up. I wanted to give the series a finite resolution, while still leaving the door open in case I did want to take it further. One way to do that was to
kill my darlings.
No, not literally. But remember how I said in another section that happy characters make for boring fiction? The same can be said of your story world.

Granted, removing such a large piece of what made the Midnight Breed series popular with readers—the secret, hidden aspect of life among the Breed—was a risk. But I believe it was the most authentic way to close the original story arc. After all, Dragos wouldn’t go down without one hell of a fight. And he’d given plenty of evidence for anyone to assume he would be just mad enough to orchestrate a retaliation so awful and irrevocable.

Although the world they once knew no longer exists, at the end of
Darker After Midnight
, the Order and their mates have made it through the fire, a little battered perhaps, but unbroken. There is new life already arrived, and still more on the way.

And in the end, for all the darkness, there is also hope.

Darker After Midnight
released in hardcover at the end of January, 2012, debuting on the
New York Times
hardcover fiction bestseller list at #9, and on the ebook and print combined list at #8. It remained on the
New York Times
list for two weeks, and on the
USA Today
bestseller list for two weeks as well, where it reached a career high for me of #17.