The Unseen Tempest (Lords of Arcadia) (33 page)

BOOK: The Unseen Tempest (Lords of Arcadia)

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He had spent most of Kane’s life feeling this way. It had been worse during the boy’s infancy. Donald had been obsessed with keeping Kane safe inside Athens. However, as the years passed, the compulsion faded, and he began to think his worries were keeping his son from actually living his life. And he knew there was something he was forgetting….

When his phone rang, he jumped, expecting it to be Kane, and he’d worried for nothing.

Instead, he saw it was Jewel, and he knew he’d been right; something had gone wrong.

He answered the phone, and she began telling him what had happened. Then, between one word and the next, after years of not knowing, something clicked in Donald’s mind, and he suddenly remembered.

He remembered everything.

And he knew Kane was in terrible danger.

“Jewel, I’m on my way home now,” he said, then hung up and called his agent. He needed to be on the next flight to Iowa, no matter what the cost. Even as he packed, he knew that even if he had the magical power to simply appear in Athens….

He was already too late.

Author’s Note

W
ELL
NOW
,
how was that?

I hope you’re coming here after the story and not before, because there might be some spoilers, so you were warned. A lot of people have… gently commented… on the cliff-hangers and how these stories end, and I think I should take a few seconds to answer the question and explain why.

My name is John and I am a comic book junkie.

You say “Hi, John” back and then I begin to share.

I grew up on comics. My grandfather used to bring me home
Richie Rich
comics from the barbershop he used to work at every day. To him it was a clever and creative way to get me to read more; to me it was like he was bringing me a whole other world contained within twenty-two pages. I devoured them, and when I discovered the comic book shop in the back of the pottery store in the small town where my grandparents lived, well, let’s just say my fate was sealed. I moved to
Flash
to
Teen Titans
and finally to
X-Men
, where I found that comic books weren’t just comics but a medium in which specific storytelling could take place.

You’re allowed to do things in comics that you can’t in other places, and I think as you grow older, that magic is lost sometimes. Which is why we gravitate back to fantasy and sci-fi books, looking for some way to capture that lost spark we once sat around and warmed our imaginations on. Arcadia was built on that foundation, and I made a conscious choice to make each book feel like a chapter in a longer story, just like a comic book. Each one would lead into the next and the plots that are brought up aren’t always solved in the same book. For example, the mystery of Molly and her red lenses is still up for grabs, what happened to Ater and Kor when they want back to ask Nystel for help needs to be told, etc., etc.

So though I understand the frustration you might feel that the book is unfinished, try and look at it this way: those cliffhangers are a promise that there is another chapter coming. Another issue is on its way, and I promise you if you keep reading them, I will keep writing them. It’s a simple contract, but I am willing to bet we can come to terms on it.

Also, I want to discuss the mysterious and ever talented J.G. Morgan, whose name is on the cover of the book with mine. J.G. has been working with me since the start of these books, tirelessly reading, giving input, adding ideas to the mix, and it is only now that I was able to convince her to add her name onto the books since I think she is contributing as much as I am in the creative process. So if you read this and go, well, that J.G. person changed things—no, they were always there, nothing changed. And if you think the book got better because she was helping—no, they were always there and nothing has changed. I just finally convinced her that taking credit for her work isn’t hubris; it is well deserved.

Somewhere in the Crystal Court,

John Goode

About the Author

J
OHN
G
OODE
is a member of the class of ’88 from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, specializing in incantations and spoken spells. At the age of fourteen, he proudly represented District 13 in the 65th Panem games, where he was disqualified for crying uncontrollably before the competition began. After that he moved to Forks, Washington, where against all odds he dated the hot, incredibly approachable werewolf instead of the stuck-up jerk of a vampire, but was crushed when he found out the werewolf was actually gayer than he was. After that he turned down the mandatory operation everyone must receive at sixteen to become pretty, citing that everyone pretty was just too stupid to live, before moving away for greener pastures. After falling down an oddly large rabbit hole, he became huge when his love for cakes combined with his inability to resist the commands of sparsely worded notes, and was finally kicked out when he began playing solitaire with the Red Queen’s 4th armored division. By eighteen he had found the land in the back of his wardrobe, but decided that thinly veiled religious allegories were not the neighbors he desired. When last seen, he had become obsessed with growing a pair of wings after discovering Fang’s blog and hasn’t been seen since.

Or he is this guy who lives in this place and writes stuff he hopes you read.

“I’m a figment of my own imagination.”
J.G. M
ORGAN

Morgan cites a lifetime of voracious, eclectic reading, much of it nonfiction, decades of listening quietly to and roaming the world outside her door, and nearly nine years of reading, commenting on, and doing beta for some of the vast sea of writing others have created about a specific television series as some of the inspiration behind her first foray into writing for publication.

Other inspirations? The author’s only response is a chuckle, an arched eyebrow, and a reference to forests and trees.

J.G. Morgan lives quietly in a garden-level studio apartment near Lake Ontario in the northeast US. Both grown children, a son and a daughter and her family, live near the author.

L
ORDS
OF
A
RCADIA by
J
OHN
G
OODE