Tag Archives: shifters

The Best Laid Plans

The Golden Anidae is only 9 days away so here’s a freebie! This little short takes place from Dean’s perspective over  a scene in Midnight Ash. MidnightAsh2_850This consists of strong language and has not been professionally edited. Read at your own risk.

The Best Laid Plans

“There’ll have to be a change of plans,” Pat said as if his perfect little world wasn’t falling apart.

I understood the slight tick at the corner of Pat’s eye.  It was almost imperceptible but I knew Pat, knew what to look for.  Pat wanted to kill something, anything that moved to keep the Blushing Death safe.

“What plan?” the dangerous little mouse squeaked.

Danny glanced over at her with guilt written all over his face.  Stupid pup. She could eat Danny alive.  Her face flushed and the soft grey of her eyes swirled with anger, tugging at my insides.  The room filled with her, the soft floral, feminine scent mixed with the rich spiciness of her anger.  My cock hardened along my thigh as her scent permeated my brain, registering something deep in my synapses that I didn’t understand.  My wolf wanted to leap out to meet her, to run with her.  I fought to hold back my beast and keep control.  I had reacted to her like this from the first and it took everything I had not to rub up against her and mark her as mine.

Dear God, what is she?

She glanced over at me, her grey eyes churning with a secret. With a wicked smile on her face, that glint in her eye was as if she’d imagined something horrible in her mind and got satisfaction from it.  I liked that devious and predatory grin.  My wolf knew it for what it was, dangerous, protective, and mine.

Pat reached out and touched her, sliding his cold, dead hand against her cheek.  Something inside me wanted to rip that hand off. It didn’t make sense. Pat was my friend, had been for decades.

The Blushing Death jumped at his touch and my wolf was glad of it. Quicker than either I or Pat saw, she’d drew her knife.  The Blushing Death would never be a victim. She’d kill everyone and everything before she let that happen and I was glad of it. Humans didn’t live long in our world but then again, she wasn’t merely human.

Pat reached out, slow and cautious, touching her again. She dropped the knife but I could see the reluctance in her gaze.  I wished it was my hand on her cheek, wished I was comforting her.

Damn it!

Janey . . . I missed Janey.  That was all. I was lonely, so lonely.  Dahlia Sabin wasn’t mine.  She was Pat’s. My wolf growled deep in my being, arguing with my brain. She may be Pat’s but she would never be Danny’s.  That much, I knew for certain.  No matter how much that boy wanted it to be true, she would never be Danny’s.

“There’s something else?” Pat asked her.

“Later,” she said, turning to face the rest of the room with her shoulders back and her chin high.  That woman was every bit an Alpha and my cock throbbed at the thought of testing her.

“What’s the change in plan?  What’s the plan period?” she snapped, sliding that long silver blade back into it sheath.  I could read the tension in her body and something in me ached to ease it.  She caressed the blade as she would a lover, taking comfort from the weapon and her own sense of determination.  The Blushing Death was no shrinking violet and my cock twitched, imagining her fingers wrapped around my hard length, squeezing my shaft with the same tenderness.  My beast paced back and forth inside me like the caged animal it was, growling through my mind.  I was stronger than this.  I was stronger than whatever was tugging at my chest and riling up my beast.

“Alex and I had intended to confront the board in the Lebensblut New York offices to come up with a compromise,” Pat said with more words than needed. Too many words could get a guy in trouble. “I’d hoped we could stop this before it started.  Make amends somehow.  Now, I’m afraid we’re too late. We’ll make an appeal but I’m afraid that Dahlia needs to be protected.”

She was stiff, her hands balled into fists at her sides as if she wanted to punch everyone in the room. I couldn’t blame her.  Pat was heavy handed but he knew what he was doing.  She took a deep breath and forced her shoulders to relax.

“Okay.  I’ll need protection,” she agreed.

Before I could hold it in, I laughed.  Out loud. The raucous sound was so foreign, I startled myself.  Pat’s eyes were wider than dinner plates and I could almost see the wheels turning in her head.  She’d surprised everyone.  Including  me.

She and Pat both glared at me but I didn’t care.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed.   It felt good.  Better than I remembered. Who was this woman? My heart raced in my chest and what I could only describe as fear churned in my gut. She’d made me feel things in the last five minutes that I hadn’t felt . . . ever. Not even with Janey.

“Is something amusing, Dean?” Pat hissed.  His jaw was tight and his tone clipped as he glared at me.  I didn’t care.  I enjoyed the light feeling in my chest and even the fear.

“You said she was unpredictable,” I answered through strangled laughter and sunk back into the couch, relaxing.  I liked her more than I knew was good for me.

RT2013

Am I the only one not concerned with fame?

I don’t care that you’re famous.

If you’re an ass, you’re just a famous ass and I don’t have time to deal with that.

If you have fans (and don’t get me wrong, I’m totally jealous), but at least pay attention to them and don’t treat them like their shit. If they want to take a picture with you, smile and say “sure, that would be great!” Also, don’t hide who you are. If you started out as self-published, acknowledge it and embrace it. Be proud of where you came from. Yes, now you have a very VERY lucrative publishing contract but own up. You started out as fan-fiction, stole someone else’s characters and wrote a very subpar set of novels that the general masses adore. Own it!

Maybe its me but I can’t respect a person who doesn’t acknowledge who and what they are, the work they’ve done, and tries to be something they’re not.

As an author, I strive to be better every day, to make my characters as real for my readers as I can. I’m not going to lie. I’ve written some shit in my day, unabashed shit but I know that and acknowledge it. I learn from it and and develop not only as an author but as a person taking the good with the bad. I feel that most of us who are in the business for a while want to be proud of our work and we understand that rejection, development, and tears are all part of the process. If you catapult to stardom without the benefit of failure, you lose something. You lose the ability to be humble, thankful, and grow.

I realize this is a little late considering that RT was in April but better late than never…right?

Welcome to the Slanty Shanty

About 3 years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. We looked at alot of houses. I don’t like the suburbs. Having grown up in the country, I wanted to be as close to the city and downtown as possible. We looked in Grandview, Clintonville, and finally German Village. We ended up getting our first home just outside of German Village in Shumacher place.

We like to call it “ghetto adjacent”. But we are downtown, we have a yard the size of a yoga mat, and we have 2000 square feet in a lovely victorian brick home.  Upon moving in, we discovered several things.

1. None of the floors are level. They slope and curve as the house has settled. You may say, “So what.” This however, has several implications. First, a line of bookcases along the wall do not sit evenly. Each one of them needs to be shimmed at different levels. This makes the bookcases, at best, precarious and at worst, dangerous. The last bookcase, we got at a different time because we couldn’t fit them all in the car. The repercussions of this is that we couldn’t bolt it to the rest. Below is the result. Also, that’s right. Those are my Minnie ears. And you know what? They’re not my only pair!ImageImage

2. There is no subfloor. This means that if the light is on in the basement, you can see it through the slats above in the dining room. HA!

3. The walls are not flat…any of them. They are plaster and who ever did it must have been cross-eyed to the point of double vision. This means that hanging pictures or, really anything else is difficult. Let’s be honest, impossible.

So, we took this house on, understanding that there were some updates that needed to be done. So far, we’ve replaced about half of the windows (we couldn’t afford to do all of them), replaced some plumbing in the downstairs bathroom (it was galvanized pipe and wouldn’t fit any of the shower fixtures we bought), we’ve redone the kitchen (during that process we discovered one wall didn’t have studs – just two sheets of dry wall and then brick), and now its time for the garage.

The shenanigans have already begun. We’ve had to replace the door since we “accidentally” broke the window in the entry door. Glass is at this moment precariously situated in the door with painters tape holding it together as we wait for Lowe’s to come and install a new door. Although, its not like the thing was keeping out intruders or robbers before the glass got broken.Image Next, the garage roof which hasn’t been replaced in…oh, I don’t know – since the house was built in 1880. See all the up turned shingles…Yeah, that should be fun.Image

Stay tuned for the next installment of Adventures in the Slanty Shanty!