I told y'all I contacted my cover artist on Monday. She contacted me back and she's available. Already she's sent me a new print cover for
In Deep Wish to approve. Bing bang boom. (But I'm not sharing it yet. It's approved but I'm waiting on the ebook jpeg.)
We've also been back and forth discussing ideas for the WHTF cover. If it turns out anything like what I have in my head, it'll be awesome. Obviously, not sharing any of that yet either.
Umm, yeah... I'm a teaser. I'm just so excited I can't NOT talk about it.
It feels good to be excited about this again. After months of anti-excited about anything writerly, I'm actually sitting down and working every day. I'm still not burning up the road, but I'm motoring along. As of last night, I've edited through pg 109.
And I'm excited about what I'm reading as I edit. It's good stuff, folks, if I do say so myself. Not perfect stuff. JC stills needs to get her awesome little hands on it and make me make it better. But I feel good about it now.
I'm excited.
To that end, I hope this will help all y'all get excited about it, too...
Wish
Hits the Fan
Chapter
One
What
in the name of Uncle Hank is it now?
Just when I thought I could maybe sorta
kinda take a freakin’ break, Trygvyr was requesting my presence at the back of
the warehouse. I gazed around the place
as if seeing it for the first time. Not
much more than an hour had passed since my allies had come in and kicked Efreet
ass. While they were doing that, I was
battling my own father for familial fun.
They’d won. I’d won. It was
over.
I gave myself a good chuckle over that one
and then motioned toward the damaged girl genie who’d been sent to fetch
me. It wouldn’t be over until I was
taking the big dirt nap. And being a
djinn meant there were few things that could put me six feet under.
As Raye guided me toward the growing kerfluffle,
I could tell we were headed for the cages I’d seen when I entered only a few
short hours before. I’d snuck inside to
save my friends from the Efreet, so it wasn’t like I had a boatload of time to
check out the contents of those cages.
In fact, I’d forgotten clean about them.
Until Raye rushed up claiming some sort
of things had been found back
there. Maybe if I hadn’t been
transformed into a mouse at the time, I would’ve sensed what those cages held. I guess what Robert Burns wrote was true, the
best laid plans of mice really do often go awry in some way or another.
I mean, the original mouse plan had worked. It got me inside undetected by everyone but
my former dog. Then we had defeated the
Efreet. And my friends were freed. And I’d kept Zeke from going over to the
shady side of the street, even if he did end up turning human in the
process. Plus, my dog was back to being
my tall, blond Viking friend, Trygvyr, again.
Now?
The after-victory party was iffy.
Some of the people we’d saved were pissed. The biggest, baddest of the baddies had
gotten away. And something freaktastic
was awaiting me in the dim recesses of the expanse strung all over with medieval
cages designed to hold even the strongest magical beings. After all I’d been through, I really would’ve
preferred a nice, long nap somewhere warm and comfortable. Instead, I had more bullshit to deal with.
I pushed past Renee after we reached the
cages where my lawyer, Michael, and Hans the bodyguard had been held prisoner
by the Efreet menace. Across from those
was the one imprisoning my receptionist, Renee, while the evil bastards had
visited unimaginable horrors upon her. She’d
been pretty bad off, but she’d recovered well.
That she had retained her sanity was a miracle, but I could sense the
scars she bore. Not for the first time,
I wished we still an our in-house therapist.
Even that traitor Mena would’ve been better than no one at all to help
my friend through this.
The sounds of Raye’s footsteps behind me
reminded me that maybe no therapy
would’ve been better for her than the half-ass shit Mena had done. When I’d discovered Raye amongst the refugees
from Mayweather Antiquities the night Amun attacked my home, she’d been wrecked
at the abusive hands of her Master. The
amount of time she’d spent at our facilities without any progress in her
welfare should’ve been a big clue for me about Mena, but finding out she was a
traitor had been a slap in the face. How
many people had paid for my ignorance, I had no idea. How many more would pay remained to be seen.
Either way, it sucked.
I stopped abruptly. I could hear Raye bring up the rear, but while
I was lost in thought, I’d lost track of the sounds in front of me. Silence may be golden in some cases, but
right then it scared the shit out of me.
“Which way?” I asked the girl.
She pointed as she stopped beside
me.
“Lead on, McDuff.”
“Lay.
It’s ‘lay on, McDuff’.”
“I don’t care if it’s ‘lay off the
McDonalds’. You go, I’ll follow.”
She blushed and then took the lead again,
this time at a slower pace than I wanted, but I had to deal with it. The poor girl paused and cringed at a cage I
remembered well. It smelled of water and
death. Natalia, the Rusalka, had been
imprisoned inside for longer than I wanted to imagine. Now, she was off somewhere giving some of her
own back to one Efreet in particular. As
horrible as they’d been, I didn’t want to think about what her gentle
ministrations would entail.
Well,
maybe a little. Payback is hell, or so they say.
When Raye stopped again, I knew we’d
reached the place. I’d been correct in
my assumption. These were the cages I
hadn’t wanted to remember After my
friends transformed me into a mouse to get into the building, I’d scurried past
these cages first. I’d been horrified
then. Dozens and dozens of cages hung suspended from the ceiling at varying
levels. Within each, I could make out a single form. Some of the forms were
still bipedal, but some were beasts. Or monsters. Or, in one case, a sick
combination of man and monster. I think I screamed. All that came out was a
shrill squeak I figured only dogs could hear.
“Why haven’t these people been released
yet?” I shouted above my growing dread.
“Oy, love, no need to break the
eardrums. We’re right here.” Basil
Hadresham had shunned his day-to-day business disguise of a forty-something,
tweed-wearing, classic Brit to look like the teen he’d been when he became a
genie. He was a toe-haired waif who
would easily steal your pocket watch after you gave him a dollar for a lollipop. Right then, I would’ve rather had the older,
more comforting model—which is a kind of a mix between Santa Claus and Mark
Williams playing the best friend’s dad in those boy-wizard movies rather than
my Artful Dodger. “And they haven’t been
released because we’re not sure if we have the means to deal with them all
yet.”
I gazed at the cages within easy
view. Too many bizarre faces looked back
at me. Their mouths were moving, but no
sounds were coming out.
“We had to block the sound, love,” Basil
said, answering my question before I could ask it. “So we could think.”
I saw Trygvyr, my friend and former pet,
walking toward us from between the hanging cages. His long, white hair had been pulled severely
back at his neck and tied with a strip of rawhide. His eyes pulled at me like twin black holes,
where only anger escaped. His wiry body
showed a tautness born of rage and I sure as hell didn’t want to be on the
receiving end. When he got within a
dozen feet of us, I could hear him snarling like the dog he’d spent fifteen
decades transformed into.
He moved to brush past Raye and I. Throwing aside any thought of personal
safety, I snagged his arm on the way by.
“What gives?” I asked.
With his eyes still locked on a space
far ahead of us, he shrugged off my grasp. “There are still Efreet in the
cages?” he asked.
“Last I checked.”
Power blossomed over him like he was
preparing to go nuclear. “If you want
any of them capable of speech any time soon, I suggest you get to them before I
do.”
When he tried to shrug off my hold on
his arm, I stuck to him like I was glued on.
“Whoa. Hang on a second. I’d like to kick all of their asses as much
as the next djinn, but we’ve got all the time in the world for that.”
Unless I missed my guess, Tryg was mere
seconds from boiling over and saying those little words he’d said once
before. ‘I renounce the Rules’ had
changed him into an Efreet then and, the way he was acting, they were sure to
turn him into one again.
“Talk to me.”
He didn’t even look at me.
“Major!”
I hated using the name I’d chosen to call the dog he’d been, but when
the big furball had gotten too engrossed in rabbit chasing to pay attention to
me, it always worked.
His dark eyes turned toward me, finally
focusing on what was real and not the rage in his head. “Yes, Mistress?”
I let out a breath I’d been holding so
long my ribs hurt. “That’s better. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Jerking his arm, he tried to free
himself, but I wasn’t letting him go until the steam stopped coming out his
ears. “The Efreet must be made to pay
for their atrocities,” he said
“Not the way you were thinking about
making them pay, bud.”
All he did was blink at me like a
freakin’ idiot.
“You were this close…” I held my index
finger a millimeter from my thumb. “…to giving up being a genie.”
When he shook all over like he still had
long fur, and it was wet, I knew I’d finally made an impression.
One hand scrubbed the side of his face
while I held tight to the other arm. “Odin’s
hairy balls.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I squeezed my hand and pulled him toward me. “Now,
I’ll ask again, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me? How can you ask after seeing…? You haven’t seen, have you?”
“When I first came into the warehouse, I
thought something was hinky. Strange and
scary and bewildering. But I was a mouse at the time. Everything’s strange and scary when you’re
that low on the food chain. I can’t say for sure whether any of those rodent
impressions were real.” I nudged Basil
with an elbow. “He was just beginning to
shed some light when you showed up all hell bent for leather.”
Yep, another teaser. But it's not a total tease because this will be available for purchase in September - good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.
Maybe by Friday I can untease at least the cover of
In Deep Wish for all y'all. I'm not pushing the artist because this isn't time sensitive, so we'll see. As soon as I have the final version, I'll post it. K?
Now, I need to get back to edits. I should have this pass done by the weekend, and a final read-through with tweaking done by the end of next week, so I can get this to JC. Yay.
Any questions? Comments? Stuffs?
