Last week we announced that Victoria Danann’s The Order of the Black Swan COLLECTED TALES is our Romance of the Week and the sponsor of thousands of great bargains in the Romance category: over 200 free titles, over 600 quality 99-centers, and thousands more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!
Now we’re back to offer our weekly free Romance excerpt, and if you aren’t among those who have downloaded The Order of the Black Swan COLLECTED TALES, you’re in for a real treat:
4.8 stars – 20 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:
Discover a world of adult fantasy where modern day knights of a secret society interact with an alien, a witch, a demon, a psychic, a berserker, a most unusual vampire, werewolves, elves, and fae. Fairytales intersect adventure, romance, and emotion proving that true love can find you in the strangest places, even when you’re least expecting it, even when you’re far, far from home. 17+ mature readers.
Book 1, My Familiar Stranger: Romancing the Vampire Hunters. (Nominated for best paranormal romance by REVIEWERS CHOICE AWARD and best indie paranormal romance and best indie fantasy romance by READERS CHOICE AWARDS. Night Owl Reviews TOP PICK. Choice Awards.) http://youtu.be/KLRFw_6gP5Q
Book 2, The Witch’s Dream: A Love Letter to Paranormal Romance http://youtu.be/BGKm-A1JqbI NIGHT OWL REVIEWS TOP PICK
Book 3, A Summoner’s Tale: The Vampire’s Confessor. http://youtu.be/iXTRRFM_TuA NIGHT OWL REVIEWS TOP PICK
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:
After a few seconds of stillness she realized she had stopped moving. That’s when the true punishment began. The pain was beyond describable, beyond mortal capacity to bear. But through the curtain of anguish, she thought she heard voices, muffled, maybe far away. The noise in the machine had left her hearing partially impaired. If she thought she would live and be whole again, she might have cared.
The only constant was pain. Relentless, excruciating pain.
She might have been in that swirling tunnel for minutes or hours or days. Trauma overrode all sense of time passage. She remembered a sudden burst of frigid air that instantly chilled her wet body and, as a parting insult, she was dropped on a cold, smooth, surface that was hard as rock.
What little wind was left in her lungs was knocked out of her on impact. At first she couldn’t inhale and thought – hoped – she would expire from that. But, just when her vision was going dark, her body involuntarily dragged in an agonizing, ragged breath.
There were muffled voices. She tried to look around, but even the tiniest movement was restricted by pain, breakage, and swelling. Breathing hurt. Moving eyeballs hurt. She thought she was curled into the fetal position, but couldn’t be sure. Through wet strands of hair she saw a blood-covered arm lying on the floor in front of her face. Beyond that, large boots moved into view; well worn brown leather with squared-off toes.
First, she tried raising herself on an elbow, but fell back when her wet forearm slipped out from under her. Once again her body slammed against the stone floor. She probably hadn’t moved an eighth of an inch, an action that would have been imperceptible to onlookers.
The voices were saying, “…fuck. What is that?”
Next she tried to roll over onto a shoulder blade to get an idea where she was and who was speaking. Her first thought was that it must be assassins who had singled her out and were keeping her alive for ransom or torture. She opened her mouth to scream from the shooting pain of rolling over, but all that came out was a groan that sounded like it had originated somewhere else.
From the new position she could see blurred shapes. Oddly, she didn’t get the sense that she was in danger or that they meant her harm, even though she thought she heard one voice say, “Kill it now”. Surely she could not be the “it” to which they referred?
She reached out to a large shape in dark colors, holding her hand toward the figure until her fingers slowly began to curl under involuntarily as if all muscle control wilted away with the last of her energy. Just before losing consciousness, she remembered thinking that was very likely the last thing she would ever do and she welcomed the peaceful escape of the silent blackness.
Suddenly she felt herself being pulled and lifted roughly, aggravating her injuries, jabbing the wounds, making the pain even worse than before. In her mind she was screaming. Just let me die. Please. Just let me be still for a minute. And die.
When her body came to rest it was against a surface softer and warmer than the stone floor. She was being jostled, pressed into the upper body of someone who now carried her. She smelled aftershave, a hint of cigar, and felt the timbre of a masculine voice murmuring assurances about being okay, calmly, but breathlessly.
The recovery room nurse looked at her face, noticed she was awake and said cheerfully, in a strange accent, “Hey there. How you doin’?”
Elora tried to say, “Hurts,” but through torn and swollen lips, it came out more like a hiss, “urrrrzzz”.
“I know, sweetheart. We’re taking care of you though. In just a minute you’re going to get some really good sleep.”
Now that she was lucid and responding to questions, they would grant the boon of deliverance drugs; drugs that temporarily allowed the sweet mercy of sleep. She tried to ask for the locket, but before she could make herself understood, she was claimed by a blissful wave of oblivion.
The nurse came in. “That’s enough visiting for today.” He nodded at the nurse over his shoulder without taking his eyes away from the pitiful creature in the bed. “Do you need anything? Something we may not have thought of?”
Elora stared at his face with a pained expression and spoke with effort. “Hwinnn.Doh.”
Storm frowned just a little, but enough for a couple of small lines to appear between his eyebrows. A window was out of the question. They had just built this… holding cell… especially for her. And it had no windows. “We don’t have a room for you with a window. I’m sorry.” He seemed genuinely apologetic. “Is there something about not having a window that would retard your recovery?”
Elora shook her head almost imperceptibly and thought Storm might have looked a little relieved. “You just like to look outside?” Tiny movement of her chin in an up down direction. “Yeah,” he smiled. “Me, too. Okay. I’ll be back tomorrow.” He turned away then thought of something else. “You know, when you’re better, maybe we can go outside sometimes. That’s even better than a window.”
“Thane ooh.”
His smile illuminated his eyes, brilliant and beautiful as a cloudless night. “If there’s anything else…”
“Ah ke.”
He frowned again. “Sorry. I don’t know what that is.” The patient seemed to respond with agitation and he knew it wouldn’t aid recovery if she was upset. “It sounds like ‘ah ke’ to me. Is that what you’re saying?” She shook her head no almost imperceptibly. “You’re not able to say the word clearly because of the swelling around your mouth?”
She sighed. “Hmmm.”
“Pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow you’ll be able to tell me. For now, I’ll think of it as a puzzle and try to solve it.”
He said he would come whenever he could. That turned out to be every day for most of the day. Elora’s speech started to improve and soon she was able to enunciate her full name and correct the misimpression.
Storm didn’t ask a lot of questions nor did he reveal anything pertinent. He would make small talk about weather and ask how she was doing. Every day he asked if she needed anything and every day she answered that she wanted a window, but one day she followed that with a request for “locket”.
“Locket.” He looked perplexed. “You had a locket with you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it was with you when you came here?”
“Yes.” Although she could form words at this point, it was still with great effort, so her sentences were as efficient as possible. “Saw them take.”
He said he would try to find it. He asked the nursing staff about the locket, but no one was on duty who had been there when she arrived. While he was there, he made sure they understood that the bursar in the Operations Office had been instructed to release funds for whatever she wanted when she was able to ask, unless it was a weapon or something that could obviously be used as one. He anticipated the day would come when she would want some of her own clothes or toiletries and such.
Storm came back into the room to let her know he would look for the locket and asked if there was anything else before he left for the day.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a hospital unit on a military base. We don’t know how you got here, but when you’re better, we’re hoping you’ll tell us. Right now just use your energy for getting well. That’s your only priority. Everything else can be sorted out later. Right?”
“Okay. And thank you. It’s nice they assigned me to somebody named Angel.”
“You speak German?”
“Some.”
“Well, don’t start setting the bar too high. It was wishful thinking on my mother’s part.”
Sol looked up from reading a brief when he peripherally noticed a shape standing in the open door of his office. Storm was waiting for an invitation. Sol took his feet off the desk and turned the swivel chair toward the door, motioning Storm inside. “Sir Storm. What can I do for you?”
“Sovereign.” Storm replied in kind, using Sol’s formal title, nodding in the way men with combat experience greet each other, as if there was an unspoken fraternal consciousness that only they shared. “It’s about the patient upstairs.”
Sol’s mouth, held semi-permanently in a rigid line, turned up just a little at the corners. “I suspected as much.”
“She says she had a locket when she arrived. Do you know where they would have put something she had on her person that was salvageable?”
Sol scrutinized Storm while contemplating whether it could do any harm to return the locket. He realized, of course, that the hesitation had already given away that he did, in fact, know something about it. The near-imperceptible release of tension in Sol’s shoulders was the tell-tale signal that he had decided to give up the information.
“Go see Monq,” was all he said. When Storm left without another word, Sol called Monq and told him to expect a visitor momentarily. Then he gave Monq clearance to release the locket and brief Storm on the intelligence gathered so far.
After hearing Monq out, Storm paid a second visit to the infirmary. Elora was sleeping. So he pocketed the locket, planning to return the next day.
He decided to spend the evening researching Elora’s supposed counterpart in his dimension. He grabbed a club sandwich to go from the hub diner and took it back to his quarters. When Monq had mentioned the similarity between his name and the owner of the locket, Storm had reasoned that, if Monq’s hypothesis regarding near-parallel experiences held, there would be an Elora Laiken, or someone with a similar name, in their reality.
With relatively little effort the investigation revealed that there was, in fact, an Elora Laiken, born twenty-three years earlier, died at the age of twelve, daughter of a Briton royal clan. Cause of death was a freak case of pneumonia that didn’t respond to any known treatment.
There was a short article written about her with a photo of her in equestrian gear, wearing a shy smile and holding a trophy with blue ribbon that was far too large for her.
The article said she had just won a steeplechase event and that she had personally trained the black, thoroughbred jumper named Crowers Keep. He noticed the photo had a video link. When he clicked it, the photo came to life.
The young Elora was telling an interviewer that the gelding, Crow, had been a gift for her ninth birthday, that he was two-years-old at the time, and that he had shown an extraordinary exuberance for running and jumping, the two skills required for steeplechase. With self-effacing humility and a relaxed and engaging style far beyond her years, she said she couldn’t really take credit for training him, that she had more or less just hung on for the ride.
As if on cue the horse nudged her from behind with his forehead, forcing her to take a short step forward. She laughed, stepped to the side, looked up at him affectionately and began to rub him between the eyes. As she talked, she took the blue ribbon and tied it to the horse’s bridle behind his ear. “You should interview him,” she said. “He’s the one who ran the course.”
The reporter asked her how she felt about winning her division.
She grinned. “Who doesn’t love to win?”
She was as cute as a twelve-year-old could be with a slightly upturned nose and a scattering of freckles. It occurred to Storm that the little boys must have been crazy for her and it made him sad to know she didn’t live to be someone’s lover, someone’s lifelong friend, someone’s great-grandmother.
Elora was awake when Storm arrived the next day. Naturally she was happy to see him. His visits were the highlight of her day. He came through the door smiling like he had a secret, walked straight to the side of the bed and, without saying a word, pulled the locket out of his pocket. He held it by the clasp, dangled it above her heart, then slipped it into her palm and draped the chain over her hand so she didn’t have to waste energy or hurt herself reaching for it. When he looked back at her face, he got all the thanks he needed from her expression.
“What else do you need?”
“Catheter. Out.”
The nurses smiled at each other when he brought the request to their station. They knew that a demand for removal of a catheter was the harbinger of a patient getting well. He argued with the doctors on her behalf until they agreed that she could have the catheter out when she could walk back and forth to the bathroom by herself. She could start by trying to sit up on the side of the bed and he could help with that if he wanted.
When he returned to the room to ask if she’d like to try sitting up, he found her more than eager. Nurses stood on either side of the bed and acted as coaches.
They lowered the bed so that her feet would touch the floor, then told Storm he could gently pull her arms while she tried to maneuver her legs and turn her body. She groaned, but told him not to stop. By the time she was sitting on the side of the bed she was breathing hard. He sat down beside her carefully and she slumped over, leaning against him. The nurses praised her for making a big leap of progress and shuffled Storm off so that they could take advantage of the moment to give her a sponge bath and change the bedding.
Since she was staying awake longer at a time, they gave her a TV remote. That’s when she began her second life in a new world. She quickly realized that the tunnel Monq had pushed her through might as well have been Alice’s rabbit hole. She was in a world similar to the one she’d left, but with differences that were inconsistent, surprisingly so.
She was a stranger in a strangish land.
Two days after sitting up for the first time, Elora’s doctors gave approval for her to try to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom for a shower. It was a task equal to racing a triathlon. By the time she got to the bathroom with catheter and IV unit in tow, she was tired but exhilarated by the promise of feeling completely clean and having a few minutes’ privacy. Her first peek at the mirror was shocking. Intellectually she knew that her face must look like the rest of her, but that didn’t prepare her for the emotional upheaval. The face that stared back was a monster mask framed by flat, lifeless hair that could be road kill. They had given her some soap, shampoo, and an ugly cotton gown to change into after her shower.
The shower was adequate in size with nice water pressure and a powerful, triple shower head. Normally these are good things, but not in Elora’s condition. There were no handles for starting or controlling water. In the end she had to give up and ask a nurse, who showed her that she simply needed to enter the water temperature she wanted on the keypad just inside the shower door, then press on or off. Not knowing what temperature that might be, she reasoned that she couldn’t go too wrong with her own body temperature so she punched in 99.2. That felt pretty good, but she made upward adjustments a couple of times after she got used to the water. Washing her hair and body was no small accomplishment, because even the shower stream was painful.
She hurt in places she thought had no nerve endings. After she’d toweled herself off like she was made of blown glass, she tied the gown in place and thought that, without the catheter, she might feel almost human. There wasn’t enough energy left to comb through her hair, but one of the nurse’s aides did it while she sat on the side of the bed and tried to eat solid food for the first time.
She was still sitting up, her hair almost dry when Storm arrived. He didn’t so much enter a room as conquer it. Like always he strode in like a person used to having his way – not arrogance or entitlement, just good old-fashioned self-assuredness. At least her long hair had managed a full recovery. With renewed life and volume, it shined with her true color: light brown with streaks of blond, out-of-this-world fiery red, and a hint of pink. In her dimension it was a common color usually thought boring. In this world it would only be made possible by spending many hours in the best color salon in New York and leaving many dollars behind.
“Wow,” he smiled, “look at you.”
The locket hung from its chain, surrounded by beautiful, thick hair that fell around her breasts, trying to separate into curls where it was dry. She still looked gruesome, but the swelling had receded around her eyes a little more. And now there was this gorgeous hair. For the first time he wondered what she was going to look like when she was well. Her speech was good. She had a beautiful voice, a pleasing accent unlike anything he’d ever heard, and a slight, but noticeable formality in her choice of words.
Doc du jour came in with a nurse while Storm was there and spoke to him as if he was a representative family member advocating for the deaf, mute patient. “Damage to organs or systems is minimal and the fractures have practically healed. No lingering evidence of concussion.” The doctor glanced her way without really looking at her. “Now she’s just one big bruise. Never seen anything like it really.” With that he looked her way again. “Tomorrow, we need to get her up and moving around more. How would you like to help her walk up and down the hallway, big guy?”
“Sure.” Storm looked happy about the prospect of having something physical to do. “Tell me what to do.”
“We’ll talk you through it tomorrow.”
One morning Storm and Elora were playing chess in the infirmary break room while having breakfast. Storm wasn’t really thinking about the game. He didn’t need to. He’d always been – what did they say? – too smart for his own good. He had learned chess from a cousin in fifteen minutes when he was ten and had never lost a game since.
Elora took Storm’s knight with her queen and, in the same tone one might use to inquire about the time, asked, “Why are they recording everything I say?”
He stared into those arresting turquoise eyes and realized that they had continued to get bigger and more pronounced as the swelling receded by tiny increments each day. For the first time he noticed her irises had yellow and gold flecks. Scabs had turned to ivory pink skin and it looked like there would be minimal scarring, if any. There was still swelling, but the black and purple bruising had gone through the even more gruesome green and yellow stage. What remained looked more like streaks of jaundice than anything. A nose had slowly emerged in the center of her face and was starting to look like it might be well proportioned and a little upturned like that video of the young Elora Laiken. The mouth that had once been nothing more than a gash in a hideous lump of flesh was now softening into lips formed in the shape of a bow. Her hair was pulled up in a severe ponytail, bound at the crown of her head so that all that thick, beautiful hair hung down to her collar bone, and swiveled enticingly from side to side as she moved her head.
He met her gaze head on so she would know he wasn’t holding back or playing omission games with the truth. “Because you arrived here in a unique way, a way no one has ever seen or heard of, and because we don’t really know anything about who you are, where you came from, or why you’re here.”
“I see.” She sat back in her chair appraising him. “Reasonable. Understandable. Prudent.”
“I don’t know what happened to you, but it doesn’t take a genius to know it was awful and that you probably didn’t volunteer.”
Elora sighed and looked out the window. “Awful,” she repeated. Her eyes seemed to be transfixed on something in the trees, glazing over as she took on that melancholy expression he had seen so often since her face had started to become more readable. Once again the whole trauma was playing across her memory in quick time.
After a beat or two she blinked and turned her attention back to Storm, hair swiveling across her shoulder to her back as the focus in her eyes took on a crystal clarity and seemed to drill through him.
“Who are you? What do you do? And what kind of place is this? Really.”
It was his turn to lean back and study her. He forced himself to smile and deliberately broadcast nonchalant body language. “You want to trade answers? Question for question?”
She stared at him as though evaluating the pros and cons of the offer. “Have you ever heard of someone named Monq?”
“Is that your first question in trade?” He didn’t try to hide the fact that he was amused by the possibility of an intriguing game.
She pressed her lips together. “Your proposal is tempting. Because I do want answers. Of course you know that, don’t you?” She nodded to punctuate that it was rhetorical. “But I don’t want to have to tell my story more than once. I’d rather make a deal for one time. One time only.”
Storm leaned forward, looking intent and serious. “I think that’s fair. When you’re recovered I’ll set it up. You say when.” He looked down at the checkered board between them, moved a piece, and she saw a fleeting hint of satisfaction flash in his eyes right before he said, “Check.”
Her mouth twitched involuntarily. Yes. She was in mourning, but she was still alive and able to relate to the pleasure of winning. After all, who likes to lose? “Just tell me one thing now. Am I a prisoner?”
Storm kept his expression blank while his emotions ran the gamut. Those were the words he had been dreading. A hundred times he had rehearsed what he would say when this moment arrived and now his mind was a blank. His chest heaved with a big sigh.
“Elora, I’ve never deceived you and I don’t want to start now. Your being here, well, you’re a walking paranormal phenomenon. Oddly enough, or maybe not if you believe in synchronicity, that happens to be what we do. So this is probably a best case scenario as far as places where you might have landed. When we’re reassured there’s no reason to be afraid of you…”
Elora barked out a sarcastic laugh. The sound startled him, but Elora was the one who was sorry because the jarring caused some remnant abdominal zingers. “So I am being held as an enemy combatant?”
Storm looked like he was working hard at choosing his words carefully. “No. More as a phenomenon of interest.”
