Tag Archives: teasers

RAVEN CALLS teaser posted!

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RAVEN CALLS, book 7 of the Walker Papers, is due out in March! I’ve finally posted a lil’ teaser for it, so here you go! Enjoy!

-Catie

Raven Calls front cover SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 9:53 A.M.

The werewolf bite on my forearm itched.

Itching was wrong. It wasn’t old enough to itch. It should hurt like the dickens, because I’d obtained it maybe six hours earlier. Instead it itched like it was a two-week-old injury, well on the way to healing.

Only I was quite sure it wasn’t healing. For one thing, I kept peeking at it, and it was still a big nasty slashy bite that oozed blood when the bandages were loosened. For another thing, my stock in trade was healing. Fourteen months, two weeks and three days ago—but who was counting—I had been stabbed through the chest. A smart-ass coyote—kinda my spirit guide—had given me a choice between dying or becoming a shaman. Even for someone with no use for the esoteric, like I’d been, it hadn’t been much of a choice. So now, nearly fifteen months on, a bite on my forearm was something I really should be able to deal with.

And it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried healing it, because I had. Magic slid off like oil and water, or possibly more like oil and gashed flesh, if oil slid off gashed flesh, which I assumed it did but didn’t want to actually find out. Either way, the magic wasn’t working. Normally that would be a bad sign, but my talent had taken both a beating and a boosting in the past twenty-four hours, and wasn’t behaving. It reacted explosively when I tried using it, and I didn’t want to explode my arm. So I was getting on a plane with absolutely no notice and flying to Ireland, because I’d had a vision of the woman who had turned werewolves from slavering beasties 100% of the time into part-time monsters, and in my vision, she’d been in Ireland. I figured if anybody could keep me human, it had to be the woman who’d bound the wolves to the moon’s cycle.

That’s what I was telling myself, anyway, because it was slightly better than a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Read more!

“Easy Pickings” PDF for sale now!

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Most of a year ago Faith Hunter and I decided to write a crossover novella with our two main characters, Joanne Walker and Jane Yellowrock. We thought we’d have it done this past summer, but, um, we didn’t.

But now it’s done! And now it’s available here, on Amazon, and soon on B&N.com!

Easy Pickings Two heroines. Two magics.

One world.

There’s nowhere in America like the Big Easy. Just ask Jane Yellowrock, shapeshifting vampire killer, whose hunting grounds run the length and breadth of the Bayou.

Just ask Joanne Walker, whose shamanic magic has drawn her to the heart of American Weird.

But it’s not Joanne’s world, and it isn’t Jane’s either. In a New Orleans where Katrina never hit and supposedly-dead vampires stalk the streets, Jane and Jo have to find and defeat the magic that brought them there–or they just might find themselves…

EASY PICKINGS
fan fiction by the authors themselves!

Read the teaser and


PLEASE NOTE: You will be given the option to “return to open at mizkit dot com” once you’ve paid! Click through on that, because that’s what will bring you to the download page! So don’t skip out of Paypal until you do so through that link! Otherwise you won’t get your story, and I won’t know that! I’ll think you’re out there happy as a fish in water, reading all about Jane and Jo’s adventures, when instead you’ll be sniffling in your tea! Don’t let that happen!

Teaser: HEAVEN CAN WAIT

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I have the sudden rash impulse to write a little back-of-book teaser for the book you’d be getting if you Kickstarted the whole “No Dominion” campaign up to the improbably high-end rollover amount of $30K.

Everybody knows Jumbletown isn’t like other cities. Stuff falls through from other places here, and mostly, it can’t leave. Head north to Detroit or south to Tampa Bay and it’s just ordinary world out there, no fae or vampires, no Civil War soldiers or little grey men. A lot of Jumbletown’s new arrivals are dangerous. A lot of them aren’t. Some of them settle down, make families, make a life…but their children can’t leave.

And then there are girls like Cori May, born in Jumbletown and untouched by the magic that’s trickled through. Her friends think she’s lucky: she’ll be able to leave someday. Cori thinks ordinary (or leaving town, for that matter) pales beside girlfriends with rainbow wings or the power to stun with a touch.

But it’s the very ordinariness of Cori’s human soul that draws the fallen angel Mirael and the demon Sebastian to her. For both, capturing Cori’s love–and her soul–offers redemption. For Mirael, plucking a pure mortal soul out of the Jumbletown mire would win her a chance to return to the Heaven from which she fell. For Sebastian, who may know more about Jumbletown’s creation than he’s letting on, seducing that same pure soul would be a one-way ticket up the ranks of demons in his home world of Hell.

But neither demon nor angel imagined falling in love with Cori, and when it comes to the final battle for her soul, perhaps…

…HEAVEN CAN WAIT.

I’ll write the first chapter if the Kickstarter campaign hits $12K. I’ll write two more chapters if it hits $15K. Those’ll be freebies, available for everybody to read. After that, I’ll write another chapter, posted weekly starting after April 15, 2012, for everyone subscribing at $25 or more, for every $1000 dollars past $15K. If the campaign actually breaks the absurd $30K rollover point, I’ll write the whole thing. :)

(And yes, you can up your donation amount if you want to–just go to the campaign page and, um. Okay, well, I know it’s possible because a bunch of people have done it already, okay? I don’t think it’s very hard, even, but I don’t actually know how to do it… :) “and click “Manage Your Pledge.” Enter a new amount in the pledge amount box. Note that you are not adding to your existing pledge; the amount you enter will be the total amount collected if the project is successfully funded.” (via the kickstarter FAQ & Gabriel Who Can Read Instructions :))

(Also, because I appear to be adding a whole lot more stories to this campaign than expected, I’ve upped the high-end rollover stuff–extra novellas, or an extra novel–from $10 to $25. I feel slightly like a git for changing it mid-campaign, but subscribers at $10 will still, without question, get the novella and three short stories, which I think is pretty fair. She said nervously.)

Hat-tip to Trent, who asked if the “Jumbletown” he kept seeing on my to-do list was a story idea (it wasn’t, Jumbletown is a freecycle site in Ireland), and to Corin, who suggested the angelic storyline. :)

Old Races Short Story Project #5

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The Old Races Short Story Project patronage window is now closed.

I’m doing an Old Races short story project throughout 2011. This project will deliver 6 Old Races short stories to its patrons. This, “The Death of Him”, is the fifth, and is a story of the selkies. I’m posting it a few days early (it’s due in October) because there’s already so much going on at the beginning of October. :)

You can find teasers for the other stories here: Awakening, a story of the vampires set after the Negotiator Trilogy; Falling, a story about Biali in 1890s New York; St. George & the Dragons, a story about Janx; Salt Water Stains the Sand, a story of the djinn.

“The Death of Him”

She was human, and she would be the death of him.

That, of course, was true as a rule. Humans poisoned the seas, overfished the waters, bore children til the land couldn’t feed them, and bred more still after that. Their numbers increased visibly by the year, while even the most populous of the Old Races bred slowly. Humans would be the death of them all, sooner or later.

But Róisín would be the death of him sooner, for she lay beside Eoin under the high late summer sun, and took his hand and put it on her belly and whispered, “Da,” beneath his ear.

Blood rushed Eoin’s head and made his hand cold against her stomach, but the fool’s grin spreading across his face belied the shocking lurch of his heart. “You’re sure,” he breathed back, and was rewarded with a nod.

“Since Beltaine,” she murmured, before her own grin split her features. “Since May Day, sure as night. My blood should be on me now and it’s not come twice. Will we be handfasted at midsummer, Eoin? Will ye be your babby’s da?”

He said, “I will,” without hesitation, then rolled on his back to stare at the starless sky. “I will if you’ll have me, Róisín, but there are things I should have told you.”

She pushed up on her elbow, grin faded to a smile, eyebrow raised in warning. “You’ll not tell me you’ve a wife and children already.”

“No. That would be…easier. Come down to the water with me, Róisín. Come down to the water so we can talk.” Eoin stood, heart pounding, and offered her his hands.

She took them, eyebrows still vocal: lifted in question now, but her smile stayed in place. “Last time you brought me to the water, it wasn’t to talk.”

It wasn’t, of course, and it hadn’t been, because graceful as his people were on land, it was nothing to their ease in the water. He might have seduced most women on land, but Róisín had caught his eye with her dark brown eyes and deep red hair, and he’d wanted, of all things, to be sure of her. So he’d taken her to the sea, to the element he’d been born in, and she, who could not swim, had trusted his arms until she could entrust his heart.

She came again willingly enough, down to the quiet bay where small boats were tied to large trees, and laughed when he stripped away his white wool shirt and dropped his brown wool pants. “I thought it was talking you had in mind.”

“It is,” he said, “and it isn’t. Róisín, sit, and be calm if you can. This is a thing I should have told you–shown you–before, but I…”

Expressive eyebrows rose again and he sighed, taking a bristling fur from beneath the roots of one of the ancient trees. “But I fell in love,” he said, mostly to the fur, and made himself look back at the girl sitting curiously on the sand. “Róisín, will you believe this, that I love you, despite all the strangenesses that may come to pass?”

She tilted her head, pretty and thoughtful. There was no curl to her hair, but unbound from its braid it fell in waves past her elbows, and she twisted a strand around a finger as she replied. “Sure and let me think. It’s most of a year you’ve come courting. Since Midsummer last, and you bearing gifts each time you’ve come. And you’re from so far down the coast as Galway town. No man comes such distanace without reason, Eoin. I’d hope it’s love, for me da’s got no money or land for you to wed.” Humor slipped away. “You’re worrying me, Eoin.”

“If worried is all you remain, we’ll be well.” Fur gathered in his arms, he went to the water’s edge. Róisín stood again as he took his distance from her, and this time he didn’t ask her to sit, only said, “Your people have seen us often enough to have stories of us, Róisín. You’ll know what I am in the moment of change.”

The Old Races Short Story Project patronage window is now closed.

Kickstarter teaser: “Magic Hath an Element”

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NO DOMINIONOkay, so the thing about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign (launching October 1!) is that I really *can’t* use a teaser from the actual story as part of the incentive text, because it starts with a scene from RAVEN CALLS and no way no how am I spoiling that scene. :) So I’ve written the first couple chapters of URBAN SHAMAN from Gary’s point of view for a bit of flavor text as to what kind of voice the novella will be in. Enjoy!

 

“Magic Hath an Element”

Three days after my 73rd birthday, a leggy brunette climbed into my cab and changed my life.

She was rude, snapping, “Drive,” without even lookin’ at me. That kinda fare always set my teeth on edge, superior and holier-than-thou. Never judge somebody by how they treat you, judge ‘em by how they treat the cabbie.

Still, drivin’ paid the rent. “Where to?”

“I don’t know. Northwest.”

I eyed her in the mirror. There was me, pretty hale for a guy that age, with all my hair and teeth I wasn’t sayin’ either way about, and there was her, twenty-six and pretty in the way women who don’t know how well they’re put together can be. She wore her hair real short, which I thought most dames should. What with her doin’ something on a notepad, scribbling and muttering, I couldn’t see her eyes to tell the color. She looked tired, though, like she’d come off a European flight, not just something continental. I said, “Northwest, the airline? It’s just a couple feet up the term–”

She snarled, “To the northwest.” I glared at her and drove. A minute later, as if she hadn’t started out rude, she asked a favor: “You got a map?”

No self-respecting cabbie would admit it if he did. “What for?”

“So I can figure out where we’re going.”

I turned around and stared at her.

“Watch the road!”

Watching the road was for sissies. I twitched the steering wheel and cars merged around us, safe as houses. The fare slumped in her seat, green eyes wide, and got politer: “Do you have a map, please?”

“Yeah, yeah, all right.” I threw a city guide over the seat and listened to pages rattle as she shuffled through them. A couple minutes later she said, “Okay, we’re going to Aurora.”

“You sure? That ain’t such a good neighborhood, lady.”

“I’m sure. I’m trying to find somebody who’s in trouble.”

I lifted my eyebrows at her in the mirror. “Good place to start.”

She scowled at me. I smiled back, my best patented seen-it-all smile that told pretty young things not to mess with me, and instead of messing, she asked if I
had a cigarette. I shook my head. “Those things’ll kill you, sweetheart. My wife died of emphysema on our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. You want a smoke, kid, find it somewhere else.”

She looked embarrassed, but didn’t have the smarts to quit while she was ahead. She muttered, “I’m not a kid,” and I eyed her in the mirror again.

“You’re twenty-six, doll. From where I’m sittin’ anybody less than fifty is a kid.”

Her jaw dropped. “Nobody ever guesses my age right.”

“It’s a gift. I can tell how old people are.”

“Some gift.”

“Gets me good tips, especially with women in their forties. I give ‘em a big story ’bout how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”

“You guessed my age right.”

“No point in lying. I never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties. Look, why’re you headin’ to Aurora, doll? Nothing there but trouble, and you don’t look like the type.”

“I told you.” She put her head against the window. “Somebody’s in trouble. I saw her from the plane.”

That made my life a lot more interesting. I put my arm over the passenger seatback and twisted to stare at the fare. “You’re trying to save somebody you saw from an airplane? What the hell, you got some kinda hero complex? How the hell’re you gonna find one dame you saw from the air?”

“It’s basic math, for God’s sake. I got the approximate height and speed we were traveling from the pilot, so figuring out the distance wasn’t that hard, and I saw a modern church on a street with only one amber streetlight. If I can find it before the lights go out–”

“Then you’ll be the first one on a murder scene.” My day was gettin’ a lot more interesting. The guys back at dispatch would love this one. I was gonna get free coffee for a week off this story. Couldn’t let her know I was lookin’ forward to whatever came next, though, and it was only God’s own truth when I said, “You’re nuts, lady, and desperate for thrills.”

She snapped, “Like it could possibly be any of your business,” which was true enough, but I never met a cabbie who didn’t think everything his fares did was his business.

“Relax, sweetheart. A pretty girl like you oughta be on her way home to her sweetie, not–”

“I don’t have one.”

“With your personality, I can’t figure why not.”

The fare put her face in her hands. “Haven’t you ever just really felt like you had to do something?”

“Yeah, sure. I really felt like I had to marry my old lady when she got knocked up.” It wasn’t true, but the fare had gotten in my cab, not the other way around. She got whatever story I felt like tellin’ today. That was the beauty of driving fares. Them, me, we were all different every time. “I never felt like I had to go chasing broads I saw from airplanes, though. I got troubles of my own.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’ve got enough that I need somebody else’s to make the load seem lighter.”

I grunted, surprised. Usually kids in their twenties were way too young to realize that helpin’ somebody else eased their own burdens. I warmed up to the fare even if she was rude, and nodded at the rear-view mirror. “Arright, lady. Let’s go find your corpse.”

Continue reading →

First Lines meme

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First Lines of works in progress, where “in progress” is an almost entirely meaningless term. :)

UNTITLED: An airship hung beneath the doubled stars.
(Actually this has a title but I’m not telling you what it is yet. :))

REDEEMER: The punch clock bit holes in Rosie’s time card with a satisfying ka-chunk.
(I hope this one goes somewhere.)

FOOL’S GOLD: Everybody’s saying how normal I am.
(YA novel I’ve got 17.5K written on. Needs characterization work. Bet I could finish it in a month if I had time.)

STRONGBOX CHRONICLES #4: this is my secret
(Wrote that line what, six years ago? And it made me smile as soon as I re-read it, because I remembered immediately what her secret was. :))

MANIFEST DESTINY: Thin light colored the close horizon a feeble red and washed over scraped-together dunes before falling into harsh shadows.
(I have fifty freaking thousand words written on MANIFEST DESTINY, but after THE PRETENDER’S CROWN’s utter flop, I may never get to finish this one. Very sad. Also needs characterization work, and actually I don’t like that first line much anymore.)

BACK TO AVALON: Dawn breaks over Stonehenge, minutes past five in the morning.
(ah yes, the second of my Methos Chronicles (I’m sure you’ve all read the first one, IMMORTAL BELOVED). I would so very much *love* to write this and the third book, PROMETHEUS BOUND, but I can’t see it ever happening.)

Ok, going back to work now. :)