Title:
STONE COLD
Series:
SoulShares (#8 of 9)
Release
Date: September 28, 2017 (the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise)
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Cover
Artist: Insatiable Fantasy Designs, Inc.
Blurb:
Maelduin
Guaire is a Fae with a mission. An obsession, really. He’s trained his entire
life to become the greatest scian-damhsa,
blade-dancer, the Fae have ever known, for the sole purpose of killing the
blade-dancer who murdered his father and gave House Guaire its reputation as
the Cursed House. Now he’s followed Tiernan Guaire through the Pattern to the
human world, to fulfill his oath or die trying... but the passage cost him all
his skill with a blade.
Terry Miller,
Josh LaFontaine’s business partner at Raging Art-On Tattoo and Piercing Parlor,
has the worst luck with men since... well, since ever, as far as he’s
concerned. Years ago, he walked out on a great thing with Josh, when Bryce
Newhouse offered to play sugar daddy for Terry’s ballet company; then Bryce
kicked him to the curb, and Terry ended up relying on big-hearted Josh to help
him get back on his feet. And now a too-good-to-be-true stranger has turned up
in Terry’s half-built dance studio, with a beautiful sword and a bloody nose.
In order to
regain the grace and skill he needs to keep his vow, a Fae cursed with the
inability to love must SoulShare with a human convinced that love runs
screaming when it sees him coming. All with the Marfach looking over their shoulders. No pressure...
Excerpt
“Sorry about the mess.” It was dark within, or at least
Maelduin supposed it would seem so to human eyes; then Terry touched a spot on
the wall, and light sprang up, revealing…
A ‘mess,’ apparently. Clothing was strewn over the main
room’s furnishings and floor, sacks made of paper and small white boxes were
piled on a small low table, and dishes were piled in a basin in a separate
tiled area to one side that he thought might be a kitchen even though it lacked
anything resembling a fireplace.
But Maelduin scarcely noticed the ‘mess,’ because the
walls were breathtaking. Terry’s walls were covered with images of human males,
and Maelduin felt an actual physical ache in his chest at their beauty. Males
in clothing as tight as a second skin, captured at the height of prodigious
leaps, or in balances so exquisite as to be impossible without magickal aid, or
so he would have thought. Poetry, given human form.
And several of the images were Terry. A younger version
of Terry in chalk-white makeup and some sort of military-looking uniform with a
red blazon on its breast, caught at the top of the arc of an amazing leap.
Another, draped in white and his thicket of curls cut short, on one knee and
playing some sort of musical instrument. And today’s Terry, in an elegant
doublet that would have allowed him to blend in anywhere in the Realm, wearing
tights leaving almost nothing to the imagination, cradling a rose in one hand
and looking up at what appeared to be a balcony.
Maelduin rested a hand on the frame encasing the image. I want to be on that balcony, looking down.
Where had that
thought come from?
“You like Romeo?” Terry turned from where he was hanging
his jacket in a garderobe. His smile was sweet, even shy. “I loved that role,
so much—that picture’s from when I was dancing with the Brooklyn Ballet. Before
I started Trock Bottom.”
The human had spoken of ‘Trock Bottom’ before, trying to
put Maelduin at ease. Maelduin suspected the name was supposed to be a play on
words, Unfortunately, his new language gift was no help at all with puns, so he
would ignore them and get on with the work he was here to do. The work of
self-preservation. Although it was something of a shame that he had no real use
for the human’s sweet shyness.
“I like Romeo. Very much.” Maelduin smiled as Terry came
up beside him. But Maelduin had never been shy—never known a Fae who was—and
his smile had a purpose. His hand brushed Terry’s arm, and magick arced from
Fae to human, a subtle pattern of light, flaring where it touched. “He is you.”
“I’m… just a dancer.” Terry stared at the place where
Maelduin had touched him, almost as if he could see the magick. His breathing
was uneven, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth in a way Maelduin
found quite fetching. “Not Romeo.”
Maelduin’s gift showed him a little of what the name
meant. He had heard no human word, during his hell-ride, expressing the sense
of the Faen word tragód’mhan, a
dramatic form dealing with the unfortunate complications arising from the
improper expression of desire. But he would make do with the words he had.
“If
you were Romeo, I would let you love me.”
“Oh,
God…”
Terry’s
whisper was like a flame to tinder; there was no seducing another without
opening up oneself to the same magick. Slowly, holding the human’s gaze, Maelduin
worked his fingers into Terry’s curls, brushed his thumb along one sharp
cheekbone, bent his head until he breathed in Terry’s every panting breath.
“Please…” It was a word that mattered to humans, he had learned that much from
his unwitting tutors. Perhaps a magick word, if humans still believed in
magick.
And whether
humans believed or not, there was magick here, seething below the skin of human
and Fae. Maelduin would wonder about it. Later. After he had done what was
necessary.
Author bio
Rory Ni
Coileain majored in creative writing, back when Respectable Colleges didn't
offer such a major, so she designed it herself - being careful to ensure that
she never had to take a class before nine in the morning or take a Hemingway
survey course. (As a result, she was not introduced to Hemingway kitties until
comparatively recently, and is now owned by one, given that nobody warned her.)
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa at the age of nineteen, sent off her first short
story to an anthology being assembled by an author she idolized, got the kind
of rejection letter that puts therapists' kids through college, and found other
things to do, such as nightclub singing and volunteering as a lawyer with Gay
Men's Health Crisis, for the next thirty years or so, until her stories started
whispering to her.
Now she's a legal editor, an Associate member of the Order
of Julian of Norwich, and amanuensis to a host of fantastic creatures who are
all anxious to tell their stories. And who aren't very good at waiting their
turns.
Twitter:
@RoryNi
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