Here’s an excerpt - the entire Prologue - to whet your appetite and if you click the “more info” link it’ll take you to the Samhain website where you can either purchase the book or read the rest of Chapter One. Enjoy!

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Prologue

Prince Nico, Spymaster of Draconia, and now King-Consort of the Jinn Brotherhood walked the battlements. The high towers of the Draconian royal castle were his home, and among his most favored places. His keen eyes searched the wide expanse, built so high in the clouds, until he found the creature he’d come to see.

She was a juvenile dragon, only about twenty-five winters old, in an absolutely stunning gold, pink and soft orange color. That’s what happened, Nico thought as he approached her, when a red and a golden dragon mated and were very, very lucky.

Jenet was one of the prettiest dragons Nico had ever seen, though she was often melancholy and refused to train with the knights and other dragons, since she had no knight. Nor would she choose a knight. She’d made her choice, she would reply when asked, and until the stubborn man died of old age without her, she would choose no other.

So Jenet served as a sort of royal babysitter, watching the younger princes when they flew as black dragons—something only a precious few males of the royal line, who could trace their lineage back to Draneth the Wise, could do. At the moment, Jenet was watching Nico’s younger brother Wil and the younger set of twins making lazy loops in the sky. They were playing tag, but the activity also served to heighten their fledgling flying skills.

Nico walked over and sat next to Jenet, his human legs dangling over the sides of the high parapet. He had no fear of falling, for if he did, he would simply transform into the dragon that shared his soul and soar away on tar-colored wings.

“How goes it today?” Nico had known Lady Jenet all his life, so there was little need for formality between them.

“Passing fair, my liege.”

“Please, Jen, just use my name. I’m sick to death of all this formality. It’s even worse now that my new wife has been crowned Queen of the Jinn. Thank heaven it’s mostly a ceremonial title.” Nico spoke mind to mind with the dragon, as only a few people could do.

A dragonish chuckle, complete with a smoky, cinnamon-scented cloud, answered him as Jenet moved her large golden head to study him. Her jewel-like eyes blinked once, fixing her gaze on him.

“You never coveted your brother’s throne, did you? Perhaps that’s the reason the Mother of All saw fit to grant you one of your own, King Nico.”

Nico groaned and clutched one hand to his chest in mock agony. “You wound me, mistress, to remind me of my woes.”

Jenet laughed outright at that, filling the air with smoky dragonish laughter. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company this morn? As you can see, your little brothers are playing on the air currents above and all is secure.”

“I came to see you, actually. I have some news I thought you’d like to hear.”

The fire opal eyes blinked once as she regarded him. “And what is your news, Prince Tease?”

Nico chuckled, relishing the moment. His news could change her life and would definitely brighten her mood, if he knew Jenet at all. He drew out the moment as long as he could, heightening the anticipation, but in the end there was just no way to say it but straight out.

“Drake’s coming home.”

“Drake!” Jenet jumped to her feet faster than Nico would have credited. She was a nimble little thing for all that she was as large as any healthy juvenile dragon. She crouched on all fours, her wings outstretched and trembling in a show of excited eagerness. Her large head crowded him as he stood. “Is it true?”

Nico smiled at her soft, almost frightened tone. “It’s true. I had a special messenger from the Jinn arrive just this morning. Drake sent him ahead to make sure my brother Roland would stay put. Drake’s coming to personally deliver a message from the Doge of Helios.”

“Drake! Coming home!” Jenet rose up to stand on her hind legs and trumpeted her delight to the sky. Her magnificent pearl-like wings flapped happily, stirring up a joyful breeze as Nico watched, gratified and amused. It had been too long since Jenet had been this happy. It was good to see her so alive again.

And it was all because of Drake.

Drake had taken the eager light from her eyes when he’d left home fifteen years ago and she’d pined for him ever since. Now he was coming home, but for how long? Would he spurn her again? Or would he finally accept what was so obvious to everyone else who knew them?

Only time would tell.

“So, what do you think?” she asked when Rich reached for a second pastry.

“Fantastic, Cassandra, as always.” He bit off a large chunk and smiled.

“Come on, you know by now, I need specifics.” She rolled her eyes as they all grinned.

Cody stepped closer and took another pastry, though he didn’t eat it right away. Instead, he held her gaze as he licked his lips, and her blood seemed to catch fire.

“I like the mixture of fruit. Apple and pear, right? With maybe a hint of citrus? Was it lemon?” His smile sent strange signals to the muscles in her womb, though his words were innocuous.

“Lime, actually.” Was that her voice? She sounded hoarse all of a sudden. Cassandra cleared her throat, trying to project calm as the men looked at her strangely.

Rich took the platter from her hands. “Come on, boys. We still have work to do.”

The hands followed the platter back into the barn, right behind Rich. She barely noticed their departure as Cody stayed behind, watching her. He took a slow, sensuous bite out of the pastry in his hand, holding her gaze all the while. Cassandra’s mouth went dry. He even chewed and swallowed sexily. The man was far too potent and altogether hot.

“The pastry is perfect, Miz Cassandra, as usual. Light, flaky and sweet. Tastes good with the filling, but there’s something missing, I think.” Her brows drew together at those words, bringing her attention back to her work. “Here, try it.” He held out the pastry to her, holding it as if he expected her to eat from his hand. She hesitated and he grinned. “I promise, I don’t have any communicable diseases. And besides, this is the only one left. You need to taste it to see what I mean.”

Raising one brow skeptically, she leaned in and took a small bite of his pastry, jarred by the intimacy of the act. She’d never been this close to Cody, though she’d dreamed of being close to him many a night in her lonely bed.

Flavor exploded on her tongue. She tasted the pastry, the sugar, the tart apple and pear with the hint of lime. It was good. But Cody was right. Something was missing.

“Darn it, you’re right.” She looked up at him. “What do you think it is?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Strawberry? Just a touch, maybe. You’re the chef.”

“Strawberry.” A grin spread over her face. “I’m going to try that. Thanks, Cody.”

He nodded as the silence stretched. Tension rose between them as he seemed to study her in detail.

“You have powdered sugar on your face,” he said. She licked her lips, brought up short when Cody moved even closer. “No, let me.” He bent, shocking her into immobility as his tongue brushed over her cheek near the corner of her lips. When she didn’t move, he grew bolder, running his tongue over the seam of her lips with heart-stopping slowness until she yielded, opening her mouth to him.

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In honor of that accomplishment here’s a little snippet from Davin’s Quest for your delectation…

Rick woke to comfort. A comfortable bed, soft linens and a soft, decidedly feminine touch on his face. If he were dreaming, he wanted to stay asleep, but daylight tugged at his eyelids until he opened them.

“Good morning.” Callie’s voice floated to him as she sat on his bedside, her hand touching his cheek gently. The look on her face nearly stilled his heart. No woman had ever looked at him in just that way.

“What time is it?” He had to stop thinking about dragging her down so he could kiss her lips the way he’d dreamed of doing since the first moment they met.

“A little after noon. I just came to check on you and see if you were up for some lunch.” At that moment his stomach rumbled and she laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She stood from the bedside and picked up a tray from the dresser near the door.

Callie stopped a few feet away from the bed, the tray still in her hand and just watched him, her head tilted to the side, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Rick started to sweat under her scrutiny. She was so beautiful and she’d never looked at him quite that way before, concentrating on him, on his comfort.

“Something’s different.”

Rick sat up and rested back against a pile of pillows. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Callie placed the tray on the bedside table. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him as Rick tried to stay calm. He’d always been careful to school his thoughts around this woman.

She reached out to touch his face, but he shied away. Immediately he regretted the move when he saw hurt cross her face.

“You know I’m empathic.” He nodded, not liking where this conversation was heading but helpless to stop it. “Well, you’ve always been blank to me, Rick.” She spoke in a low voice, her hands cradled in her lap. “But you’re not anymore. I’m starting to pick up…things…from you.” She blushed and looked down at her hands.

Rick swore under his breath. “Ignore it, Callie. Just forget all about it.”

She looked up until her gaze met his. “What if I don’t want to forget it? What if I can’t?”

Human 

Richard St. John was a hard case. Raised in the Waste since his early teens, he had only scattered memories of the way the world had been before the aliens came—before the attack from orbit tore apart the fabric of the world.

He’d wanted to be a doctor in the old days, but the crystal bombardment destroyed everything long before he was old enough to go to medical school. His mother died in the first wave, leaving his father heartbroken. But Rick’s father, Zach, was a survivor. He’d packed Rick up and they’d headed for the mountains in his pickup truck. They’d just barely made it before the next orbit when the attacks began anew.

Zachariah St. John had been both a doctor and an Army Ranger in the old United States and he taught his son everything he knew about living off the land and surviving in the wild. Rick’s old man had a sixth sense about nature and was able to keep them both safe through the waves of attacks that followed, each time the Earth rotated fully on its axis. They’d moved farther into the mountains, working their way north, into the deepest recesses of the Rocky Mountains. They kept up with radio reports about the decimated coastlines as tsunamis spawned by the massive crystal shards hitting the Earth’s oceans killed by the millions.

One day, their small transistor radio stopped working entirely. Only static met repeated attempts to tune in a station — any station at all. Civilization, as they’d known it, was over.

“Guess that’s it,” Zach said, stowing the antenna and switching off the radio. “We’re on our own now.”

The last broadcast had listed details of nearly unimaginable devastation. Coastlines all over the world under water from giant tsunamis. California separated down the line of the San Andreas fault. Massive earthquakes brought on by the crystal bombardment from space had finally clipped the golden state nearly in half. The ring of fire was more active than ever with two or three volcanoes erupting violently in the Pacific and Pacific Northwest.

The sky was dark with soot covering the sun, and autumn came early that year, but by the following summer, temperatures started drifting back to normal. The sun shone brightly in the sky—but so did alien craft.

Zach St. John took in the news spreading through the wastelands of the Rockies—now called simply the Waste—with his typical calm. They’d run into a trader one morning who told of tall, fair-haired aliens building a silver city on the plains. Rick asked his dad about it that night at dinner.

“I figured it was something like this, son,” Zach said as he dressed the rabbit they’d snared for dinner. “The attack came from orbit. First thing to go down was my sat phone and GPS. Not many world powers who could do that, and none that could launch an attack on the entire planet. Had to be something from outer space.”

“Aliens?” Rick wasn’t entirely surprised. They’d talked about various possibilities often during the early days. “So they’re not little and green like in the old movies.”

“According to the trader, they look a lot like us, but with elf ears.” Zach finished with the rabbit and looked at his son. “This changes things. Now that they’re on the surface, they might just start hunting. Up ’til now, all we had to worry about was other men. The stakes are higher now, because any race that can do what they did to our planet has got to have superior weaponry. You’re going to have to learn to defend yourself, and we’ll make plans for when they come.” 

Rick thought it significant that his father said “when” and not “if”. 

He spent the next ten years learning from his dad and growing to adulthood. They’d met a few fellow survivors along the way, but not many, and not often. They grew close in those years. 

Zach shared an amazing secret that helped keep them both alive. He had a strong gift of empathy with animals, and could sometimes pick up their thought images and see through their eyes, sensing when the animals of the forest were scared or felt threatened. He could also read people, but only when he touched them. 

Rick had his own secrets. He finally let his father in on the biggest of them. He could heal most wounds by simply laying his hand over them and thinking real hard. That was why he’d wanted to study medicine—to find out how he did what he did, but also to help people with his gift. 

Through their infrequent interactions with other survivors, they realized they weren’t the only ones with psychic abilities. It seemed like every single soul they met had something different about them. Many had small amounts of precognitive ability that had led them out of harm’s way before the attack began. Some were telepaths, some could move things with their minds. Others had combinations of skills that were often benign, but some were downright deadly.

All in all, Rick preferred to be on his own—just him and his dad. They didn’t need the society of others, except for one thing, but hetero sex was hard to come by since there were so few women among the survivors of humanity. Still, Rick grew into a good looking young man and the few women he was able to charm were as eager for him as he was for them. But dalliances were few and far between as the lack of females turned many of the male survivors into beasts. Women went into hiding for their own protection, though few towns existed with even fewer inhabitants.

“I pity women today,” Zach would often comment after contact with others. “They’re traded like commodities, forced into whoring or multi-partner families. That’s not the way it was, son. You should always remember that. You were old enough to know the way it should be. The way our family was. God knows, I miss your mother more every day, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to see the level of depravity to which we have sunk.”

Rick took all his father’s teachings to heart, but especially that one. He’d just been starting to date when the cataclysm happened and felt strongly that girls should be protected, not exploited. Every time he saw some poor, frightened creature creeping about a settlement under guard by one of her protectors, the lesson was driven home again. He’d never sink that low.

The likelihood he’d ever have a woman of his own was close to nil, but Rick didn’t curse fate—at least not too often. He had his dad. That was more family than most people could claim nowadays. So the St. John men lived off the land in their own small cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

Until the Alvians came. 

They heard the ships fly by in the night and then the miniscule sounds of one landing not far away. Silently Zach signaled his grown son to head for the woods behind the cabin. They’d planned for this kind of thing. Each man would fend for himself, since two together were more likely to be captured or killed. They had a rendezvous and backup plan already in place. 

Zach grabbed his son for one last hug before they headed out the doors—Zach out the front, and Rick out the back.

That was the last time Rick St. John saw his father. 

Now that’s what I call motivation! *sigh* Guess I’d better get to the writing for today, but before I leave you, a little further tidbit from Mr. St. John (who looks a lot like the guy above)   Here’s a tiny bit of his first meeting with Callie, as it stands now. It might change as I edit this manuscript, but this is how I wrote it yesterday…

“You’re an empath?”

She nodded, making an amused yet curious expression as she no doubt tried to feel what he was feeling. Rick redoubled his shielding. He’d be damned if he’d let her read him so easily.

“Believe it or not, I’m a very strong empath, but you’re a tough nut to crack, Rick. Why such strong shields?”

“It’s pretty miserable where we live. It’s become second nature to block.” Rick grabbed at the most likely excuse he could find.

“You have some empathy?” Callie stopped concentrating and looked up at him with an open, friendly expression.

“Some, but not strong.”

“Telepathy?” she asked in his mind.

He liked the feel of her thoughts in the intimacy of his mind all too much. “Some. But not over great distances.”

“Me either. My range is limited to two or three miles.”

“Yeah, that’s about my limit too.”

“So what has you so conflicted about joining Davin’s program? I can assure you he’s not like the other Alvians.”

“Yeah, I get that, though it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. I never thought an Alvian could have emtion.”

“It’s rare. But it gives him a unique understanding of what our people are going through. He chose to come here first to test because he knew of all the Alvian settlements, this one treated humans worst.”

Rick was surprised by the statement, but oddly he felt a flare of hope kindle inside him. He looked around the room, glad to see Sadie among those chosen for the program.

Watching the dear older lady, Rick spoke more candidly than he otherwise would have. “I’ve been doing my best to help them. That’s why I don’t know if I should leave. Who will take care of the rest?”

A soft hand covered Rick’s and shocked his gaze back to the beautiful young woman standing in front of him. “You’ve done all you can here, Rick, and you can continue to work toward better conditions for humans even more effectively if you come with us. That’s what Davin wants. It’s what he’s working toward—freedom for us all to live in peace.”

“How do you know we can trust him?”

Callie’s smile lit the universe as she turned back to Davin and took his hand. “That’s easy, Rick. Davin is my husband.”

Yesterday I did well on the challenge writing just shy of 3000 words. Woo-hoo! I also put up an overall word count meter in the sidebar of this blog. It looks rather sad now, but we’re only just starting, so I set a goal of about 100,000 words in the next 70 Days of Sweat. I might expand that goal somewhere down the line, but I thought it a good, round number to start with.

One of the things I’ll be doing is posting little tidbits - not excerpts exactly - but little snippets of what I’ve written the day before so you can get a little flavor of what I’m working on. The snippet below is from Davin’s Quest, the second in my Resonance Mates series. It’ll be out from Samhain in February 2008.

Rick St. John had learned survival skills at his father’s knee. There was no better man to learn from than Zachariah St. John, former Army Ranger and medical doctor. He knew how to survive in the worst conditions, how to hide, and how to fight. He taught his son all the skills he’d need to survive in the Waste and gave him more of an education than most children born near the end of the world as they knew it ever attained.

But the day the Alvians finally caught up with him, Rick was not at his best. Sick with a high fever, he wasn’t able to use his gift of healing or his extensive knowledge of either medicine or self-defense. His reaction time was way off and when the soldiers captured him, they took him not to prison, but to a hospital ward where he stayed for the first three weeks of his captivity.

He didn’t make a lot of friends during that time, but he’d used the opportunity to learn more about his new situation before the Alvians realized he was more recovered than he let on.

He didn’t let them know about his talents either. As far as they knew, he was a minor telepath. He wasn’t about to become the subject of study when they realized just what he could do. Healing talent as strong as his was rare. He’d be damned if he’d give the Alvians another lab rat to study.