Creatures from out of nightmares swept through the skies, sending flaming arrows into tents and dropping firebombs that exploded in rains of sparks. I could only catch bewildering glimpses of the things in the sky, great sweeps of bat-wings and planes of dark feathers mixed with arms and legs and tails, and my first entrance into battle left me standing helplessly in the night while those half-seen demons made the world scream.
This is Hell, I thought, one drifting thought before a dark shape dropped for me.
Battle-instincts I hadn’t realized I possessed roared into life. Before I could think to react, I had the steel line between me and my attacker, and the sharp clang of our swords as they struck felt as natural as breathing. I followed the motion with an attack – you must always try to cut the enemy – knowing that he would whip to the side, out of the way. His foot hit the ground where I knew it would, claws digging into soil, and he pivoted for me with strength I couldn’t hope to counter.
So I didn’t try, moving with him like a dancer, with an intuitive sense of where he would strike and how that alien body would move. Where my sword went, his sword met me, and when his blade struck for me, I put mine between us. I sidestepped strikes from his long tail as he drove me across the battlefield, the firelight casting pieces of him into flickering relief. It should have been a nightmare, but now that war had found me it all felt like everything else fell away. The world was this, strike after strike like a choreographed fight, moving with my partner as if we’d fought since the beginning of time.
I wasn’t thinking – wasn’t paying attention to anything other than the man in front of me and the gleaming line of his sword – and so I didn’t see it as Marion Woods came out of the darkness. But he didn’t see her in time either, his focus entirely on me, and in the last moment he chose her blade instead of mine. My swing carried through, hitting him in the side and biting through the leather of his armor. The shock of it made me stagger backwards, nearly dropping the sword, and I watched Woods smash her shield into the winged faery with blank horror.
“No!” I screamed as her sword drove for him. “Ayre!”
I'm working on a companion prequel to Captured by the Fae Beast, tentatively named In the Claws of the Raven Prince! Set 80 years prior to the events of Beast, this story steps into the war between Raven Court and Stag Court and explores the events leading up to the destruction of Phazikai from the point of view of a 1940s woman rescued from death by the fae to become a soldier.
We'll get to meet Dain, Alluin, and Zhiolas during their war days, before Dain becomes the Beast of Phazikai, and take a deeper look at the risks and rewards of having a soulmate. I'm hoping I can bang this one out; if I can manage it in time, I may bump the publication of The Sorceress and the Incubus to release Raven into the world.
