By Aurelia
T. Evans (Guest Blogger)
Thank
you so much for letting me guestblog today, Lisabet!
Winter
Howl was my first novel and features a young woman who suffers
from agoraphobia and accompanying panic attacks. Renee requires a
service dog to get around outside her property—a service dog who is
also a canine shapeshifter and her best friend and lover, but a
service dog nonetheless around the rest of the world’s population.
Renee
is the only person who lives at the sanctuary who’s human. Everyone
else is a shapeshifter or a werewolf, and so she’s used to being
the least powerful in the room (practically speaking). She’s
awkward around people and doesn’t think much of her abilities and
worth, the events of Winter Howl notwithstanding. She thinks
she depends a great deal on her core pack of shapeshifters that help
her run the sanctuary, and she’ll defend her sanctuary and its
inhabitants to the death long before she’ll fight for herself.
(None of those were spoilers for Winter Howl’s ending.
They’re descriptions established in the first chapter of the
novel.)
Enter
Kelly in Cry Wolf, the second book in the Sanctuary series and
a bit of a standalone, although it features significant spoilers for
Winter Howl. It starts a few months after Winter Howl
ends and directly deals with some of the repercussions of it.
Winter
Howl was written from Renee’s perspective, and Call for
Blood, the last book in the series (as far as I know), will also
be written from Renee’s perspective, because in the end, the series
is about Renee and her sanctuary. However, to understand Renee
better, we have to bring in Kelly and tell her story, stepping back a
little from Renee’s head and seeing her and her sanctuary through a
different set of eyes.
If
Renee’s a small, scared little girl in a big world, Kelly switches
gears almost entirely. She’s a witch who was turned into a werewolf
and really has more power than she knows what to do with, so she
tamps down as much as she can. And she’s just left her werewolf
pack after killing the alpha in order to protect Renee, and because
she’s a bitch, she can’t just take alpha’s place, natch
(there’s some serious misogyny ingrained in the werewolf pack
dynamics, but that’s “just the way things are”). She could have
been killed for it, but she had to be exiled instead because everyone
else was afraid to take her on, although they’d never say so out
loud.
Seems
like the polar opposite to Renee, and in some ways, Kelly has to be
for this series. But while it was a true pleasure to write someone
with shitloads of power who got to choose to defer, choose to submit
or dominate, choose to join a pack or not—all these different
choices that a girl gets to make when she can kill you with her brain
or her teeth or any number of ways like a mystical Swiss Army
Knife—one of the big themes of the Sanctuary series is fear. Fear
that requires the need of a sanctuary in the first place. And while
Renee’s fear stems a great deal from seeing herself as weak,
Kelly’s is the flip side of that coin—she’s just too darn
powerful. Renee fears not having control, and Kelly, of course, fears
losing it. Renee fears she doesn’t have any power. Kelly fears she
has too damn much.
It’s
really no wonder why they get along, or why telling Kelly’s story
also tells a little bit of Renee’s as well. And fear, my friends,
is something that I truly love—it is a destructive love, but
addictive nonetheless—and so I need to write about.
Cry Wolf Blurb
As a werewolf and witch, Kelly belongs to neither pack nor coven,
making her a perfect addition to the ragtag collection of dogs,
humans and canine shapeshifters at the Chambers Dog Sanctuary.
After
recently being transformed against his will, Malcolm—one of the
Sanctuary residents—wants nothing more than to shed his werewolf
skin and return to his shapeshifter pack. Kelly tries to help him
accept his new wolf nature, but then some of the shapeshifters
discover Salvation, an organization that claims to cure magical
hybrids. Kelly has long since made peace with lycanthropy, which
tempers her volatile magic, but when Malcolm begs Kelly to accompany
him for one last attempt to resume his old life, she agrees for his
sake.
Upon
arriving at Salvation, however, the already shaky balance of her life
becomes even more tenuous, forcing Kelly to decide which part of
herself, wolf or witch, she loves—or fears—more.
Excerpt
Kelly and Malcolm have already had the wild, crazy, naked,
woodsy sex with the feral edge that Kelly loves and Malcolm’s
getting accustomed to. Now Kelly gets to experience something she’s
not used to and isn’t sure about at all—tenderness.
Although
she had been unconscious for several hours, she was actually tired by
the time she made it to her trailer. When Malcolm stepped out from
behind it, she was fully prepared to tell him that she just wanted to
go to sleep. Surely he could run on his own.
But
he smelled of the forest. He had already been running.
“What—?”
Kelly began.
Malcolm
took her hands in his, his hands swallowing hers as he leaned down
and pressed his lips against hers. As slow and gentle as his kiss, he
pushed her up against the trailer. His erection was an insistent
bulge confined in his jeans, yet his actions were anything but
urgent. His body seared her with the most delicious kind of heat.
When
he broke the unhurried kiss, Kelly followed his lips.
He
smiled then pulled her closer against his strong, lean body. He used
his height to his advantage, standing straight so that she could not
reach him. Kelly was dizzy with the kiss. His taste mingled with the
whiskey that still hazed her head and coated her tongue.
“What
are you doing?” she asked, surprised by the tremble in her voice.
Malcolm
put one finger on her lips. “Shhh. I just want to know if I still
can.”
He
reached behind her and opened the door to her trailer then lifted her
up so that they did not have to separate. As soon as they had made it
in, Malcolm captured her mouth again, sliding his tongue deliciously
over hers. She expected him to bite sharp teeth on her lip, but he
didn’t.
He
smoothed his maddening hands over her back and thighs through the
fabric of her dress. The fact that Malcolm could not stand up
straight in the short-ceilinged trailer served as an excellent
pretext to bend her over his arms, to take control of the kiss but
not dominate. Kelly’s legs grew weaker the deeper he kissed her,
but beyond the pleasured mists in her mind was deep-seated confusion
she could not articulate.
Butch
Cassidy yowled for attention on the kitchen counter. Kelly
automatically held a hand out for him to rub his cheek over her
fingers.
Malcolm
tried not to laugh. He relinquished her mouth to look around for
Butch Cassidy’s food container. He poured a little into the empty
bowl. Butch Cassidy gave the interloper a glare, but he accepted
Malcolm’s gift with a flip of his mostly lame tail—limp from an
early injury.
“Where
were we?” Malcolm murmured against her cheek.
“I’m
not entirely sure,” Kelly said.
“I
may be wrong, but I think we were headed to bed,” Malcolm said. He
kissed her chastely on the lips before moving less chastely down to
her neck.
As
his hot, wet mouth did the most sinful things to her neck from ear to
collarbone, he unbuttoned the front of her dress. He made quick work
of each small, pearly button with surprisingly deft fingers. Again,
Kelly kept waiting for the teeth, to feel his canines rake across her
flesh and spike the simmering excitement in her blood, but although
he bit at her, they were nothing more than nips.
Once
he had unbuttoned the dress past her waist, he pushed the sleeves
down over her shoulders and let gravity do the rest. Kelly had to let
go of him to shed the dress in favor of skin, the long length of
pale, inked limbs. The moonlight came in through her bedroom window
and illuminated the rumpled bed.
She
tingled all over. As soon as she could, she tangled her fingers in
his black hair, raked her nails over his back, but he pulled that
hand off.
“I
don’t understand,” Kelly said, another quaver in her voice. She
realized that she was near tears, though she didn’t know why.
“This
is how I made love,” Malcolm murmured, twining their fingers and
pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the black ink on her sternum. “When
I needed it, this was what I did. I need to know if I still can.”
“But
why don’t you—?” Kelly began.
“Just
relax, Kelly,” Malcolm said. He flicked the tip of his tongue over
her nipple, catching slightly on the bar piercing through it. “Just
relax and let me try. Let me take care of you.”
Kelly’s
eyebrows drew together, but she combed her free hand through his hair
down to the back of his neck and bit her lip, nodding.
Get your own copy of Cry Wolf
About Aurelia
Aurelia T. Evans is a hopefully up-and-coming erotica writer with a
penchant for horror and the supernatural. She’s had short stories
featured in Amber Dawn’s Fist of the Spider Woman, Kristina
Wright’s Fairy Tale Lust, and Mitzi Szereto’s Thrones
of Desire. Her first novel about shapeshifters, werewolves, and
the woman who loves them, Winter Howl, debuted November 2012.
The sequel, Cry Wolf, was released February 2014.
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