Tag Archive: Soulshares


Veterans’ Day at Purgatory

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November 11, 2013

Here’s a little story, with gratitude to all who have served, and who still serve. Including my nephew — I’m a proud Army aunt!

                Mac carefully set the brimful pint glass of Smithwick’s in front of the customer who had ordered it, a thin, drawn guy in a faded camo jacket.

                “Thanks, what do I owe you?” The man shifted on the bar stool and reached into his hip pocket, pulling out a battered wallet and opening it up, to reveal a wad of what looked like singles, and a very familiar blue identification card.

                “Active-duty retired?”

                The man looked startled, but nodded. “Desert Storm, Third Armored.”

                Looking the guy up and down, the bartender made a quick decision. “Then you don’t owe me anything. The club’s buying for all veterans tonight.”

                “No shit?”

                “Least we can do.” Hell, yes. Desert Storm was pre-Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. Which meant that this guy had served most or all of his career at risk of dishonorable discharge, if anyone had discovered the secret that made him one of Purgatory’s customers.

                “Did I hear you right?” This from a balding bear in leather shorts and a harness, a couple of stools down the bar. “I did three tours, USMC, last one at Camp Fuji.”

                “Semper Fi, what’ll you have?”

                A small crowd gathered around the bar, as word started making it around the room that the house was buying for servicemen. Mac was more than a little surprised at the number of Purgatory regulars coming forward to claim drinks. Even Miss Mona, a drag queen who probably hadn’t missed a Monday night at Purgatory in forty years, turned out to have been a pilot in Korea. My paycheck’s going to take a beating this week. Mac laughed to himself. It’s worth it.

                He looked up from pouring a martini – and grinned ear-to-ear, he couldn’t help it. “Sarge! – what the hell are you doing here?”

                Thomas Almstead grinned back. “You turned down my offer of a beer tonight because you were working.” He glanced around at the men crowding his son-in-law’s bar – business is good, I see – and then reached across the bar to shake the hand of the man who’d saved his ass twice in Vietnam. “So I thought I’d come to you.”

                “Did I hear him call you ‘Sarge’?” The speaker was an elderly man in a pink sequined mermaid gown and pink feathered headdress. “Then you can buy a lady a drink on the house.”

                Mac grinned at the drag queen. “You need to finish your creamy Sex on the Beach, Miss Mona, then you can pester Sarge for another one.”

                “Oh, poo.”

                Thomas laughed. Two years ago, if anyone had told me I was going to be spending Veterans’ Day 2013 in a gay nightclub run by my son-in-law, I would have… well, I’m not sure what I would have done. Questioning sanity would have been high on the list, though. Then he leaned across the bar, as Mac motioned to him. “Looks like they really needed you tonight,” he commented, before the bartender could speak. From what Thomas remembered from dinner conversations with Tiernan and Kevin, Monday nights were usually fairly quiet at Purgatory. Tonight was, apparently, an exception.

                Mac’s gaze swept the group clustered around the bar. “Well, it’s my own fault. I decided to pick up the tab for any vets in the house tonight. Who’d have thought there were so many?”

                “You decided to –“

                “Hey, bartender!”

                Mac rolled his eyes as a gaggle – there really was no other word for it – of boys who looked barely out of their teens waived at him. “Excuse me just a second, Sarge. I need to go card a few people.”

                Thomas frowned in thought as Mac moved off down the bar, a slight spring in one step from the carbon fibre blade prosthetic leg he was sporting, then turned away from the bar and crossed the club, carefully skirting the edge of the pit full of black leather furniture and knocking on the nearly-invisible door on the far side of it.

                Tiernan looked up, startled, from the computer monitor displaying his rotation of security cameras. “What the particular fuck?” Most people didn’t know his office door was there, and the ones who did generally didn’t bother to knock. He unfolded himself from behind the desk and went to the door, pushing it open. “Mr. Almstead!”

                “I thought we’d agreed on ‘Thomas’, at least.” The human shook his head, chuckling briefly, before turning serious again. “I just wanted to let you know what your bartender’s up to.”

                “Mac? Is something wrong?” Tiernan craned his neck to look past Thomas and over to the bar, but he couldn’t see the bartender over the unusual-for-a-Monday-night crowd.

                “He’s picking up the tab for all the veterans in the club tonight. Even though he was discharged other than honorably himself.” Thomas shook his head, apparently at Tiernan’s confused expression. “An other than honorable discharge, back in our day, meant no benefits, no retirement, nothing. All because some rat bastard of a second lieutenant saw him holding hands with Lucien, off base, and Mac was too damned honorable to lie about it when they called him on it.”

                Tiernan growled under his breath. He tended to do that, when reminded of what Mac had gone through. His husband had grown up on his father’s stories of his Marine Corps friend – hell, Kevin had been named for him, ‘Mac’ McAllan’s given name was Kevin – and the Fae tended to think of the bartender as one of the members of the extended family he’d managed to acquire when he SoulShared with Kevin. “Thanks for letting me know.”

                “Mac. Over here.”

                Startled, Mac, turned away from the group of just-barely-legals, to find his boss standing behind the bar, drumming the fingers of his gloved hand on the glass surface. “What’s up?”

                “I’m told you’re buying for all these gentlemen.”

                Mac cleared his throat. “Well, yes. It’s Veterans’ Day. Seemed only right.”

                Tiernan frowned.

                Mac wiped suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans. “It’s my own money –“

                “What seems right to me,” Tiernan cut in, his voice raised, “is that your customers know that you served as honorably as any of them, you saved my father-in-law’s life, and you’re fucking well taking the rest of the night off.”

                Mac felt himself turning bright red. On the far side of the bar, he caught a glimpse of Sarge, nodding at Tiernan, and customers staring. He’d never talked much about his service. Bartenders were supposed to listen, not talk, and most of the memories were still too painful. But looking into the eyes of one customer after another, he was sorry he’d kept it to himself for so long.

                “Go on.” Tiernan made a shooing motion. “I’ve got the bar.”

                A little dazed, Mac skirted the far end of the bar and made his way back to where Sarge and the others were waiting for him. He felt hands clapping him on the back and shoulders and Miss Mona tiptoeing to kiss his cheek as he shook Sarge’s hand. “You ratted me out.”

                “Guilty.” The former first sergeant didn’t even try to look embarrassed.

                “Look, I know this isn’t really your kind of place. If you want to go somewhere else –“

                “Hell, no.” Thomas looked around at the men clustered around them. “None of you jarheads have heard any of my stories yet…”

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Chapter One of TEMPTED FROM THE OAK

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October 6, 2013

The first in my new series of novellas (Tales of the Grove), Heart of the Oak, will be released by Ellora’s Cave in early December. And I’ve just started work on the second, Tempted from the Oak. Here’s the introduction — enjoy!

            Tearlach moved, restlessly, in darkness and the embrace of the darag.

            His oak, he knew, would have been happy, in the way of its kind, to set him free. Free to roam the rocky face of A’Chailleach, as far as the magick allowed; free to make his way down to the small loch down the slope, cup the chill water in a hand of flesh and blood and wood, ease a thirst two thousand years in the making.

            Two thousand years, and more, since he had ceased to exist as anything other than a faint memory in wood robbed of its magick. Somehow the darag had counted the seasons, the years. Or it had been told, by a voice Tearlach could no longer hear, another darag, awakened like his own.

            The Gille Dubh would have wept into the silence, had he but eyes. He had never been closed off from his darag before. He had always known the ancient tree’s thoughts, as it knew his.

            No longer.

            Tearlach and his darag were one, and yet they were not. Gille Dubh and oak were of one essence, yet they were separate beings. In the normal way of things, a spirit and his tree shared their substance by day, and separated by night, to remember their unique selfness, and in remembering it, to make it be what was. Without the nightly separation, in time the Gille Dubh and the darag would become one strange, living, breathing, yet barked and root-bound being.

            But Tearlach could not separate himself. He dared not. And his heart was breaking, for his darag was walling him off, a last desperate act of defense, both of him, and of itself. Trying to save them both, by cutting them off, one from the other.

            When the magick was stolen from them–from all the creatures who depended on it for life, from the very world itself–he had been in the act of emerging from the darag, into a moonlit night. Laughing with delight–he remembered it clearly, it had been less than a moon ago, for him–at the sight of a handsome human clansman, waiting for him with usquebaugh and roasted mutton and the promise of a night of pleasures.

            He had been half emerged from the darag, his face feeling the cool night breeze and a hand reaching out for the hammered silver cup the human had brought to honor their pleasure, when all the essence of what he was, was drained away. He shuddered now, remembering. For an instant that had lasted forever, he’d known what was happening to him, to his darag. He had felt himself die, and known his death.

            He would leave the darag, now, if he could. But he dared not.

            Not to save both their lives.

 

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Spotlight on ALL the SoulShares

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September 3, 2013

As part of the festivities during launch weekend for Deep Plunge, Erin Kelley at The Lurker invited me to ruminate about where the SoulShares series started, where it is, where it’s going, and what I think The Meaning Of It All is. I had some fun with the project — so I thought I’d share it with you, with Erin’s kind permission!

Lurker Spotlight — September 1, 2013

Thanks for having me here to talk about the SoulShares, Erin! – I don’t really want to give away any spoilers, for people who haven’t read one, or two, or all three of the books that are out so far (though, really, what are you waiting for? – this post will still be here after you go to Amazon! *winks*) So I’ll summarize the books, but I thought I’d spend more of my time talking about how my Fae came to be, how they evolved, and what I think they’re trying to say through me.

Hard as Stone: Tiernan Guaire is a Fae in exile. Forced from the Realm into the human world for the unimaginable crime of a brother’s murder, he lives by a century-old vow, to trust no one, and never to allow himself to love or be loved. Kevin Almstead has just lost his future, to a vote of the partners at his law firm. Trying to escape for an evening, he ventures into Purgatory, the hottest all-male nightclub in Washington, D.C., where he allows himself to be seduced by a stranger with long blond hair and ice-blue eyes. Drawn into a Soulshare bond with his intended one-night stand, Tiernan soon learns that the most ancient and evil enemy of the Fae still walks the human world, and it will stop at nothing – certainly not Kevin Almstead – to possess the magick of a Noble Fae.

The Fae – MY Fae, anyway – were born on Facebook. I wrote up a Fae character for roleplay, and being the attention-to-detail sort that I am, I wrote a whole back-story for him. Where he came from, what he was doing in the human world, and so on. I’ve loved Irish legend and lore ever since I was old enough to read (which is a VERY long time), so I’m well acquainted with the Fae of Irish legend. Mine… aren’t quite those Fae. I played with the idea, had fun with it, changed a few of the basic assumptions just to see what kind of changes that might make in my character. I’m a great believer in creating a detailed and realistic world for my characters to play in, and letting it shape them. Then I entered a short-story contest that I couldn’t use my original Fae for, because of the theme of the competition, so Tiernan and Kevin were born. And the month after that contest’s deadline was NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writers’ Month, where you’re challenged to write 50,000 words in a month. I used the short story as the core of my project… which became HARD AS STONE.

Gale Force: Conall Dary is the most powerful mage born to the Fae race since the Realm was parted from the human world, over two thousand years ago. But that power condemns him to a lifetime of celibacy, because sex calls to power, and he has power enough to drain a world. When he refuses to use his talents for a Noble lady’s petty revenge, he finds himself shanghaied to the human world, his soul torn in half and his magick blocked. Josh LaFontaine is the beautifully inked owner of Raging Art-On, a Washington, D.C. tattoo and piercing parlor. While taking part in New York City’s Pride march, his world changes forever when the man of his dreams materializes at his feet. Josh’s sensual and loving touch, the first Conall has ever known, may be enough to give him back the magick he’s lost. But before they can complete their Soulshare, a terrible accident leaves Conall bodiless, lost, and invisible, to everyone except – maybe – the human with whom he shares a soul. But Josh will need to find him before the ancient evil of the Marfach does or everything they have – and more – will be lost.

I was stunned, to put it mildly, when I was offered a four-book contract by Ravenous Romance after they saw the first chapters of HARD AS STONE. I’d been prepared for years of slogging from one agent to the next, collecting rejection letters, the ‘normal’ author’s life. Now, all of a sudden, I had a ginormous playground I was responsible for filling up. ‘Terrified at the prospect’ sums up how I felt, pretty well. So I was pleasantly surprised when the stories didn’t stop coming. Conall and Josh had a compelling story to tell, so I sat down and started writing it. As I wrote, though, the story grew, and changed, the way all living things do, and I found myself in the position of wishing I’d built a better foundation for a few things in the first book. (This is not a problem that has gone away – while I was working on DEEP PLUNGE, I got myself a tattoo for a Mother’s Day gift, and spent the whole two and a half hours quizzing my artist about the ins and outs of tattooing. I would do a MUCH better job with Josh now. Did I mention my attention-to-detail personality?) And keeping track of who knew what about whom when caused me more than a few headaches. I would love a chance to go back through the first few books and re-write them. Maybe someday… And I started discovering all the additional things that come along with being a Published Author. Like the utter lack of time for anything other than working, eating, sleeping, and writing, not necessarily in that order. They say it’s essential to writing to read everything you can get your hands on — I’ve had to learn to keep my darn hands to myself. If I’m REALLY lucky, I can steal five or ten minutes before bed to read, but I don’t get lucky very often. I miss it…!

Deep Plunge: For the last six hundred years or so, the only things reminding Lochlann Doran he’s a Fae have been his faceted aquamarine eyes and the fact that he can’t die. He’s been a wanderer for so long in the human world – over two thousand years – that he’s lost his magick, including the gift of healing that goes along with being a Fae of the Demesne of Water. Finding his SoulShare might get it back for him. But it might kill him, too. Garrett Templar has been living on borrowed time, in a sense, since he was eighteen, when one of the johns he entertained to pay the bills while he danced at Purgatory infected him with HIV. It was always supposed to be a “manageable” disease, though, at least until a cure was found. Except he’s just found out that the virus in his system has inexplicably mutated into full-blown AIDS, and no known drug cocktail can even slow it down.  And when Lochlann and Garrett find each other at last, on Purgatory’s dance floor, the only thing as urgent as their need for one another is the hunger of an ancient evil to do whatever is necessary to possess Lochlann’s magick…

When I first started writing the SoulShares, back in the fall of 2011, I wasn’t thinking at all in terms of a message or a theme. There were people in my head, Fae people and human people, who wanted their stories told, and that was about it. That’s changed, the more I write. The first notion I had of a “theme” dawned on me when a gay friend of mine, who I’ve known for something like 25 years and who is the only person I know I would trust to “fact-check” my erotic scenes, responded to my first draft with “Have you been a gay man in drag all these years, and I just never knew?” I love being able to write gay romance, and erotic fiction, in a way that I hope says something to the rest of the world about how love is love, period. When my Facebook banner is done, it’s going to have a motto on it: “Many Fantasies… One Love.” And the other theme that’s come to mean a lot to me in these books started by accident. (Except that there’s no such thing as accident, really.) The first incident of what I’ve come to call “SoulShare joy” just sort of happened, between Tiernan and Kevin, but it’s become a hallmark of all the erotic scenes in all the books.  Love and delight, love and laughter go hand in hand, and even the hottest sex imaginable is heightened by joy. And as long as I still have anything to say on those themes, there will be Fae, and there will be SoulShares.

Thank you for having me, Erin! – and you can find all my books (including several anthologies I have stories in that I didn’t mention here) on my Amazon Author page, at

http://www.amazon.com/Rory-Ni-Coileain/e/B009M8XQP2/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

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Release Day for DEEP PLUNGE

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August 30, 2013

Welcome to the launch of DEEP PLUNGE, SoulShares #3. Lochlann Doran and Garrett Templar are the two newest additions to the little SoulShare community coming to center itself around Purgatory, the hottest gay club on the Eastern seaboard, which just happens to be built over a nexus of incredible raw magickal energy. Or they will be, if they survive their Sharing, and the test that will come after it…

Enjoy this excerpt, and the Amazon link is at the end!

            He had just spotted the recessed doorway that would take him up to his own apartment, directly over Luigi’s Italian Ristorante with the missing “n” where a rock or a bullet had taken out the neon tubing two or three years ago, when he first heard the footsteps behind him. Not quite running, but coming up fast.

            Shit. His grip tightened on the strap of his bag, ready to swing it — or ditch it, if it looked like that would help him escape . And for one sick, sweaty, gut-wrenching moment, he was ten years old again, hearing the kids closing in behind him, knowing there was no way in hell he was going to get away without another split lip, ruined shirt, blackened eye. Almost hearing his mother’s voice. Garrett Lee Templar, I swear, you find more trouble than any ten other boys ever dreamed of. Do you think I can just make new clothes appear out of thin air?

            “Garrett?”

            He recognized that voice from somewhere. Slowly, he turned. And stared up into eyes that gleamed blue even in the crappy light from the streetlight on the corner.

            “Lochlann?” He hadn’t had to rent his ass out for a while now, but the idea of a john following him home from the club still made his skin crawl. Yet there was something about those eyes, something different.

            No. Fuck that shit. You get hurt the worst when you let yourself hope. 

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Long and Short Reviews — 6th Anniversary Bash

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August 26, 2013

LASR Banner 2013 Anniversary copy

What a great way to kick off Release Week  for DEEP PLUNGE (SoulShares #3) – participating in the Long and Short Reviews 6th Anniversary Bash! If you’re finding me for the first time through the Long and Short Reviews site, welcome – and don’t forget to go back for more Q&A all week long, August 26-30! And to my regular followers, LASR is hosting a week of Twenty Questions, all about your favorite authors. Check their site, and see how I – and many other authors of romance and erotic romance – answered some VERY interesting questions. Oh, and did I mention prizes? Yes, there are prizes. Four $100 Amazon gift cards, publishers’ gift cards, books, e-books, and author swag galore! (Please, no one tell my teenaged son I used the word “swag”. He’s threatened to die of shame if it ever gets back to him. I think it means something else to his generation…) Here’s the link back to LASR:

http://www.longandshortreviews.com/category/guest-blogs/

And to thank you for stopping by – yes, I have a new release coming out on Friday, August 30. DEEP PLUNGE is the third in the SoulShares series, m/m urban fantasy erotic romance. An excerpt follows, just to whet your appetites. And everyone who comments below or follows my blog will be entered into a drawing for a free Kindle copy of DEEP PLUNGE. (Yes, if you both comment and follow, you’ll be entered twice.) Enjoy, and good luck, and happy reading!

“Sit down.” Tiernan motioned toward the chair in front of the desk as he dropped into his own.

“Thanks, I prefer to stand.” Lochlann arched a brow, looking pointedly down at the other Fae.

“I am sprung from the loins of an entire race of assholes.” Tiernan rolled his eyes, turning in his chair to check out the monitors before swinging back to look narrowly up at Lochlann. “Although without the attitude, I have to admit, I’d have a hard time believing you’re Fae.”

“Sus do thón,” Lochlann offered pleasantly.

“Yeah, up yours, too, and may you have much joy of it.” Tiernan leaned back in his chair, put his bare feet up on the desk, and crossed his arms behind his head. “Speaking of which, what did you say that spooked Garrett like that? I don’t take kindly to my dancers being treated badly. Unless they want to be, in which case it’s none of my fucking business.”

Lochlann’s lip curled in a snarl. “It was nothing I said. It was…” His voice trailed off, as he remembered the way the ash-grey aura had curled up out of the human’s body, wisps of smoke from a fire nearly dead, weaving themselves into a shroud. “He has AIDS.”

Tiernan shook his head. “No. He’s HIV-positive. There’s a big difference.”

“Don’t condescend to me.” Lochlann bent forward, knuckles resting on the desk, looming over the other Fae. “I know what I saw. My Demesne is Water, my gifts are healing and empathy. I saw his aura. He’s dying.”

The words caught at his throat, clawed, as they left him. My scair-anam is dying, and there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it. A healer who can’t heal.

 

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Just a taste of the work in progress

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August 22, 2013

I thought I’d celebrate the upcoming release of Deep Plunge with a taste of Book Four in the SoulShares, Firestorm. This is a bit from Chapter Two, where we meet Rian Sheridan, a Belfast lad with an interesting hobby. Just remember, this hasn’t been edited yet… Oh, and warning — just a little bit of adult content…

Feargal grunted, and let go of Rian’s hair to grip his shoulder. Which was a bit of a disappointment, but Rian couldn’t spare time to think about it just now, not when he couldn’t fecking breathe and the drumbeat in his cock put the Lambeg drums to shame. Sweat poured down his face, down his chest, over the trail of stars inked into his flesh that spiraled from shoulder to abs and pointed straight to his throbbing erection. In and out, slow and massive. Rian’s low moan felt like it started at his toes, and the burn was as close as one such as he was ever going to get to Heaven. Even better, this pain was touching the buried place that craved the hurt. He never knew when he’d catch that wave, what new or old torture would start that rush. This was going to be one of the magical times. Each slight movement of the clenched fist in his ass was bringing him closer, not to one release, but to two. Bliss, pure and uncut.
Until the movement stopped.
“Jesus feckin’ Christ, finish what ye started!”
The response wasn’t what he expected.
“Get that arm out of him unless you can live without it.”
The voice was not Feargal’s.

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Watch this space…

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July 31, 2013

Several readers have offered me suggestions on my Facebook page for short short stories. The challenge was “give me any two characters from the SoulShares, and any object. And I’ll write a story around them.” The first is in progress… watch this space for Tiernan, Kevin… and a puppy. *grinning*

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Book promo video for HARD AS STONE

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May 11, 2013

Here’s a link to the fabulous video for HARD AS STONE (Soulshares #1)!

http://youtu.be/hVjg9hHMIMY

 

Thank you, Erin Kelley! Onward to GALE FORCE…

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How about a teaser?

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April 30, 2013

Who can tell me who said this, and to whom?

 

“Neither one’s going to happen.” The human’s grip tightened. “I run interference with the cops for pretty much all the shit that goes on around here, because my husband is about as diplomatic as a rhino with a rash. But I am not going to try to explain a fight between two Fae to D.C.’s finest. Whatever issues you two have, you can take them off the premises. Am I clear?”

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Would this make you want more?

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March 31, 2013

I’m playing with a totally new magickal race — would this pique your curiosity?

He was alone, in darkness.
Which was more than he’d known a moment ago. For there to be darkness, there must be awareness, and a memory of light; to know one’s self alone, there must be a knowledge of self, and a memory of others. He had had none of that, until now.
How long had it been?
Ah, now he remembered time.
Time passed, alone in the dark.
He could feel his heart, beating. Or was it the heart of his darag, his oak?
The ancient tree was around him, was part of him. As he was part of it. It, too, was awakening, whispering to him in the old language of leaf and sap and wind. Whispering of the passing of centuries, centuries during which the darag had stood sentinel overlooking the loch far below, nothing more than mute wood.
That, too, was changing.
Magick, the darag whispered. Magick returns to the world. Felt first in root, and now in trunk and branch and leaf and bark.
He would have nodded, had he been real enough, yet, to move; the places where his eyes had been and would be glowed, alive with magick and memories. He remembered when the magick was taken away. Remembered what it had felt like, to become nothing.
He wept, in the heart of the oak, thoughts of tears falling from eyes as yet unreal. His darag murmured to him, with the breeze that stirred its leaves; caressed him, with the water welling cool from the earth; consoled him, with the magick rising from some unknown source.
Soon, it whispered. Alive soon.

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