Please share a little about yourself, your genres,
any other pen names you use.
I am a
mom, a wife, a spiritual being, a practitioner of yoga, a novelist, a
questioner and a seeker. I write historical novels and paranormal romance
novels. I’ve written a few nonfiction books, as well, including THE ART OF
LIFE, a photoessay about figurative sculpture through the ages. This book was
written with my husband classical sculptor Sabin Howard.
Tell us a little about your latest or upcoming
release.
The
latest news is the publication of the 4th book in my dystopian After
Series, BLOOD SKY. The saga of Emma and Arthur, and the apocalyptic mists and
the psychic human biomind, continues….
Here’s
the blurb: In a
time of apocalyptic despair, love is put to the test… Deep in the badlands of Outpost City, in
the Dark Horse saloon, a poker game is being played. The stakes are life and
death—for the world. What can Emma afford to lose? Will she gamble on herself,
or on Arthur? Will love find a way when the apocalypse closes in? A mystical
odyssey, a haunting love…
Are you a mom?
Yes! I
have three daughters and a stepdaughter. We are a modern blended family. My
husband Sabin Howard has a daughter from his first marriage; I have two from my
first marriage; and we have a ten-year-old together.
If yes do you find it hard to juggle writing and
parenting?
Every
day I juggle parenting and writing, it’s just the way my life is. If I stopped
to think about it, I might find it hard. I also do a lot of work to support my
husband Sabin’s art. It requires constant multitasking and flexibility and a
ready sense of humor!
Have you ever based your book or characters on
actual events or people from your own life?
I
always feel that novels are like dreams, everyone in them is the dreamer. So
all the characters in my books are facets and pieces of me and of everyone I’ve
ever met. My protagonists show some of my positive and negative traits, but so
do the villains. I also draw readily on my feelings and experiences, those feed
my imagination.
Is there a theme or message in your work that you
would like readers to connect to?
There
are a few ideas that matter to me. For one, I know that we have greater
abilities than the material, concrete senses that Newtonian science
acknowledges. I try to share that with readers. Also, BLOOD SKY turns around
Emma’s choices. She has to come to understand that she is making a choice at every
turn. I think facing our choices is part of maturation.
When you’re not writing what do you do? Do you have
any hobbies or guilty pleasures?
Guilty
pleasures: chocolate and red wine! I also have a daily practice of yoga, which
grounds and centers me. It’s become a treasured part of my day, though of
course I sometimes encounter my own resistance to it, as in, “Oh no, yoga again?!” But I am always happy I took
the time to breathe and come into the present and to integrate my consciousness
into my body.
I love
to travel, to read, and to spend time with my husband and children.
If this book is part of a series…what is the next
book? Any details you can share?
The
next book is Book 5, and I don’t have the title yet. In it, Emma and her merry
band of psychic misfits journey across land and sea to return to Europe and
reunite Susie with Caris, so the two girls can make a stand against the mists
that have devastated the Earth.
What is next for you? Do you have any scheduled
upcoming releases or works in progress?
Having
finished BLOOD SKY, I’m currently working on a novel called THE YEAR OF LOVING.
It was entitled THE YEAR OF LOVING A YOUNGER MAN, but then the protagonist went
and got herself involved in a love triangle with a younger man AND an older
man, and her best friend has cancer, so I realized it was THE YEAR OF LOVING.
I’m also researching the siege of Montsegur and the Cathars for a historical
novel. And I’m starting the notes for Book 5 of The After Series.
What book are you reading now?
Currently
I am reading books by Dave Richo, a Jungian therapist. His books HOW TO BE AN
ADULT, THE POWER OF GRACE, and HOW TO BE AN ADULT IN RELATIONSHIPS are just
amazing. They are about love and maturation and what it means to be a whole
human being.
I
am also reading everything I can find about the Cathars as research for a
historical novel. I’ve found this strange and wonderful British psychiatrist
named Arthur Guirdham who writes about being a Cathar revenant. I’m all over
his books like stink on a skunk.
Blood Sky
The After Series
Book 4
Traci L. Slatton
Genre: paranormal romance
Publisher: Parvati Press
Date of Publication: August 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942523-02-4
ASIN: B012TXZ4OC
Word Count: 67,000
Cover Artist: Gwyn Snider
Book Description:
In a time of apocalyptic despair, love is put to the test… Deep in the badlands of Outpost City, in the Dark Horse saloon, a poker game is being played. The stakes are life and death—for the world.
What can Emma afford to lose? Will she gamble on herself, or on Arthur?
Will love find a way when the apocalypse closes in? A mystical odyssey, a haunting love…
Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/moBlcXPG33o
Available at Amazon
Chapter 1
The
seeds of all time are planted in every discrete moment. If you pause, breathe, and come to presence, you’ll
discover this marvelous truth: that all of time is contained within each single instant, like a giant oak is
contained within a fragile brown shell. It’s
all laid out for you, all of it, the past and the future, events and people and
destiny. All you have to do is come to awareness.
So I should have known that there would be trouble. I,
Emma, should have known that love
would fail, that it wouldn’t be enough to protect us all from the very person who had plunged us into the apocalypse a
few years ago.
It was all there to be seen in the first moment we met, when he saved my daughter Mandy from the obliterating mists
and then accepted my trade: myself for his protection
of the band of orphans I was shepherding around France. We talked about food,
and I pointed out that he was eating
well. One notices such things after a global
ecological cataclysm that has
destroyed most of the planet’s buildings and people—and all of its manufacturing capabilities. One cares
about who is eating well when one has been
scrounging for scraps for several months. Priorities come into sharp focus.
He spoke of the mists and of rebuilding. I wanted to take Mandy back home
to my husband and older daughter
Emma in the Safe Zone of Edmonton, Canada. He had his goals and I had mine; his were lofty, mine were personal. I
should have known a conflict was inevitable. But could I have predicted
that the fate of the world would be tangled up
in it?
Could I have foreseen that he
would be taken by madness, a madness that had
slept within him
since before the day his invention erupted to scour the Earth clean of structures and human beings? Even with
all the mindfulness of the world, could I have known in advance that Arthur would be
possessed by madness?
We
left a mist-ravaged Outpost City and traveled east, mostly along the old Trans-Canada Highway. It was summer
and we were en route to Quebec, where a boat waited to take us to Europe. ‘We’ consisted
of Arthur and me and our beloved friends
from the original camp in Europe: warrior woman Jeannie and Robert her Irishman and their infant twins, sharp-tongued
French beauty Laurette and her companion Charles
Nwokocha, who had been a famed linguist in the Before, and Serbian Theo and young Marco, the Italian whose madness
had been cured by Arthur mere seconds before
the mists swarmed around us.
Other comrades from Canada had joined us: Donny who had once been a cop and inscrutable Kangee his Sioux wife, and
pretty but feral Susie, saved from a
band of raiders, and the sly pickpocket Gaff from Outpost City.
We were riding at a good clip, about fifty kilometers a day, and we were south and west of Winnipeg. In the late
afternoon, we rode along a flat, straight road into a small community named
Starbuck. It seemed deserted. There was no movement, no wild dogs or skinny cats or desperate rats scrounging for food.
It felt empty and lifeless despite leafy trees and tall grass, and desolate in
the way that ghost towns often did now, in the After. Even when a town wasn’t devoured by
the mists, people didn’t want to live outside the Safe Zones where mists never encroached.
“Let’s check houses for food,” Arthur called, from the front of our
peloton of horses and riders. He
swiveled around in his saddle and nodded to Theo and Donny, who
peeled off
together, trotting toward a small brown cape on the right with an abandoned car in the driveway. He turned toward me and Laurette and nodded
again, and we picked up our reins to
veer off to the left.
“Some of these homes look sweet to me,” Jeannie called. A worn expression scrolled over her lovely dark
face with its pronounced cheekbones. “How about we find a place with food stock
and we settle in for the evening?” She was as staunch in the saddle as
ever, but since giving birth to twins a month ago, she tired easily. She
pressed her lips gently to the
forehead of the infant strapped onto her chest.
Arthur eyed her without responding.
“Aye,
come on, Big Mister, let’s take a breather,” said Robert. “It’s not often me lady
asks for one.”
“Every break slows us down, lengthens the time it takes us to get back to Europe and
make a stand against the mists once and for all,” Arthur said.
“Arthur, we have two babies with
us,” I called.
Arthur stared at me. Abruptly, he nodded. He could still
see reason, at this point. He
called, “Let’s find a place big enough to accommodate all of us. Then we’ll
send out scouts for food.”
So Theo and Donny rejoined the
group, and Laurette and I stayed tight to the
flank.
We
rode along Arena Boulevard past a school and a recreation center to Birch Street. Tall, fragrant pines
planted in neat rows and colorful perennials showed that the inhabitants had once
taken loving care of their yards.
“Arthur,” Theo called, “big
yellow house ahead, green Ford truck out front. Look
good. Check out?”
Arthur waved his assent.
Theo
and Donny trotted out ahead of us to a sprawling yellow place with a spacious
yard. I watched them dismount and take out their guns. This was the After, and they couldn’t be too careful. There
was no telling who might be hiding in the house, and how sane they might be. Billions of people had died on The
Day, that terrible Christmas eve that
the mists rolled across the globe and devoured structures, people, animals, objects…anything with the wrong
balance of metals in their chemical composition.
Fortunately, many millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions,
hadn’t died. But some percentage of
the survivors were mad, and were a threat to the rest of us. The mists
had made them mad.
“Emma,” said a quiet voice from
my elbow.
I
turned, and it was Susie. Her heart-shaped face was solemn. She jerked her blonde head to one side, wanting to
speak to me privately. I guided my horse out a
few meters away from Laurette. Susie followed so close that my horse
danced anxiously beneath me.
“Quit!” I said firmly, dropping my heels in the stirrups. I looked over
at Susie, who was practically at my
shoulder. “So?”
Susie frowned.
“Something’s wrong. Something here in this town.” “You’ve seen something?”
“Not exactly.” “Felt something?” “Not really.”
“Then
what?” I pressed, in a low voice. Perhaps Susie had felt something with a sixth
sense stimulated by the mists. All too often, the mists left strange psychic
gifts in their wake, extrasensory
abilities that both tormented and enhanced the recipient. We all feared
these gifts because they often preceded madness. I had a gift, a healing gift
in my hands, and I kept careful watch
over my internal state, lest I descend into a chaos from which few people emerged.
Susie shook her head ferociously. She uttered, “Yah!” Her horse quickened its pace and she rode off toward the
yellow house without answering me.
I stared after her in bemusement. Susie who lived to kill raiders was uncomfortable with something in
Starbuck, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain her feeling to me. Perhaps it was ordinary intuition, perhaps
it was something more. I looked around carefully, steering my horse in a
tight clockwise spin when my neck wouldn’t turn
anymore. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Streets were empty, houses
were quiet and dark. There was no movement apart from our group.
“What’s wrong?” It was Arthur, who had guided his horse close to mine. He studied
my face.
“Susie feels uneasy,” I murmured,
still scanning the surroundings.
“She
has good sensitivity, she’s open psychically,” he murmured back. “I always think she’ll be a key piece of the
equation, when we mount an attack on the mists.” He looked around. “I
don’t see anything.”
“Me, neither.” I frowned as I
caught his eyes. “That’s what worries me.”
His
gray eyes lit up, the way they always did when his genius struck him. Before the
mists, Arthur had been a professor of sorts, a polymath inventor involved in military
research and development. “I know
what you mean. It’s all a little too quiet.”
“Why
are the yards all so tidy? And where are the dogs?” I wondered. “Packs of wild dogs run through every ghost
town. We should have seen some.”
He scowled and gathered his reins in one hand, and then pulled out his
pistol with the other.
I followed his example.
“What
are we fearing?” Robert asked, riding up to us. He didn’t wait for us to answer but drew his weapon, as well,
holding it firmly in his hand despite the baby
nestled on his chest.
“The quiet,” Arthur answered.
Theo
yelled for us to come to the house, breaking the unnatural silence of the sunny
afternoon. Arthur motioned the rest of us to go ahead while he took up the rear and scanned the countryside.
The yellow house was spacious enough, a living room with a fireplace, four bedrooms, and a nicely appointed
den. We were eleven adults and two babies, and
Laurette assigned us all rooms. She delegated bedrooms to couples and gave
Donny his own in case Kangee showed
up, put Susie in the den, and told Marco, Theo, and Gaff to figure out their accommodations in the living room.
“I like this place, it is very well kept,” Laurette approved. She stood
in the kitchen with her arms akimbo.
“Too well kept.” I was going through the pantry. There was little in it,
though it was very well organized and spotlessly clean.
“I know what you mean, but why
question it, it is so pleasant? You are so
suspicious,
Emma,” Laurette said. She peered over my shoulder into the cabinet. “There are
dried beans, we can use those.”
“Someone will
have to hunt something, there’s not enough.” “We can look into nearby homes, also,”
Laurette said. “Susie—”
“I don’t want to go out,” Susie
said. She seated herself at the kitchen nook.
I
pulled out a box of Earl Grey sachets. “Cup of tea? If I can get some water boiling.”
“There’s no electricity,” Susie
said. She laid her head on her arms.
“The water
runs,” Laurette said, turning on the faucet for a few seconds. “There’s a fireplace,” I said.
Jeannie came into the kitchen with a twin on each hip. “I’m so thankful
to be off a horse! Emma, what have we got? Anything to snack on?” She slid
into the nook table opposite Susie, who didn’t pick up her head.
“Not much, yet. I’m still
looking,” I said.
Shaggy
and awkward, Gaff stood in the doorway. “Arthur is sending us to scout for
food in nearby houses.”
“Don’t go anywhere alone,” Susie murmured.
“He
said to stay in pairs,” Gaff said. “I’ll be with Marco.” He watched Susie. “You okay?”
“Shut up,” she answered, but her
voice sounded listless, without its usual snap
for
Gaff.
“Go
on, then, Gaff,” Jeannie said. She started unbuttoning her shirt so she could nurse the babies.
Gaff
shrugged but he scowled at Susie and then made a face at me before he went outside.
I took his point: something was
up with Susie.
Something
more than what was usually up with her, that is. Susie was often quiet, depressive. She had been kept by a
group of raiders after the mists had ravaged her home town and killed
her family. The raiders had used her badly and the residue of their cruelty stayed with her. I had helped her
get free after a mist incursion, and she was closer to me than anyone else, but
she was still often remote.
“I will start a fire in the fireplace,” Laurette announced. She took a
large pot from inside a cabinet and
filled it with tap water, then went to the living room.
“It won’t matter,” Susie said. “Even if she gets the fire going and she
boils the water. It won’t matter. Nothing
matters.”
I leaned back against the sink,
scrutinizing the girl. “Susie, you want to talk about
it?”
She turned her head to look in
the other direction.
“So,
food supplies?” Arthur asked, coming in. He walked over to me and put his hands on my hips. He smiled. “Didn’t
we have our first encounter in a kitchen?” He touched my hair, lifted a blond lock to his
lips. Then he leaned into me, his tall, muscled
form lithe and warm along the length of me. He breathed deeply as if inhaling
me and then he kissed me, running
one hand along my neck and the other along my bottom. He lifted his mouth
from my flesh to murmur, “We’ll have our own bedroom tonight.
Privacy. Finally.
It’s starting to feel like a long, long trip to Quebec without any time alone
together.” He kissed me again, hungrily, his hands roaming over me.
I
felt myself melting, responding, as always. I had this response to Arthur, an instinctive physical surrendering. I
couldn’t help myself.
“Yuck,” Susie muttered. Jeannie chortled.
Arthur pulled back. He threw a glance over his shoulder at Susie, and
then raised an eyebrow at me.
I shook my head.
He stood back and reached past me
to open the pantry door. “It’s tidy.”
“Too tidy,” I agreed. “Not a speck of dust or an insect
carcass or anything. From what I’ve seen, the whole house is that way.
Like it’s been hermetically sealed since the Before. Which is not possible.”
“There are no cairns commemorating the dead, either,” Arthur said, his voice deep
and thoughtful. “We see them everywhere. But not for the last ten miles or so, and not in town.”
“Little food, clean homes and yards, no dogs or cats or dead gerbils, and no cairns,” I summarized.
“Someone’s in town,” he decided. “We don’t see them, but they’re here. They’re taking
care of the homes.”
“I wonder why they didn’t greet
us, one way or another. I doubt they’re mad.
Maybe OCD, but not crazy, not when
they’re doing this much housekeeping.”
“Perhaps
they were concerned about our sanity, or our intentions,” Arthur mused. “We’re an armed group riding in
tight formation. It’s a reasonable concern.”
“They know you’re not crazy,”
Susie said, her voice hollow. “They’ll come.”
She
refused to say more even when
Arthur and I pressed her.
Marco
shot a deer with his bow and arrow, his first since returning to sanity a few weeks ago. Theo and Robert dug a
shallow pit in the front yard and made a fire
for roasting the deer, as they’d done many times before when we were on
the road both here and in France, traveling hard and fast on a
mission. Tucked away in the cellar of a house down the street, Gaff found a stash of food,
including some canned goods. The big score was Ramen noodles. Laurette used a cast iron
skillet in the fireplace to make a feast of
the noodles, which had an expiration date sometime in the next millennium.
We wouldn’t have cared if the expiration date was last year, the piquancy
of the seasonings made the noodles such a treat. We all appreciated
simply having food, but delicious food, food that was well-seasoned,
was cause for special celebration.
It was a warm dusk under a vast azure and plum sky. We sat outside around the fire
to eat our meal. Gaff and Marco had dragged chairs out for us, and Laurette and
I had found and lit citronella
torches to discourage mosquitos, so we sat in comfort. Crickets trilled and cicadas whirred and bats streaked overhead
and moths fluttered and the air smelled
bright and fresh beneath the smoky pine of our kindling. Poplar and birch logs, found stacked behind a neighboring
home, streaked the orange flames with dancing
blue, red, and green nymphs of light.
“Does anywhere have more stars
than here?” asked Robert.
“Aye, France,
where we met,” Jeannie said. She exchanged a smile with Robert. “Less light pollution here, I think, because the spaces
are so vast,” Arthur
commented. He was chewing a
piece of venison backstrap, the succulent meat, tender yet
lean, along the spine of the deer. “Theo, your recipe for this meat gets
better all the time.” “Use what I find for cooking,” Theo said
modestly, but he looked pleased. He’d
found some spices in the cache of noodles and used them with great efficacy. “Something’s off,” Donny said.
He set his plate on the ground beside him and
stood up. His
dark, pockmarked face wore a brooding expression. He was a portly man of African descent, grounded, calm, and
steady; he’d been a cop in the Before. We all trusted him implicitly. He muttered, “I feel
it with my…other sense.”
We all grew quiet and a little tense. The mists had
given Donny a special ability to
sense other minds. Sometimes he could even influence other minds. We had relied on this mental power in other, prior missions.
“Do you feel a
presence?” asked Nwokocha. “Alexei?” Arthur asked, sitting straighter.
Donny shook his head, No. It wasn’t the Russian psychopath who had bedeviled us over the past few years.
“Alexei will
come to us, eventually,” Arthur stated. He was counting on it, in fact. “Maybe it’s Kangee returning?” I
asked, hoping to see her.
Kangee had been given a mysterious ability to travel great distances. She would begin walking and the air would
morph into red streaks and she’d be miles ahead of where she started out. I had experienced this myself once when
she carried me on her back. Since
she was unfettered by distances, she came and went from our group as she pleased.
We kept her horse with us for the occasions she joined us.
“Not Kangee, I can feel my wife from, well, wherever she is when she
starts to come back,” Donny rumbled.
He stroked his chin, hard, as if he had something on it that
he wanted to rub away. “I can’t
tell. I don’t know. What’s wrong with me?”
“We
are all curious, Donny, but don’t fret yourself,” Nwokocha said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled
at Donny.
“I don’t know,” Donny said in frustration. “But I know they’re here.
They’re here, I can feel them.”
“They, who?” I asked. But I didn’t wait for an answer. I took my gun from my backpack at my feet and rose.
Arthur and a few others rose, also.
Susie buried her face in her hands.
A small voice piped up, “They, us.”
A small rustle of movement intensified until it saturated the space
around us. Scattered gossamer ribbons
of light twisted in the firelight like DNA helixes, and then several small forms slowly became visible, first as
columns and then as people.
I yelped, and
exclamations flew up from Laurette, Jeannie, Gaff, and Marco. “We’re here to talk to her,” said the small voice. It
belonged to a dark-haired,
dark-eyed
girl of about nine years old. She was one of dozens of children who suddenly encircled us in the yard. The
girl pointed a slim index finger at Susie.
Arthur took in a quick, startled
breath. “What do you want with her?”
The
girl looked at him and tilted her head, a birdlike pose. “She can do it. You can help her, maybe. She can do it. Susie, come.”
“Do what?” Arthur asked.
The girl turned away from him to
gesture to Susie. “I am Irina. Come with me.
You’re the one we’ve been waiting for.”
Susie got up and
walked toward Irina. “No, Susie—” I started.
“Susie, stay where you are,”
Arthur said, in his command voice.
But
Susie kept walking. Her face was blank, expressionless. She took Irina’s hand. The two of them vanished.
Theo, Laurette,
and I lunged toward the now vacant spot.
Gaff yelled, “Susie!”
“Bring her back this instant!” I yelled. I drew myself up, placed my
hands on my hips, and made a
ferocious face of command. I had two children of my own, Beth and Mandy—I knew how to scowl effectively.
“Don’t worry,” said a boy by me. He was six or seven, with ragged red
hair and missing front teeth. “Don’t
worry, Emma.” He patted my arm and then he vanished, too.
All at once, all the children
were gone.
Robert squeaked. “Where’d the
little birds fly with our girl?”
The
rest of us stood aghast, unmoving. The appearance and disappearance before our
eyes of so many people—children—was so unexpected that it befuddled us.
I was at high alert and almost jumped out of my skin when Arthur touched my shoulder. “Arthur? We have to get
Susie back!”
“Sh,” he said, his head cocked. “Listen.”
So
I froze. I strained to hear what Arthur did. It was a steady susurration, a
kind of syncopated snicking that
receded into the ethers. Then I got it: it was the sound of many bodies breathing as multitudes of
little feet pattered over grass and pavement.
Arthur saw the comprehension grow
on my face. He nodded. “Yes. They’re
cloaked. They’re not teleporting the way Kangee does.” “Grab one?” I
asked, under my breath.
He shook his head, No.
“Why do they
want Susie?” I wondered. “Where did they take
her?” “They have to bring her
back,” Gaff said. He lifted his hat off his head and
scraped his
hands back over his thicket of dirty-blond hair. His narrow face was set and stern. “I mean, she’s a heinous bitch
and all, but they can’t have her. She’s one of
us.”
“I think she
knew they were here all along,” Laurette said
slowly. I nodded. But now what?
About the Author:
Traci L. Slatton is the international bestselling author of historical, paranormal, and romantic novels, including IMMORTAL (BantamDell) and BROKEN; the award-winning dystopian After Series which includes FALLEN, COLD LIGHT, FAR SHORE, and BLOOD SKY; the bittersweet romantic comedy THE LOVE OF MY (OTHER) LIFE; and the vampire art history romp THE BOTTICELLI AFFAIR. She has also published the lyrical poetry collection DANCING IN THE TABERNACLE and THE ART OF LIFE, a photo-essay about figurative sculpture through the ages. Her book PIERCING TIME & SPACE explores the meeting ground of science and spirituality.
@tracilslatton
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