As I was looking through the ASK KMM’s this month, I started noticing patterns and themes. Rather than answering individual questions this time, I answered many. There is not one ‘Q.’ There is only my ‘A’.
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What you have become is the price you paid for the things you thought you wanted.

That’s the quote that I wrote on my wall in 2004 without being able to divine its application to the Fever Series.

Beneath it, in black sharpie, I scribbled a second one.

What happens to the soldiers when the war is over and they go home?

Carrying physical and psychological wounds, full of PTSD triggers—do they get a happily ever after? Or do they grow increasingly removed from any semblance of normal life? Do they want a normal life? Are they even capable of it?

The day I finished Shadowfever, I’d been writing the Fever series for seven years and as I typed the words THE END, I stopped, with only this complete

THE E

I sat there, staring at the page, asking myself what I wanted. Besides a divorce since my marriage had fallen apart during the course of the series and—being a workaholic and driven artist—I’d shoved my pain aside and poured myself into the writing. I might have failed at my marriage but I would not fail my fans and my vision for my work.

I wanted to force the series to end. I wanted to walk away. Start over in life and in writing. But just like the first damned series had stalked me, the second one did as well. The Muse insisted I wasn’t done. I had too many questions. I’d left everyone in the wrong place. I’d written a happy grill scene after Barrons rescued Mac, which I knew would placate most people and conceal the many flaws inherent in the stopping point.

I, however, wasn’t placated.

I love the Harry Potter series. I kept that series firmly in my mind while choosing to move forward with the second story arc. I asked myself, as a reader, what would I have wanted, if Rowling had decided to pick up right where she’d left off?

Those answers were very clear: I wanted to know what happened after their war was over and they all went home. There’s always another war. I wanted to see deeper emotion than I’d seen in the earlier books. I wanted to come to know them more intimately and see them evolve into the next thing. I wanted them to become family, not fragmented soldiers going their separate ways.

But at the end of Shadowfever, this was where I left my characters:

1. Mac came to Dublin hunting the ultimate evil. By the end of the series, she’d defeated one version of it and discovered she, herself, harbored the greatest evil within her own psyche, a pure psychopath with immense power. At the end of Shadowfever, Barrons saved her. Shoved into her head and helped her close the Book. But Barrons wasn’t always going to be there—nor would she want him to—and Mac was left feeling vulnerable, knowing she hadn’t saved herself, deeply suspicious about whether she even could. Bad place to leave a woman, unsure of her ability to save herself. Never going to leave her there.

2. Dani, my darling Dani was finally out of her cage, in the world, getting some of what she’s always dreamed of: friends, a safe place to hang, adventures, the possibility of love. But her dark secret (one of them) was always going to come out in the first story arc. She’d killed Alina and now Mac knows it. (When will she face that other secret?) My commitment to verisimilitude demanded that Mac’s reaction be true to life; that she be torn between forgiveness and suffering an acute sense of betrayal every time she tried to love her sister’s killer—despite the enormously extenuating circumstances. You can forgive a lover for cheating, but the fallout tends to pop up in moments of intimacy and times of stress. Dani’s story was just beginning and was inextricably entangled with Mac’s.

3. Cruce. Wow. I had a single villain in the beginning and I ended the series with two. That’s fucked up.

4. The Nine. Until now, there’d never been a single threat to their existence. Now there was K’Vruck. They could die. (And after Iced, there were two threats, and the second one was far more enormous.) How would this change them? Would it make them need other people? Would it make them compromise how they’d been living for eons? Ryodan is always saying adaptability is survivability. The Nine survived by evolving. I wanted to see the nuts and bolts of it. Evolution, transformation is what fascinates me.

5. Speaking of the Nine—what is it like to live for millennia and never be able to mate? They were human once. Barrons had a woman that was his sun, moon and stars. They aren’t like the Fae. They feel. Yet at best they can have 70 years of caring for a human woman…sure seems to me it would feel like choosing to live with a case of terminal disease again and again, watching them suffer and fail and die bit by bit. These are strong, Alpha, passionate males but unlike my good friend J.R. Ward’s BDB, they never get to have a forever mate. Would they keep trying? Or would they stop loving entirely? And if they stopped loving, what would separate them in time from the icy, destructive Fae who prey on humans for a taste of passion?

6. Ryodan: I was left knowing I’d seen only the tip of his iceberg. I wanted to see the submerged part. This was the man who’d devoted his entire existence to keeping his family together. The man who’d followed his brother to Dublin—as he’d followed him to thousands of other places while Barrons hunted the way to free his son—dragging their cantankerous, difficult band around after him, wherever Barrons went because Barrons was the one that just kept fucking leaving. Ryodan loves. Barrons does, too. All of the Nine do. I always knew this about them but because the first five books were so focused on Mac’s story, and I never dipped into the Nine’s point of view, there was no opportunity to explore it.

7. Speaking of Barrons, for his entire existence from a year after he and the others were cursed—and it was meant as punishment—he devoted his life to freeing his son. His own life was put on hold. He had no life. Just millennia of an obsessive quest to stop his son’s pain. But just as Mac felt lost when the Lord Master was dead, deflated from the sheer lack of tension from hunger for vengeance and grief for Barrons that glued her together, Barrons, for the first time in his life, has to ask himself what he wants on a day to day basis. Define himself in ways he’d never considered before. Plus, he has a woman is now long-lived for whom he feels enormous passion, and kindred. Each character in this series is complex, fully fleshed in my head. I lay awake at night pondering their issues, are they happy? Do they deserve to be? What is happiness to each of them?

8. Christian MacKeltar becoming that very thing he was trained to protect the human race from. I left him turning full, insane Unseelie prince.

9. The abbey was a mess, with no suitable headmistress. The sidhe-seers were undeveloped, unled with no good leader anywhere in sight.

What a frigging mess. Of course it couldn’t end there. There was no way I could walk away.

After a very long time, I sighed and typed

ND….FOR NOW.

My divorce was final four months after Shadowfever was released. The months leading up to the release had been awful, fraught with acrimony. I moved, leased a place for a few months and gave myself the summer to decide where I was going to live and what to do next.

Despite how strongly my Muse was insisting I continue writing Mac and Barrons immediately, the first story arc was irretrievably associated with my ex and I needed a break from it.

While trying to refocus my life, I decided to simplify my writing focus and craft a Dani story, one that didn’t delve too deeply into anything; more of a mystery than anything else, with no love, romance or difficult emotion that I was in no mood to write about. I absolutely loved writing Iced. It was a free, fun place to be and I got to crack myself up with the Mega.

But while writing Iced, the second story arc continued stalking me, urging me to get back to it. Too much unsaid, undone. And while writing Iced, I realized the advent of “Jada” was going to make Mac’s return mandatory. My muse had been right all along but I’d insisted on muscling it in a different direction.

That doesn’t mean I’m sorry I wrote Iced. I’m not. It’s in the top three of my own favorite books. I’ve been proud of each book I’ve written, aware that it’s been the best I could do at the given hour. I’ve tried my damndest to live up to what the Muse asks of me, even when I don’t understand it. That’s our sacred Compact.

I sat down to gently merge the two series back together but then something happened to me in my personal life that completely fucked me up.

There’s a reason I hired a sniper, learned to shoot guns in 2012 and got licensed to carry concealed.

There’s a reason I hired a Russian to train me in Systema.

There’s a reason I took a year off from writing between Iced and Burned.

That’s a story I’ll probably never tell. If I do, it will be as fiction.

Needless to say, it shattered me. Beyond shattered. It silenced me. I crawled until I could stand. I stood until I could walk. And when I could move in a forwardly direction again, I went home to Cincinnati, set up my desk in my new house and wrote the quote on the wall that I now understood, marveling at how the Muse and my life were in such flawless collusion that I got to precisely the place I needed to be.

I know intimately Mac’s vulnerability, her immobilization and passivity, I know intimately her sense of powerlessness, of raw terror, her loss of confidence facing a psychopath. I would no more leave her there than I would myself.

Life has beautiful symmetry, pattern and purpose.

What you have become is the price you paid for the things you thought you wanted.

Choose carefully those things you want. Understand the cost.

What happens to the soldiers when the war is over and they go home?

If they’re very lucky, they go home to family and friends, people who understand they are no longer the same and never will be again. They go home to a place of healing and love.

I’ve been very lucky.

My characters will be, too.