Hello Everyone!
Can't Fight Fate is now on sale! Yay!
You can get the book on Amazon now!Nina nodded, understanding what she meant. “So, how do you know those colloquialisms?”EXCERPT“Oh!” the Darklore Queen laughed. “Big fan of How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures of Old Christine. Whenever I reap, I always set out time to marathon watch each show. Sucked when Christine got canceled though. Got to find a new show.”
“How do you marathon watch? Do you have a place to live while you’re there? I thought reapers weren’t able to stay on Earth very long, or weren’t allowed to.”
The queen raised a brow, set down her tea cup on the side table, and folded her arms across the back of the couch so she could lay her chin on them. “Curious, aren’t you? We aren’t supposed to stay with humans because we reek of death. Drives some people crazy, makes them do crazy things. We either reap or we take a human here. We used to anyway. When they’re saturated with death, it just doesn’t affect them anymore. They become desensitized to the compulsions of our power.”
Nina nodded and reached for the glass of milk beside her empty plates. The Darklore Queen made a noise, and Nina looked over the rim of her glass at the woman. “You sound old, like you’re pushing eighty.”
Huh?
“I’m older than dirt, honey, and I can talk just about any way I want because I’ve been through every life cycle.” She pointed to Nina. “You, on the other hand, are a twenty-something-year-old human. You’re young and pretty and smart. I don’t know why you’re trying to suffocate those traits in lieu of the impervious, cold bitch persona you got going on.”
She flinched back at the description and the queen softened her words, “All I’m saying it that you're in your twenties. The world shouldn’t be on your shoulders yet.”
The words staggered Nina, and she set down the cup. “You’re right.”
“Course I’m right. I’ve had over a millennia to say what I mean and mean what I say. Words are great like that. Real comforting. Real beautiful.”
Tears welled up in Nina’s eyes at the thought of her age. She wasn’t as old as the queen, but she looked it. Haggard, bags under her eyes, weariness in her step. She’d gone from twenty-three to sixty-two in a few months. It wasn’t surprising, just a little sad.
Every day was a fight against some new threat, that threat had a couple of years on her. So Nina had started to shed everything that resembled youth in favor of wisdom gained with age. Maybe if she started looking and acting a hundred, all the wisdom and power that came with the age would come to her.
“Oh, Nina,” the queen sighed softly as she rose from her side of the couch and came to crouch in front of Nina. “Age does not make you inherently wiser, it just makes you older.
“And sweetheart,” she added gently, brushing a stray curl behind Nina’s ear, “you don’t have to be what everyone wants you to be. You’re not going to like that person. And sooner or later, the people following you won’t either. You’re young, but that’s not a bad thing. We are all children until we are tested. We just might not look it.”