“No,” she insisted again. “Because high school sucked, and I’d rather spend that night doing anything else with you.”
His lips tilted up. “Anything else can cover a lot of ground.”
She grinned. “Yes, it can.”
He looped an arm around her waist and pressed a kiss to her neck just beneath her ear. “All right. We won’t go.”
“You see?” Marcus said smugly. “Crisis averted.”
Seth shook his head. “I’m out.”
I wrote this one for an event Paranormal Haven held in May 2013. It can almost be considered a deleted scene from In Still Darkness because I imagined the events in it taking place early in Richart and Jenna’s story before Richart started venturing into the store to strike up conversations with her.
A shadow among shadows, Richart watched Jenna stride through the darkened parking lot toward the store, preparing to embark upon yet another grueling night shift. Though petite, she moved with long, confident strides that swiftly ate up the cracked and stained asphalt and made it nearly impossible for him to drag his gaze away from her shapely form. Her head swiveled from side to side as she kept an eye on her surroundings, allowing him brief glimpses of her face.
His own eyes, preternaturally sharp, searched for but found no threats lurking.
Oblivious to his presence, Jenna disappeared through the front doors. He smiled as he heard her greet her friend Debbie, laughed at the joke she cracked and Debbie’s witty rejoinder.
“Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar),” performed by the Doors, split the night, driving him to retrieve his cell phone and answer a call from—he glanced at the screen—his Second. “Yes?”
“Code blue! Code blue!” came Sheldon’s urgent greeting.
“What?”
“Code blue! Code blue! Or code red! Wait. Which one is it if it’s an emergency?”
Richart groaned. “What have you done now? I thought you were out on a date.”
“I was,” Sheldon said, the panic in his voice temporarily giving way to disgruntlement, “but she bailed on me as soon as she saw I was taking her to a carnival.”
Richart frowned. “Why? I thought women liked that sort of thing.” And he knew Sheldon had really been looking forward to tonight, yet another first date. The boy couldn’t seem to land a second, not that Richart could talk.
“I did, too. I mean, how many times have we seen couples make out on carnival rides in chick flicks?”
“Too many times to count,” Richart responded dryly. “Did your date leave before or after you tried to grope her on the Ferris wheel?”
“We didn’t make it to the Ferris wheel. We didn’t make it through the gates. Apparently she thinks carnivals are for kids and that they’re juvenile and… I can’t remember the other big word she used. The bottom line is they aren’t sophisticated enough for her.”
Richart pursed his lips. “If she wanted someone sophisticated, why did she agree to go out with you?”
“Oh, ha ha ha. I can be sophisticated when I want to be. Wasn’t I the one who—?”
“Sheldon?” Richart interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Weren’t you calling about some kind of emergency?”
“Oh crap! Right! Code blue! Code—”
“Just tell me what it is!” Richart snapped, then counted to ten.
“Right. I need you to meet me in the tunnel of love.”
Richart remained silent for a long moment. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Do I even want to know what you’re doing in there?”
“Nothing pervy!” Sheldon instantly replied. “I followed some vamps in here and have them cornered.”
Alarm rose. “You what?”
“They were hunting a human couple—drunk, easy prey, you know how it goes—so I followed them in and… intervened before they could attack.”
“Damn it, Sheldon. You know Seconds aren’t supposed to actively hunt vampires on your own! You don’t have their speed or strength or—”
“What else was I supposed to do? I knew you were busy stalking Jenna and didn’t want to interrupt.”
Richart ground his teeth. “I’m not stalking her. I’m watching over her.”
“Whatever you say, man.”
“Where is the carnival located?”
Sheldon told him.
Richart’s surroundings disappeared. First darkness, then the outskirts of the carnival grounds replaced them as he teleported. Four feet away from him, a woman stood with her head down, texting away on a cell phone. The toddler clutching her skirt stared up at Richart with wide eyes and a gaping mouth as pink cotton candy melted on the child’s tongue.
A hasty glance around confirmed that no one else had noticed his sudden appearance. Relieved, Richart offered the boy a smile and a wink, then strode through the gates and began to search for the tunnel of love.
“How many are we talking?” he asked Sheldon.
“Vampires? Three.”
That Sheldon, a human who lacked their preternatural speed and strength, had gotten the best of even one vampire was impressive, particularly since he was likely unarmed.
“Where are they? What are they doing?” Relief suffused Richart as he finally spotted the tunnel of love, its exterior as gaudy as he had feared it would be.
“I sort of immobilized them,” Sheldon said uneasily. “But I don’t think it’s gonna hold much longer, so you might want to haul ass—” A crash sounded. “Oh crap.” Click.
Screams erupted from the tacky tunnel.
Groaning, Richart pocketed his phone and raced forward.
The internet provides authors with a wide variety of methods they can use to promote new releases. One I continue to use to this day is a virtual book tour or blog tour. I’ve launched one for every book I’ve released, each of which included a variety of posts like dream casts, playlists, Author Q&As, and top 5 lists. But my favorite posts to write have always been the character interviews.
If you’ve joined me on the tours, you will undoubtedly recognize some of these. I’ve written quite a lot of them over the past decade or so. Some can still be found by those who are determined enough to ferret them out. Many, however, are no longer available because the blogs on which they appeared either no longer exist, deleted older posts when they updated or reinvented themselves, or simply lost their archives when they moved to a new host.
Also, not everyone enjoys spending time on social media, which is where I usually promoted the posts. So quite a few fans of the series don’t know these interviews took place. I’m nevertheless asked about them so often by those who do that I thought I would compile the many character interviews Sheldon and others have conducted over the years into this collection so you can have them all in one place. My purpose with each was to make fans laugh and hopefully entice new readers into giving the series a try. To that end, most of the interviews include a sentence or two explaining what gifted ones and immortals are. But beyond that, each is unique.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. These interviews, after all, are what made me come to love Sheldon so much that I expanded his role in the series beyond what I originally intended for him. I even allowed him to interview me at the end of the collection.