Low: “Half Light”
Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Saturday Night Special”
Mark Lanegan: “Bleeding Muddy Water,” “Phantasmagoria Blues,” “Miracle,” “Pentacostal” (with Duke Garwood)
Men Without Hats: “Safety Dance”
Oingo Boingo: “Weird Science”
People in Planes: “Vampire”
Screaming Trees: “Gospel Plow,” “Where the Twain Shall Meet,” “Dime Western”
Scorpions: “The Zoo,” “Send Me an Angel”
Shriekback: “New Man,” “Dust and a Shadow”
Stone Temple Pilots: “No Way Out,” “Glide”
Talking Heads: “I Zimbra,” “Slippery People”
Thomas Dolby: “She Blinded Me with Science”
Thompson Twins: “Watching,” “Love on Your Side”
3 Doors Down: “Loser”
Wang Chung: “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”
Verve, The: “Bittersweet Symphony”
Yoko Kanno: “Lithium Flower”
Zero 7: “In the Waiting Line”
Dear Reader:
I hope you enjoyed Crimson Veil, book fifteen of the Otherworld Series. I love writing this world, it expands and grows with each book, and I see so many possibilities ahead for the D’Artigo sisters.
Next, stay tuned for the last book in the Indigo Court Series, Night’s End, coming July 2014, in which Cicely and her friends face the final battle against Myst and the Indigo Court. Turn the page for a sneak peek at the first chapter.
While the Indigo Court Series will be wrapping up, the Otherworld series will not! Priestess Dreaming (a Camille book) comes out in the fall of 2014, and there will be more books from Otherworld after that. I am also starting a spin-off series set in the Otherworld altaverse—same time frame, different characters.
The first book in the Fly By Night Series—Flight From Death—will be out in 2015. This series will not take the place of the Otherworld Series, but will run concurrently! It’s exciting for me to have the opportunity to bring you more stories from the Otherworld.
For those of you new to my books, I hope you’ve enjoyed your first foray into my worlds. For those of you who have followed me for a while, I want to thank you for once again revisiting the world of Camille, Menolly, and Delilah.
Bright Blessings,
The Painted Panther
Yasmine Galenorn
I stood on a hillock near the barrow. The land was covered with snow and ice, the horizon stretching out in a vast panorama of winter. It was like the perfect picture: The snow gleamed under an overcast sky, sparkling with the cold. Here and there, patches of ice glistened the faint blue that winter ice tends to take. Evergreens—firs and cedars—stood cloaked in white blankets, the snow weighing down their limbs to touch the ground.
My breath was visible in the icy chill of early dusk, a cloud of white every time I exhaled. But the pristine chill that made the very air shimmer barely penetrated the white feathered cloak I wore. And even the cold that did make it through had ceased to bother me over the weeks. For I was the Queen of Snow and Ice now, and cold was no longer an enemy.
As I surveyed the land around my barrow, I was aware that, not ten yards away, Check, my personal guard, kept watch. Beside him stood Fearless, who had recovered from his wounds. The Cambyra Fae had healed quickly, even from the severe wounds he had sustained from the Shadow Hunters, and while he had been in great pain for several weeks, now he was back in action. As an interesting side effect, I sensed his attitude toward me had shifted. Where before, he had been doing his duty, now there seemed to be a loyalty in place that I hadn’t expected.
I listened to the slipstream carefully, searching for information. The realm of Snow and Ice might be mine to command, but it was vulnerable, and Myst was still out there. While I trusted the scouts and my advisors, I had begun to realize that my awareness had heightened since the coronation, and I could—if I listened carefully—sense Myst when she was around. After all, in a lifetime long before this one, she had been my mother and I had been her daughter Cherish, the hope of the Indigo Court, until I betrayed both her and my people.
Ulean, my wind Elemental, swept around me. She was stronger here, the winter kingdom agreed with her. While she’d always come through clear to me—ever since being bound to me when I was six years old—here, in this frozen realm, I had become even more aware of her.
At times, I thought I could catch a visible glimpse of her. Strict, my advisor, had told me it was one of the side effects from taking the crown—one in a long line of shifts and changes that I had been going through. Some days, I looked in the mirror and wasn’t entirely sure of who I was.
Cicely, there is danger close by. A looming shadow. I believe Myst is on the rise again. Ulean swept past me, swirling snow in the gust of her wake.
It was only a matter of time. We knew she was regrouping. I’ve been hoping she would hold off until Rhiannon and I are more settled in our positions—that it would take her more time to re-strengthen her forces, but I don’t think we have that leeway. I’m afraid we’ll be fighting sooner than we’d hoped.
Shivering, I pulled my cloak tightly around my shoulders. The owl feathers used to make the cape had been gathered one by one, gifted by my Uwilahsidhe brethren. I was half magic-born, and half Uwilahsidhe—a branch of the Cambyra Sidhe. We were the owl shifters. I’d only discovered the latter half of my heritage less than six weeks before. The cloak had been a wedding gift from my people.
We will do as we must. If we fail, Myst will extend her reach. She will take control of this realm and drive the eternal winter into the world to blanket the land with ice and snow. She will loose the ravenous appetites of her Shadow Hunters on anyone who stands in her way. We cannot let her win, Cicely, or everyone—the magic-born and the Weres and the yummanii—they will all be so much prey for the Vampiric Fae. Even the true vampires, Lannan and Regina’s people, will fall to her fury if we don’t stop her.
I reached out, trying to sense the danger she’d mentioned. It was like stretching a new muscle—one that wasn’t in body but within my spirit. Focusing, I sent out feelers, probing the landscape, creeping like vines through the slipstream. There, I could sense an arctic fox, and over there—the hare it was stalking. A ways beyond and I felt the chill of a group of Ice Elementals passing through, their focus so distant and alien that I couldn’t have deciphered their intent if anybody paid me to. But the creatures were my subjects, they were aligned to me, and so I simply touched their energy before I passed on.
Beyond the Ice Elementals, I came to a treeline, and the dark sentinels of the woodlands whispered rumors in my ears. There were creatures in the woods—creatures who did not belong here, even though they, too, were born of winter and hearkened to the dark months of the year.
I softly began to move forward, my attention drawn by a familiar presence in a stand of snow-covered bushes nearby. As I approached the Wilding Fae—I knew who she was—Check and Fearless flanked my sides.