Title: Soothsayer
Author: Cari Z
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: January 30
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 68200
Genre: Romance, Action, urban fantasy, magic, magic user, psychic/soothsayer, myth/folklore, mafia, reunited, road trip, spirits, posession
Author: Cari Z
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: January 30
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 68200
Genre: Romance, Action, urban fantasy, magic, magic user, psychic/soothsayer, myth/folklore, mafia, reunited, road trip, spirits, posession
Add to Goodreads
Synopsis
Cillian Kelly can look into people’s eyes and see their fates. He’s running from a past filled with mistakes, lying low and selling his services on the sly. When he learns that Sören Egilsson, a man who sacrificed himself so Cillian could escape imprisonment two years ago, is somehow still alive, Cillian has to find out how. What he gets is the body of the man he loves possessed by an ancient spirit who draws Cillian into a battle to the death for the right to control Sören’s fate, and the power that comes with it.
Excerpt
Soothsayer Cari Z © 2017 All Rights Reserved
Soothsayer Cari Z © 2017 All Rights Reserved
My phone buzzed, interrupting my musing. I frowned as I pulled it out of my jacket pocket. Only a dozen people had this number, and I wasn’t expecting to talk to any of them any time soon. I unlocked it and looked at my new message. Move ten paces to the right. My feet were moving even before my brain caught up, obedience was so instinctual. Two seconds later, I was out of the mouth of the alley, and three seconds after that, a beat-up silver sedan coming down the road was clipped by a delivery van and veered straight into the corner of the building. It wasn’t moving fast, thankfully, but the crash was plenty loud, especially since I was just a few feet away from the point of impact. A memory flashed through my mind, one of my personal rare and painful gems. I was in the backseat of an old Lincoln, and I was very small. My feet wouldn’t have touched the floor even if I hadn’t had my knees squished to my chest, and my face was pressed to the knobby joints so hard they were leaving red blotches on my cheeks. The man driving was on a phone—an old-school cell phone, clunky in his hand, distracting. He wasn’t paying attention, but I knew the moment before the car was hit and covered my head with my hands, so when I went flying into the door, it didn’t hurt as much. Metal crunched, and bright spots flashed across the darkness behind my eyelids as the car spun and spun… I shook my head and took a deep breath, focusing on the present. The van hadn’t stopped, but I didn’t bother trying to catch its license plate number―there were plenty of people exclaiming and getting on their phones. I headed over to the driver’s side and opened the door, but didn’t reach in to touch the woman who had been driving. She was moving under her own power, picking her head up off the remains of her airbag and whimpering softly. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…” “It’s all right,” I said gently. I might not be a martyr, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel compassion for another person, especially one who’d just been thrown into a wall. “You’re okay. Just a little accident. There’s an ambulance coming to help you.” I could already hear it in the distance. We were only a few blocks from a major hospital. “Can you look at me for a moment?” She blearily turned, and as soon as our eyes met, I sighed and backed out of the way. One of the employees at the auto-painting store took my place, and a second later—bam. The fucking Ace of Cups moment. Who found true love as a result of a car accident? This wasn’t exactly the heartwarming scene I’d envisioned getting me through the day earlier. “Are you all right?” the newcomer asked frantically. “What’s your name? I’m Felix. I’m gonna stay with you until the ambulance gets here, okay? Oh Jesus, are you all right?” “I’m…I think so?” the woman said, her voice gaining a little bit of strength. “I’m Paula.” “Paula, hey.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back. I rolled my eyes. “Nice to meet you.” For fuck’s sake. Well, at least the settlement from the trucking company would give them a nice nest egg to get their new place together. I turned away and walked to the end of the block before getting out my phone again and making a call. She picked up on the second ring. “Hi, baby.” “What, you can see me getting smeared across a wall, but you don’t bother to let me know about having a gun pulled on me?” “Cillian.” My mother sounded half apologetic, half resigned. “You know it doesn’t work like that.” Yes, fine, I did know that, but I didn’t feel like being reasonable right now. “So you didn’t see that this morning, then?” “Did you need me to see it?” I wasn’t about to go down the self-sufficiency road with her. It meant a surefire argument, and I was still buzzing with adrenalin from being so close to the car crash. “No,” I said flatly. “I guess not.”
Purchase
NineStar Press | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Smashwords
Cari Z. is a Colorado girl who loves snow and sunshine. She writes award-winning LGBTQ fiction featuring aliens, supervillains, soothsayers, and even normal people sometimes.
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | eMail | Blog
Creepy Lullabies FTW
Soothsayer wasn’t a book with a soundtrack. Some of my books are—I find the right songs and listen to them over and over again while I write them. Not so with Soothsayer. Because of the way I wrote it—one chapter per week until I was done (yeah, I spent 30 weeks writing it, which in retrospect is kind of a lot for a 67k novel, but that was the method to this madness) I didn’t get the chance to settle into a song. And that was fine, until I suddenly needed one for the narrative. Specifically, I needed a lullaby.
A…lullaby? What, because of the profusion of infants in the story? No. Because I wanted a song that would soothe a drowned soul to sleep, something tender and cruel all at once, and the best source for songs that sing the unspeakable is lullabies. In so many different cultures, lullabies tackle the toughest subject matter—that of separation and fear of death—and juxtapose it with sweet melodies and a loving embrace. Lullabies are love and fear and anxiety all rolled into one, and there’s a scene in Soothsayer that craves that emotional combination. So I went looking for Icelandic lullabies that fit the bill, and I wasn’t disappointed.
I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81uD4Gcb22U, which if you click it will like you to a song called Móðir mín í kví kví. It has all the elements I was looking for: the urge to comfort shadowed by the specter of death, and the depth of a tale that hasn’t had all of its dark and uncomfortable pieces brought to light. It’s the only song I listened to while writing the book, and the only one I directly referenced. Give it a listen! It’ll add a new dimension to your day.
Tour Schedule
1/30 On Top Down Under
1/31 Love Bytes Reviews
1/31 Out Of My Head
2/1 Slashsessed
2/3 We Three Queens
No comments:
Post a Comment