Radiant Shadows: Beginnings
Author Sarah Baethge
Author Bio
Sarah was born in Houston, Texas in 1982. She grew up in Eastern Texas and North Louisiana. When younger, she had never seriously considered becoming a writer until she was in a bad car wreck when driving between home and college in 2000 and decided there was no real reason that she should wait to try. Actually, she was much more interested in math and science, and is probably still something of a little nerd.
Sarah has always enjoyed reading. You could say that Michael Crichton is a big reason why she likes science fiction. Stephen King and Anne Rice have definitely led her imaginings through a bit of slightly twisted fantasy. There are far more authors she has read and loved, so she has even tried to set about reviewing a few books to share her thanks. Reading the works of new, unknown authors can hold surprises.
Now Sarah lives on her step-mother’s donkey ranch in central Texas where she tries to spend a bit of time writing each day. She enjoys doing so much that you would have a hard time trying to do otherwise now. For her, the craft of writing can be as fun as reading.
Description
The story begins by telling of how a human named Stephen Brown finds himself caught helping a group of vampires who are working their hardest to get along with human people yet also trying their hardest not to be seen as people. Because a vampire named Randy Martin is happily killing people in ways that could negate their efforts, Steve has agreed to help human magicians that may have a way to stop the rogue vampire.
Unbeknown to Stephen and to Caroline (one of the women he is trying to help), the rites that they were attempting to enact leave them both very weakened and unable to fight effectively against what is happening. Although the eventual outcome is supposed to confer great vampire-fighting power, immediately it does nothing useful.
Marshall Bretter is the human boyfriend of Caroline (that Stephen is trying to work with), yet he personally has no belief that any of what he sees as ‘that vampire nonsense’ could possibly be real. He may just find himself unwittingly caught in the middle of the fight to bring down Randy because he doesn’t want to see his girlfriend threatened as she is by Randy. How can he stand up against what he refuses to acknowledge?
Phyllis Wicket is another human friend of Stephen. She has a unique perspective of the situation, because as a child she was adopted by
one of those vampires who thinks that it is better to try and get along with humans. What others often dread, she has learned to just see as a normal fact of life. She quickly decides that it is her duty to stop Randy before his killings stir up too many problems for her vampire friends.
When the power that Caroline and Stephen were trying to enable comes into effect, will the risk that they took be worth it?
Will Marshall be able to save both himself and Caroline from a monster that he doesn’t even believe in?
Will Phyllis be a help to the situation at all, or will she just become a victim herself because of her strange belief in ‘nice’ vampires?
Book excerpt
Believe me; I never imagined the eventual result I was left with.
When I was called to stand before that vampire high council myself, the oddness of the situation had me a little concerned that their whole event may just be a dramatic bit of show before I was killed/possibly turned (vampires seem to enjoy creating eerie situations like that for their own amusement), the only reason I felt that I might possibly keep my human life was because of the presence of one specific other human I saw who was sitting among them.
And you have this admission of nervousness coming from a guy who had long ago simply decided that the risk of becoming a vampire was just an unmentioned, yet rather obvious, chance I had taken when signing the contract for my job.
I worked as something of a human diplomat within the HVA (Human-Vampire Alliance). This is the organization that exists to tend the fragile threads of agreement both sides want, in order to prevent some type of all-out supernatural war between our two societies. If you ask why this is necessary, then I’m sure you can’t understand exactly how many thousands of vampires really do exist.
That one human I’m talking about was Caroline Ace, a steadfast human huntress who outwardly despised most vampires. There is no way that she would voluntarily attend a death or turning ceremony, and she certainly didn’t look unhappy as if she were being held there against her will.
–oh sure, like no vampire has ever thought of breeding and keeping a supply of people in a tiny dark little basement full of cages reminiscent of some sort of inhumane egg producing facility. ‘Twould make things a bit easier at their end of the equation, something like that. Yet, I doubt somehow that their blood-cow choices would include a huntress.
Childish happy ideas about keeping our dark brethren content with animal blood are really something of a fairy-tale too. Understand please; some sort of iron or hemoglobin doesn’t nourish a vampire’s body like it would yours. Vampires are dead. Every person that becomes a vampire has first died. A dead body has no need of nourishment.
When the life in a body ends, that living energy normally produced in the brain simply drains out through the jugular because it can no longer cling directly to the body that produced it; in the moments just after death, this force has been knocked loose enough that it can be stolen by a vampire who moves to take it quickly enough. Sure, some vampires develop a taste for the blood itself, yet the chemicals within this fluid have very little use to their dead organs.
When a vampire takes someone’s blood, what they are ‘feeding’ on is human life. By ‘life’ I mean that energy or spirit of self existing within, throughout a living person that their healthy body will continue to replenish within itself until death. You might scoff were I
Author Website
http://www.facebook.com/SarahBaethge
