Magic Claims Updates

Magic Claims is finished. Woooo, made it! Yay!

I have good news and bad news.

Good news: Magic Claims is officially a novel at 63,000 words. What does that mean?

Pages are not a good indicator. Magic Tides was 96 pages. These are not the actual book pages but manuscript pages. Magic Claims is somehow 275 pages. A lot more dialogue.

Look at it this way:

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – 38,421 words.

Magic Tides – 43,000 words.

Clean Sweep – around 60,000 words.

Magic Claims – 63,000 words.

Magic Bites – 92,000 words

So good news is there is more book. The bad news is that there is more book.

Magic Claims comes out on June 13th.

To everyone who preordered the ebook of Magic Claims at $4.99 price: thank you so much! Thank you for your support and belief in our work. We are so glad that you were able to purchase this book at a discount. Congratulations! Your preorder is safe and locked in.

Before June 1st: $4.99.

After June 1st: $5.99.

To take advantage of the promotional price, you have to preorder before June 1st.

::looks at Mod R:: I think we were as clear as we can be.

Please do not cancel your preorders to give us more money. We want you to enjoy our book at the promotional $4.99 price. It makes us happy. This is exactly why we are announcing it now. Thank you, BDH, for your awesomeness.

You can preorder here or at the retailer of your choice like Kobo:

::looks at BDH and says real fast:: Before June 1st, $4.99, after June 1st $5.99.

Watch Mod R get all the questions, hehe.

Print of Magic Claims

Print books will be available closer to the release day. We will try to do the preorder again, so you could get the print book earlier than release date. But there are no guarantees.

The preorder isn’t available right now, because we are about to go into edits and the manuscript isn’t yet final. We will announce print availability as soon as it goes up.

Audiobook of Magic Tides

The audiobook is going into production this Monday! Contracts are signed and deposits are paid. We are working on pronunciation guide. This will be a split narrator production, meaning parts of from Kate’s point of view will be read by a female narrator and parts from Curran’s point of view will be read by the male narrator.

They will not be doing the dialogue back and forth; the switch only happens when there is a point of view change. This is done because otherwise Kate and Curran’s sections will be confusing.

Audiobook of Magic Claims

The audiobook of Magic Claims will be recorded right after Magic Tides. The timeline is a little tight, so we don’t know if Magic Claims audio will be available at release, but you for sure won’t have a long wait. At worst, the delay, if it happens, should be a couple of weeks or so.

::collapses:: Snippet? To celebrate?

Fall in Wilmington was lovely. It was a perfect October day, full of golden sunshine and happy green trees. The locals told us that the foliage wouldn’t turn until November, and poplars and maples shading the streets proved them right.

The sky was a crystal-clear blue, and a slight breeze stirred random hair that had escaped my braid. The temperature in our fort was always lower than inland, and I’d optimistically wore my favorite light hoodie, grey with a green stripe.  If the weather turned any warmer, I’d have to take it off.

Around me Wilmington buzzed as Cuddles made her way through the old streets at an unhurried pace. Since the Shift, foot traffic had increased, because gas was expensive, chanting a car into life during magic took at least 15 minutes, and horses needed to be fed, secured, and took a lot of care. If the destination was less than 5 miles away, most people opted for walking, and Castle Street channeled a steady crowd: craftsmen coming back from lunch, shoppers heading to the markets, laborers, businesspeople, a couple of mercs, all on their way to somewhere.

The hot red dot that burned in my mind got hotter. A vampire, ahead of me, not too far.  I’d been watching it for about a mile, and I seemed to be getting closer.

To the left of me, on the empty lot, someone had set up a chicken market and it had drawn a crowd. The chicken vendor, a dark haired, older white man, waved a huge chicken around asking for bids.  She was grey and fluffy and seemed to be content to sit in his arms like a docile cat.

“… Lays 5 large brown eggs a week!”

That was a good-looking chicken with some serious egg laying power. I should probably look into that.

The Order Chapter of Wilmington chose a historic firehouse as its lair. The old brick building rose on the corner of Castle and 5^th Avenue, complete with a lovely red door and 4-story tall tower housing a large metal bell.  As I got past the chicken crowd, the tower came into view on my right. A neon-green, gaunt shape crouched on the tower’s top floor, by the bell, shaded from the sun by the tower’s small roof. 

There you are, precious.  We finally meet.

The vampire sat perfectly still, like a mint-green gargoyle. If a navigator had come to visit the Order, they would’ve taken their undead inside. There were only two reasons why a vampire would end up in the order’s tower.  Either the Order and the Farm were cooperating on something and the undead was keeping watch, or Barret and Claudia were taking potshots at each other, and Barrett had one of his necromancers park an undead there to annoy the Order.

Either way, this would be entertaining.

We reached the tower.  I dismounted, secured Cuddles to the rail, and walked inside.

The interior of the firehouse looked just as I had left it about three months ago: a single bright room with brick walls, sealed concrete floor, and large windows secured by thick grates. The two desks on the left were occupied, one by an athletic man in his thirties, with a handsome face and a ragged scar that crossed his neck drawing a dark slash on his light brown skin, and the other by a trim woman in her early twenties with tan skin and short blond hair, frosted with red dye.

Claudia sat at the larger desk on the right. She was in her fifties, with a round face, russet-brown skin, and a powerful build.  Her short curly hair was streaked with grey, and her eyes told you she had very little patience for your nonsense.

I gave her a big smile and a cheery wave. “Hello!”

The Knight-Protector gave me a flat stare.

The other two knights pretended to be absorbed in their paperwork.

“Yes?” Claudia asked me.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“Don’t we all.”

I had sent her a report on Darin’s rescue, complete with all the sins of the Order’s former knight-enchanter named Aaron spelled out in excruciating detail.  And there were a lot of sins. Kidnapping, imprisonment, human trafficking, conduct unbecoming a knight, reckless disregard when practicing magic…

I tilted my head and waited.

Above us, the undead shifted a foot to the left. Claudia glanced up. If she could’ve fired laser beams from her eyes, a smoking undead corpse would’ve plummeted to the ground in a fraction of a second.  So the vampire wasn’t a welcome guest.

This was a flex by Barret. He’d waited until the tech was up – otherwise the wards would’ve kept the undead off the building – and parked his vampire in the tower, knowing full well that the Order would never tolerate it. Claudia had to chase it off.  There was no question about it. But she also would have to avoid making a spectacle or damaging the vampire.  A spectacle would make the Order look weak, and any harm to the undead would escalate tensions with the Farm and again, would cost Order their street cred. Whichever party resorted to violence first would lose face.

“What do you want?” Claudia asked me.

“Access to Knight-Pathfinder Isaac Silverstein.”

Before I left the fort, I’d called down to Atlanta’s Chapter of the Order and asked Nick to look up Isaac Silverstein. After he told me that he wasn’t my secretary and we’d bickered for 10 minutes about who was keeping score on favors, he came back with an interesting tidbit.

 Silverstein was a really good pathfinder, highly decorated and experienced. He’d come to Penderton as a part of a 5-man knight team specifically dispatched to handle this problem. Five knights went in, Silverstein came out alone, and after he came out, he stuck around in the area.  Officially he was on an extended mental health leave.  Unofficially, he’d hung around Wilmington for the last six months, but the Order had no address for him. His mail was forwarded to the Chapter.

The Knights of Merciful Aid were like soldiers in enemy territory. When possible, they preferred the company of their own and the safety of their base, so Isaac was likely inside the Wilmington Chapter right now. He’d probably lived here for the last half a year.

“That’s a big ask,” Claudia said.

“I realize the knight-pathfinder is working through some things,” I said. “But I’m about to go into Pender Forest.”

“Ask the National Guard,” Claudia said. “They can brief you.”

“What’s the point? They didn’t see anything. Knight-Pathfinder Silverstein saw something, because instead of leaving, he’s here impersonating a monk. Like you said, it’s a big favor, but there are 5,000 people trapped in Penderton.”

She sighed. “You don’t need to be anywhere near that damn forest. I’m sure Penderton promised you the sky and the moon, but all you’ll get is pain and death. This isn’t me dissing you. This is me speaking as an expert with two decades of experience in the field: powerful people tried to resolve this and failed. This is above your paygrade. It’s not worth it.”

Claudia was trying to look out for me.  I felt so… touched. Genuinely touched. This meant three things: Claudia was the real deal, by-the-book knight, Nick didn’t tell her who I was, and I wouldn’t see Isaac Silverstein unless I convinced her that I was capable of surviving.

This would require a show of power.  

If it was just about me, I might have hesitated. Showing my cards to Claudia meant she would start digging deeper.  Eventually she’d figure out exactly who I was. But I wouldn’t go alone into the woods.  Curran would be with me, and we would be bringing Keelan and his crew.  I had already made the decision to take Penderton up on their generous land offer, cracking the door open.  Might as well open it all the way, so I could get through.

Letting go of the need to hide was surprisingly easy.

Above us, the vampire shifted again.

“I appreciate where you’re coming from,” I said. “But I already gave my word to Penderton. Getting the knight-pathfinder’s input would really help me.”

Claudia shook her head.  The world was filled with fools, and I was clearly the dumbest of them all.

I gave her a smile. “While you’re thinking it over, would you like me to get rid of your unwelcome visitor? I can take it off the tower without damaging it, and if you humor me, Barret won’t ever put one up there again.”

Claudia pondered me. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

She didn’t ask how I would do it. I pulled off my hoodie and held it out.  “I need one of your knights to put this on with the hood up, get on my mount, and ride around the block. The undead needs to see me leaving.”

I didn’t want Barret’s attention focused on me. Eventually he and I would have a reckoning, but not yet.  Not for a while.

Claudia nodded. The female knight walked over and took my hoodie. “Which horse is yours?”

“The black and white mammoth donkey up front.  Trust me, you can’t miss her.”