It’s #bookqw and the ‘rain’ shelter piques my hero’s curiosity.
More from Chapter 3:
Wellspring Collective, Blighted Basin
Daeryn Darkcoat’s paws carried his polecat form in a weasel’s rolling leaps along a dirt road. The setting moon, just past half, lit Wellspring Collective’s rows of plants in the sharp grays and blacks of his nocturnal vision. Butternut squash on the right and a late planting of beans to the left. Nothing amiss.
And yet squeaks, pitched higher than the thrum of crickets, carried across his assigned patrol section. Perking his ears, Daeryn caught the stray sound again. There. Homing in, he slunk his long, brown body down the hill to the open front of an equipment shed.
Scritch…scritch, scritch.
Not calls, but scratching. Claws on metal. Deep shadows hid one of the pests they’d been hunting for days, but it was there. Somewhere. Daeryn padded closer to the row of tillers and raised his snout.
No scent but engine oil. He hesitated. This animal’s actions were different. What farm pest entered a rain shelter full of equipment when hundreds of acres of vegetables lay available for the taking?
Scritch…
Daeryn charged through the tillers.
A shadow shifted at the back wall. The forest of metal legs stuck out everywhere, the low water tanks blocked his leaps. He twisted and—
—slammed into an inches-wide crack, nose tickled by disappearing fur.
Damn. He scuttled back, skirted machines and tore out of the shed. Behind it, he jumped on a crate and paused on his toes, ready to spring. Broad squash leaves covered the still field.
Nothing. Nothing.
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Yes, Daeryn is a shapeshifter, and not the usual wolf or cougar. A European Polecat is a common night hunter in the UK. The more I researched this animal, the better I loved the mix predator and playfulness that the animal side brought to Daeryn’s personality in the series.
Polecats are in the Mustelid family, related to mink and weasels, and are the sole ancestor of the ferret, which many folks are familiar with. They hunt a variety of small animals–rodents, amphibians, reptiles and birds.
Throughout The Luminated Threads books, Daeryn shares his story as well, and often while in polecat form. He is a night guard and protects the crop fields on Wellspring Collective, which naturally leads to him possessively guarding Annmar. I love that my cover designer was able to convey both his forms in the cover of volume 2.
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Ingenious Victorian contraptions. Enchanted farmlands. Can a struggling orphan switch gears and run full steam into freedom?
The Unraveling is the first volume in a serialized novel, The Luminated Threads, that is complete in three volumes.
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