The Hunter And The Hunted

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When my publishers asked if I’d consider writing an Otherworld short story for a pre-Thirteen eSpecial, I jumped at the chance. I knew exactly which character I wanted to write about: Eve Levine.

When Eve was first introduced in the Otherworld series in Stolen, she didn’t actually appear in the book-she’d died before the story began. Eve was only important for the role she’d played in the life of her young daughter, Savannah, and for the problems her reputation and past would bring for Savannah’s new guardian, Paige.

Yet as Eve developed, she became a fully-fledged character, itching for her time on stage. She got that chance in the fourth book of the series, Industrial Magic, when Paige winds up in the afterlife and Eve makes a fateful bargain to get her out.

That bargain played out in the next book, Haunted, where Eve got her own story. She hasn’t been an easy character to work into the other books, though. Being in the afterlife, she exists in a separate world and can overlap with other characters’ stories only as a ghost. That limits her potential, which makes me thrilled for any chance to give her a story, as I do here, in Off-Duty Angel.

Another Otherworld character who doesn’t get to narrate very often is Clayton Danvers. None of my guys do. When Bitten launched the series, the official title was Women of the Otherworld… and I was so happy to have an actual series that I didn’t stop to think that it meant my protagonists would all be women. So I quickly began “cheating” by letting the guys narrate short stories and novellas. One of the first of these stories was Stalked, which returns to my werewolves, Elena Michaels and Clayton Danvers, from Bitten. Stalked was originally published in the anthology My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon almost five years ago, which means most readers have missed it. I’ve been wanting to reprint it for a while, and this was my chance.

As the Otherworld series draws to a close, it seems fitting to celebrate it with a return to Clay and Elena in Stalked. And Off-Duty Angel makes the perfect segue into Thirteen, where Eve will… Well, you’ll have to check out the excerpt for that.

Happy reading!