Title:
Windwalker’s Mate
Author:
Margaret L. Carter
Genre:
Dark Paranormal Romance
Book Blurb:
Shannon’s little boy, Daniel, has disturbing psychic powers. He talks to the wind–and it listens.
All Shannon wants is a normal life. She wants to forget the cult of the Windwalker, a dark god from another dimension, and the terrifying night when her child was conceived. But her first love, Nathan, son of the cult leader, contacts her for the first time since that horrific ceremony. He claims his father is stalking Shannon and Daniel.
Whose child is Daniel, Nathan’s or the Windwalker’s?
Nathan’s father plans to use Daniel to open a gate between dimensions and unleash chaos on our world. To save her child and become reconciled with her first love, Shannon must embrace the strange powers she has rejected.
Excerpt:
After one night at the farm on the Eastern Shore, Shannon had decided to stay. She remembered how safe and sheltered she felt with Dr. Lange at first. For the first time in her life, an adult knew about her “gift” and accepted her anyway. Contrary to the vague fear that had troubled her at first, he didn’t keep her prisoner. He even encouraged her to call her mother from a pay phone, so she’d know Shannon was safe. To Shannon’s relief, the answering machine picked up her call. Leaving a brief message, she felt she’d done her duty and could start a new life with a clear conscience. Like the other five kids already living on the Order’s property, she soon started calling Nathan’s father Professor Hugh.
He hadn’t lied about the other teenagers’ wild talents. With his help, they all practiced control. Shannon became friends with the boy who started fires; another boy who, under stress, spontaneously teleported any distance between two feet and the width of a room; a girl who suffered confused glimpses of the near future; and twin girls who fell into trances and projected their minds out of their bodies. All were younger than Shannon, twelve or thirteen. She gradually became aware that Professor Hugh envied their psi powers, because he had only a modest talent for influencing people with his mesmeric voice, plus a small portion of Nathan’s strong ability to sense things by touching people and objects.
When the teenagers weren’t busy practicing their wild talents, the professor expected them to help with cleaning and maintenance chores. He didn’t impose rigid housekeeping standards, though, and as for outside work, he didn’t mandate anything more than occasional mowing of the lawn in front of the house. He let the rest of the land grow wild. This routine left his guests plenty of time for goofing off, as long as they kept up their studies.
He also expected them to earn their GED certificates. At first Shannon greeted this news with a suppressed groan of dismay. She discovered, though, that the professor had a lively teaching style that could render subjects like calculus not completely brain-numbing. She grew to think of him as a kindly uncle figure. The new life in the Order even included holidays, although Christmas was labeled Yuletide, and the solstice and equinox celebrations would have shocked her churchgoing mother.
Nathan made everything worthwhile, including the isolation of living in the middle of nowhere, hardly ever seeing anyone outside the Order of the Wind Between the Worlds. Shannon didn’t miss mundane society with him to occupy her free time. The heat of their first kiss, on a blanket in a hollow shaded by the drooping limbs of a giant tree, sparkled through her veins and melted away all fears and regrets. Secret moments like that even made up for the weirdest of the psychic exercises Professor Hugh demanded.
Not long after her arrival, he initiated her into the bizarre religion he practiced. To her surprise, he really believed in vast entities who had ruled Earth in the prehistoric past and would reward those who opened the way for them to return from the dimension where they’d been exiled. Later she found out he’d picked up this strange lore while researching manuscripts on obscure cults in the library of a small college in Massachusetts. She went along with the rituals and lessons to humor him. Besides, at bleaker moments in the middle of the night, she almost enjoyed the fantasy of watching most of the world get wiped out. Who else cared about her, anyway, besides the people in the Order? Her stepfather had made her life miserable, and her mother hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him.
After a while, though, as the prophecy began to seem more real, it became more scary than alluring. Sometimes she considered going home. Two factors stopped her, fear of her stepfather and passion for Nathan. She kept reminding herself that the Stalker Between the Stars and Its apocalyptic return had to be as much of a myth as the Norse Twilight of the Gods. She had to repeat that assurance to herself most emphatically after each of Professor Hugh’s group hypnosis sessions. He wanted to train the boys and girls to open their minds to other dimensions and catch glimpses of alien planes of existence. Sitting in the circle in lotus position, sinking into trance under his feather-light touch, she found him almost creepy. She sensed a craving that made her cringe, not sexual, but a kind of psychic hunger.
Sometimes she felt uneasy enough to mention her anxiety to Nathan. Whenever she did, he said things like, “I won’t let Dad hurt you. If all this ever freaks you out enough that you really want to leave, I’ll help you. But I sure hope you won’t.” A kiss usually followed that statement. “Anyway, what’s the harm? He’s only trying to induce visions, nothing physical.”
She did see visions. Exploding stars and blinding meteors in the void of interstellar space. Vast, ruined cities of cyclopean stone blocks etched with bizarre hieroglyphics. Blasted landscapes under skies of alien hues. Undersea forests prowled by tentacled monsters with enormous, luminous eyes. The younger teenagers didn’t share those perceptions. They reported dizziness and kaleidoscopic swirls of colored lights, but nothing more definite. Gradually they all dropped out of those sessions except Nathan and Shannon, the only ones able to see beyond the borders of this world…
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Author Biography:
Reading DRACULA at the age of twelve ignited
Margaret L. Carter’s interest in a wide range of
speculative fiction and inspired her to become a writer.
Vampires, however, have always remained close to her
heart. Her work on vampirism in literature includes four
books and numerous articles. She holds a PhD in
English from the University of California (Irvine), and
her dissertation contained a chapter on DRACULA. In
fiction, she has written horror, fantasy, and paranormal
romance, as well as sword-and-sorcery fantasy in
collaboration with her husband, a retired naval officer.
Recent publications include AGAINST THE DARK DEVOURER (Lovecraftian dark paranormal romance) and spring-themed contemporary light fantasy BUNNY HUNT.
Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies,
including the “Darkover” and “Sword and Sorceress”
series. She and her husband live in Maryland and have
four children, several grandchildren and great-
grandchildren, a St. Bernard, and two cats. Please visit
Carter’s Crypt:
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