Counting down unto
The Eterna Files, my debut from Tor Books in a new Gaslamp Fantasy saga! In the coming days various excerpts will be forthcoming here and on the Tor sites.
-
Read on and check out my still-in-progress
Appearance schedule for book tour, launching first at WORD, Brooklyn on Feb 11 in NYC!
-
Pre-order a personalized, signed copy of The Eterna Files from the fabulous independent community bookstore WORD!
-
From
The Eterna Files cover:
London, 1882:
Queen
Victoria
appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division
Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and
persons. Spire, a skeptic driven to protect the helpless and see justice done,
is the perfect man to lead the department, which employs scholars and
scientists, assassins and con men, and a traveling circus. Spire's chief
researcher is Rose Everhart, who believes fervently that there is more to the
world than can be seen by mortal eyes.
Their first mission: find the Eterna Compound, which grants immortality.
Catastrophe destroyed the hidden laboratory in
New York City where Eterna was developed, but
the Queen is convinced someone escaped—and has a sample of Eterna.
Also searching for Eterna is an American, Clara Templeton, who helped start
the project after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln nearly destroyed her
nation. Haunted by the ghost of her beloved, she is determined that the Eterna
Compound—and the immortality it will convey—will be controlled by the
United States, not
Great Britain.
-
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR
THE ETERNA FILES:
“Hieber’s
formidable imagination is given free reign in this smart, boundlessly creative
Gaslamp fantasy. She blends historical fact and paranormal fiction with ease,
creating a world that is lush and fascinatingly strange, and reveals her
secrets sparingly, keeping fans on edge for more information about these
intriguingly powerful characters and the ties that bind them together. Patient
readers will be well rewarded for letting this haunting novel unfold around
them and savoring the expansive world and complex plot that Hieber has
constructed.” – Bridget Keown for RT Bookreviews Magazine
-
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS SERIES:
The Eterna Files follows a parallel storyline in two cities following a
complex cast of characters. If you like your stories very simple and
small-cast, this is not the series for you. Hopefully you won’t mind a host of
colorful, quirky characters in a darkly rich Victorian atmosphere. I write the
worlds I want to spend an increasingly deep amount of time in. So come along on
what has been called a fascinatingly strange journey with my whole madcap cast.
-
EXCERPT ONE: The Prologue! Why not start from the very beginning? They say that’s
a very good place to start.
-
PROLOGUE
-
The White
House, April 16, 1865
The sanity of a bloodied nation hung by a
precarious thread. Hundreds of thousands of bodies rotted in mass graves.
Mountains of arms and legs lay just beneath the earth in countless pits of
appendages. Thousands of young men had been torn into wingless birds, stunned,
harrowed, and half whole. No one had gone untouched by the war; everyone was
haunted. A gunshot in a theater tipped
the straining scales and the nation’s battered, broken heart faltered and
stopped.
This was the
world in which twelve-year-old Clara Templeton grieved. She wept for her land
with the kind of passion only a young, gifted sensitive could offer. When she
was called to the side of the first lady, she did not hesitate.
Clad in a black
taffeta mourning gown, Clara stood in a dimly candlelit hallway outside the first
lady’s rooms, awaiting admittance alongside her guardian, Congressman Rupert
Bishop, aged twenty-five—though his prematurely silver hair gave one pause as
to his age. He’d been silver-haired as long as she’d known him. When she’d
asked about it with a child’s tactlessness, he’d simply responded with a wink
and a smile: “It’s the fault of the ghosts.” Soon after, Bishop took her to her
first séance and Clara began to understand just how dangerous the thrall of
ghosts could be. . . .
A red-eyed maid opened the door and gestured
them in.
Inside the small
but well-appointed room, a low fire mitigated a cool draft and cast most of the
light in the room. Mary Todd Lincoln sat on a chair in the shadows, staring out
a small window, her bell-sleeved, black crepe dress spilling out in all
directions. Only the ticking of a fine clock on the mantel and the occasional
sniff from the weeping maid broke the silence. The congressman beckoned Clara
forward, into the firelight. Her step creaked upon the floorboards as her
petite body cast a long shadow behind her.
Finally the first
lady spoke in a quiet tremor. “Do you know why I called you here, Miss
Templeton?”
“I’ve a
supposition,” Clara replied quietly, nervously moving forward another step.
“But first, Mrs. Lincoln, my deepest sympathies—”
“When your
guardian here first brought you to visit the White House two years ago, you ran
up to me, a perfect stranger, and gave me an embrace from my William. My dead
William.”
“Yes, Mrs.
Lincoln,” Clara murmured, “I remember—”
“I need you now,
Miss Templeton,” the first lady began with a slightly wild look in her eyes,
“to give me an embrace from my dead husband.”
Alarmed, Clara
looked at Bishop, her eyes wide. The tall, elegantly handsome man lifted a
calming, gloved hand and Clara attempted to gather herself
“I . . . well,”
she stammered, “I’m unsure my gifts can work on command, Mrs.—”
“Try!” the
grieving widow wailed, turning to face the girl, her face drawn and hollowed.
Clara rushed over and fell to her knees beside the first lady, removing her kid
gloves to take Mary’s shaking, bare hands into hers.
“I know that he
is with you,” Clara murmured, tears falling from her bright green-gold eyes.
“The president is with all who mourn him—”
“Prove it,” Mary
Todd murmured. She snapped her head toward the door. “Rupert. You’re a spiritualist,
have you not trained Miss Templeton
since she became your ward?”
“Only charlatans
cue up the dead precisely when the grieving want them, Mary, you know that,”
Bishop said gently. “And this is far too vulnerable a time to try.” He shivered
suddenly. “Too many things want in.
We risk inviting malevolence, not comfort.”
“No one should ever have to suffer what I have—” the
first lady choked out.
“No, they
shouldn’t,” Clara replied. “Never.”
“The country can
bear no more,” Bishop added quietly, his fine black mourning coat making him
almost invisible in the shadows by the door. “We must guard against the basest
evils grasping for purchase—”
“What could be
more evil than what I have endured?” the first lady exclaimed.
The last two years had taught Clara that
Rupert Bishop coddled no one, even the grieving. She spoke before he could
offer another example of his oft-sobering perspective. “Such a powerful seat
needs protection,” Clara exclaimed, squeezing the widow’s shaking hands with
innocent, sure strength. “Such a man should never have fallen. He deserved to
have been made immortal!”
“Why
. . . yes, child!” Mary Lincoln exclaimed, a sudden light in her eyes. “Do we
not have resources, researchers, scientists, theorists? Should we not have
granted a man like the president eternal protection while he bore the nation on
his shoulders? My dear Congressman Bishop . . .”
The
small woman rose to her feet and began to pace the room, skirts swishing and
sweeping with renewed determination.
“I charge
you,” she said, bright gaze fastened on Bishop. “If you’ll not bring my husband
back to me in spirit or form, then you must do this. Take Clara’s idea. For
this bled-dry country. For the seat cloaked in immense power. Do this,
Congressman, so no other wife in this dreadful house might go through such agony
again. . . .”
“Do
what, Mary?” he pressed.
She
stared at him with steely ferocity. “Find a cure for death.”
***
Seventeen
Years Later, New
York City, 1882
“It was
born of good intentions,” Clara insisted in a choking murmur.
She
sat on a bench in Central Park on a mild June
day, beneath a willow tree, looking out over the southeastern pond. She could
not move. Her breath was shallow against the double stays of corset and
buttoned bodice; soft ivory lace and muslin ruffles trembled around her throat.
Tendrils of dark blond hair, blown free from braids beneath a fanciful straw
feathered hat, tickled around her streaming eyes. Her world was again cracking
open.
“Wake
up,” she heard a voice calling. “Wake up.” It was not a human voice but that of
some ancient, cosmic force.
She
had known there was something different about her since the age of nine, since
she’d awakened in the middle of the night to see a wild-haired woman in a cloak
sitting at the foot of her bed.
“You’re
special,” was all the woman said before vanishing.
The
next day, Clara’s father, a prominent doctor to Washington lawmakers, died of tuberculosis.
Her mother soon followed. They were buried in a Greenwood
Cemetery mausoleum in their native Brooklyn. Clara was the marble sepulcher’s most frequent
haunt. The Templetons’ will ensured that Clara would be educated at fine
institutions and looked after by prominent figures.
Rupert
Bishop, then a talented young New
York lawyer, frequented the same Washington and spiritualist
circles as the Templetons. A beloved family friend, he stepped in to graciously
provide for the girl left behind. Bitterly estranged from their Southern
families after the war, the Templetons hoped Clara’s manifest spiritual talents
would blossom under Bishop’s care and guidance. She indeed flourished, until
her gifts turned physically dangerous and had to be carefully monitored.
The
visitor returned the night Bishop brought Clara to the White House the first
time; Clara saw the creature watching her from the shadows. She had not seen
the strange herald since, not even after that fateful second encounter with the
first lady, a meeting that had set an unlikely destiny in motion.
Paperwork
left on the slain president’s desk established a “Secret Service” to
investigate counterfeit currency. A tiny cabal, headed by Bishop, supposed the service
might also, in some unnamed office, investigate immortality. Bishop assembled a
team of occultists, mystics, and chemists and set them to work in a secret
location.
Once
Clara completed finishing school, Bishop gave her a key to a nondescript office
on Pearl Street
in downtown Manhattan.
A county clerk’s record office on the first floor served as a front. Clara’s
offices—and those of the colleagues she and Bishop hired—took up the top floor.
Congressman Bishop became Senator Bishop. A quiet era of investigation and
theorizing followed.
In 1880,
Eterna theorist Louis Dupris secretly told Clara that he’d made a breakthrough
in localized magic. The world had suddenly seemed full of possibility. But now
. . .
The
Eterna Compound had been born out of grief. At this moment Clara wondered if it
should never have been born at all, for now it bore grief of its own.
“Something’s
wrong,” Clara murmured, wanting to cry but feeling wholly paralyzed. “I can
feel it. . . .” All of Clara that had ever been could feel it; a love torn from
her like layers of skin.
Before
her eyes, in layers of concentric circles stretching out like mirrors
reflecting mirrors in dizzying multiplication, she saw lives. Her lives, those
she’d had before. She was twenty-nine years old . . . with a soul a thousand
years older.
Pried
open in a painful awakening, she knew her life was far more than the boundaries
and limitations of her current flesh, but at present she felt the pain of all
those centuries all at once, things done and undone. The sheer, heavy press of
it all was staggering.
A
mockingbird alighted on a branch above Clara’s head. It squawked and stared at
her, then made the sounds of a police whistle, a bicycle bell, and some
roaring, whooshing thing: the sound of something tearing.
And
then there was a woman next to her. The visitor.
Though
she couldn’t turn her head, in her peripheral vision Clara saw skirts, gloves,
and long hair that was scandalously unbound. The presence of the visitor
confirmed what she was feeling; something terrible was happening. Clara tried
to move again, to fight the gravity lashing her to the bench, wishing tears,
something, anything could be set free.
“What
is it this time?” Clara gasped.
“Hello,
Clara,” the visitor said quietly. One didn’t mistake an ordinary person for the
visitor, for it brought with it the weight of time itself. “It’s been awhile.”
The visitor smoothed the skirts of its long, plain, black, uniform-like dress,
something a boarding school girl might wear. “Have you been waiting?” the visitor
asked.
“I’m
not a girl who waits,” Clara replied.
“That’s
why I trust you,” the visitor said, pleasure in its voice. “I last saw you when
you impetuously gave the first lady an embrace from her dead son.”
The
mockingbird gave a raucous trill from the limb above them. The woman adjusted
what Clara thought was a hat—she still couldn’t get a good look. The mockingbird
had flown across the path and alighted on a limb at her eye line, trilling
accompaniment to their conversation.
“You
presage terrible things but I never know what,” Clara growled.
“You’ve
always been gifted,” the visitor replied. “Sensitive.”
“And we
see what good sensitivity has done
me.” Clara choked out her words. “I’m a freak of nature. My ‘fits’ render any
hope I might have had for a normal life or a place in society laughable. I
curse my gifts for all the misfortune they bring.” Embarrassing, traumatic
memories paraded through her mind, her past lives staring on in pity. Clara
hated pity. Perhaps it was best, then, that the visitor had none.
“Don’t be
ungrateful, child,” the visitor chided. “You’ve two friends in a world of loneliness,
you had a lover when many never know such pleasure, you’ve worked when hordes
seek pay, you’ve a guardian who dotes on you when countless orphans have no
one, and you’ve money and a fine house in a city that denies both to thousands
of its denizens.”
Clara
wanted to lash out at the creature. But it was right, which only sharpened her
pain.
“Something
terrible has happened, hasn’t it? To the Eterna team?” she whispered, her
throat raw as if from screaming even though she had loosed no such sound. “To
my Louis? My love is among them. . . .”
An amulet
of protection, tucked beneath her corset stays, was a knot against her shaking
breaths. The amulet had been given to her by Louis, an item charged and blessed
by his mother. Clara never felt she had the right to it, and now, he, who
needed protection, lacked it
“I
am very sorry for your loss,” the visitor said solemnly.
“I
must go,” Clara insisted, trying to fight free but failing. “Maybe I can help
the team—”
The
visitor held up a hand. “It’s no use. They’re gone.”
“Why
can’t you stop terrible things if you’re aware of them?” Clara demanded. “Why
can’t I?”
“Not
in our skill set,” the visitor replied. “You’ve taken too much ownership of something
that is not your responsibility, Templeton. What is your responsibility, is
to—”
“‘Wake up?’ Yes, I hear it, on the wind.
In my bones. What does it mean?”
The
woman gestured before her, to Clara’s iterations. “You see the lives, don’t
you?”
“Yes.”
Clara swallowed hard. “Do you?”
“Of
course I do,” the visitor replied. “I’m here to tell you that a great storm is
coming. It will break across two continents; two great cities, the hearts of empires.
Your team is gone and storms are coming. Weather them, find special souls and
shield them. Second-guess your enemy. Find the missing link between the lives
you see. Do this for yourself. And for your country.”
Clara
snorted bitterly. “Do I hear patriotism?”
The
visitor shook its head. “I owe allegiance to no land.”
“Then
what are you here for?” Clara begged.
The
visitor’s voice grew warm. “I care about certain people.”
“Why
me?”
“Show me why you, Templeton,” the visitor
proclaimed. “You’re at the center of the storm. Be worthy of the squall.”
The
mockingbird made the strange, roaring sound again and the woman was gone.
Clara’s
hands shook. The people she had been in her many lives turned and looked at
her, male, female, all with certain similar qualities that she recognized as
uniquely hers. Curiosity. Hunger. Restlessness. Intensity. Independence. A desperate desire for noble purpose.
And lonely.
She was awake. But Eterna had died, taking with
it the lover no one knew she had.
(End of Excerpt)
Next Tuesday we'll reveal excerpts from the first chapter!
Want to get a book signed??!!
Check out the TOUR APPEARANCES so far! We're starting in New York City on February 11th with several Barnes & Noble signings in Florida, hitting Anachrocon in Atlanta at the end of February, Ohio readers, stay tuned for Ohio dates, and stock signing locations around the country.
See the current listings.
Join Leanna's no-spam mailing list for release day announcements! Visit her
website and put your email address into the column on the right or via the
Appearances / Contact page.
-
Cheers and happy haunting!
Posts
