Tempest Rising

Book 1: Jane True

by Nicole Peeler

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

During her nightly, clandestine swim in the freezing winter ocean, a grisly find leads Jane to startling revelations about her heritage: she is only half-human.

Now, Jane must enter a world filled with supernatural creatures that are terrifying, beautiful, and deadly-all of which perfectly describe her new "friend," Ryu, a gorgeous and powerful vampire.

It is a world where nothing can be taken for granted: a dog can heal with a lick; spirits bag your groceries; and whatever you do, never-ever-rub the genie's lamp.

If you love Sookie Stackhouse, then you'll want to dive into Nicole Peeler's enchanting debut novel.

Release date: November 1, 2009

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 368

Sample

I eyeballed the freezer, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night. Such a decision was no mean feat, since a visiting
stranger might assume that Martha Stewart not only lived with us but was preparing for the apocalypse. Frozen lasagnas, casseroles,
pot pies, and the like filled our icebox nearly to the brim. Finally deciding on fish chowder, I took out some haddock and
mussels. After a brief, internal struggle, I grabbed some salmon to make extra soup to—you guessed it—freeze. Yeah, the stockpiling
was more than a little OCD, but it made me feel better. It also meant that when I actually had something to do for the entire
evening, I could leave my dad by himself without feeling too guilty about it.


My dad wasn’t an invalid—not exactly. But he had a bad heart and needed help taking care of things, especially with my mother
gone. So I took up the slack, which I was happy to do. It’s not like I had much else on my plate, what with being the village
pariah and all.


It’s amazing how being a pariah gives you ample amounts of free time.

After putting in the laundry and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, I went upstairs to take a shower. I would have loved to
walk around all day with the sea salt on my skin, but not even in Rockabill was Eau de Brine an acceptable perfume. Like many
twentysomethings, I’d woken up early that day to go exercise. Unlike most twenty-somethings, however, my morning exercise
took the form of an hour or so long swim in the freezing ocean. And in one of America’s deadliest whirlpools. Which is why
I am so careful to keep the swimming on the DL. It might be a great cardio workout, but it probably would get me burned at
the stake. This is New England, after all.


As I got dressed in my work clothes—khaki chinos and a long-sleeved pink polo-style shirt with Read It and Weep embroidered in navy blue over the breast pocket—I heard my father emerge from his bedroom and clomp down the stairs. His
job in the morning was to make the coffee, so I took a moment to apply a little mascara, blush, and some lip gloss, before
brushing out my damp black hair. I kept it cut in a much longer—and admittedly more unkempt—version of Cleopatra’s style because
I liked to hide my dark eyes under my long bangs. Most recently, my nemesis, Stuart Gray, had referred to them as “demon eyes.”
They’re not as Marilyn Manson as that, thank you very much, but even I had to admit to difficulty determining where my pupil
ended and my iris began.


I went back downstairs to join my dad in the kitchen, and I felt that pang in my heart that I get sometimes when I’m struck
by how he’s changed. He’d been a fisherman, but he’d had to retire about ten years ago, on disability, when his heart condition
worsened. Once a handsome, confident, and brawny man whose presence filled any space he entered, his long illness and my mother’s
disappearance had diminished him in every possible way. He looked so small and gray in his faded old bathrobe, his hands trembling
from the anti-arrhythmics he takes for his screwed-up heart, that it took every ounce of self-control I had not to make him
sit down and rest. Even if his body didn’t agree, he still felt himself to be the man he had been, and I knew I already walked
a thin line between caring for him and treading on his dignity. So I put on my widest smile and bustled into the kitchen,
as if we were a father and daughter in some sitcom set in the 1950s.


“Good morning, Daddy!” I beamed.

“Morning, honey. Want some coffee?” He asked me that question every morning, even though the answer had been yes since I was
fifteen.


“Sure, thanks. Did you sleep all right?”

“Oh, yes. And you? How was your morning?” My dad never asked me directly about the swimming. It’s a question that lay under
the auspices of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that ruled our household. For example, he didn’t ask me about my swimming,
I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me about Jason, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me whether
or not I was happy in Rockabill, I didn’t ask him about my mother…


“Oh, I slept fine, Dad. Thanks.” Of course I hadn’t, really, as I only needed about four hours of sleep a night. But that’s
another thing we never talked about.


He asked me about my plans for the day, while I made us a breakfast of scrambled eggs on whole wheat toast. I told him that
I’d be working till six, then I’d go to the grocery store on the way home. So, as usual for a Monday, I’d take the car to
work. We performed pretty much the exact same routine every week, but it was nice of him to act like it was possible I might
have new and exciting plans. On Mondays, I didn’t have to worry about him eating lunch, as Trevor McKinley picked him up to
go play a few hours of cheeky lunchtime poker with George Varga, Louis Finch, and Joe Covelli. They’re all natives of Rockabill
and friends since childhood, except for Joe, who moved here to Maine about twenty years ago to open up our local garage. That’s
how things were around Rockabill. For the winter, when the tourists were mostly absent, the town was populated by natives
who grew up together and were more intimately acquainted with each other’s dirty laundry than their own hampers. Some people
enjoyed that intimacy. But when you were more usually the object of the whispers than the subject, intimacy had a tendency
to feel like persecution.


We ate while we shared our local paper, The Light House News. But because the paper mostly functioned as a vehicle for advertising things to tourists, and the tourists were gone for
the season, the pickings were scarce. Yet we went through the motions anyway. For all of our sins, no one could say that the
True family wasn’t good at going through the motions. After breakfast, I doled out my father’s copious pills and set them
next to his orange juice. He flashed me his charming smile, which was the only thing left unchanged after the ravages to his
health and his heart.


“Thank you, Jane,” he said. And I knew he meant it, despite the fact that I’d set his pills down next to his orange juice
every single morning for the past twelve years.


I gulped down a knot in my throat, since I knew that no small share of his worry and grief was due to me, and kissed him on
the cheek. Then I bustled around clearing away breakfast, and bustled around getting my stuff together, and bustled out the
door to get to work. In my experience, bustling is always a great way to keep from crying.


Tracy Gregory, the owner of Read It and Weep, was already hard at work when I walked in the front door. The Gregorys were
an old fishing family from Rockabill, and Tracy was their prodigal daughter. She had left to work in Los Angeles, where she
had apparently been a successful movie stylist. I say apparently because she never told us the names of any of the movies
she’d worked on. She’d only moved back to Rockabill about five years ago to open Read It and Weep, which was our local bookstore,
café, and all-around tourist trap. Since tourism replaced fishing as our major industry, Rockabill can just about support
an all-year-round enterprise like Read It and Weep. But other things, like the nicer restaurant—rather unfortunately named
The Pig Out Bar and Grill—close for the winter.


“Hey girl,” she said, gruffly, as I locked the door behind me. We didn’t open for another half hour.

“Hey Tracy. Grizelda back?”

Grizelda was Tracy’s girlfriend, and they’d caused quite a stir when they first appeared in Rockabill together. Not only were
they lesbians, but they were as fabulously lesbionic as the inhabitants of a tiny village in Maine could ever imagine. Tracy
carried herself like a rugby player, and dressed like one, too. But she had an easygoing charisma that got her through the
initial gender panic triggered by her reentry into Rockabill society.


And if Tracy made heads turn, Grizelda practically made them spin Exorcist style. Grizelda was not Grizelda’s real name. Nor was Dusty Nethers, the name she used when she’d been a porn star. As Dusty
Nethers, Grizelda had been fiery haired and as boobilicious as a Baywatch beauty. But in her current incarnation, as Grizelda Montague, she sported a sort of Gothic-hipster look—albeit one that was
still very boobilicious. A few times a year Grizelda disappeared for weeks or a month, and upon her return home she and Tracy
would complete some big project they’d been discussing, like redecorating the store or adding a sunroom onto their little
house. Lord knows what she got up to on her profit-venture vacations. But whatever it was, it didn’t affect her relationship
with Tracy. The pair were as close as any husband and wife in Rockabill, if not closer, and seeing how much they loved each
other drove home to me my own loneliness.


“Yeah, Grizzie’s back. She’ll be here soon. She has something for you… something scandalous, knowing my lady love.”

I grinned. “Awesome. I love her gifts.”

Because of Grizzie, I had a drawer full of naughty underwear, sex toys, and dirty books. Grizzie gave such presents for every occasion; it didn’t matter if it was your high school graduation, your fiftieth wedding anniversary, or your baby’s baptism.
This particular predilection meant she was a prominent figure on wedding shower guest lists from Rockabill to Eastport, but
made her dangerous for children’s parties. Most parents didn’t appreciate an “every day of the week” pack of thongs for their
eleven-year-old daughter. Once she’d given me a gift certificate for a “Hollywood” bikini wax and I had to Google the term.
What I discovered made me way too scared to use it, so it sat in my “dirty drawer,” as I called it, as a talking point. Not
that anyone ever went into my dirty drawer with me, but I talked to myself a lot, and it certainly provided amusing fodder
for my own conversations.


It was also rather handy—no pun intended—to have access to one’s own personal sex shop during long periods of enforced abstinence…
such as the last eight years of my life.


“And,” Tracy responded with a rueful shake of her head, “her gifts love you. Often quite literally.”

“That’s all right, somebody has to,” I answered back, horrified at the bitter inflection that had crept into my voice.

But Tracy, bless her, just stroked a gentle hand over my hair that turned into a tiny one-armed hug, saying nothing.

“Hands off my woman!” crowed a hard-edged voice from the front door. Grizelda!

“Oh, sorry,” I apologized, backing away from Tracy.

“I meant for Tracy to get off you,” Grizzie said, swooping toward me to pick me up in a bodily hug, my own well-endowed chest clashing with her enormous fake
bosoms. I hated being short at times like these. Even though I loved all five feet and eleven inches of Grizzie, and had more
than my fair share of affection for her ta-ta-riddled hugs, I loathed being manhandled.


She set me down and grasped my hands in hers, backing away to look me over appreciatively while holding my fingers at arm’s
length. “Mmm, mmm,” she said, shaking her head. “Girl, I could sop you up with a biscuit.”


I laughed, as Tracy rolled her eyes.

“Quit sexually harassing the staff, Grizzly Bear,” was her only comment.

“I’ll get back to sexually harassing you in a minute, passion flower, but right now I want to appreciate our Jane.” Grizelda
winked at me with her florid violet eyes—she wore colored lenses—and I couldn’t help but giggle like a school girl.


“I’ve brought you a little something,” she said, her voice sly.

I clapped my hands in excitement and hopped up and down in a little happy dance.

I really did love Grizzie’s gifts, even if they challenged the tenuous grasp of human anatomy imparted to me by Mrs. Renault
in her high school biology class.


“Happy belated birthday!” she cried as she handed me a beautifully wrapped package she pulled from her enormous handbag. I
admired the shiny black paper and the sumptuous red velvet ribbon tied up into a decadent bow—Grizzie did everything with
style—before tearing into it with glee. After slitting open the tape holding the box closed with my thumbnail, I was soon
holding in my hands the most beautiful red satin nightgown I’d ever seen. It was a deep, bloody, blue-based red, the perfect
red for my skin tone. And it was, of course, the perfect length, with a slit up the side that would rise almost to my hip.
Grizzie had this magic ability to always buy people clothes that fit. The top was generously cut for its small dress size,
the bodice gathered into a sort of clamshell-like tailoring that I knew would cup my boobs like those hands in that famous
Janet Jackson picture. The straps were slightly thicker, to give support, and crossed over the very low-cut back. It was absolutely gorgeous—very adult and sophisticated—and I couldn’t stop stroking the deliciously watery
satin.


“Grizzie,” I breathed. “It’s gorgeous… but too much! This must have cost a fortune.”

“You are worth a fortune, little Jane. Besides, I figured you might need something nice… since Mark’s ‘special deliveries’
should have culminated in a date by now.”


Grizzie’s words trailed off as my face fell and Tracy, behind her, made a noise like Xena, Warrior Princess, charging into
battle.


Before Tracy could launch into just how many ways she wanted to eviscerate our new letter carrier, I said, very calmly, “I
won’t be going on any dates with Mark.”


“What happened?” Grizzie asked, as Tracy made another grunting declaration of war behind us.

“Well…” I started, but where should I begin? Mark was new to Rockabill, a widowed employee of the U.S. Postal Service, who
had recently moved to our little corner of Maine with his two young daughters. He’d kept forgetting to deliver letters and
packages, necessitating second, and sometimes third, trips to our bookstore, daily. I’d thought he was sweet, but rather dumb,
until Tracy had pointed out that he only forgot stuff when I was working.


So we’d flirted and flirted and flirted over the course of a month. Until, just a few days ago, he’d asked me out. I was thrilled.
He was cute; he was new; he’d lost someone he was close to, as well. And he “obviously” didn’t judge me on my past.


You know what they say about assuming…

“We had a date set up, but he cancelled. I guess he asked me out before he knew about… everything. Then someone must have
told him. He’s got kids, you know.”


“So?” Grizzie growled, her smoky voice already furious.

“So, he said that he didn’t think I’d be a good influence. On his girls.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” Grizzie snarled, just as Tracy made a series of inarticulate chittering noises behind us. She
was normally the sedate, equable half of her and Grizzie’s partnership, but Tracy had nearly blown a gasket when I’d called
her crying after Mark bailed on me. I think she would have torn off his head, but then we wouldn’t have gotten our inventory
anymore.


I lowered my head and shrugged. Grizzie moved forward, having realized that Tracy already had the anger market cornered.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, wrapping her long arms around me. “That’s… such a shame.”

And it was a shame. My friends wanted me to move on, my dad wanted me to move on. Hell, except for that tiny sliver of me
that was still frozen in guilt, I wanted to move on. But the rest of Rockabill, it seems, didn’t agree.


Grizzie brushed the bangs back from my eyes, and when she saw tears glittering she intervened, Grizelda-style. Dipping me
like a tango dancer, she growled sexily, “Baby, I’m gonna butter yo’ bread…” before burying her face in my exposed belly and
giving me a resounding zerbert.


That did just the trick. I was laughing again, thanking my stars for about the zillionth time that they had brought Grizzie
and Tracy back to Rockabill because I didn’t know what I would have done without them. I gave Tracy her own hug for the present,
and then took it to the back room with my stuff. I opened the box to give the red satin one last parting caress, and then
closed it with a contented sigh.


It would look absolutely gorgeous in my dirty drawer.

We only had a few things to do to get the store ready for opening, which left much time for chitchat. About a half hour of
intense gossip later, we had pretty much exhausted “what happened when you were gone” as a subject of conversation and had
started in on plans for the coming week, when the little bell above the door tinkled. My heart sank when I saw it was Linda
Allen, self-selected female delegate for my own personal persecution squad. She wasn’t quite as bad as Stuart Gray, who hated
me even more than Linda did, but she did her best to keep up with him.


Speaking of the rest of Rockabill, I thought, as Linda headed toward romance.


She didn’t bother to speak to me, of course. She just gave me one of her loaded looks that she could fire off like a World
War II gunship. The looks always said the same things. They spoke of the fact that I was the girl whose crazy mother had shown
up in the center of town out of nowhere, naked, in the middle of a storm. The fact that she’d stolen one of the most eligible Rockabill bachelors and ruined him for life. The fact that she’d given birth to a baby without being married. The fact that I insisted on being that child and upping the ante by being just as weird as my mother. That was only the tip of the vituperative iceberg that Linda hauled into my presence whenever she had the chance.


Unfortunately, Linda read nearly as compulsively as I did, so I saw her at least twice a month when she’d come in for a new
stack of romance novels. She liked a very particular kind of plot: the sort where the pirate kidnaps some virgin damsel, rapes
her into loving him, and then dispatches lots of seamen while she polishes his cutlass. Or where the Highland clan leader
kidnaps some virginal English Rose, rapes her into loving him, and then kills entire armies of Sassenachs while she stuffs
his haggis. Or where the Native American warrior kidnaps a virginal white settler, rapes her into loving him, and then kills
a bunch of colonists while she whets his tomahawk. I hated to get Freudian on Linda, but her reading patterns suggested some
interesting insights into why she was such a complete bitch.


Tracy had received a phone call while Linda was picking out her books, and Grizelda was sitting on a stool far behind the
counter in a way that clearly said “I’m not actually working, thanks.” But Linda pointedly ignored the fact that I was free
to help her, choosing, instead, to stand in front of Tracy. Tracy gave that little eye gesture where she looked at Linda,
then looked at me, as if to say, “She can help you,” but Linda insisted on being oblivious to my presence. Tracy sighed and
cut her telephone conversation short. I knew that Tracy would love to tell Linda to stick her attitude where the sun don’t
shine, but Read It and Weep couldn’t afford to lose a customer who was as good at buying books as she was at being a snarky
snake face. So Tracy rang up Linda’s purchases and bagged them for her as politely as one can without actually being friendly
and handed the bag over to Linda.


Who, right on cue, gave me her parting shot, the look I knew was coming but was never quite able to deflect.

The look that said, There’s the freak who killed her own boyfriend.


She was wrong, of course. I hadn’t actually killed Jason. I was just the reason he was dead.



I was already stripping off my clothes by the time I got to the secret cove that is my little sanctuary. I was way too pissed
off to bother with the wetsuit.


Fuck Linda, I thought, as I tore off my shirt and bra.


Fuck Rockabill helped propel me out of my jeans and panties.


And fuck me accompanied my shoes and socks, and then it was a short sprint into the ocean, whose waves reared up and enveloped me the
way my mother’s arms had when I was a little girl. In fact, swimming was all I had left of my mother, really. Her real face,
the face in my memories, had begun to fade years ago, leaving behind only details I’d memorized from photographs. But I would
never forget our clandestine nightly swims. The little secret that bound us together when I was a child.


And which, I suspected, had driven my family apart.

My mother, Mari, had turned up naked as a jaybird one night right before an awful storm hit. My father and the other young
men of the town had been racing around for the preceding few hours, helping people board up the windows of the shops and houses
that lined our small main street and central square. Then, out of nowhere, his buddy Trevor had let out a low whistle of surprise
at the same time that Louis said, “Holy shit,” in the awestruck voice he used when they went to the big Fourth of July celebration
in Bangor to see a real fireworks display. My father, along with just about everybody else who lived in Rockabill at the time,
had looked up to see a naked young woman, black hair swirling down to her waist, sauntering down the street as if she had
an invitation that specifically requested “stark naked, only, please.” No one moved, except my big brave father, who took
off his coat and went and put it around the young woman’s shoulders. She smiled up at him, and that’s the moment he says that
he knew he loved her and couldn’t live without her.


For propriety’s sake, he’d taken her to the Grays’, Rockabill’s only bed and breakfast at the time. That it was strategically
so close to our house was never mentioned in the official story. Nick and Nan were still alive and in charge, not Stuart’s
nasty parents, Sheila and Herbert. Nick and Nan gave her a bed for the night but weren’t all that surprised when they woke
up to find it empty. Nor were they surprised when they found the girl and my dad at the local diner that morning, sharing
a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes. I came around about a year later into an ideal family. My parents adored one
another; Nick and Nan served as the perfect surrogate grandparents (my father’s parents had passed away before I was born),
and soon Jason joined his grandparents, Nick and Nan, to take his place as my best friend and soul mate. For six years I lived
as happily as a child could live. Until the night another big storm struck, one almost as bad as the one that was raging the
night my parents first shared a bed together. That morning, my mom was gone as suddenly and inexplicably as she had appeared.


Then I learned the truth about our family: that the cozy nest of happiness in which I’d enjoyed growing up was a sham. Rockabill,
except for Nick, Nan, and Jason, had never accepted my mother. Many in the village considered her dangerously different and
were happy to have their worst suspicions confirmed by her abandonment of her husband and young daughter. That a young girl
whose mother had deserted her deserved any sympathy was trumped by the fact that I looked almost exactly like her: the same
dark hair and eyes, the same pale skin, and, as I grew older, the same dangerous curves. Rockabill wasn’t an overtly religious
community, but our Puritan ancestors must have channeled Melanie Griffith down through the generations. Like her mother, they whispered, that girl has a bod for sin. The whispers had stuck, growing into shouts as the years went by and other worse things happened.


Angrily, I swam and swam, letting the powerful currents and riptides of the Old Sow and her piglets jostle me back and forth.
I wanted to lose myself in the whirlpool, and she was always happy to oblige.


The Old Sow used to be the bane of Rockabill’s fishermen and had killed more than her fair share of our men. Now, however,
she was our livelihood: the tourist attraction that we depended on for sustenance. She was one of the five biggest whirlpools
on earth, and boats had to be careful to avoid her. But there I was, plunging along her outermost boundaries like a naked
little seal.


I didn’t know why I was such a powerful swimmer, since I was so small, or why I loved it so much. And yet I was never happier
than when I was in the water. If I was honest with myself, there was more to it than that. I really had to swim. It was as much of an addiction as it was a desire. Not that I understood the implications of that need. I knew my
swimming was the key to something, but it was that annoying, anonymous key that hung on every inherited key ring. The key
that didn’t fit any door in the house, or any drawer in the office, or any suitcase in the attic. Swimming was my mystery
key that constantly nagged me with its presence. But, no matter how many locks I tried, it never revealed anything about what
it concealed.


I tried to push away my negative thoughts and focus on my delight as the thunder clapped and the rain poured down, causing
the ocean to buck in response. The storm that was percolating when I drove home from the grocery store had struck while my
father and I were eating dinner. It was all I could do to get through the meal without banging down my fork and running off
into the night like some maenad. I was still so angry from my biweekly run-in with Linda that I was short-tempered with my
father. Which made me feel guilty, which made me feel frustrated, which made me feel even more angry…


When I got like that only a swim helped.

And if any old swim was therapeutic, a swim during a storm was better than Prozac. Maybe it was because my mother had appeared,
and disappeared, during a storm that made me so obsessed with them. But I was never happier than when the sea was wild and
thrusting and angry and I was roiling around in it as powerless and riveted as one of Linda’s paperback heroines confronted
with her first unbuckled swashbuckler.


A particularly strong wave dunked me, and I realized I was getting dangerously close to the Old Sow. Who, in her bounteous
unpredictability, was happily swirling away despite the fact that she should really be quiet at this time of night. But I
was so pissed off that only really rough water was going to do for me tonight. Whenever I had a run-in with Stuart or Linda,
I couldn’t help but think about my mom. Her disappearance was like a sore tooth demanding to be prodded.


I used the riptide caused by one of the Sow’s piglets to help shoot me up into the air so I could dive back down, like a porpoise.
I landed more heavily than I’d anticipated, the piglet forcing me into a strong current that wanted to carry me to her mother.
I fought hard to free myself, but the current had. . .