I’m pleased to welcome Libby Doyle to my blog today to discuss her Covalent Series. Take it away, Libby.
I’d like to introduce you to Pellus, a vital character in The Covalent Series, and a total badass. But first, a little about the series. It’s a sexy urban fantasy that features a murder investigation, battles with demons, and political intrigue on an alien world. At its heart, though, it is a love story between Alexandra “Zan” O’Gara, an intrepid FBI agent, and Rainer Barakiel, a superhuman warrior from another dimension. In Book I, The Passion Season, they meet and fall in love. In Book II, The Pain Season, let’s just say the title is evocative of their states of mind.
Barakiel is Covalent, a race of ancient beings who use their great power to keep the elemental forces of Creation and Destruction in Balance. He has lived in exile on Earth for centuries, passing for human. He was able to avoid detection and accumulate great wealth thanks to Pellus, who is a type of Covalent known as a traveler adept. Pellus was tasked to look after Barakiel when he was young. Over the centuries, the traveler adept has come to love Barakiel like a son.
One might say all good heroes need a sidekick, but Pellus is much more than that. He is my Spock, my Data, my Gandalf, and my Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is a master of matter and energy.
What do I mean? Pellus can manipulate the environment because he sees the world through the lens of quantum physics. His mind is beyond the most powerful human supercomputer. He can see subatomic particles and assess probabilities in their behavior. He can alter the molecular structure of everything: the air, the soil, the light. For your enjoyment, here is a brief passage from The Pain Season that describes his power.
Pellus focused, forming another compression a sliver in front of the barrier. He drew from power lines buried in the grass to slowly build a lattice that crawled upward over the old barrier, sparking and zapping. Not a solid wall. More like a fine mesh of unbreakable filaments that repelled and attracted electricity in alternating rounds, warning the demons that they would touch it at their peril.
Yeah. Pellus is coooool. You may have noticed that he’s called a traveler adept. Although he can do much more, traveling is his basic function in the Covalent Realm. He can detect tears or gaps in the fabric of existence that he uses to journey between dimensions. The Covalent call these gaps the kinetic rifts. They perpetually open and close, like the breathing of reality. Pellus can see them and navigate among and between them. He can travel to Earth from the Covalent Realm in an instant.
The rifts are how Barakiel moves back and forth between Earth and his homeworld. I got the idea from string theory, which seeks to unify the principles of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity. String theory posits that all matter and energy is composed of a strings that continuously vibrate. As the physicists worked out mathematical equation to test their theories, they discovered something astounding (well, if you’re a theoretical physicist). They learned that the equations only make sense if there are dimensions beyond the four that we know (three spatial and one time). The equations indicate that there are eleven dimensions (and some configurations propose twenty-six)! The physicists surmise these dimensions are close to our own, folded in right next to it, manifesting in vibrating sheets of power called branes.
Of course, it’s really much more complicated. All my research sources packaged the theory for the consumption of non-physicists. I’m not even good at math! But for some reason, this theory stirred my imagination, and I used it to construct the cosmology of my urban fantasy. When the Covalent used their great power to bring the elemental forces to Balance so their world would not be destroyed, that bonding of the forces caused myriad dimensions to erupt from the edges of the bonded realms. One of these dimensions contains Earth.
Pellus understands all this on an intuitive level and sees a world in which empty space is not empty space, but a field of vibrating, interacting particles that tell him the story of existence. I’ll leave you with this bit of dialogue.
“Feeling chilly?” Pellus asked.
“You did that to me?”
“Yes. In the area around you, I blocked the transfer of energy among particles that produce heat. Cold is simply the absence of heat.”
“Could you freeze someone on the spot?”
“I never have, but I suppose I could.”
Zan forcefully exhaled. “Christ. I’m glad you’re on my side.”
Barakiel chuckled. “Zan, you have no idea how often I have said that to myself.”
The Pain Season is available now at Amazon: goo.gl/O3MEfT, iBooks: goo.gl/JQIOHL, Barnes & Noble: goo.gl/sSNpSb, & Kobo: goo.gl/AHm51x. Although not a cliffhanger, The Pain Season is not a stand-alone novel. The story begins in The Passion Season and will continue in The Vengeance Season coming in 2017.
Blurb
ON THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX, ZAN O’GARA’S LIFE WILL CHANGE.
Tonight’s the night. Rainer Barakiel is going to tell me all his secrets. I thought I’d be excited, but I feel like someone shoved a knife into my gut.
Heh. Fitting, considering I met Rainer because of his expertise in edged weapons. The daggers used in that ritual sacrifice became our best lead thanks to him. What kind of omen is it, that I met the love of my life because someone found a human spleen in the bushes?
I didn’t expect someone like him. When he opened his door I couldn’t talk, I was so stunned. God, how I flirted with him. Hell of a way for an FBI agent to act. This whole relationship is a hell of a way for an FBI agent to act. I didn’t want to face that he was hiding things from me.
What if he has something to do with this murder?
I’m being paranoid. He’s denied being a criminal and I believe him. I don’t see how my instincts could be so wrong. He can’t be bad. He can’t.
He’s hiding things from me, but he loves me. I feel it. Maybe he didn’t expect to fall in love with me, but he did, and now he wants out. He’s going to confess, leave it all behind. For me.
I wonder, after he tells me all his secrets, will this become a wacky story we love to tell? Or a story I tell only to myself, alone in a stale-smelling apartment, stewing in pain? The story of how my heart got damaged beyond repair.
WARNING: This book contains foul language, violence, and explicit sex. Adults only, please. Although not a cliffhanger, this is not a stand-alone novel. The story began in The Passion Season, and will continue in The Vengeance Season.
About Libby
Libby Doyle is an attorney and former journalist who took a walk around the corporate world and didn’t like it. She escapes the mundane by writing extravagant yarns, filled with sex and violence. She loves absurd humor, travel, punk rock, and her husband. You can discover more about Libby’s world at http://www.libbydoyle.com
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Many thanks for featuring me today on your blog, Shari!
Happy to have you. Visit any time.