September
Lucy's Age: 19
I didn't go to Venice's funeral, but I arranged for a large cash donation to be dropped off at the morgue with instructions on how I wanted her laid out for burial.
The funeral was the only thing that almost managed to bring me out of the desolate numbness that had taken me over ever since I'd found out that Venice was dead. The nightmares took on an even more sinister cast. Sometimes it was me walking through the house with a bloodied blade instead of the shadowy figure whose face I'd never managed to see.
I stopped sleeping in stretches longer than half an hour and almost completely lost my appetite. Movies, books, financial research, it all lost its appeal. Instead, I spent every waking minute and even most of my dreaming ones analyzing my life, looking at all of the places where I should have acted in a different manner, dwelling on all of the places where I'd failed and thereby killed Geoffrey and Venice.
Hal and the others didn't know what was wrong, but they'd still clued into the fact that something was up, and it had taken several attempts to get them to just leave me alone, but I'd finally succeeded by the time that Venice's funeral rolled around.
Once the funeral was past there wasn't any reason to keep track of time, so I didn't know how long it had been since the funeral when I heard a knock on my door. I answered it and found not, Hal as I'd expected, but a pale old man who made my skin crawl.
He stepped into the room without asking for permission, which set off an additional round of alarms, but when I stuck my head into the hall to ask Hal for help, the old man grabbed the back of my shirt and threw me into my own living room. As I was sliding across the floor I realized that the motionless mounds in the hallway that my mind had been struggling to make sense of were my bodyguards.
"I'm afraid that I can't have you going out in to the hall, my dear. I have to apologize, I would have been here quite a while ago, but other matters temporarily took precedence. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Imastious."
—The Story Continues—
Publisher's Note:
We hope you've enjoyed this installment of the Reflections Universe. It's becoming apparent to us that Eldon Murphy (an open pen name for Dean Murray) is writing something bigger than just a paranormal romance or an urban fantasy series. The Reflections Universe is something that Dean/Eldon has taken to calling Epic Paranormal Romance, which we think is a pretty good description for what he's trying to do.
It's an ambitious, complex undertaking, but so far it's been incredibly rewarding for his readers. As always, the Reflections Reading Order Diagram is a great resource for keeping track of how the various books in the series fit together, but we wanted to take a moment to encourage you to go read Broken, Torn, and the rest of the Sanctuary Pack Reflections books before you go on to read about what happens next for Geoffrey in Driven.
With the release of Driven, Dean has brought the Sanctuary pack together with his Eldon Murphy characters and the results are spectacular. You're not going to want to miss out on the full impact of Driven by skipping over the Dean Murray books.
Author's Note:
The Greater Darkness is the third novel I ever wrote. I wrote it approximately seven years ago and asked some of my friends to read it. They all hated it, but I look back on the first installment of Geoffrey's novel with a lot of fondness because in a lot of ways it was the beginning of me being a 'real' writer. The first two books were fan fiction and I don't expect that I'll ever go back and rework them so that they can be put up for sale.
Back when I wrote The Greater Darkness I had no idea where I wanted to take the series; I just wrote and figured that subsequent books would take care of themselves at some later point. I had no idea how far away, and yet how close, that later date would end up being.
Once I finished up The Greater Darkness, I proceeded to write Frozen Prospects and Thawed Fortunes. Partway through writing Thawed Fortunes I started my third accounting job (The Greater Darkness and Frozen Prospects were written in between jobs) and consequently Thawed Fortunes took a while to finish, which was okay. Meanwhile though my attempts to get The Greater Darkness and Frozen Prospects published weren't going anywhere, which was incredibly disheartening.
I finished up Thawed Fortunes and stopped writing altogether for a while. When inspiration next struck I found myself writing a new novel, one with shape shifters in it rather than werewolves and vampires. This new novel was pretty different in tone, but I knew almost from the start that it was set in the same world as The Greater Darkness.
Broken took me somewhere in the neighborhood of half a year to write, but about the time I finished it I once again found myself between jobs. I wrote some short stories and then wrote Torn as I attempted to get Broken traditionally published. The new few books in the Reflection series—Splintered, Intrusion, and Trapped—were all written while working a day job once again, and then I decided to do this writing thing full time.
I wrote two more Guadel Chronicles books, as well as Forsaken and Riven in the first six months that I was writing full-time, and then I realized that it was time to write this book, a book that started out as nothing more than an idea that 'I needed to write about Geoffrey's adopted daughter.'
The most amazing thing about writing A Darkness Mirrored has been how easy it was to weave a second storyline around and behind the original story line from The Greater Darkness. There were so many things that I never contemplated doing while I was writing Geoffrey's story, but which fit perfectly once I got into the meat of writing Lucy's story. I especially love the way that this second book has given both Geoffrey and Venice more depth than I was able to provide in the first book, but even more exciting still is that now that Lucy's story has been started it's time for me to weave the Eldon Murphy Reflections books in with the Dean Murray Reflections books.
If seeing the interplay between Geoffrey's story and Lucy's story was amazing for me, seeing that same interplay between the Eldon Murphy and the Dean Murray books have completely blown my mind. A minor character from The Greater Darkness has become one of the two or three most pivotal individuals in the entire world. Some oddities as far as werewolf behavior in The Greater Darkness has been completely explained by one of the villains from Alec's world, and a host of other things have just worked out much better than I ever could have hoped.
There are probably only a few of you that have stayed with me through this ridiculously long author's note, but for those who have I guess what I really want to say is please go read the Dean Murray books. Start with Torn, or maybe Broken if you want something with a little more romance and a little less action, and read all the way through Riven. You're going to want to know the background behind these other characters that Geoffrey and Lucy are going to meet in the next book!
Acknowledgments:
My Eldon Murphy books tend to go through a slightly different vetting process than the rest of my books, but if anything the smaller number of people involved in these books means that this group needs even more thanks than normal.
As always, Katie is the glue that holds everything together. She's done great work on the cover and editing for A Darkness Mirrored as well as serving as my primary sounding board—Thanks Katie.
Claire Farleigh graciously read through my rough draft to make sure that I hadn't crossed any lines that fans of The Greater Darkness wouldn't want crossed, and then the book went off to RJ Locksley and Amy Jirsa-Smith for editing and then the final version was sent to Chris in the Netherlands and Mei to make sure that my fixing of the edits everyone else found hadn't introduced yet more problems into the manuscript.
I'm very grateful to all four of those individuals for their help in making A Darkness Mirrored much better than it otherwise would have been.
Lastly, thanks need expressed to Obsidian Dawn (www.obsidiandawn.com) for making available a host of amazing free brushes some of which were used in the preparation of the cover for A Darkness Mirrored.
About the Author:
Eldon Murphy is an open pen name of Dean Murray, a prolific author with more than 20 titles across multiple pen names and more than 300,000 copies of his work currently in circulation.
Dean started reading seriously in the second grade due to a competition and has spent most of the subsequent three decades lost in other people's worlds.
Things worsened, or improved depending on your point of view, when he first started experimenting with writing while finishing up his accounting degree. These days Dean has a wonderful wife and two lovely daughters to keep him rather more grounded, but the idea of bringing others along with him as he meets interesting new people in universes nobody else has ever seen tends to drag him back to his computer on a fairly regular basis.
Keep up to speed on Eldon's/Dean's latest projects at deanwrites.com.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Torn
Shape shifter Alec Graves has spent nearly a decade trying to keep his family from being drawn into open warfare with a larger pack. The new girl at school shouldn't matter, but the more he gets to know her, the more mysterious she becomes. Worse, she seems to know things she shouldn't about his shadowy world.
Is she an unfortunate victim or bait designed to draw him into a fatal misstep? If she's a victim, then he's running out of time to save her. If she's bait, then his attraction to her will pull him into a fight that'll cost him everything.
Torn is a complete novel
in its own right, but also represents one-half of a double novel
when paired with Broken. Regardless of which book you start with,
the two are designed such that you can continue on to the other in
order to get answers to questions not answered in the book you
started with. The series continues with
Splintered.
Frozen Prospects
The invitation to join the secretive Guadel should have been the fulfillment of dreams Va'del didn't even realize he had. When his sponsors are killed in an ambush a short time later, he instead finds his probationary status revoked, and becomes a pawn between various factions inside the Guadel ruling body.
Jain's never known any life but that of a Guadel in training. She'd thought herself reconciled to the idea of a loveless marriage for the good of her people, but meeting Va'del changes everything. Their growing attraction flies against hundreds of years of precedent, but as wide-spread attacks threaten their world, the Guadel have no choice but to use even Jain and Va'del in their fight for survival.
Bound
The only thing worse than having no family at all, is having a family that is out to hurt you. That would all be bad enough for a normal 17-year-old, but it's even worse for Alec Graves. A shape shifter's pack, his family, is the only thing stopping the other preternatural creatures out there from killing them.
Alec's pack isn't just neglectful, he's pretty sure that his father wants him dead. Alec is about to be sent to the front lines of a war between his people and everything else that goes bump in the night. His only chance of survival is to convince everyone around him that he's the perfect soldier, but there are lines that Alec won't cross, not for any price.
Publisher's Note: Dean Murray's ongoing Reflection Series has been a stunning success with hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation, and a rich, complex world where choices—right or wrong—have real, profound consequences. Unsatisfied with the restrictions imposed on him by writing inside of the conventional series structure, Dean has returned to Sanctuary and the characters so many fans have fallen in love with.
Bound is the first in Dean's new Dark Reflections novels, an alternate timeline set in the same world and featuring many of the same characters, but with a profoundly different backstory.
Dean finally answers many of the questions that his most dedicated readers have been asking themselves for years. What would have happened if Alec's father hadn't been murdered by the Coun'hij, how would Adri's life have changed if her family hadn't been shattered in a horrific accident?
The answers may surprise you, but one thing is for sure; you'll see new sides of familiar faces and when all is said and done, you'll never be able to look at some of them the same.