Author photo by Michele Cwiertny

I keep trying to do interviews with the heroes, but somehow I always end up losing control. I’ll give you an example of the interview I tried to do with Axel Lock, the hero of BLOOD MAGIC.

I went to Axel’s club, Axel of Evil, to meet him for the interview. The club has a clear theme—hell on earth. There are caged fire pits, two fire-etched bars, and carvings of demons and gargoyles starting down onto the dance floors.

Axel’s mother, Eve, meets me at the door and offers me a drink. I want to say Apple Martini, but I really need to look like a professional author. Besides, this place looks like beer on tap and hard liquor with a side of sex, not fruit flavored martinis. So I take a seat on a barstool and say, “Water will be fine.”

Eve pours a sweating bottle of water into a clean glass when I feel my hair stand on end. I can’t help myself, I turn around.

Striding across the floor is a huge man, with dark just-a-shade-too-long hair and a hard cut face that frames glittering green eyes. This man commands attention. He’s wearing a green shirt over some serious muscle and jeans cupping a very fine butt. He’s moving fast, yet I can’t hear the sound of his footsteps. It makes the skin on my arms tingle.

Uh oh, I’m tingling all over.

Annoyed, I set my glass down and say, “Cut that pheromone stuff out.”

Axel raises one dark brow over his incredible green eyes. Then he works a slow smile.

The tingling increases. Damn it. Note to self: if you give the men pheromones to attract women for sex, you’re asking for trouble. I grit my teeth and say, “Knock it off.”

“Axel,” Eve says in her mom-voice.

I smirk at that. Eve Locke is Axe’s mother. She’s a mortal woman, and she’s tough as nails. She does not take crap from her witch-hunter son.

Axel moves behind the bar, fishes out an ice cold beer and opens it. “Hannah’s awake, mom.”

Eve said, “Answer the author’s questions Axel. We can’t take any risks with Hannah.” She walks out, and I can hear her steps clearly, unlike her son.

Axel’s eyes turn from the color of sun-warmed grass to glittering emeralds. “Hannah’s four years old.”

I nod, knowing he’s talking about his baby sister. Axel loves his sister, everyone loves her. “It couldn’t be helped. I—”

He set his bottle down on the acrylic bar. “You let a four-year-old kid be death cursed. She’s innocent.”

“You just have to trust me. If you do your part, it’ll all work out.”

His body goes deadly still and his hand remains around the bottle of beer. With his gaze locked on me, he says, “It’d better. If Hannah dies, nothing will stop me from hunting you down.”

He can’t do that, can he? I gnaw on my lower lip, trying to work out the paradoxes of the world I created. He has to stay in the storyline I wrote, right? He can’t break out, track me to my Lyon’s Lair and have his way with…I mean, extract his revenge? I pick up my water and drink it down. It’s hot in here! Desperate to take control of the interview, I say, “I’m giving you the tools to save her.”

He snorts at me. “I can deal with you cursing me and the other guys. We can deal with the painful craving for witch blood. We’ve vowed to never kill an innocent earth witch. That’s all fine. But now Hannah’s been death-cursed and has less than a month to live. And your solution? I have to kidnap a witch.” He lifts his beer, finishing it off. “How the hell am I going to keep from killing her before she gets that curse off Hannah?”

Another shiver races over my skin and deeper. “That’s what you have pheromones for. Use them.”

“Now?” He asks in a slow, rich voice. He starts moving around the bar toward me.

Damn. I slide down off the barstool and say, “I have to, uh, go. We’ll continue this interview later.”

His dark laughter follows me. “What’s the matter, Lyon?”

“Shut up, Axel,” I mutter and slam out the door. He’s messing with me, I know that. I gave him a super-sized sex drive and he’s just using it to torment me.

But I also know that Axel Locke will meet his match in Darcy MacAlister. Darcy may not know she’s a witch in the beginning of the book, but by the end of the book, she’s brings the powerful and sexy Axel to his knees.

Ah yes, good times. Freed of the darkly sensual pheromones that were saturating the air in the club, I laugh.