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Richard is right. I can’t give myself completely to Jean-Claude. I can’t let him feed. I can’t truly share a bed. He is, no matter how lovely, the walking dead. I keep shying away from anything that reminds me too strongly of that fact, like blood-drinking and low body temperatures. Jean-Claude certainly has the keys to my libido, but my heart…Can a walking corpse hold the keys to my heart? No. Yes. Maybe. How the hell should I know?

Afterword

This is book seven in the Anita Blake series. As a reader, I find a lot of series begin to lose steam somewhere between book five and book eight. It’s almost as if the writers begin to forget what made the earlier books work, or they are simply bored. As a writer, this is a challenge. How do I keep myself, and you the readers, interested? Here are some of the ways I tried to plan my world so that I, my characters, and hopefully the readers would still be having fun books down the road.

First, I gave myself enough toys to play with: hard-boiled mystery, horror with its monsters, fantasy with its myths, romance with its complications, bare-knuckle politics where assassination is simply good business, and a main character that I still love. I planned a world as broad as our own, so there would be plenty of places to play, and ideas galore. I must have done it right, because as I write this I am enjoying writing the beginning of the sixteenth Anita Blake novel. The fifteenth hit the shelves only this month. I learned new things about my world, my characters, and my mythology in that last book that I had not known, ever. Pretty cool, after fifteen books.

I think that this book you hold in your hands, Burnt Offerings, is a good example of another thing that keeps me interested in Anita’s world. I introduce two new characters in this book. (I introduce more than that, but these two will not only stick around, but also will become what I call minor major characters. Or major minor characters, if you prefer.)

By the time most series have gotten to book seven the cast is pretty much set, but bringing in new characters to join the established cast has become a hallmark of my series. In Burnt Offerings, you’ll meet Asher and Nathaniel.

Asher was originally meant to be a villain, but almost from the first moment he stepped on stage he became more than that. He is truly a flawed hero, in that Hamlet, Prince of Denmark way. He was once one of the most beautiful men that Belle Morte had ever collected for her private harem. Then the church got hold of him and tried to burn the devil out of him with holy water, which burns vampiric flesh like acid. Half his body still has that almost heartrending beauty, but the other half has the scars of the burns.

He saw himself as ruined goods. But Jean-Claude loved him, had loved him centuries ago. They had shared the only two women that they ever loved: Belle Morte, the creator of their bloodline, and Julianna, Asher’s human servant.

Julianna was burned alive by the same people who used holy water on Asher. Jean-Claude has never truly forgiven himself for not saving them both. Asher has never forgiven him either. The twenty-plus years that the three of them spent as a ménage à trois, free from Belle Morte, was probably the happiest time of their lives, and definitely of their afterlives.

But from the first moment we saw him, Anita and I thought Asher was beautiful. We were afraid of him at first, because he was a bad guy, but he was always beautiful. Through Jean-Claude’s memories we remembered his body smooth and untouched by the holy water, but Anita fell in love with Asher just the way he is now, scars and all.

Anita and I love Asher, but there is always that suspicion that he actually loves Jean-Claude more than he loves Anita. People keep asking me when Asher will find a girl of his own. I’m no longer certain it’s a girl of his own that he wants. I think there is a certain Master Vampire of St. Louis that Asher would give anything, anything, to truly belong