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But I think Jean-Claude needs a third person around, to be with Asher. Belle Morte first, then Julianna, and now Anita. I guess it just depends on where you fall on the Kinsey scale.

In the books that came after Burnt Offerings, Asher would grow and change, and show that he loved Anita, too. And that he still loved Jean-Claude, and had missed him as much as he tried to hate him.

Asher has become not just one of my favorites but a fan favorite, as well. Pretty good for a character introduced seven books in.

Which brings us to Nathaniel, who is also introduced in this book. When you meet him in Burnt Offerings he’s nineteen, and to Anita he is a burden. He is another victim that she has to protect—we actually meet him in the hospital after he has nearly been killed. Since he’s a wereleopard, he’s hard to kill, but a client got out of hand. Client? He’s a high-class “escort” when we meet him, as well as a stripper at Jean-Claude’s club, Guilty Pleasures. And yeah, escort means what you think it means. He went into the hospital because he let a customer tie him up and the customer gutted him. (By the way, I didn’t make that up. Actual crime. Yeah, way creepy. I find that true crime is far more disturbing to me than anything I can make up.) Nathaniel is into bondage and submission, and he is so submissive that he won’t say no, not even to save himself. (That’s actually true of a number of people I interviewed when I was researching the BDSM scene. I found the concept that some people would let you do anything, absolutely anything to them, both horrifying and fascinating. It’s rare, but these people seemed to mean it. Luckily for them their masters, or dominants, kept them safe, even from themselves.)

Nathaniel was never intended to be a major player in the books. His character grew out of the research I’d done, and some corner of my personality I didn’t know was there, I guess. Or maybe Nathaniel just needed to be there for Anita. (If you have not read the series after book ten, Narcissus in Chains, then stop reading this essay, because a big, big, spoiler is coming up.) Have you stopped reading? If you haven’t, here comes the spoiler:

I never intended Nathaniel to be Anita’s boyfriend, of any description, let alone her live-in lover. Surprised the hell out of me. The only relationship that ever surprised me more was Micah, but he’s new in the book he appears in; Nathaniel just sort of crept into our minds and hearts.

He is that person who has had everything go wrong for him, almost. He’s one of those people who should be dead by now in some tragic way, but in the world of fiction I could save him. He is in part based on people I interviewed or knew of in real life, and some of them have vanished. But Nathaniel has not. He has remained in the series, in my world, and he has grown as a character and a person. Anita loves him. He has changed for her, because she demanded it of him. But when you are in love, really in love, you are changed by it. In trying to help Nathaniel change, Anita has changed herself. They have grown together.

I love Asher and Nathaniel, and I never intended either of them to be major players. I certainly never intended them to be Anita’s lovers, let alone for her to love them.

I think that this is what I do differently from most other writers of series: I create characters with each book that are new, fresh, and exciting, and that intrigue me. With each book new people come on stage to fascinate me and my characters. I am never afraid to add to my cast.

Now, as a writer that makes my job harder in some ways—it’s quite a job to juggle everyone. But as a reader, it keeps me happy. It keeps me interested. It keeps me guessing. When I finish this essay I will go back to work on the sixteenth book. I am a little more than two hundred pages into it, and already I have learned new things about a character who has been in the series since book four, The Lunatic Café. Which character? Jason, who is introduced in that book and is on stage in every other book from that point on except for book nine,