CLOAK & GHOST: REBEL CELL question & answer!

For a book that I gave a way for free, I sold a lot of copies of CLOAK & GHOST: REBEL CELL. Thanks everyone!

I’ll answer some questions people had about the book here. Spoilers alert!

JLH asks:

“Curious though how Nadia is supposed to function as a shadow agent for the queen when she is so well known.”

With the Cloak, Mask, and Occlusion spells, Nadia can be as unobtrusive as she likes. Also, she’s not a very large woman, so all she really needs to do is put on a big coat, a ball cap, and sunglasses, and she’ll immediately look non-threatening to most people. The High Queen usually recruits shadow agents with a variety of different skill sets, but with Nadia she has someone who can be a scalpel or a hammer as needed.

Also, Nadia is only a certain level of famous. Like, the governor of a smaller US state level of famous. (Or a backbencher MP, for those of you from countries with Westminster-style governments.) Like, I have no idea who the governor of New Jersey is at the moment. But within a certain circle of people, the governor of New Jersey is very well known and influential. But if you’re outside of that circle of people and you met the governor of New Jersey, like you saw him in line at McDonalds or something, you’d have no idea who he was. Nadia’s about that level of famous. She was on the national news for a while, but the news cycle does move on.

“Also looking forward to seeing her interact with more human wizards. Wonder what they think of her?”

Nearly all the other human wizards are part of the Wizard’s Legion and personally sworn to the High Queen. (The Wizard’s Legion is one of the hammers she uses to keep the Elven nobles in line.) A human wizard meeting Nadia would first be frightened when he or she realized how strong Nadia was, and then would suspect that she was either an Inquisition agent or one of the High Queen’s scalpels or hammers.

Matthew asks:

“Question though, what was the point of Markus?”

I want to do more with the Shadow Hunters as a organization further down the road, but the only members of the Family Nadia had met so far have been Riordan, Nora, and Adler. So it was time to start introducing more of them.

“Or was he just there to give me a sense that Shadow Hunters are apparently attracted to slightly insane females?”

LOL. That would be Riordan. As Nora points out to him (repeatedly), he does have a type. Both his previous long-term relationships tried to kill him, which is why he took things so slowly with Nadia. Markus was just being charming.

Nadia would be attractive, but the longer you talk to her, the more apparent it would be that there’s something…off about her, to the point where it’s off-putting and unsettling. Like, people who look into her eyes usually have to look away first, she’s hyper-vigilant about her surroundings, that kind of thing. Caina has much better poise, and it much better at controlling her emotions. The flip side of that is Nadia tends to boil over and lose her temper and be fine after, while Caina internalize emotions and deal with them by doing things like overthrowing governments.

Anyway! CLOAK & GHOST: REBEL CELL was a good warmup for CLOAK OF DRAGONS, which I should be able to start writing in January.

-JM