Hello and Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors. Apologies to my fellow Warriors if I didn’t visit your excerpt last week. I actually got caught up in….writing!  Yes, I pushed ahead and finished the umpteenth draft of my other WIP!  Not Snow, which I’m excerpting from here, but that novel-from-hell that’s been sucking up my life for over a year now. Soon I’ll be sharing from that one (hint: it might feature a fashion designing cat shifter with intimacy issues), and pushing to finish Snow in the background.  One of these days I’ll learn to work on one project at a time, but for now, the stories beckon.

I really want to finish out this scene from Snow, in which Prince Gabriel learns all kinds of disturbing things, and that’s before he even gets home to Castle Rosenthal.  Last week, Gabriel had the disturbing thought that one of his brother’s men had deliberately tried to kill him.  He pushed the thought off as ridiculous, but…

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There was a clamor in the trees and then Tristan emerged, looking agitated and flushed, his breathing labored.

“So you managed to interfere with the hunt again, Brother? What’s this nonsense about a magical deer?” Tristan held his bow tightly in one hand, and as he drew closer, it seemed to Gabriel that he was not only agitated, but enraged. Even in the fading light of dusk, blotchy patches on his face radiated red heat and his eyes gleamed with something akin to hate.

Startled, Gabriel took in a sharp breath and exhaled slowly before responding. “It was the white stag, Brother. The same white stag that adorns the family crest.  It is auspicious.”

“And the stag showed himself to you instead of me?”

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Blurb-in-progress for Snow, a reimagined fairy tale:

Following the death of his mother the Queen, Prince Gabriel is called home by his brother, now King. Gabriel hopes for a reconciliation with his estranged brother, but all is not well at Castle Rosenthal. King Tristan has fallen under the sway of a scheming alchemist and along the border of the Black Forest, magical denizens are on the move. Gabriel begins to fear for his life. Is the handsome huntsman in on a plot to assassinate him, or is there an even darker, more evil power afoot? A forced flight into the Black Forest may expose ancient magic at work, if Gabriel can survive long enough to uncover it.

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Weekend Writing Warriors is a blog hop where writers from a wide variety of genres share from their work in excerpts of ten sentences or less.  Click the link to check out the other writers participating today.  It’s a great way to discover your next favorite book.