Author's Comments
This book wrote itself. After the painful struggle I'd had withSteal the Dragon, I
couldn't believe how fast this book came out. It took me only nine months - most of my books
take me at least a year. Here was the murder mystery I'd tried inSteal the Dragon and this time,
probably because I wasn't working from an outline, it worked out.
There were a lot of people who contributed to this book. My sister who is a doctor was very patient with phone calls requesting details about dead bodies, blood, and what being confined to a wheel chair in the middle ages really meant. My husband is a wealth of unusual information - like did the ability to blue a sword like Kerim's was blued exist in the middle ages. Not the general bluing to protect it from rust, but the kind that leaves behind a peacock blue finish. And when he couldn't answer my questions he called the Smithsonian and then Metropolitan Museum of Art trying to find someone who knew enough about swords and metallurgy to tell us if blueing a sword would ruin its temper.
When I wrote this book, I intended it to be the first in a series of books about these characters. First I had a book to write about Wolf and Aralorn, but then I was going to do some things with Sham and Kerim. But reality hit when Ace refused When Demons Walk. Laura Anne had taken a job heading Roc and Masques final numbers were terrible. Really bad. Steal the Dragon was doing pretty well, but not well enough to make up for Masques without an editor who liked my books. Down-hearted, I finished Wolf's Bane and shuffled around, trying to find a reason to write another book. My agent, Virginia Kidd, shopped When Demons Walk around. I have all the rejection letters, most of them quite happy with the book, but not my numbers. When I finished Wolf's Bane, my contract with Ace indicated that I had to send it to them too. While Ace and my agency tried to decipher the arcane language of the contract, someone at Ace actually read my books: the upshot was that they bought When Demons Walk after all. I was relieved to find that Anne Sowards, my new editor, was both enthusiastic and skilled.
They didn't buy the sequel to Masques for the very legitimate reason that Masques was out of print and was, as my husband likes to say, a limited edition. So I decided to wait for a while to write a sequel to When Demons Walk.
