Good morning! Please welcome guest author Cornelia Amiri. Though I will be away for most of the day, please feel free to leave comments for Cornelia and I will post them as soon as I return. Thank you!
~Kate
Valkyrie Vampire Ball
There is a secret to my Dancing Vampire series. My vampires aren’t really vampires. They are vampiric fey women who roam the Scottish highlands.
I’ve always seen seductive blood suckers such as vampires as more feminine than masculine, but in the old horror movies they are mainly men. Yet the Celtic fey vampiric creatures are all women, which makes more sense to me. I am intrigued by folk takes of a type of Celtic vampiric fey, the Scottish baobhan sith (baa’-vawn shee), who wear green dresses and in some legends have goat hooves for feet. They are also called dancing vampires.
The gorgeous temptresses appear before their human victims, usually young men coming from the local pub late at night. Clad in scanty, green silk dresses displaying their shapely, sensuous bodies they entice these stumbling men to dance with them. Burning with desire for the hot embrace of a seductress’s slender arms and the softness of a dancer’s supple thigh, the men enjoy dancing with the baobhan sith, at first. Once the men grow exhausted of the nonstop dancing, the baobhan sith strike. Without warning, their long nails transform into talons of death, to rip the flesh of their victims and drink of the crimson stream. They don’t have fangs, their nails extend like claws and they use them as a deadly weapon. Some of the other ways Celtic vampires differ from their more traditional, fang growing counterparts is they don’t turn mortals and no one stakes them through the heart. With the baobhan sith it’s all about the cairn. When a stone in a cairn is overturn, the baobhan sith are able to pass through to our realm. To get rid of them just stack the stones back on the cairn and they cannot leave their fey realm underhill.
Of course I thought what a great character for an erotica paranormal romance and I wrote Dance of the Vampires for Ellora’s Cave with a baobhan sith, Sorcha, as the heroine. Sorcha has six sisters so I knew it was only fair that each of them have a story – so the Dancing Vampire series was born — a modern take on the baobhan sith. Follow these dark fey as they discover the wild delights of romance with the men of their dreams. The books in the series are Dance Of The Vampires, Vampire Highland Fling, Ever So Bonnie A Vampire, and One Dance With A Vampire. Valkyrie Vampire Ball , the 5th novella in my Dancing Vampire series comes out November 28th.
As the dark fey, the dancing vampires, are an aspect of the Celtic War and fertility goddess, Morrigan, I use her as a secondary character throughout the books. I find it interesting how much the Norse War and Fertility goddess, Freya is similar to Morrigan. I realized that the Valkyrie are also a lot like the baobhan sith. I have always been intrigued by the Viking roots of the Scottish Clan Gunn. So in Valkyrie Vampire Ball, the hero, Tor, is a Gunn. Both the valkyrie and the baobhan sith are after Tor as his ancient genealogy is both Scottish and Norse. I was able to have Morrigan and Freya face off against each other. This was a super fun book to write. I think the readers will find it a lot of fun and hot hot, hot.
ISBN – 9781419942785
Ellora’s Cave Publishing Inc.
Blurb:
The baobhan sith—vampiric fey—Mordak and her sisters search the highlands for men to dance with and drink from. The moment Mordak spots Tor, she burns for his touch and yearns for the taste of his lips in a lingering kiss. Before she can sway her hips in a seductive dance to enchant Tor, three Valkyrie land in front of him. Mordak is not about to let the Norse blondes fly off with the man she chose.
Tor never expected to run into six gorgeous women on his way to the pub. It’s the redhead, Mordak, who catches his eye. When she fights the Valkyrie and saves his life, he knows she’s the woman for him. But Mordak lives in the fey realm where he can’t go and she promised her sisters she’d never fall in love with a human. Can he escape the Valkyrie who want to slay him and win Mordak’s love even though he’s only human?
The last book in the series, Some Vampires Shimmy will be coming soon.
Cornelia Amiri, who also writes under the name of Maeve Alpin, is the author of 24 Celtic and Steampunk romance books. She lives in Houston Texas as does her son and granddaughter and her cat, Severus. Severus is a writer’s cat, he loves books. He likes to knock them off the bookshelf, sit on them, and sniff the open pages. He also uses the computer, he sits on it, lays on top of it, and walks across the key board almost constantly. You can visit Cornelia at her web site and FB page.
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