Unlike all of my other series, Gates To Faerie is intended to be open ended. I have published two stories so far, I have others in development. Each one is intended to be largely self-contained while contributing something to the development of the series – in other words, the characters have changed due to events in each story. The series will be over when I stop writing.
The basic McGuffin is that there is a parallel Earth, which can be reached by portals of various types, invoked by making the proper deities’ sign in the proper places (and never the wrong deities’ sign). On this parallel Earth, there are Elves – mutated humans who are long-lived and have certain magical abilities, and Smith’s People, also mutated humans who live in one of two types of communities, forest and mountain, but they are biologically the same although culturally different.
A word of warning: These are not young children’s books. Bad things happen to good people, and while I don’t go into detailed descriptions, some of them are upsetting enough that I wouldn’t recommend it for people of less maturity than roughly high school age. Depending on specific individuals, that might be a resilient 13 year old or a less sturdy 16 year old.
Mark Jackson is the viewpoint character. He’s 39 when we meet him. Mark was an actor who realized there were other actors better than he was, and changed to being a salesman – specifically a financial planner. He’s a very good salesman, but his main trick is being able to show potential clients the benefit to them. Because he knew other actors, he’s always specialized in entertainment industry clients, and he’s done very well out of it. He nw manages portfolios totaling many billions, and his own fortune is into nine figures now. As the series opens, he’s divorced with no kids.
Julie Ingmar is an attorney who helps Mark out of some legal trouble. She’s 34 when we meet her, sharp, and has a good level head on her shoulders. She’s a criminal defense attorney who has no illusions about the innocence of most of her clients, but she can recognize it when someone is in fact innocent. She is divorced.
RaDonna Adedeji is (when we meet her) the office manager for Mark’s coop. She and Mark are friends. She’s married to Roland Adedeji, an agriculture and shipping magnate. The Adedejis have a secret: They have elven blood, mostly from the dark-skinned West Elves. RaDonna’s great-grandmother is a powerful West Elven mage, over a thousand years old.
John is Mark’s assistant. He’s smarter than Mark but has absolutely no sales ability, so he works in the background, never meeting clients. Without John, Mark would probably make less than half what he does. Without Mark, John would be homeless. He and his wife Mollie are in the SCA. John has a sense of humor that is problematic in the modern workforce, and he is significantly overweight.
Zebulon Pike is somewhere over 200 years old when we meet him, a former slave who escaped a plantation in South Carolina and went west during the California Gold Rush. Instead of mining gold, he learned he was a mage and able to make gold. He’s one of the few actual human mages, but his long isolation has left him short of people skills and hygiene.
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Mark’s phone rings one night – it’s his ex-wife Diane, looking for place to spend the night. She claims to be on the run and desperate. Against his better judgment, Mark relents. When she shows up, she looks sixteen and blonde – not forty-two and brunette. She says she can’t explain why, but it’s because of the people she’s running from.
Unfortunately, when Mark wakes up in the morning, Diane is a mummified corpse. His regular lawyer – a securities specialist – tells Mark to call a criminal defense lawyer and hangs up. Mark does so, and his call is returned by Julie Ingmar, who has the watch for new clients contacting the firm in difficulty.
Julie calls the police for him, and talks the responding officer out of arresting Mark on the spot. When Mark finally gets to work, he tells RaDonna about his problems, who says she might have something that can help him.
It turns out, what killed Diane is a cult practicing some obscene magical rituals which are also causing problems for the Elves – and the elven-descended mixed bloods. A meeting with the most powerful local noble explains the situation. Mark investigates, scouts, and tries to come up with a compromise or negotiation which is not successful. When that doesn’t work, Mark and Julie try for infiltration to gather intelligence but it all goes wrong and the final encounter doesn’t go according to plan or happily for anyone, but it does solve the Elves’ problems.
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Mark and Julie have problems – the two most obvious of which are that the final encounter of the first novel left Julie pregnant and both of them messed up psychologically.
It’s been all of three weeks, but both of them are determined to work through the problems. Mark even talks Julie into becoming engaged, and (because human therapists would never understand) they ask RaDonna if there is anyone she knows who might be able to help them get through it.
The Elves are immensely grateful for what Mark and Julie did for them, and RaDonna’s great grandmother agrees to perform a therapeutic ritual – but meanwhile they are the subject of magical attacks. The elven mage informs them that their children will be talented mages when they are born due to the favor of The Mother, one of the elven deities.
Old Zeb saves Mark from an attack, and after Mark negotiates for his services, begins to teach them the first elements of sorcery, a kind of ‘recipe’ magic most people are able to learn. Both Mark and Julie demonstrate a particular prowess when they finally get a spell right, so Old Zeb surmises they have been the subject of a divine blessing, intended as beneficial but dangerous to them as well.
But the attacks continue, without motive that Mark or Julie can find – until they learn that there may be another priest of the Mad God in the mix, looking for revenge of the defeat Mark and Julie inadvertently inflicted on the cult. Things build for a while, then Julie gets caught and enthralled in the opposition’s big play – a riot built with The Mad God’s power, and Mark has to sneak through the riot to rescue her.
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