Q&A with the Mortal Machine’s Remy #interview #releaseday

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I thought long and hard about how to celebrate the release of Midnight Dawn. I could talk about my challenges in writing the book, my inspiration, or the fact that the book is only 99 cents for a limited time, but it’s been done a million times before. Nope, I needed something new and epic.

Yesterday, it finally hit me. I needed Remy in the hot seat. Readers seem to be fascinated with my gentle giant, and I realized I know almost nothing about him.

It took some coaxing…okay, it took a whole load of coaxing and promises of peach pie with a gallon of ice cream, but he finally agreed to talk to me, and to you, the reader. He’ll be answering your questions all day long, so post them in the comments below.

 

Casting call: Jason Mamoa would play a great Remy, no?

INTERVIEW

“Hey, Remy,” I asked, settling into the chair across from him, close enough our knees brushed. “Um…why are you trying to strangle your own fingers, big guy? I’m not going to take a bite out of you. We’re just going to talk.”

He lifted his chin and studied me with his bright blue eyes that had a jade star as a mark of his sentinel status. Tribal tattoos covered one whole half of him, cutting his handsome, exotic face in two. Neither side of it appeared happy to be here. “Jus’ talk, huh?” he said in his creole accent of Hawaiian and Canadian English. “Then why you have that look in you eye, Adams?”

I raised a brow and smiled in a way I hoped appeared innocent. “What look would that be?”

“The one that usually come right before you do something nasty to one of us, especially my kolohe, Addison. I should know. I see it lots. An’ where’s my pie?”

I waved him off and sat back. Addison was finally growing into the big shoes she had to fill. Yeah, so I’d put her through hell, but she was strong. “Tell me about the first time you saw Sophia, and we’ll get you that pie.”

Remy sat up straighter, his features softening as they did every time I mentioned the young woman he’d adored in secret for decades. “She was in a tree when Asher an’ me find her. As wild and timid as a cat, and jus’ as skittish. She’d jus’ seen her first wraith, an’ it took me almost two hour to coax her down outta that tree.” He chuckled, and it wasn’t entirely a happy sound. His smile fell flat. “Only eighteen, and her life already full of darkness not even a mind-wipe could erase.”

“But now she has you to turn on the light.”

He half smiled and shook his ginormous head. “Her fadda hurt her, and I have big hands like he did. I scare her, too.”

I leaned forward and patted his knee. “Don’t you worry, big guy. I don’t think you scare her the way you think you do. She just doesn’t know how to be loved yet, because she’s never had that. Just keep being your patient, gentle self, and she’ll come around.”

“If you say so.” His cheeks reddened, and he went back to strangling his hands. “Now get on with this. Ask what you really want to know so I can get back to her.”

I sighed and reached for his hand to stop him from cutting off his own circulation and maybe give him some comfort, but one dark look from him sent me back in my chair. “A sentinel’s gifts are born of their fears, as you know. And Izan chooses his guardians based on their potential to have heightened emotions, which powers the Mortal Machine. Why did he choose you, Remy? What was your childhood like? I know everything about Sophia, but what scares you?”

An unsettling stillness came over him, as if his body had shut down while whatever wound I’d poked my finger into consumed him. I felt like a grade A asshole, but I didn’t take back the question. I needed to know before I wrote the next chapter of his life.

“I tell you if you promise nothing bad happen to Sophia in whatever nasty piece of work you write for us next.”

Ah! Nasty? I swallowed my snappy retort and rekindled my smile. “I think readers would throttle me if I ever hurt Sophia. I can’t promise she won’t shed some tears by the end, but I can promise that everything will turn out okay.”

“You version of ‘okay’ and mine totally different, I’d bet.” After an agonizing few minutes, he finally said, “Water.”

Squinting at him, I waited for more that never came. “I’m sorry, what about water?”

“I don’ like the water, okay?” he snarled. “Now jus’ drop it.”

No wonder he never went swimming. “You know I can’t do that. Why are you scared of the water, Remy?”

His knuckles made a terrible cracking sound as he curled one fist into the other. “My mother jealous my of the time my fadda spend with me. Try to drown me in the ocean when I was four year old.” His eyes iced over as he set his haunted stare on me. “You know what it feel like to have lungs full of salt water? To know the woman who give birth to me try to kill her own child? So yeah, that stick with a man for a good long while. Bring it up again, or you make my Sophia cry for any reason, you an’ me come to blows, you get me?”

My heart dropped at the pain in his voice. “Yeah, Remy. I get you. I’m sorry. You know I love you both to pieces, right?”

He sighed, and the aggressiveness that only moments before made me thankful for good bladder control disappeared as if it had never been. “Yeah, I know you do. Just be good, yeah?”

Good? He clearly didn’t know me very well. A person’s greatness often comes out of the hardest trials, and Remy would find his happy place at the end of his own hard road. Hopefully he didn’t throttle me after he found out what I had in store for them in Forever Dusk. Peach pie could fix anything, even an impending apocalypse. Couldn’t it?

Thanks for helping me celebrate the release of Midnight Dawn. Remy will be sticking around for a while today. If you have any questions for him, post them in the comments below and he’d be glad to answer.