Eden Ashe

There are times I am sure I have lost my mind. It can’t be normal to have walking, talking, breathing people in your head demanding your time and attention–and not only that, they all seem to come with their own personalities and quirks and ideas about how I can make them happy.  They can be as stubborn and demanding as any person in the world, and they can break my heart in the blink of an eye.

From the moment I met Jilly and Caleb,  my very first heroine and hero, I knew that to be a successful writer I had to love my characters. If I don’t love them, how can I expect any one else to? It wasn’t easy, and my poor Jilly scared the hell out of me. To this day, almost four years after I finished their story, I am still not sure that I know everything there is to know about her and the darkness she came from.

It would be infinitely easier to turn off my emotions and the feelings I have about my characters and just write their story from an objective standpoint. To not worry about every thought, every fear, every emotion they like to bombard me with, and yet even as I think about it, I know if I ever got to the point where I couldn’t care about those things, I would have to turn off my laptop once and for all and walk away from writing forever. I don’t write because I want to write, I write because I need to–because I have to–and because I need to tell these stories. No matter how stubborn or difficult the characters are, there is something about each one that makes their stories need to be told.

And boy, do I have some stubborn characters. I love them all madly, but these are some of my favorites, just because they know how to drive me nuts.

Emma. My fantasy artist, who sees more than she realizes. Convinced, at age four, by her father that she drove her mother to suicide, Emma spends the next twenty years alone, too afraid to let anyone into her life. Her life changes when she the massive giant across the hall from her pulls a knife on her.  Afraid, not for herself, but of how close he is to the edge, Emma decides he needs a friend and puts herself solidly in is life. Then she realizes that the fantasy world she’d always seen was real, and the guardian dragon she’d longed for all of her life had finally come to save her. Now, if only she can get them both to their happy ending without anyone giving in to the urge to throttle her, or snapping the fine hold he has on his sanity, they might have a real chance at forever.

Mica. Because I don’t even know where to start with explaining him and his stubbornness, I’m just going to skip him for now. Trust me, if sweet little Emma can get to the point of wanting to hit him over the head with something solid, he’s enough to drive anyone insane, even his seventeen-year-old daughter, Becca.

Seren.  The third oldest Dragan child, and the smallest of her kind, both Undying and Amazon. She has the heart and soul of a warrior, trapped in a 4’11, 90 lb frame.  A human doctor and an Undying healer, she is as fierce, protective and possessive as her life-bond, Adrian. The mother of two, adorable Braden with his father’s smile and addiction to cookies, and tiny baby Willa, who puts even her parents’ possessiveness to shame. There is nothing that Seren loves more than her family, and when Adrian dies before Willa’s birth, it sends Seren’s world spinning out of control.

Adrian. While not my darkest hero, Adrian is the scariest, and not just because of his sheer, massive size or the jagged scar that bisects the left side of his face, but because he is the deadliest. While too young to remember the death of his parents, his sister Allie’s death would haunt him for the rest of his life. After the time shift, when the Undying were catapolted two thousand years into their future, he finds a lost Undying child, Zanna, and raises her as his sister. He falls in love with Seren the moment he sees her for the first time, but before he can give her the forever he never believed he deserved, he is forced into a decision that will destroy the lives of everyone he loves, but not even death can keep him from his Seren.

Luca. The second oldest Dragan child. While infinitely more pleasant to be around than his older brother, Mica, he’s still a stubborn, difficult man, who insists on calling the woman he’s stuck on the run with Damn it, Keeley, and threatening to shoot her every time she gets herself hurt (which, to be fair, is a lot) or refuses to listen to him.While still a dark hero, and harboring a two-millenia-long hatred of his brother, he’s one of my more stable heroes. He has to be, to survive Keeley.

Keeley. Ah, my Keeley. The quiet librarian with a secret life as a best-selling romance writer who dreams of a mysterious man and adventure every night. While highly accident prone, and a good-girl belief system she never seems to be able to shake, she seems completely mis-matched for the tall, dark, deadly man who never seems to be more than a second away from shooting her. Did I mention that he insists on calling her Damn it, Keeley?

Katia. The youngest Dragan, and up until recently, my most broken and elusive character, there were times when I was sure she was going to kill me. It took a lot to strip off all of the fears and issues I’d dumped on her in an effort to find her real personality, but I believe I have finally found the Katia she was always meant to be. Quick and wicked, she spends her life traveling when she’s not with her family, or checking in on Donovan, the Undying male who raised her after it was discovered who she was.  A dancer, she’s been all over the world, always looking for her life-bond. She knows he’s out there somewhere, waiting for her, and she doesn’t stop looking until she finds him. Once she does, she knows she’ll fight for her Padraig until the end of time.  He is ice to her fire, and when he tells her ‘Whatever the life-bond wants’, she believes him, because what she wants–the only thing she wants–is him, forever.

Rachel. Orphaned at a very early age after her parents and her younger sister were killed in a plane crash, the only fear she’d never been able to overcome was her fear of flying. Despite his belief that he was an ancient Undying male–and an actual dragon–Rachel can’t stop herself from falling for him.  When the pilot dies somewhere over the North Pacific, Rachel has no choice but to believe Chad is exactly who and what he says he is.

Reece. Poor Reece. Assigned as Becca’s guard, it’s hell on him when he realizes the 17 year-old daughter of the Dragan is his life-bond. He manages to not let anyone know, because he needed her to experience life before he binds her to him for eternity. His world goes upside down when he gets a call from his parents, letting him know a woman just dropped off a little girl claiming to be his, while Becca, now 18, decides she wants her Reece and she wants him now.

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