Blog Tour – Life and Death of Lily Drake

„Fans of Charlaine Harris and TRUE BLOOD will find much to enjoy in Michelle Nelson’s cracking, sanguine debut. Dark, funny, audacious and written with a confidence that belies this as her first effort, LIFE AND DEATH OF LILY DRAKE dispenses with the idea that vampires are pasty, maudlin, emo-types and restores them to all their brutal bloodthirsty glory. And in terms of heroines to root for, I daresay Lily Drake gives poor ‘ol Sookie a run for her money.”

 – Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award-Winning author of THE TURTLE BOY and KIN.

For Lily Drake, slaying vampires is easy…

Dating them is the hard part.

Lily Drake is your everyday hard-working single mom…until a gorgeous vampire shows up on her front door who she mistakenly assumes is her blind date for the evening. As one crazy scenario after another unfolds, Lily finds herself falling in love with two vampires, slaying the evil ones, and being prophesied as the savior of the entire undead race.
Deciding between pizza and Chinese take-out will no longer be one of the hard decisions facing Lily Drake once she is immersed into vampire society. Humanity or immortality? That doesn’t hold a candle against this question – which of the two handsome vampire cousins?

The Life and Death of Lily Drake is not your typical vampire love story. It’s a tale about the humorous mistakes a woman makes simply trying to survive not only life, but the dating scene.  How will Lily manage working full-time, taking care of her young son and fighting the undead at every turn?
Lily will have to figure it out, but who better to save the world than a mom?

 

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Book excerpt

As Lily turned to walk back inside, she noticed a shadowy figure against one of the closer trees. Her heart raced in her chest and she quickly slipped inside the garage, locked the outside door, and spun around to get back inside the house. To her surprise, Valentine stood inside her garage, past the door she had just locked.

“I’m so sick of you guys doing that!” Lily whispered, keeping her voice low so as not to wake Keaton. The man was truly tall. Easily standing six-foot-five, he towered over Lily.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He smiled, but it was not entirely friendly.

“Oops. I’m not supposed to remember, right?”

Valentine laughed. His mood was a large improvement from the last time he’d unexpectedly dropped by Lily’s house. “You know, when Rose comes looking for you again, you’re going to have to do better than this. Or take her up on the offer. She’d probably forgive you two if you’d just consent to the turn. You could be with him then. Happily ever after and all that shit, you know?”

“All that shit, huh? Valentine, for your name you aren’t much of a romantic, are ya?”

“I was around long before this modern Valentine’s Day nonsense with hearts and stuffed animals.”

Valentine accepted Lily’s offer to come inside for some coffee. She explained they had to keep their voices low, and he’d have to hightail it if Keaton woke. Valentine didn’t seem offended and even told her he would hear long before she did if Keaton did wake.

He wasn’t one for small talk, it seemed. Valentine got straight to the point. He knew Mathias wouldn’t have removed her memories, but he discerned that they had said their farewells. He explained that after five hundred years, he understood his cousin as well as he did himself. He recognized his despair was real. Valentine had expected Mathias to keep seeing her, but when he came home, he understood Mathias had given her up for her own safety.

“You know, you could still have most of your life. You would still be a mother for the next ten years,” Valentine explained. “Keaton would be an adult by the time you had to disappear from sight.”

“Just because Keaton will be an adult, that doesn’t make my duties as a mother complete. Eighteen or twenty-one isn’t some magic number that means you don’t care for your children anymore, Val. I’m guessing you were never a father?”

Val smirked. “Not to my knowledge, anyway. Keep in mind, someday Keaton will be given the same option you’ve got and more than likely he’ll take it.”

“That isn’t a chance I’m willing to take. Since I retained my memories of everything that happened, if Keaton did choose to leave, I’d at least know what happened. I’d know that he chose this and he’d live forever, as long as I didn’t get wiped again between now and then. But if I choose this life, and he doesn’t, I’ll have to watch him get old. I’ll someday have to watch my son die, maybe never know my grandchildren, watch them die. A vicious circle. Don’t you understand? No parent should ever have to endure that, even if it’s eighty or a hundred years down the road.”

Lily had argued her case well, but had very little fight left in her when Valentine finally relented. He gave her a stern warning to be convincing if—and more likely when—she next ran into Rose. Lily thought maybe Mathias exaggerated, but she had begun to believe Rosamund could be one scary bloodsucking bitch. Lily agreed to be careful, and surprised Val when she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug.

“Take care of him,” she whispered in Valentine’s ear.

“You should have been the one doing that,” he whispered back, and like Mathias, he left before she could say anything else. Lily thought she heard the garage door quietly shut, but she couldn’t be sure. When she checked, the house was locked tight.