We’re so pleased to have author TA Moore dropping by today on the tour for her new novel, Stone the Crows, book two in the Wolf Winter series. We have an exclusive fairy tale ficlet to share with you today as well as a giveaway, so be sure to check out the Rafflecopter widget at the end for details.

Welcome, TA!

Once Upon a Time…

When Dr Nicholas Blake was a little boy he lived with his Granny in a little grey house in a long grey street in Glasgow. His granny wasn’t like other grannies. She wore make-up like them. The other grannies told stories about wolves–about little pigs and little girls–but not like Granny’s.

Once upon a time, she’d say after she tucked Nicholas in and covered up the mirrors, there was a wolf. She lived in the mountains and she hunted on the plains. Her thoughts were wolf thoughts and her stomach was full of wolf-hunger. Her ears were sharp and her teeth were white, but not as sharp as her grief or as white as the milk that leaked from her teats. For wolves can love, boy, better than you ever will.

This wolf had no pack. Her pups had died. Her mate had left. She was alone until a man came. The wolf knew men, she knew to avoid them, she knew they killed and didn’t eat. Usually she would have run, but she could smell sour milk and fresh shit. The things that squirmed in the man’s arms were not pups, they were naked and soft, but they were infants.

Maybe the wolf had run mad. Wolves aren’t meant to be alone. Wolves aren’t built to mourn. It made an odd sense to her, though. In her den were the bones of two malformed pups, dead before they could suckle. Now two squalling infants had been left here, naked and pink as worms in the sun.

So she took them. She fed them. But they were weak and slow. Their eyes didn’t focus, their teeth didn’t grow. Her milk would dry up. Other beasts would come. New bones would lie with the old bones, and she’d be alone again.

The wolf waited until the moon rose high in the sky. For she was a wolf and she had been born, grew, hunted in one of the old, high places were the air and the real was thin. She could see the moon. She could see the Moon, the pale, fierce woman and the star-eyed wolves who pulled her chariot.

Her mate had eyes like stars and smelled like the earth after a lightning strike. Maybe that is why the chariot slowed when the wolf sang. Maybe that’s why the Moon looked down and chose to give the wolf what she wanted. Pups instead of boys, fur instead of skin, teeth instead of gums.

But there are always two sides to a god, to a gift, to the moon. The light face and the dark.

The cubs were still men, and men where to be avoided. The wolf had forgotten that. When men saw the naked, wild children on the hill they came to take them, they raised them on mutton and taught them to hunger for more than would fill their belly.

Wolves are hungry. Men are greedy. The wolf’s children were both.

Now go to sleep, and hope you wake.

About the Book

Title: Stone the Crows
Author: TA Moore
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Release: May 29, 2018
Cover Artist: Bree Archer
Buy the Book: Dreamspinner Press || Amazon and Other 3^rd Party eTailers
Blurb: When the Winter comes, the Wolves will come down over the walls and eat little boys in their beds.

Doctor Nicholas Blake might still be afraid of the dark, but the monsters his grandmother tormented him with as a child aren’t real.

Or so he thought… until the sea froze, the country ground to a halt under the snow, and he found a half-dead man bleeding out while a dead woman watched. Now his nightmares impinge on his waking life, and the only one who knows what’s going on is his unexpected patient.

For Gregor it’s simple. The treacherous Prophets mutilated him and stole his brother Jack, and he’s going to kill them for it. Without his wolf, it might be difficult, but he’ll be damned if anyone else gets to kill Jack—even if he has to enlist the help of his distractingly attractive, but very human, doctor.

Except maybe the Prophets want something worse than death, and maybe Nick is less human than Gregor believes. As the dead gather and the old stories come true, the two men will need each other if they’re going to rescue Jack and stop the Prophets’ plan to loose something more terrible than the Wolf Winter.

About the Author

TA Moore genuinely believed that she was a Cabbage Patch Kid when she was a small child. This was the start of a lifelong attachment to the weird and fantastic. These days she lives in a market town on the Northern Irish coast and her friends have a rule that she can only send them three weird and disturbing links a month (although she still holds that a DIY penis bifurcation guide is interesting, not disturbing). She believes that adding ‘in space!’ to anything makes it at least 40% cooler, will try to pet pretty much any animal she meets (this includes snakes, excludes bugs), and once lied to her friend that she had climbed all the way up to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, when actually she’d only gotten to the beach, realized it was really high, and chickened out.

She aspires to being a cynical misanthrope, but is unfortunately held back by a sunny disposition and an inability to be mean to strangers. If TA Moore is mean to you, that means you’re friends now.