Wings of Fire

A selkie, a rusalka, and a taniwha walk into a story...

A creative mix of Russian mythology, Maori legends and Irish folklore centered around a modern day woman who's own past is more complicated than even she realizes.” - Emily Macejak

Sabrina Warne’s ex is Lucifer himself and he still claims a part of her soul. Her best friend turns out to be a selkie, a seal in human form, sworn to protect her body. A rusalka – a vengeful, jealous water nymph -- is trying to kill her. And a taniwha, a water being lurking in a deep underground pool, fights to save her life against the call of his conscience.

On the run from supernatural enemies, racing against time to help friends torn from myth and legend, and trying to come to terms with the true identity of the man whom she had thought to be her soulmate, Sabrina Warne is about to find out that nothing she has ever believed has been true.

When Marco, Sabrina’s seven-year partner breaks up with her, she flees her home in Auckland, New Zealand and finds herself re-visiting some of the places where they had been happy once. She meets a kindly stranger who asks her to call him “Uncle Bob” and she finds herself pouring out her story. Uncle Bob gives her a pendant and tells her to go to the fiords and to cross what the Maori have long known as the Lake of the Sorrowing Heart, Lake Manapouri.

Sabrina smothers her misgivings and wearing Uncle Bob’s pendant boards the tourist ferry to the opposite side of the lake, where a unique and underground power station has been built, and from there goes across the mountain pass and down to Doubtful Sound, the Sound of Silence.

A young Maori man named Jack looks at the pendant and angrily tells her that she has broken a taboo and may not cross ‘his’ lake just moments before a malevolent spirit sinks the crowded ferry drowning everyone aboard except Sabrina.

Then things get complicated.

A unique and powerful story which melds together three different mythologies, a hierarchy of legendary archetypes, some of the more controversial trappings of a major world religion, and a unique real world underground power station.

The novel has a virtual soundtrack – thanks to the “Lord of the Dance” CD which was spinning constantly with what became themes linked to individual places or people in the story while it was being written. For instance, the “Lake of Broken Glass” in the first chapter is painted very evocatively by track 3, “Celtic Dream”. The chase into the woods to rescue Jack and Fiana from the rusalka is almost precisely echoed by track 14, appropriately entitled “Nightmare” – you can even hear the thuds of the axe in the music. The night at Uncle Bob’s house during which so many things are revealed, is encapsulated in track 10, “Lament”. And Sabrina herself can be glimpsed in track 5, “Gypsy”

A must read for all high fantasy fans.