The Faeries Who Started It All

BLURB: Stowed away in the trunk of a pharmaceutical representative from Killarney, a band of feisty Irish faeries is released in the outlying suburbs of Philadelphia, where Malachi McCurdy sets up bachelor housekeeping. In need of a housekeeper, he is introduced to Shawna Egan, unaware that “his” faeries have taken up residence in her oak tree. Shawna, who was raised with tales of the Fair Folk but never realized she can see them, learns it the hard way when she cuts down the tree in which they made a home. She gives them another and faeries always repay their debts. But Shawna has secrets, and although she knows Mal is what she is seeking, will he want her after he has heard the confessions of the cleaning lady? If so, he will need help from the Fae, for the dragons he must slay for his lady live in her mind.

EXCERPT: On Thursday, the faeries went on strike and Shawna should have seen it coming. Then again, seeing was part of the problem. Great-granddaughter of a couple who had fled starving Ireland, Shawna could See faeries. It was not a visual seeing, but something that happened in the ancestral recesses of the mind: a subliminal perception of the fast flit of a wing or the shimmer of a gossamer body or the mosquito-like hum of a tiny voice not heard with the ear. But Shawna found herself living not in Ireland, as her genes supposed, but forty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia where Seeing faeries usually resulted in the administration of medication. She had made up her rational twenty-first century mind never to See anything.
It almost worked.
The day before, her friend Dorothy’s significant other, Tom, had brought the Mexican laborers he supervised for a landscaper to moonlight in the pasture behind Shawna’s ramshackle barn. The men had agreed to take down a lightning-struck oak for fifty dollars each and all the beer they could drink, which made it a concern that she and they were uninsured. Her homeowners’ insurance had lapsed—a fact she was trying to keep from the mortgage company—and those men were not working on company time, with workman’s comp.
When they got the tree on the ground and sawed into firewood without anyone being maimed, Shawna thought the worst danger had been averted.
That didn’t work.
On Thursday morning, she was pleased to see the oak in a pile on the leeward side of her barn. It would not do for firewood that winter, but she hoped to need it the following year, when it should be aged enough to feed the basement woodstove. It would have to heat the house if she couldn’t pay her electric bill. If she still had the house, she had the wood. If she didn’t have the house…well, she wouldn’t permit her mind to travel in that direction any more than she would let it See faeries. Apparently, though, they saw her.
She was sure that the shimmer at the base of her wood pile was the sun, poking rays through a canopy of oaks starting to rain their cacophony of September
acorns onto the metal roof of the barn. But the shimmer grew and seemed to be moving. Curious, she squelched through muck and shoots of grass nurtured by droppings from the days when she had not yet fenced in the chicken run, before the Zoning Officer had informed her in less than polite language that she needed one. The hens were behind bars now, metaphorically speaking, and she acquired less white and smelly stuff on her shoes than she might have done as she walked to the barn, but she was conscious of their beady-eyed looks. She knew they burned for the freedom to scratch for crickets and other tasty treats.
Burning, that was it…something must be burning. Yet that glow wasn’t smoke, and it wasn’t fire. It wasn’t anything she had ever seen. That was when Shawna Egan
realized that there was seeing and Seeing. She Saw them: swirling, tumbling, agitated-looking little creatures dipping and darting at such speed that the dappled sunlight glinting on their pulsating wings gave off a glow. She thought at first that the high-pitched whispery sounds she half-heard were the beat-beat-beat of those tiny wings, but they weren’t.
They were shouting at her.

4 CUPS AT COFFEE TIME ROMANCE: http://www.coffeetimeromance.com/BookReviews/Confessionsofacleaninglady.html

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kiPVxGocYY

BUY LINK: www.thedarkcastlelords.com/confessions-of-the-cleaning-lady.htm

THE PIXIE

I couldn't resist. Is she not cute?

HOW THE BLOG GOT ITS NAME

On one of my many jaunts to Ireland, I was staying in Killarney at the Killarney Princess, where the lobby and bar look like one solid hunk of polished mahoghany and a sumptuous Irish tea will be brought to you and your guests in the lobby any afternoon, upon request. A wonderful way to sit out a Force 10 gale, by the way, which I did after having been nearly been blown off a walkway the previous morning at Kylemore Abbey. It almost made up for the fact that there was zero soundproofing in my otherwise very nice room and it sounded that night like someone was rolling huge laundry carts over my head all night long. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled downstairs looking for the other ladies going to the Waterford Crystal Factory to shed our American dollars for their beautiful things. I was early because I hadn't slept, one thing led to another and I ended up sharing Guinness Stout (before noon--yes, Mother) with a gentleman who regaled me with typical Irish stories including an allusion to being surprised at a disturbance in the hotel the night before. Barely awake and feeling my liquor, I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

Ah, yes, he said. It was surprising in such a high-class hotel where even the desk clerk called me "Madam," but Bobbie told me there had indeed been a screaming and banging at his locked door in the middle of the night. But he told me he had taken pity on the lady, got up and let her out.

Anyway, on to Waterford where I had heard there was a replica of a Viking longship. I never did find it, but that gives me a reason to go again (as if I needed one). I climbed aboard the bus hoping to God I wasn't going to be car sick--or bus sick--and away we went, rolling up a newly constructed highway of which everyone was very proud. It took so many twists and turns I thought I was back at the Ring of Kerry. a tourist trap so circuitous that only the strong of stomach survive. As we took one especially dramatic loop-de-loop, our guide pointed to the left where a scarecrow tree stood in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence which, if I recall correctly, was taller than the tree.

"You may have noticed," he said, "that this road takes an unexpected twist."

I was about to ask him which one, but I was afraid to open my mouth, which was OK since he never closed his; he was supposed to entertain us, after all, and in fact made a good job of it.

"Well, our roads department had to do that," he explained, "because the original plan would have required destruction of the faerie tree."

The what? The faerie tree, of course. The construction crew would have had to lop down my spindly little friend over to the left. Which no one would do, because everyone knows it's bad luck to cut down a faerie tree. And so an entire highway was re-routed, an understandable precaution in Ireland. The fence had been erected, he went on to say, because a delusional mental patient had attempted to burn down the tree and the Garda (police) had to protect him from irate locals, who then decided they should fence off the tree.

Wouldn't that inconvenience the faeries, I asked, but the guide looked at me as if I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. "Oh, no," he reassured me. "They have wings, y'know."

Duh.

That gave me one of many fond memories of the trip and a lasting affection for faerie trees. And, oh yes, I do prefer the Irish spelling of "fairy." It's just more satisfying somehow. Almost as good as that early-morning Guinness.