My Own Local Beast – Pre-Order Blade by Shaw Montgomery (Legends Series)

A Note From Shaw: Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to have some guest hosts here on my blog. I wanted to show you guys more about the other authors involved in the Legends series and show you more about their books because I’m just so excited for this project to finally get here. Click here to see all blog posts about the Legends Series.

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My turn!

Becca is an amazing planner so I’ve known about this project for a long time. So long I kind of felt like it would never get here.

My book is Blade and it’s about The Beast of Bladenboro.

I knew as soon as I saw where my monster lives on the map that he needed to be mine. He lives right around the corner from me and is just down the road from some of my favorite places. My NC friends should recognize some of the places they end up.

This is one of those books where I’ve walked around all the places you’re going to see and that’s made it an even more fun process than normal.

I did my best to research the original stories about when he was first “seen” but there were just beastly stories about him. So I had to figure out how he got himself into that predicament and what we could do to save him.

Well, he found his savior in a very unexpected way and I’m just going to say yay for impulsive humans and mate magic.

What can I say about our cute human Henley?

Oh, well, I’m going to need some kind of warning for him because while we’ve had families with questionable behavior, and even some assholes, we’ve never had monster hunters…yeah, his family are bad guys.

He’s doing his best to be one of the good guys but trauma colors how we see things and you’ll see that as he starts telling about his past. But don’t worry. He’s a chattery cutie who’s thrown himself into finding his place in the monster world.

And he’s met some interesting people along the way.

What can I tell you about our Beast?

Not much without spoiling his past and telling how he got in his situation.

But to make up for that how about a tease from Blade?

“Why does monster hunting always go so wrong?” Somehow I’d ended up stuck in the trap I’d set up instead of the monster I was supposed to be hunting and that was actually the least of my problems.

Because I liked being tied up.

“You can figure this out.” Giving myself a peptalk probably made me look nuts but I was hoping I was the only one in the sandy woods that surrounded Bladenboro. “You managed not to offend that Bigfoot. This is going to be fine.”

Nothing ever went fine, but if I repeated it enough, I’d believe it eventually.

“Okay. What do you do first?” If panic wasn’t an option, I needed to figure out a plan. “Um. What do I have in my pockets?”

Nothing helpful unless breath mints would help me get myself out of a rope net. It’d seemed like a good plan when I’d been going through my options, but somehow, I’d forgotten to include how fucking clumsy I could be into my metrics.

“Live and learn.” Yes. “I’ll remember for next time.”

I really wasn’t a complete fuckup no matter what my family thought. “You’re going to catch an actual monster who’s causing problems. This is just a setback. You can do this. It’s literally the family business.”

It would’ve been nicer if the family business was something more relaxing like world domination or working in the tech industry, but I wasn’t that lucky. I’d always thought it made sense that if there were monsters someone needed to hunt them, but eventually I’d just come to realize my family was bat shit nuts…and probably the monsters that needed to be eradicated.

“Next time you’re going to remember to put a knife in your pocket.” It wasn’t doing any good in my backpack at least ten feet down. “And next time you’re also going to remember to practice not talking to yourself.”

I didn’t do very well on my own but luckily being on my own meant no one could realize I was just as nuts as the rest of my family.

“At least you’re not homicidal.” That made me better than them. “It’s got to be homicide if what they’re trying to kill talks back.”

Right?