At last, the release date for the third book in the Blood Bathory trilogy is nigh! It will wrap up the story arc that’s run through the previous two books. There’s room for us to return to the Blood Bathory universe — and we have a couple of ideas along those lines — but we aren’t leaving any big loose ends dangling.

For the first two books, I found inspiration for the characters I wrote (Evan and Tyr) in Evanescence songs. I hadn’t heard of the group until I heard someone perform “Bring Me to Life” at karaoke. I was sitting in a position that let me read the lyrics on the screen, and they gave me an epiphany about Evan. I’d been struggling with his characterization, but when I heard that song, I thought, “That’s Evan”. From then on, I knew who he was, what he wanted, and why he returned to Will.

After that, I bought a couple of Evanescence albums because their music is grand and gorgeous, if a bit overdramatic for someone my age. My teenage self would have eaten this with a spoon if they’d been around back then. At any rate, it wasn’t difficult to find Tyr’s song once we started working on Blood Bathory 2. “My Immortal” summed up where he was in his grieving for Aaron (who had only a cameo in the novel, but I found a song for him anyway: “Swimming Home”).

I wanted to continue the tradition of connecting an Evanescence song to my character in Blood Bathory 3, but there isn’t really one that fits him. Instead, I found a song for Ari’s character, Antonio: “My Heart is Broken”.

It captures his loneliness after losing Raphael, the Dark Guardian he was bonded to five hundred years ago. Part of his heart and soul were lost when Raphael died, and he still feels the loss of his “dark angel” to this day.

Part of Antonio’s journey in Blood Bathory 3 will be deciding whether he can move beyond his grief and take a chance on loving a man who is different from the man he lost or whether giving his heart away during such dangerous times is too great a risk.

Blood Bathory: Be Not Proud will be released on August 31 by Torquere Press!