Zyan Star Series, Character Profile: Riley

Hello and welcome! My Zyan Star character profile series continues with Riley. If you missed the previous profile of Quinn, click here. These guys are from Martinis with the Devil, my urban fantasy that released on April 11th. Martinis and its prequel Black Magic and Mojitos are both FREE until April 25th on Smashwords and B&N. Without further ado, I give you Riley:

Name: Riley

Supernatural powers: Werewolf

Appearance: Black hair, hazel eyes, cocoa skin, muscular

See my Pinterest board here for a pic (swoon all you want ladies, but Riley goes for guys)

Favorite drink: Brimstone liquor

Weapon of choice: Teeth and claws

Riley is Zyan's other best friend, along with Quinn. The three of them are roommates, and work in Zyan's bar Noir together. He also goes with them on supernatural bounty hunts. He's a total exercise-a-holic and adrenaline junkie, often riding his motorcycle without a helmet and other daredevil stunts. He's gained mastery over his inner wolf, so he can change between human and wolf shape at will, not just on the full moon.

And now one of my favorite Riley excerpts. This is actually from Martinis with the Devil Part 2, which comes out on April 25th. So, a sneak peek! Riley is helping Zy learn to control her inner magic, which she's suppressed for over a century.

The next day it was Riley’s turn. When I woke up late in the afternoon, he was standing in the living room with an expectant look on his face.

“Let me guess—a training session for my inner beast is about to go down?”

Riley nodded. “You bet. Little witch isn’t going to have a monopoly on your training program.”

I simply groaned in response and sat down on the sofa. 

“What are you doing? This is not a lecture. We’re heading out into the field.” Riley started for the door.

“What?”

He looked at me with his dark eyes. “Sitting in the house is not where you have a problem. It’s when you start to unleash your power.” He kept walking and I had to jog to keep up. “The last couple centuries since the incident with the village, you’ve only used the tiniest of bursts of your power, and mostly for simple, mundane things. Right?”

I nodded. Not to sound incredibly immodest, but my looks alone could lure any scumbag I wanted with no magical powers whatsoever. I’d kept my power under heavy lock and key when it came to hunting. Until the other day.

“So, what’s happened is that you’ve just suppressed your power so that it’s grown desperate like a starving animal. It’s not meant to be suppressed. You just need to learn a balance between nothing and everything. Let the racehorse out to run, so long as it understands that when you call it back, it’d better listen.”

“Okay, enough with the animal metaphors.” I rolled my eyes.

Riley ignored my comment and carried on. “You are the alpha, not your power. You just need to establish dominance.”

“You’re talking like it’s a completely different person.”

“It’s not a person at all. Your humanity is the person. Your supernatural side is the animal. They must work together.”

We’d reached the street now. Riley headed south. “As you know, being a werewolf I’m extremely compelled by the moon. When I was younger, I had no choice but to change on the full moon. My inner wolf would completely take over. I had to stay out in the middle of nowhere, or I undoubtedly would have killed someone.”

I nodded. That was all right out of the werewolf handbook.

“As you also know, I was in a pack in my early wolf days, the pack my family had been in for countless generations. Our alpha taught me over time how to control my wolf side without suppressing it too much. But even now, all these years later, I’ve not mastered things completely. Though I can resist the change on the full moon if I really need to, once I go wolf it’s still always a struggle to keep my human thoughts. When I’m a wolf, humans are just another animal to prey on.”

I glanced over at Riley as he spoke. Like me, he didn’t like to talk about his past too much. When I’d met him, he’d separated from his pack and was a loner. I knew his parents had been killed in some sort of pack fight, but he had never shared the details. We all had our secrets to keep.

Hope you love Riley as much as I do! Stay tuned over the next couple weeks for profiles of Pan, Donovan, Eli and of course Zyan herself.