The Bargainer #1

* This book contains explicit sexual scenes, violence, murder, blood, and abuse.

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Callypso Lillis is a siren with a very big problem, one that stretches up her arm and far into her past. For the last seven years she’s been collecting a bracelet of black beads up her wrist, magical IOUs for favors she’s received. Only death or repayment will fulfill the obligations. Only then will the beads disappear.

Everyone knows that if you need a favor, you go to the Bargainer to make it happen. He’s a man who can get you anything you want… at a price. And everyone knows that sooner or later he always collects.

But for one of his clients, he’s never asked for repayment. Not until now. When Callie finds the fae king of the night in her room, a grin on his lips and a twinkle in his eye, she knows things are about to change. At first it’s just a chaste—a single bead’s worth—and a promise for more.

For the Bargainer, it’s more than just a matter of rekindling an old romance. Something is happening in the Otherworld. Fae warriors are going missing one by one. Only the women are returned, each in a glass casket, a child clutched to their breast. And then there are the whispers among the slaves, whispers of an evil that’s been awoken.

If the Bargainer has any hope to save his people, he’ll need the help of the siren he spurned long ago. Only, his foe has a taste for exotic creatures, and Callie just happens to be one.

In complete honesty, this was not the first time I read this novel. It has been a few years though.  Overall, I love this book so much it will not be the last time I reach for it. After I complete the series of course.

The dynamic between Desmond and Callie has my anxiety on edge at every turn. It is obvious how they gravitate toward one another, but work so damn hard to keep from giving into that inevitable pull.

Desmond is a fae king of the Night Kingdom. Callie, essentially a human, is a siren. Humans are regarded as slaves in Otherworld, the realm of the fae and other supernatural creatures. Here on Earth, Des is just your run-of-the-mill ethereally gorgeous and powerful fairy that has anyone with at least one of the five senses swooning.

Callie is apparently the female, human version of Des. Gorgeous, powerful, and like many, damaged. Her abusive past has led her to the person and life she presently leads.

We learn about both simultaneously as each chapter covers what is happening in the present and what has happened in the past to get both Des and Callie to the point they are at now.

This style seems to really annoy some people. Not going to lie, for the first third of the book (my first read through) it did get a bit annoying. But once the past and present began to correspond more cohesively, I was able to appreciate the jump in time. Really, there aren’t many other ways for Laura Thalassa to accomplish this without either having a million flashbacks within the chapter (talk about annoying) or write a prequel novella. Neither would have been as effective or as powerful to the story.

You really need both sides at once and appreciate the style.

I also appreciate that one mystery has been solved in this story, but there is clearly something bigger and scarier coming.