Spirit Blog Tour! Prizes!

From May 5^th to May 18^th I’ll be on a blog tour promoting the third book of my Spirit Trilogy, Spirit of the Sky. At each stop I’ll give away a  $5 Amazon gift certificate to a lucky commenter. Each stop will have a picture of an eagle in the post. Follow the tour and send me the number of different pictures you saw while following the tour. If there is more than one correct entry I’ll draw a winner on May 21^st  to receive a $25 gift certificate to either Barnes and Nobles or Amazon, a handmade custom ereader cover, and chocolate.

Blurb for Spirit of the Sky

To save her from oppression, he must save her whole tribe. To give her his heart, he must desert his career…

When the US Army forces the Nimiipuu from their land, Sa-qan, the eagle spirit entrusted with watching over her tribe, steps in to save her mortal niece. Challenging the restrictions of the spirit world, Sa-qan assumes human form and finds an unexpected ally in a handsome cavalry officer.

Certain she is a captive, Lt. Wade Watts, a Civil War veteran, tries to help the blonde woman he finds sheltering a Nez Perce child. While her intelligent eyes reveal she understands his language, she refuses his help. But when Wade is wounded, it is the beautiful Sa-qan who tends him. Wade wishes to stop the killing—Sa-qan will do anything to save her people.

Can their differences save her tribe? Or will their love spell the end of the Nimiipuu?

Excerpt

     She smiled and his heart leapt into his throat. He thought her beautiful from the first moment he saw her standing in the river fiercely protecting the child, but watching her tense face relax and smile, he was smitten. A light and pleasing calm washed over him for the first time in a very long time. He could only bask in the moment briefly. They were enemies.

    “I am from the sky, and I watch over the Nimiipuu.” She nodded her head and flashed him with yet another smile. “You may call me Angel.”

    “Only if you call me Wade.”

     She nodded. “Let me check your wounds. You have moved around.”

     “Why are you taking such good care of me when your warriors left me for dead?”

     Her sunshine gaze peered straight into his eyes. “You saved my niece at the village and the wounded from the Bannock scout. You do not have the thirst to kill like the other soldiers.” She bowed her head and removed the blood encrusted bandage from his shoulder. “The Nimiipuu need you.”

     Her touch warmed his body, tingling the areas around his wounds. He glanced at her small, delicate hands hovering over his injuries. He shut his eyes, and then opened them. Her hands shimmered as if in a fog. His pain subsided, in fact, his body felt well rested.

     A soft lyrical chant rose from her lips as she continued to hover her hands over his wounds. Her eyes remained closed, her light lashes resting on her sun-kissed cheeks. He’d never seen a woman as beautiful as this. He had to learn her true origins and return her to her family.

Buy Link:

http://www.thewildrosepress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=191&products_id=4850

Bio:

Wife, mother, grandmother, and the one who cleans pens and delivers the hay; award winning author Paty Jager and her husband currently ranch 350 acres when not dashing around visiting their children and grandchildren. She not only writes the western lifestyle, she lives it.

She is a member of RWA, EPIC , and COWG. She’s had eleven books and a short story published so far and is venturing into the new world of self-publishing ebooks. 

Her contemporary Western, Perfectly Good Nanny won the 2008 Eppie for Best Contemporary Romance and Spirit of the Mountain, a historical paranormal set among the Nez Perce, garnered 1^st place in the paranormal category of the Lories Best Published Book Contest. Spirit of the Lake was a finalist in the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence.

You can learn more about her at her blog; www.patyjager.blogspot.com  her website; http://www.patyjager.net or on Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/#!/paty.jager and twitter;  @patyjag. 

Everyone Needs a Little Spirit

Growing up in an area rich in Native American history has made me curious and empathetic to the band of Nez Perce who summered in Wallowa County many generations before Lewis and Clark entered their lives.

The Wallowa, or Lake Nimiipuu as they call themselves, are a band of the Nez Perce(Nimiipuu) who moved like nomads across the Pacific NW and into the plains with the seasons. They wintered along the Imnaha River in the lower warmer regions of Wallowa County, spent the early spring in the camas meadows of Idaho, and summered at Wallowa Lake, fishing the Columbia in the fall and returning to their winter home before the snows became too treacherous. The warriors and some of the women went out on hunting expeditions to the plains for buffalo.

Best Paranormal
Lories Contest

They were nomadic, but they had a fierce love of the land in their hearts.

Spirit of the Mountain, the first book of the trilogy, shows their love of the lake area and how they came to carry it so deeply within them. The heroine, in this book, carries the mountain in her heart and when she falls for the spirit who looks after the mountain and its occupants, she loses her heart to him as well. 

Spirit of the Lake, is the second book in the trilogy. This book deals with the Whiteman encroaching on their land and the way the Nimiipuu are willing to look the other way to avoid being forcefully taken from their home.

Finalist Gayle Wilson
Award of Excellence

The spirit entity in these books is all a figment of my imagination, but it felt real to me. My fascination with the Native American culture, their healing herbs, chants, legends, myths, and vision quest all primed my imagination when I came up with the spirit siblings who are the main characters in the books.

In the first book, I use the vision quest as the means to bring the chief's daughter to talk with a white wolf, the hero and spirit of the mountain. In her vision quest, her weyakin(the spirit who visits her) is a white wolf. So when her life is thrown upside down by her believing her vision quest means she must marry a warrior from the enemy Blackfeet tribe, she feels talking to the wounded white wolf she encounters is natural. When he turns into a handsome warrior, doing her duty becomes harder as she must leave the mountain and spirit of her heart.

The second book has Wewukiye (Bull Elk) as the hero. He is the white wolf's younger brother and a spirit as well. He lives in the lake as the antlered legend who comes out of the lake and takes bad children. Yet he is the fun loving practical joker of the three sibling spirits. In his book, he befriends a Nimiipuu maiden who has been raped by a Whiteman and becomes pregnant, but the band believes she is not telling the truth to avoid trouble and perhaps being tossed from their land because the treaty of '68 was not signed by Old Joseph, yet the government believes the other chiefs who signed spoke for all the Nez Perce.

Sa-qan (Bald Eagle) is the youngest of the three. She soars in the sky above all the Nimiipuu land watching over them. In the third book, Spirit of the Sky, she is desperately trying to keep the Nimiipuu from annihilation as the U.S. Army chases them from their homes on a four month, 1400 mile trek where they fall short of freedom and end up on reservations far from home. During the campaign she falls in love with a cavalry officer and together they try to save the Nimiipuu.

This spirit trilogy is my proverbial book of my heart. I spent countless hours on research to make sure the Nez Perce culture is correct in the books and the historical information is accurate.

Spirit of the Sky released on Friday and you can follow my two week long blog tour to learn more about the book and win prizes. The places I'll be are on my website along with the blog info.