Synopsis

JANEY SINCLAIR never knew how or why she gained her ability to teleport. She never wanted it, and for years tried her best to ignore it. But when horrible violence shattered her world, she vowed to use her mysterious talent to protect the citizens of Atlanta, in an effort to prevent anyone else from suffering the kind of agony she had. Wearing a suit of stolen military body armor, Janey became known to the public as the GRAY WIDOW.

But now the extraterrestrial source of her “Augmentation” is about to reveal itself, in an event that will profoundly impact Janey’s life and the lives of those closest to her—

TIM KAPOOR, who barely survived the assault of twisted, bloodthirsty shapeshifter Simon Grove and still struggles to pull himself together, both physically and mentally.

NATHAN PITTMAN, the teenager who got shot trying to imitate Janey’s vigilante tactics, and has since become obsessed with the Gray Widow.

SHA’DAE WILKERSON, Janey’s neighbor and newfound best friend, whose instant chemistry with Janey may have roots that neither of them fully understand.

And Janey’s going to need all the help she can get, because one of the other Augments has her sights set on the Gray Widow. The terrifying abomination known as APHRODITE LUPO is more powerful and lethal than anyone or anything Janey has ever faced. And Aphrodite is determined to recruit Janey to her twisted cause…or take her off the field for good.

Unrelenting ghosts of the past clash with the vicious threats of the future. Janey’s destiny bursts from the shadows into the light in GRAY WIDOW’S WEB, leaving the course of humanity itself forever changed.

Guest Post

I guess one of the strangest thing that’s happened to me in my writing career—or at least one of the most perplexing—is something I’ve come to think of as…

THE GREAT NADIA MYSTERY

or

WEIRDNESS AT THE BEERFEST

In 2014, I got hired to do some writing on a video game called Dying Light. Most of the game work I had done up to that point had involved a little bit of traveling, usually to Canada, and usually for maybe a week at a time every few months. Dying Light was being developed by a Polish company called Techland, and in the course of getting the job, I found out that there would be a good bit of on-site work. Like, several months’ worth. In Poland.

But hey, I needed the job, and as my wife Tracy put it, “When else are you going to get to visit a country you’ve never been to before, and on someone else’s dime?” So I packed my bags and headed out for Wrocław, Poland’s southernmost major city.

A little background: those trips to Canada were the only trips out of the United States I had ever taken. This job in Poland also involved my first-ever trans-oceanic flight and my first-ever trip to Europe—where I bypassed all the English-speaking countries entirely and landed firmly in Central Europe.

I made some really good friends while I was there, several of whom I still keep in touch with. (Hi Magda! Hi Maciek! Hi Michał!) (Not all Polish names start with M, despite how this makes it sound.) But I was a foreigner in a country where I spoke only a few words of the native language, those few being the ones I had learned in the weeks leading up to my trip. What I’m getting at is that it was very easy for me to feel isolated.

Well, my older brother Clint worked with a Pole who turned out to be from Wrocław. My brother’s colleague, when he found out where I was going, immediately said to Clint, “Get him to look up my brother! He can show your brother around the city! It’ll be great!” I’m certainly not averse to making new friends, so I happily took down Clint’s colleague’s brother’s number there in Wrocław, and around the third week I was there, I called the guy up.

He was very friendly, but he didn’t speak much English, as he was quick to point out. He said, “What we can do is take you to the beer festival going on at the stadium this Saturday. Would you like to go?” I was immediately very interested in a Polish beer festival—the Poles take their beer pretty seriously—so I said that I would indeed like to go. He said, “Great. My daughter speaks much better English than I do. She’ll come along and translate.”

So the work week went by, and when Friday afternoon rolled around, I got contacted by the guy’s daughter, whom I’ll call Nadia. (Not her real name, in case that wasn’t obvious.) Well, Nadia’s English wasn’t really that much better than her father’s, but she did make it clear that her father wasn’t going to be able to make it to the beer fest, and did I want to just go with her?

This struck me as a little odd, but I didn’t want to offend anyone, so I said, “Sure, I’ll meet you there.” In the interest of actually communicating effectively, though, I asked my friend Maciek and his wife Monika if they’d like to come along as well, since they’re both Poles who speak very-nearly-perfect English. They agreed, with the caveat that Monika would have to join Maciek and me a bit later, so Maciek and I went to meet Nadia at the Wrocław stadium (which is really a sight to behold once it gets dark, as the entire outside walls of the place light up and constantly shift colors).

It took a few minutes for Nadia to find us. When she finally rendezvoused with Maciek and me, my first thought was, “Wow, she looks like what would happen if Evangeline Lilly worked out a lot more, and maybe spent most weekends playing soccer.” Nadia was clearly kind of uneasy at meeting these people she didn’t know, and truth be told, the situation still felt pretty weird to me. But again, new friends = good, so I introduced Maciek and myself, and once Nadia realized we weren’t a couple of maniacs, she relaxed a bit and we all just stood around and drank (amazing) beers and got to know each other.

It turned out that Nadia was twenty-seven years old, had lived in Wrocław all her life, had a steady job that she didn’t care for all that much, and was just in general a very nice person. She also seemed very interested in how Maciek and I both worked in video games, and even more interested in what life was like in America. I learned at least half of this information thanks to Maciek translating, because Nadia’s English, as I said before, was pretty limited.

Now, during all of this, there was a thought in the back of my mind. I didn’t think it was a very realistic thought, but it hung there, poking at me: did Clint’s colleague think he was setting his niece up with a nice American man?

Surely not, I thought. Surely my brother mentioned that I was married. And it wasn’t as if Nadia was coming on to me. She was just talking with us. Still, to make sure there weren’t any crossed wires, I mentioned my wife several times, along with how I was fifteen years older than Nadia was.

Anyway. Monika arrived, and the four of us spent another couple of hours hanging out and drinking more (amazing isn’t even the right word for it, there was this strawberry ale that made my toes curl, holy cow) beer. By the end of the evening, we decided that we all had indeed made some new friends, and Nadia said that next time we saw each other, maybe I could help her a bit with her English. I said I’d be happy to, and she said she’d contact me the following week.

She never called.

We had exchanged numbers, and at one point I sent her a text, just in case she had misplaced my number. She sent back an oddly-worded reply about how she was hiking in the mountains. That was the last bit of communication I got, and I didn’t press it.

So from then on, I was left wondering. Was the whole thing supposed to be a set-up, but then she went home and looked me up on Facebook and saw that I was married? Or is that just my writer’s over-active imagination at work? Maybe she was just being polite the whole evening, and was happy never to see the weird American guy again? Like, had I offended her in some way and not realized? I don’t know. The one thing I did find out later, that might have some bearing on it or might not, is that in Poland, you wear your wedding ring on your right hand.

Anyway. I have no answers for the whole deal. It remains The Great Nadia Mystery.

About the  Author

Dan Jolley started writing professionally at age nineteen. Beginning in comic books, he soon branched out into original novels, licensed-property novels, children’s books, and video games. His twenty-six-year career includes the YA sci-fi/espionage trilogy Alex Unlimited; the award-winning comic book mini-series Obergeist; the Eisner Award-nominated comic book mini-series JSA: The Liberty Files; and the Transformers video games War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron. Dan was co-writer of the world-wide-bestselling zombie/parkour game Dying Light, and is the author of the Middle Grade Urban Fantasy novel series Five Elements. Dan lives somewhere in the northwest Georgia foothills with his wife Tracy and a handful of largely inert cats.

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