Shadow for Hire
Wages of Death
Everything has its price…even death.
For Leopold and his friends, a group known as The Shadow, assassination, theft, and espionage are nothing personal: they are just part of the job. Their skills go to the highest bidder no matter the assignment, making The Shadow the most notorious collection of criminals in the realm.
As long as the money is good, they never ask questions. However, as the jobs get personal, Leopold’s walls against his reservations begin to buckle. “Anything for the money” is The Shadow’s motto and their leader’s favorite saying, but how long can money continue to pay off their consciences?
Join the Shadow in an episodic journey of danger and adventure as they struggle between money and morality, asking the question: Is it worth gaining the world at the cost of your soul?
Read the first chapter for free or purchase your own copy on Amazon. Also available on Kindle.
Peter's Favorite Quote from "Wages of Death"
When he got rich, he would straighten himself out. After all, scruples and conscience were the commodity of the wealthy.
Leopold Character Description
In The Shadow – Leopold
At only 14 years old, Leopold is the youngest member of The Shadow. His small size and slim build make him a perfect choice for the group’s stealth expert. Though remaining unseen is his preferred method of operations, He can rely on a deadly array of combat skills if he gets cornered. He wears a long cloak of dark, mottled colors, perfect for breaking up his silhouette and blending into shadows.
Leo’s mysterious past is hidden from him due to amnesia caused by a previous trauma. He remembers nothing until just before meeting Midas. This missing piece of his story bothers him, and he is often frustrated by his inability to recall memories. Without knowing where he came from, how can he possibly know what his purpose in life is?
In the mean time, Leo finds his purpose in working for Daniel, the leader of The Shadow. This man saved Leo and Midas from a dangerous situation, and they have been in his debt ever since. Though Leo doesn’t agree with everything Daniel says and does, he finds that being part of a tight-knit group is better than the alternative. Besides, purposefully ignoring hard questions goes a long way toward quieting his conscience.
Leo’s life is also lent meaning by his friends. He and Midas have been like brothers since their introduction. Later, the two of them, very familiar with dangerous situations, were rescued from a particularly deadly one by Daniel. Raven was already part of The Shadow at the time, and the inclusion of Leo and Midas brought the group’s total membership to four. The Shadow is an incredibly effective covert mercenary group, and the dangerous nature of their jobs coupled with the small size of the organization created a close-knit relationship between its members. It is the closest thing to a family that Leo has every known.
Peter's Favorite Scene from "Wages of Death"
My Favorite Scene from Wages of Death: Fight with the Marsh Monster
SPOILER WARNING for Wages of Death
I love Castle Rajikline because it shows The Shadow in their element, introduces the crew, and sets a baseline for their personalities and professionalism. On the other hand, I love Marsh Madness for the opposite reason. The marsh strips away the surface, continuing the group’s development by revealing how they act when forced outside their element. How do they behave when their unique skills don’t help them? When they get frustrated, what happens to the group dynamic?
The battle with the marsh monster is my favorite part of the story because it answers all the questions of loyalty, bravery, fear, and ingenuity in a single climactic action sequence. Yes, the battle itself is fun to read, but more impactful is the selflessness of the characters rushing to rescue their friend. Midas whaling away at a gigantic monster leg with an axe, the only weapon at his disposal, is a perfect depiction of how he approaches problems. It also illustrates his innate impulse to stand up and be counted, even in the midst of a hopeless situation.
In contrast, Leopold’s ability to utilize his standard skill set in the unfamiliar environment emphasizes his ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Similarly, his approach to combating the swamp monster highlights his bent toward critical thinking and ability to solve complex problems in the midst of stressful situations.
Additionally, Daniel’s words and actions do a lot to set the stage for exactly what kind of a leader he is.
Overall, I just love this scene. It is a nice bit of action while also developing the individual characters and the group dynamic. In a small way, I think you can trace the final destination of each character in In the Service of the King all the way back to their beginnings in this story.
Peter's Favorite Location from "Wages of Death"
World of The Shadow - Castle Rajikline
Castle Rajikline was built as a method for controlling an important trade route. Because the terrain did not aid the defensive nature of the structure, the baron who built it left no stone unturned in its design. To make his new fortress as strong as humanly possible, he sourced defensive features from castles across the known world, showing a particular penchant for technology and architecture from distant lands. He hired the best engineer he could find to lead the project, a man called Rajikline who hailed from a distant country. Rajikline had to use interpreters to communicate with the craftsmen, so construction proceeded slowly. The building took so long to build that the original baron died before it was completed, and his son took over.
Rajikline’s exacting standards were another reason the castle took so long to construct. He was mocked incessantly for his high standards, so much so that people took to calling the castle “Rajikline’s Folly.” When the castle was finally completed, however, it was undeniably an impressive structure and so effective at its job that it quickly became known as truly impregnable. After standing firm against an invading force, people took to calling it Castle Rajikline. Utilizing a host of brilliant machines and architecture implemented by its builder, the castle has successfully withstood every siege. It only changed ownership once and only with the help of a particularly devastating famine.
Castle Rajikline, or simply Rajikline, is one of my favorite locations in Wages of Death because it pits technological innovation against human ingenuity. This castle with all the advantages of a meticulously designed and technologically advanced defense must be infiltrated. It sets up the stakes common to contracts of The Shadow, creates a situation to showcase the group’s skill sets, especially that of Leopold, and guarantees a bit of action to go along with it all.
I like Rajikline because I love castles. It was fun to design a fortress that can come across as impregnable. Afterwards, I had the joy of developing an infiltration strategy to defeat the very same fortress! Everything about this location from the visuals to the architecture to the defensive designs and interior features like spiral staircases and trash chutes, are thrilling to me. I liked designing it, I loved infiltrating it, and the joy of bringing it to life in the story makes it one of my favorite locations in Wages of Death.
How Peter Used His Own Writing Tips to Make "Wages of Death"
Just Write – Wages of Death
SPOILER WARNING for Wages of Death
Just write.
This is one of the first, and possibly most important, pieces of writing advice I give to aspiring authors because it solves most early problems and answers early questions.
How do I get started? Just write.
How do I learn to write? Just write.
How do I get better at writing? Just write.
I don’t know if my idea is good enough. Don’t worry about it; just write.
But this advice is easier said than done, so to encourage aspiring authors, I thought I might share a personal story of how I implemented it in my own writing. Many years ago (c. 2010), my publisher was pushing me to build a following and publicize my work (something she is still on me about to this day!). Blogs were popular at the time, so she wanted me to get in on the action but I had a problem: I had no idea what to post on a blog.
Blogs began as a sort of public diary, and while they had evolved by the 2010s, they still carried a heavy connotation of that sort of content. Unfortunately, my life was pretty mundane. I was going to college at the time and spent most of my days in class and doing homework. I had the occasional interaction worth chronicling, but nowhere near enough to write about it weekly. Honestly, my life simply wasn’t interesting enough for anyone to care about.
Not knowing what else to do, I fell back on what I knew: story writing. To accommodate the frequent posting requirement without creating a large workload to create a continuous story, I had the idea to write a series of short stories. They would be loosely connected by their characters and setting but separate enough that each could be read on its own. I called it “episodic” writing and envisioned it as the TV show of prose.
Of course, an idea isn’t enough. Where to begin? What should I write about? What about the world I was to set my stories in?
There wasn’t time to flesh all this out when I needed to be posting regularly, so I just started writing. The Shadow was born because assassins are fun to write about. From the very beginning, I wanted to show they were atypical, so I wrote a story about them rescuing someone instead of killing them. The next story I wrote during March Madness on a college campus, so of course I called it Marsh Madness. This name drove the trajectory of the story. I wrote another story during the Christmas season with the goal of producing a Christmas story.
I wrote five stories in all, not with some grandiose plan in mind but precisely because I had no plan. Even though I didn’t have it all figured out, I chose to JUST WRITE. Later, with some editing, four of the five stories became what is now Wages of Death and spawned a trilogy.
The moral of this admittedly long, rambly, and much-more-like-a-blog-post-than-I-intended rant is simple: Just write, even if you don’t always know what the plan is. Even if you are worried your idea is silly. Even if you are not very good at writing. You can always change what you have written, morph it, modify it, and edit it later, but if you never write it in the first place, you will never write at all.