CHARACTER PROFILES
The Waning — Gardenia Series, Book 1
paranormalromance.ca | Serena Hawke
NIA ASHFORD
She didn’t ask for any of this.
Gardenia Anne Ashford — Nia to everyone who matters — is twenty-two years old, a research librarian at the University of Maine in Bangor, and the kind of person who notices things other people miss. The way a colleague’s smile doesn’t reach their eyes. The particular weight of silence in a room after someone lies. The feeling, persistent and unexplained, that she has been somewhere before — or been someone before.
She is organized, methodical, and quietly brilliant. She holds dual degrees in sociology and university studies, catalogues knowledge for a living, and applies the same careful attention to the people around her that she applies to research. She reads people the way others read books — through the language beneath the language, the body speaking what the mouth won’t.
She is also, if she is honest with herself, exhausted.
Nia grew up in the wreckage of someone else’s grief. Her mother Rosalind died when Nia was ten — or so she was told — and her father Edgar, a pharmaceutical executive, filled the absence with alcohol. The pattern it left behind is one Nia has been unconsciously repeating ever since: choosing men who need saving, people with cracks she tries to fill, wounds she tries to close. Her therapist would call it a trauma response. Nia would call it love, until she learns the difference.
She is five feet five, olive-skinned, with long wavy brown hair she twirls absently around one finger when she’s thinking. Her eyes shift between green and brown depending on the light — hazel, technically, though the word feels too ordinary for what they actually do. She has the kind of face that is both open and watchful: warm enough to invite confidence, sharp enough to catch everything you didn’t mean to reveal.
She attends an ACoA support group one evening to deal with her stress that she thinks is sapping her energy — little does she know something dark and evil is the actual cause. She goes to book club on Saturday mornings at Burdock’s Books in the Sunshine Shopping Center. She keeps her faith — barely, and with increasing questions — and her instincts, which have always told her things she doesn’t yet have language for.
Something is draining her. She can feel it. She just doesn’t know what it is yet.
At a glance:
- Age: 22
- Occupation: Research librarian, University of Maine Bangor
- Appearance: 5’5″, olive skin, wavy brown hair, hazel eyes
- Personality type: INFJ
- Defining trait: Empathetic to a fault — sees the best in people, often before they deserve it
- Habit: Twirls her finger in her hair when thinking
- Wound: Abandoned by her mother, emotionally abandoned by her father — feels fundamentally unworthy of uncomplicated love
- Secret: She has always sensed things she cannot explain. She is beginning to suspect she is not imagining them.
DRAKE CORVIN
He has been waiting for her for five hundred years.
He does not always admit this, even to himself. Patience, when you have lived nearly two thousand years, becomes something different than it is for humans — less a virtue than a survival mechanism, the art of enduring time without being consumed by it. Drake Corvin has had a great deal of practice.
He was born Dragomir Antonius in 101 AD, in the hill country of Dacia, during the years Rome was pressing its ambitions northward into land that did not belong to it. His mother was Dacian and called him “Dragos”. His father was Roman — and something else, something older. At four years old, something happened to Drake that no one in his current life fully understands — an illness, a curse, a mercy — and he was placed in a stone crypt and sealed inside. He slept there for over fourteen centuries.
In 1525 AD, a lightning storm cracked the crypt open. He woke, physically four years old, with little to no memory of what had come before. A young girl named Gardenia near the village of Vălășești found him and took him back to the village where his parents helped him, then their neighbor Ambrose raised him as his own. He grew normally until eighteen. Then the aging slowed almost to a stop.
He grew next door to the girl, Gardenia. He grew to love her. He lost her. He has not let himself love anyone since.
That was five hundred years ago.
He goes by Drake now — the latest in a long series of names worn and shed across centuries: Dragos, Drago, Drako, Drako-la, Drak-ul, Drak. He lives on a forested estate outside Bangor, Maine, in a place called Thornvale. He is an artist, an investor, and a vampire-witch of considerable power — though he carries his age lightly enough that most people who meet him at an AA meeting on a Saturday night assume he is thirty, which is exactly what he intends them to think.
He is six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered, and built with the deliberate physical discipline of someone who needs an outlet for impulses he refuses to act on. He has long dark hair with a slight curl, dark eyes, and skin on the paler side of swarthy. Ancient scars mark his body — faded traces of a war fought centuries ago. On his left shoulder and upper arm, branching fractal patterns trace the path the lightning took when it woke him from the earth. He renews them every year so they do not fade. He is not entirely sure why. He tells himself it is to remember. He suspects it is something else.
He is disciplined, guarded, ethical to a degree that surprises people who expect otherwise from a vampire. He has a dry sense of humor he deploys like a shield. He has been attending Alcoholics Anonymous not for alcohol but for blood — the only framework available to him in this century for the addiction that has been escalating, slowly and then urgently, in ways that began, if he were honest, around the time a certain research librarian arrived in Bangor.
He is patient. He is careful. He has contingency plans for his contingency plans.
He recognizes her the moment he sees her.
At a glance:
- Age: 1,924 years (appears late 20s — tells people he’s 30)
- Born: 101 AD, Dacia (modern Romania)
- Species: Vampire-witch (Strigoi)
- Coven: Corvin (founding member; currently stepping back from council)
- Occupation: Artist, investor
- Appearance: 6’3″, dark curling hair, dark eyes, Lichtenberg scars on left shoulder/arm
- Personality: Disciplined, guarded, ethical, dry-humored
- Element: Earth
- Defining trait: Has not allowed himself to love anyone in five hundred years. He is running out of reasons why.
- Secret: He knows exactly who Nia is. He has been waiting for her to remember.
AMBROSE CORVIN
If you want to find Ambrose, look for the aviary.
He is usually somewhere near growing things — under the canopy of an old grove, coaxing a reluctant tree into bloom, feeding the ravens that arrive without invitation and stay because he lets them. He is six hundred and fifty years old and has the unhurried quality of someone who discovered, long ago, that urgency is mostly a human invention and rarely improves any situation it touches.
He was turned in 1376, at an age he chose deliberately: late fifties, silver-haired, already a scholar and sage. He wanted the gravitas. He has never regretted it.
Ambrose is a vampire-witch whose practice is rooted in Druidry — the old kind, not the romanticized modern version, though he has no objection to the romanticized modern version if it brings people closer to the living world. He works with trees, groves, birds, and the long slow intelligence of systems that do not need to be hurried. He has prophetic gifts: visions, scrying, the deep-sea intuition that arrives as certainty before it arrives as knowledge. He knows when people lie with the ease of breathing. He performs healing work. He has been doing all of this for six and a half centuries and is, by any reasonable measure, exceptionally good at it.
He is also deeply, openly, contentedly in love with a landscape designer named Rowan Connelly, whom he met two years ago over apples at a farmer’s market and whose ability to make things grow in soil that should not support them Ambrose considers nothing short of miraculous.
He and Drake call each other uncle and nephew — not because either word is accurate, but because affection between men who have known each other across centuries sometimes finds the words already spoken and uses them anyway. He has watched over Drake for a very long time. He sent Drake to AA because a vision told him to. He has learned to trust his visions.
He has been waiting for Gardenia to come back. He was alive when she left, and he remembers her clearly. He has told Drake she would return. Drake has believed him, on good days. On bad days, Drake has believed nothing.
It is shaping up to be a very good day.
At a glance:
- Age: 650 (turned 1376; appears late 50s/early 60s)
- Species: Vampire-witch (Strigoi)
- Coven: Corvin (Elder)
- Magic specialization: Druidry (trees, groves, aviaries, living systems); prophetic visions, healing, truth-sensing
- Appearance: Silver-white hair, warm green eyes, slender, distinguished, tailored
- Partner: Rowan Connelly (two years together)
- Personality: Wise, patient, quietly funny, openly gay, deeply ethical, completely unbothered
- Role in Drake’s life: Mentor, elder, the closest thing to family Drake permits himself
- Defining trait: Has seen enough of the world to know how rarely things go right. Sends Drake to AA anyway. This is what hope looks like after six hundred years.
ROWAN CONNELLY
Rowan Connelly is thirty-two years old, and there are several things his family does not know about him.
They do not know he is gay, though they would not take it well. They do not know that his partner is six hundred and fifty years old, which they would take considerably worse. They do not know that the herbs he keeps in his kitchen window are arranged according to protective properties, that the charm above his door is not decorative, or that the reason his clients’ gardens thrive in soil that should not support them has less to do with his professional expertise — considerable as that is — and rather more to do with the particular attention Rowan pays to what the land itself seems to want.
He is a hedge witch, self-taught and quietly serious about it, working in the gap between the formal magical traditions and the practical everyday world of growing things. His high-end landscape design business provides the cover story and the income. The actual work — the designing of spaces that feel genuinely alive, that breathe and settle and hold people gently — is something else. Something he doesn’t entirely have words for yet.
He has sandy brown hair that goes darker when wet, warm golden hazel eyes, and a medium build that speaks of someone more comfortable in the garden than the gym. He almost always has a little soil under his fingernails. In autumn he wears a striped scarf in browns, greens, burnt orange, and mustard yellow — thick stripes, worn soft with use — and drives a beat-up truck that has been sanded down through several layers of previous colors to reveal something that looks almost intentional.
He met Ambrose over apples at a farmer’s market two years ago and has been quietly rearranging his understanding of the world ever since.
He is Nia’s best friend. They met at book club at Burdock’s Books and have met there every Saturday morning since. He is her safe space — the person she calls when the week has been too much, the one who listens without fixing, who makes her laugh without minimizing. He is the one who suggested she try a support group.
He is gentle, loyal, funny, knowledgeable about herbs and kitchen magic and the language that plants use when they need attention. He is also, if he is honest, a little anxious about most things — being found out, being too much, being not enough for a man who has watched centuries pass like weather. He is working on that. The plants, at least, have never seemed to mind.
At a glance:
- Age: 32
- Species: Human (hedge witch)
- Occupation: High-end landscape designer
- Appearance: Sandy wavy hair, golden hazel eyes, medium build, perpetually soil-stained hands
- Signature item: Autumn striped scarf — browns, greens, burnt orange, mustard yellow
- Partner: Ambrose Corvin (two years)
- Best friend: Nia Ashford (met at book club)
- Magic style: Hedge witch — herbs, protection, cleansing, green magic; intuitive rather than formal
- Personality: Gentle, nurturing, loyal, quietly anxious, genuinely funny
- Defining trait: Has an extraordinary gift for making things grow in places they shouldn’t. This is both literal and not.
MARCUS ABEL
Before
Marcus Abel was, by every visible measure, the kind of man who got what he wanted.
He was tall, well-dressed, conventionally handsome in the way that photographs well and rooms respond to. He had the charming smile of someone who had practiced it long enough that it arrived on cue without ever quite reaching his eyes. He moved through professional and social spaces with the easy authority of a man who had never seriously considered the possibility that something might be beyond his reach.
He was born in 1963. He built a career in commercial real estate and pharmaceuticals, the kind of career that involves knowing which people to cultivate and which to discard, and he was very good at both. He became a business partner with a pharmaceutical executive named Edgar Ashford, and for a time the arrangement suited them both.
It was Edgar’s wife Rosalind who became the problem.
Marcus had an affair with Rosalind Ashford. This was not unusual for him — he collected people who interested him, held them close until the interest passed, and let them go without much reflection. Rosalind did not pass. There was something about her he could not name and could not stop wanting: a quality in her energy, something in her blood that called to the latent magical ability he had discovered in himself and had spent a decade quietly developing. He did not understand it then. He understands it now. She had vampires up in her family line, and he wanted that. Marcus had a plan.
When Edgar found him with Rosalind in his office — Marcus feeding from her, trying to finish what he had started — he picked up a chair. The blow came first. The stake through the heart came second. When Marcus appeared practically unhurt, Edgar grabbed the broken chair leg and used it with the specific violence of a man who has nothing left to lose.
Edgar believed he had killed him. He had, technically. Just not in the way he intended.
Marcus Abel died in 2015 at the age of fifty-two. He did not stay dead.
DESANGUINATE
After
He gave himself a new name. He always had a talent for grandiosity.
Desanguinate. Drained of blood. He chose it from a medical dictionary, pleased with its precision and its length. He had, after all, become something that drains — not blood now, but life force, the essential energy that keeps a person warm and present and themselves. A shadow that feeds on light. A Moroi.
What Marcus Abel became after Edgar’s chair leg and the improvised stake is not quite a ghost and not quite a demon. It is something older and less categorized — a corrupted spirit, a consciousness that refused to dissolve, that instead thickened and darkened and learned new ways to reach. He moves as shadow now. He enters through keyholes, through the gap beneath a door, through the particular darkness that gathers in a corner at 3 AM. He has learned to elongate, to reach across a room without moving his body, to press into dreams and sleep paralysis and the vulnerable half-second between waking and not.
He has been feeding this way for ten years. He has been getting stronger.
He was always obsessive. Death has not improved this. The fixation that absorbed him in life — Nia Ashford, her power, her potential, the particular quality of her energy that he recognized years before she recognized it herself — has become the entire organizing principle of his existence. He has waited. He has fed. He has grown. He has watched her with the patient, absolute attention of something that does not experience time the way living creatures do and has nowhere else to be.
He has been creating the wasting deaths in Bangor. Draining life force from the vulnerable, the isolated, the people no one looks for immediately. Growing his strength on borrowed energy. Leaving nothing behind that anyone can explain.
He is not finished.
He was never going to be finished until he had her.
At a glance — Marcus Abel:
- Born: 1963 | Died: 2015, age 52
- Occupation: Businessman (pharmaceuticals, commercial real estate)
- Appearance: Tall, well-groomed, charming smile that never reached his eyes
- Personality: Narcissist — charismatic, manipulative, obsessive, entitled, patient predator
- Key relationship: Business partner to Edgar Ashford; had an affair with Rosalind Ashford
- Death: Stabbed through the heart with a broken chair leg by Edgar Ashford
- Result: Did not die cleanly. Became something worse.
At a glance — Desanguinate:
- True name: Marcus Abel
- Shadow name: Desanguinate (self-given; means “drained of blood”)
- Species: Moroi (corrupted shadow spirit)
- Appearance: Dark humanoid silhouette; occasionally red/glowing eyes when feeding; cold presence that drains warmth from a room
- Powers: Energy drain (feeds on life force), shadow travel (keyholes, cracks, darkness), induces nightmares and sleep paralysis, grows stronger with each feeding
- Weakness: New Moon Potion (destroys Moroi when consumed by their victim); strong magical wards; diminished in daylight
- Obsession: Nia Ashford — her power, her energy, the belief that she belongs to him
- Defining trait: Chose a name that means drained of blood. Has spent ten years making other people’s names mean the same thing.
More to come soon!
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