The Changing Seasons

I’m wagering almost everyone loves the springtime. I say this about spring because the days are longer, the weather warmer, our energy levels higher. Spring gets our blood pumping and our juices flowing. Spring is the season of passion.
 
All that holds true in the world of my novel. Rainer Barakiel (pronounced Ry-ner Ba-rack-ee-el) is a superhuman warrior from another dimension, exiled to Earth for the sins of his father. When he meets the strong and talented FBI agent Alexandra "Zan"  O’Gara, blood pumps and juices flow. The season lives up to its name with an added twist. On the vernal equinox, the day that spring begins, monstrous demons shoot through a rift in the fabric of existence to attack Barakiel. Massive, drooling beasts with an endless thirst for violence, the demons are sent by Barakiel’s father to kill him.
 
I released The Passion Season on March 20, 2016, because the vernal equinox occurred at 12:30 a.m. on that date. Chapter 1 begins with the demon attack shortly before Barakiel meets Zan. We learn in the prologue that Barakiel has been fighting demons for centuries. He is Covalent, a race of ancient beings who use their great power to bring stability to the cosmos. Barakiel was exiled after his father, the once-admired warrior Lucifer, led a rebellion against the rulers of the Covalent Realm. As Barakiel grew up, the rulers of his world came to mistrust his power. They feared he was his father’s son, so when he reached adolescence they banished him to the Earthly Realm.
 
Their fear was misplaced. Far from being his father’s sleeper agent, Barakiel refused to become his father’s slave. As a result. Lucifer never stops trying to kill him, sending demons against him at every change of season: the vernal equinox, the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.
 
Why only the changes of season, you ask? Because the kind of inter-dimensional rift used by the demons opens only at that moment when the Earth’s axis shifts position relative to the sun, the moment of a solstice or an equinox. During the brief time the rift is open, demons cram inside to rocket through and attack Barakiel.
 
As you can see in image #1, in the autumn and winter the northern part of the Earth is tilted away from the Sun. Spring comes to the northern hemisphere when the Earth has traveled far enough along its orbit for the northern part of our planet to once again tilt toward the heat of the fiery star.
The rift opens because the Earth stretches the fabric of existence when it reaches one of the far points of its elliptical orbit. Imagine the Sun sitting at the center of a vast vibrating cloth, as in image #2.
The Earth travels along the surface of same cloth, following the same furrow in the fabric over and over again, held in that groove by the gravitational pull of the Sun. At the far points, when the Earth’s axis shifts relative the Sun, small tears appear in the fabric that almost immediately repair themselves. But the tears are open long enough for the demons to enter. The beasts rush through to set upon Barakiel, seeking to satisfy their blood lust and please their master, Lucifer, by ripping apart his son.

The axial rifts, as these tears in the fabric of existence are called, look something like enormous trees, their branches embracing the Earth.
 
Zan and Barakiel are brought together by a murder, a macabre ritual that happens shortly before the vernal equinox. Fearing the gruesome crime has something to do with the demons, Barakiel offers to consult for the FBI because he has expertise in antique daggers like those found at the scene. His goal is information, but after Zan shows up at his door to question him about the knives, he he can’t get her out of his mind. And so begins Barakiel’s passion, a season of more happiness than he has ever known, with more at stake than he has ever had to lose.