Wick'd Candles and Perfumes by Studio 3B

**Discontinued Item**

Dangerous and Deadly....

The SNAKES Candle is designed to bear the same totem snake tattoo as Shem in William Maltese's latest sexy adventure novel, SNAKES.

Made with a rough rustic texture, completed with a handpainted totem snake design, and scented in Sun and Sea Scent,  it is the perfect companion as you journey through Australia's most dangerous territories with Shem and Ian in SNAKES.

Even before Shem peeled off his black T-shirt, which he proceeded to do, Ian could see the blue-snake tattoo curled on Shem’s muscled belly, the snake’s open mouth seemingly intent upon biting the young aborigine’s navel.

          Ian had asked Shem about the snake and received a rather vague response, Shem seemingly embarrassed, about it having been not Shem’s idea to get it but that of Shem’s father. Ian had asked Leith about it, too; Leith had been a little less reluctant to discuss it but had very little to offer by way of additional insight, except, “Noah once expected far more of Shem than he does now. Had Noah known what he now knows, such early preparations, as the totem snake tattoo, would likely have been unnecessary, but who could have guessed?”  Excerpt from SNAKES.

SNAKES

Internationally best-selling author William Maltese, known for his been-there, done-that expertise in bringing exotic locales into the bedrooms of his readers, does it yet again, in SNAKES, a tale of that super-dangerous side to Australia - not ballyhooed in any of the country's enticing tourist brochures - that includes indigenous deadly plants, animals, insects, marine life, and reptiles, that can and do out-kill any of their counterparts on the world's remaining six continents.

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Author William Maltese

EXCERPT FROM SNAKES

“KENK-LUM-RRA!” Gerald Sims identified and pointed. His low voice promised the worst was over; his optimistic smile, that crinkled the edges of his velvety black eyes and deepened his already deep dimple, bolstered that promise.

          Kenk-lum-rra was a supposed victim of aborigine Dream Time. To Ian, disinclined to believe in mythical battles once waged by half-men, half-monsters, against half-men, half-animals, Kenk-lum-rra was only a long-standing, very dead tree. Although even Ian, on second thought, would have conceded “only” a misnomer in a landscape without another tree, dead or alive, within miles. That the desiccated gum tree, limbs and trunk bleached skeletal white by the never-kind elements of the Australian outback, hadn’t been carted away, piecemeal, to fuel one fire or another, in a locale where firewood was rarer than gold, was supposedly proof-positive of the survivor’s Dream-Time origins. Ian suspected the tree’s long-time stick-figure existence, supported atop bone-dry earth by a root system as dead as the deadweight it supported, was more a case of no one, in his right mind, wanting to stop in such an inhospitable spot to roast marshmallows or wieners.

          “Home base is suddenly close enough to walk,” Gerald encouraged; the Australian-blown dust had frosted his black hair with dull, reddish highlights.

          Ian wasn’t encouraged. Kenk-lum-rra, although sighted now from their car, was still a good ways distance. The Facility, their ultimate destination, was even farther afield. Such miles might be walked easily on a good day, in ideal conditions, in some American suburb, but in a storm, in this wilderness area of Australian’s Northern Territory? “What’s the bit about counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched?” He ran his fingers through his dust-dulled blond hair; at the same time, more wind-blown whirlwinds were whipped up outside to obliterate all signs of the just-sighted landmark.

          It was a mile later, Ian’s eyes squinted to again discover the whereabouts of Kenk-lum-rra within the latest thickening of stormy miasma, that the blinding flash of lightning impressively materialized, its upper limits lost amid the multi-layered dust-blankets that had been ripped to let it through, its leading-edge spearheaded into the ground. The resulting radiance seared, the crackle irritated, and the reverberations made the earth shake.

          In the immediate aftermath, Ian’s retinas retained a negative image of the bolt; it was through that optical illusion that one skeletal arm of Kenk-lum-rra rained at him through shattering car windscreen and threatened to impale him as surely as any vampire on a good Christian’s wooden stake.