River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)(94)

So I have to live with the rage for a few moments. I have to make friends with it. I have to let the red turn to black, let it settle in my bones.

And there, hidden underneath all the molten hot torment, is the source of my rage.

It’s pain.

It’s a dull ache in my ribs, right around my heart.

The same kind of ache I would get when I looked at her beautiful face as she came.

Oh, I ached for her. Craved her, possessed her, relished her when my cock was deep inside, when I felt she was no longer mortal but instead part of my skin and bones.

I ached for my little bird.

Now I break for her.

I swallow it down, welcoming the anger again. The anger I can deal with, the rage I can use. I just have to learn to control it so it doesn’t get the better of me. I need to wield it like a weapon against the one who spurned me.

I need to make her suffer too.

“I’m getting her back,” I growl, and start storming out of the darkness of the cave, using all my senses to find my way back to the light. “I’m getting her back and I’m making her pay. No one escapes Death, not even her.”

Especially not her.



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More to come…May 2022





Black Sunshine





A Dark Vampire Romance





Here’s a sneak peek at my paranormal contemporary vampire romance, Black Sunshine, out now in KU and paperback.



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Black Sunshine





All Lenore Warwick wants for her 21st birthday is to hang out with her friends, finish her second semester at Berkley with flying colors, and maybe catch the eye of a hot musician playing a show at a club that she can now (legally) get into.

Unfortunately, fate has other plans for her.

A week before her birthday, she’s kidnapped by the brooding and dangerous stranger with cold eyes and a lethal touch who has been stalking her on San Francisco’s fog-shrouded streets. Absolon Stavig isn’t your average criminal though. He’s a centuries-old vampire who’s caught between wanting to kill Lenore and wanting to save her.

You see Lenore, too, is a vampire.

She just doesn’t know it yet.

Taken by a pair of vampire slayers when she was just an infant, Lenore was raised never knowing her true nature. All Lenore knows is that she has parents who love her, that she’s exceptionally smart, and she’s squeamish around blood. But once she turns twenty-one, she’ll fully turn into a vampire, and Solon hopes he’ll be there to guide her, opening her eyes to her deepest hunger, both sexual and otherwise.

But this turning can’t be kept a secret. Soon, both slayers and vampires are hunting Lenore, with only Solon and his unpredictable motley crew of vampires to save her.

If they don’t kill her first.

Black Sunshine is a dark adult standalone romance with a paranormal twist, about sex, love, secrets, and revenge, set in contemporary San Francisco.



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PROLOGUE


Orcas Island, Washington State

Nineteen Years Ago





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It’s the snapping of a branch that gives them away.

Elaine Warwick immediately winces as the sound ricochets through the forest—a mix of cedar, Douglas fir, and alders that should have muffled the noise, in theory. But Elaine knows better.

Up ahead, Jim stops running, shooting his wife a harried look over his shoulder. He knows better too. The expression of pure disappointment mixed with fear threads through his eyes, but Elaine can only nod at him to keep going.

They’re so close.

And now they’ve lost their advantage.

The Virtanens will hear them coming.

Even isolating yourself on an island in the Pacific Northwest, withdrawing from society in some sort of penance for your many sins, doesn’t take the amplified senses out of the vampire. Once a vampire, always a vampire, until you die.

Which is why Jim and Elaine are here tonight.

To find Alice and Hakan, the famed Virtanen vampires, who inflicted centuries of pain upon people before they decided to have a change of heart — “retirement” as some in the guild called it — and put them to death.

It’s going to be nasty work, and there’s a chance that neither Jim nor Elaine will survive this, but it’s personal. It’s been personal for years, since Alice killed Elaine’s sister. The guild doesn’t even know that the Warwicks are here on a vengeance trip. They long ago said it was best to concentrate on vampires that were still doing damage, but Elaine hasn’t forgotten, and the damage is never going away. She knows that since the guild didn’t sanction this kill, there’s a chance they could get in trouble for it.

Executed, even.

Then again, what the guild doesn’t know, can’t hurt them.

Besides, they might die here anyway.

That snapping branch didn’t help.

They continue running, as soundless as possible. They’ve trained most of their lives for moments like this. How to be quiet and quick, especially against predators who are faster than they are. Predators who must know they are quickly approaching the property.

Elaine feels her knife burning at her calf, the energy coming off it seeping into her own skin, her own skin feeding back into the knife. The vampires won’t know that knife is there, protected under a cloak of spells, buried by the sigils and fire agate threaded into her black pants. Slayers have evolved to try and trick their prey, just as their prey have evolved to try and trick them.