fiction

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Between the living world and the next there exists the largest city ever created. The vast Necrosanctum, the City of the Dead, houses those souls not quite ready for final Judgment. Pagans or sinners, the meek and the conniving, they gather by the billions in the City, clustered around the Pillar of Heaven, at the heart of the infinite Darkling Plain where souls are born.

This is the world discovered by nerdy teenager Joe Preston as he takes on the mantle of a Guardian, one of seven protectors endowed with fantastic powers and charged with maintaining the balance between the living and the dead.

But when Joe’s girlfriend is murdered by the Shadow King, he finds himself thrust into a war he doesn’t know how to fight. Recruiting his friends, misfits and outcasts all, to become the other six Guardians, Joe sets out to save his girlfriend’s soul, and along the way discover what it truly takes to be a hero.

CATALOG

Life has not been easy for Rosita Sanchez. Nearly murdered as a young mother by her thug husband, she was taken in by a hitman who not only nursed her back to health, but taught her his deadly profession. As the assassin Belladonna Rose, she has risen to the top of the elite, while raising her special needs son all on her own. Now the time has come for Belladonna to retire. She has all the money she will ever need, and she wants to put the life of a paid assassin behind her, to embrace her alternate life as a single mother raising her child in a normal world.

For some people, such a destiny was never meant to be.

This is Rose's last day as Belladonna. It begins with what was supposed to be her last kill, a hit that goes very wrong, setting the stage for a day that will test her strength, her skill, and her iron will. Pursued by mercenaries, confronted at every turn with surprises as the mysteries of her life unravel, and forced by her nature to help the weak each time she encounters them, Rose will spend her last day as Belladonna setting things right, tying up loose ends, and learning that there is no escape from the person she was always meant to be.

Even if it kills her.

Jacob, by his own account, is a simple, humble man. Ordinary. He is a husband, a father, a hard worker. A provider. He grew up an only child to a carefree mother and experienced a somewhat chaotic youth. He has never known a family other than the one he has made for himself, and he would do anything to protect them, to preserve that normality.

And then a woman enters his life, a sister he has never known, and he is launched down a crooked path to adventure, self-discovery, and the terrifying realization that he is anything but ordinary. He is the Daikan, the end result of ten thousand years of genetic manipulation designed to produce the ultimate warrior and the only weapon with a hope of freeing mankind from its singular, secret alien overlord.

But can superhuman strength, psionic abilities, and lifetimes of genetic memory be enough when pitted against an immortal alien wielding god-like powers and technology a million years ahead of anything on Earth? It has to be. Jacob is the Daikan, and he is the means for Earth’s salvation —

Or its ultimate destruction.

So it came to pass that the Lord sent down a few of His angels to walk among his mortal children, that they might be lifted up from savagery and into the light. But lo, it came to pass that the angels were weak against the temptations of flesh, and took for themselves wives, and begat many children, and there were giants among men after those days.

Ten thousand years later, they still walk among us. The angels, the demons, and the children of both who struggle eternally for domination. So far, there has never been an incursion that the noble Warriors and the mighty Sorcerers of the Order could not repel. But nothing good lasts forever, and a new demon has arrived. A demon which can possess more than one person at a time. A demon who can become its own army. A Legion.

Plans long in the making are coming to fruition. The Order is crippled. The Legion will soon open a portal into the heart of Hell itself. All that stands between us and apocalypse are a girl with the gift of war, outcast in a society where only males become Warriors, and a boy with wild magic, heir to a lost angelic bloodline. Without support, with only each other and the burgeoning love they share, they must overcome the forces of darkness and drive the Legion back to Hell, before Hell comes to Earth.

You know the tales. You grew up with them as a child. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, The Pied Piper, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Beauty and the Beast. Tame. Boring. But not anymore.

Here are six re-tellings of your favorite tales coated in a healthy portion of grown-up magic. Why does the Pied Piper want all those children? Who was more dangerous, Little Red or the Wolf? What if Snow White was trained to fight back? You have questions, herein lay the answers. From vampires to magical curses, werewolves to demons, these aren’t kids’ stories anymore.

So sit back, relax, and take a stroll down nostalgia avenue. Just don’t take the wolf’s shortcut, and always pay the Piper what he’s due. Happily ever after is just for fairy tales. These fairies bite.

First love often happens when we are too young to appreciate being deeply in love. That was how it was for Evie and Mason when they met in college. Awkwardness and self-doubt held them just far enough apart for Mason's best friend Gerald to sweep in and steal Evie away.

Now, years later, Evie and Gerald are to be wed, but Mason's career has brought him back to town and, as if by fate, the thwarted lovers are reunited. Neither can deny the intense physical attraction to one another. Neither can stop thinking about the love that almost was.

The love that still burns deeply inside them.

So, Evie approaches Mason with a simple request. "Make love to me," she says. Gerald is the only man she has ever been with, and she wants to experience what it feels like to be in Mason's arms before it is too late.

Mason cannot deny her, and it kicks off a torrid romance that challenges their beliefs about destiny, fidelity, and the purity of a love they were never able to forget.

It won’t be easy. Gerald is a man accustomed to getting what he wants, and he has dangerous friends to help him. Will love win? Or will it forever be a memory lost to time, unforgotten.