When life breaks you, you pick up the pieces and move on.
As The Nightingale Circus begin a quest to deliver a power source that has the potential to change the outcome of the war in the Far East, their efforts are thwarted when Nicholas is apprehended by French authorities.
Meanwhile, Dale stays in Bratislava to protect Aurore and her power source. When the largest weapons manufacturer in Europe discovers her secret, the chase is on.
With a tracker hot on their heels, Dale and Aurore struggle to stay one step ahead. Their dangerous journey takes them across Europe and leads them to the only ones who can help them – The Nightingale Circus.
Award-winning writer Ioana Visan has always dreamed about reaching the stars, but since she can’t, she writes about it.
After fighting the apocalypse aftermath in “Human Instincts”, she played with shapeshifters in “Blue Moon Café Series: Where Shifters Meet for Drinks”, and then she dealt with vampires in “The Impaler Legacy” series, before tackling longer works like a fantasy trilogy and a science fiction series.
Aside from publishing short stories in various Romanian magazines and anthologies, she published a short story collection “Efectul de nautil” and the Romanian edition of “Human Instincts”.
She was awarded the Encouragement Award by The European Science Fiction Society at Eurocon 2013.
When Ultimate Evil
engulfs the entire world, only Dagger can pierce the
Darkness—even if the Apocalypse falls on a school night!
Dagger Beaumont is a High School senior who’s been recruited by D.U.S.T.—a
covert governmental organization dedicated to battling supernatural terrorism
all over the globe.
However, Dagger’s unresolved conflict over his missing brother could be his
undoing, as he races around the world battling the Dark Reich, a diabolical
organization on a quest to possess an ancient artifact and unleash a mystical
plague to enslave humanity. If that weren't treacherousenough,
Dagger must juggle his life as a secret agent with his social life, where he
faces romantic rivalry for the guy of his dreams, a mysterious and handsome new
student at his haunted boarding school.
But in a high-stakes world where nothing is as it seems, and death lurks in
every shadow, love rides shotgun with survival!
I pulled the sheet down Reinaldo’s naked right hip,
trying hard not to peek at what lay beyond. Why did he have to
be so damn hot? Hey, I was a typical seventeen year-old guy, raging
hormones and all that jazz. With one big difference.
I had orders to terminate.
Reinaldo lay sprawled beside me on the king-sized bed in our
Parisian hotel suite, looking like the statue of David in a centerfold spread:
jet-black curly hair, Roman nose, angular jaw, the chiseled body of a college
gymnast. His biceps bulged, as did his pecs, which were lightly coated with
hair that tapered into a trail leading down ridges of sculpted abs, past his
pelvis, before disappearing into the tent under the sheets. As far as what was
hidden, let’s just say all that rigorous exercise hadn’t stunted his growth.
He was the first guy to tell me he loved me. And now he’d be
the first guy I had to kill. The quintessential love-hate relationship. If
there’s one thing I’d learned ever since my brother Phillipe’s supernatural
disappearance, it was that love had no business in the world of occult
espionage.
Opening your heart was akin to opening your wrists.
I shifted closer, my face inches from his pelvis. Moving in,
I smelled the freshly laundered linen, mixed with Reinaldo’s own musky athletic
scent. I blinked my eyes three times, activating the infrared contact lenses
I’d slipped on earlier, while Reinaldo’d slipped out of his clothes, after
drinking the potion I’d slipped in his wine. Talk about a slippery slope.
He didn’t look quite as sexy bathed in a green glow, more
like Michelangelo’s boy with a serious case of gangrene. But the only part of
Reinaldo’s body that truly mattered was the part no longer hidden by the sheet.
The part that throbbed underneath the gaze of my infrared lenses.
It was there, on his inner right thigh. The birthmark. My
intel had been correct.
It was so tiny I might not have ever seen it, even if we’d
done the deed.
What was it? Right?—no, left to
zoom in. I blinked my left eye a few times enlarging the image. It was a
symbol. A dragon inside a pyramid, its base parallel to another pyramid base
facing the opposite direction and encasing some type of demon. Both of these
were housed within a larger triangle.
I squinted, flexing my brows. Snap! Snap! Snap! The
photographic evidence of the mark uploaded via the lenses’ transmitter. These
shades rocked. I’d have to give props to Felanie—if I made it out of this.
I glanced back up at Reinaldo’s face. He looked so peaceful
lying there, completely unaware he’d been duped. For a split second I almost
felt sorry for him. Keywords split and almost.
He’d more than duped me by pretending to be my boyfriend,
until I’d found out he was a member of a sorcerist cell. Even so, the concept
of terminating him sounded clinical and abstract when discussed in a cold,
sterile briefing room, especially when I’d prepared months in advance, both
physically and mentally, convincing myself it was for the greater good. With
the target warm and curled up against me like a helpless pup, termination
seemed more like murder. Orders be damned. Better to drug him and see if I
could find it first before going down that road.
I maneuvered my body across his sleeping form. When our skin
touched, I broke out into goose flesh.
Reinaldo stirred slightly.
I held my breath, tensing every muscle.
Then he stretched a sculpted bicep over his head, not a care
in the world.
My heart down-shifted.
I reached over the side of the bed, past the ornately carved
nightstand, and carefully rummaged through the pile of clothes Prince Charming
had deposited on the lush, wine-colored rug. One black V-neck T-shirt with no
pockets, the better to show off his massive chest. Skin-tight jeans that hugged
his thick thighs and narrow waist contained nothing but empty pockets. A pair
of size twelve flip-flops. Not much else.
I’d already performed a sweep of the room. He had to
have it on him.
Wait a minute. The big silver belt buckle. Trendy.
A good place for hiding a top-secret micro-chip embedded with an encryption key
… stylish. I snatched it up, the metal feeling cold, even in my icy
hands.
I examined the buckle, a very butch affair, complete with
some type of horned steer. At first I’d thought Reinaldo’d been going for a
metrosexual country western look. But the horns reminded me of the ones on that
birthmark nestled against his loins.
My fingers explored the buckle’s surface, my thumbs pressing
against every ridge. Nada. I’d have to improvise. Following my instincts, I
pricked my thumb on the prong. A small trickle of blood bubbled forth. Kind of
unconventional for espionage, I know, but it’s not like I worked for the CIA.
As a matter of fact, I doubted even the CIA knew about us, that’s how high we were
on the secret ladder. The Department of Unexplained
Supernatural Terrorism. DUST. Saving the unsuspecting world from the criminal
forces of the supernatural and the occult, one phenomenon at a time.
I smeared the blood on the buckle’s surface, hoping the
“offering” would activate the trigger point. Voila! The
surface snapped open, revealing the microchip lying in the buckle’s womb. It
amazed me the clout virgin blood carried in the occult world. Yes, technically,
I was still a virgin, though hardly the poster boy for innocence at the moment.
I sat up, carefully removed the dime sized-chip, and slipped
it into the hidden slot in the waistband of my tighty-whities. Then I replaced
the buckle’s face and dropped the pants back into the pile, just as the light
came on. Two powerful arms encircled me from behind.
About the Author:
Steven dos Santos is the author of THE TORCH KEEPER novels,
THE CULLING & THE SOWING, a Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic series. The first
book was named an American Library Association 2014 Rainbow List Top Ten
Selection. His new novel, DAGGER, The D.U.S.T. Ops Mission 1, a Young Adult
Paranormal Espionage Adventure, has just been released by Evernight Teen on
September 10th, 2015! Steven is a Team Member of We Need Diverse
Books and is represented by literary agent, Ginger Knowlton of Curtis Brown,
Ltd. Steven studied Motion Picture production at University of Miami and
graduated from Florida International University with a B.S. Degree from the
School of Journalism and Mass Communications Television Broadcasting program.
He is a passionate advocate of LGBT rights.
Blurb:
Walker Callaghan doesn't know what happened to her. One minute she was living her teenage life in suburban Chicago...and the next minute, she was in a strange place and in a brand new school with absolutely no homework, no rules, and no consequences. Walker Callaghan, 17, is dead. She doesn't go to heaven or hell. She lands at The Academy, a middle realm where teenagers have one thing in common: They were the morning announcement at their high schools because they died young.
These high school kids are now caught in a strange “in-between” zone where life hasn’t changed very much. In fact, this special teen limbo looks a lot like life in a quaint Michigan town complete with jocks, popular girls and cliques. "There are even cheerleaders in death," Walker observes. It's not a coincidence that the music teacher is a guy named Kurt who "used to have this band." The drama teacher, Heath, is crush worthy because back in his life, he starred in some superhero movie. Principal King explains the rules -- there are none. Why? You can't die twice. There is no homework. No tests. No SATS. You're just there to learn because the human brain isn't fully formed until you're 24.
By the way, you can't get hurt physically, so race your Harley off that hillside. But falling in love is the most dangerous thing you can do ...because no one knows how long you'll stay in this realm or what's next. "Losing someone you love would be like dying twice," Walker says.
* * * * * *
Walker Callaghan has just arrived at the Academy after a tragic car accident. “Is this heaven or is this high school?” she asks. She finds out her new life is a bit of both as she falls in love with tat-covered, bad boy Daniel Reid who is about to break the only sacred rule of this place. He's looking for a portal to return back to the living realm. He needs just one hour to retrieve his younger brother who strangely never arrived at The Academy. Bobby is an Earth Bound Spirit, stuck at a plane crash site that took both of their lives as their rich father piloted his private jet nose-first into a cornfield on Christmas Eve. Walker loves Daniel and risks it all to go with him. Have they learned enough to outsmart dangerous forces while transporting a young child with them? Can their love survive the fragmented evil parts of themselves that are now hunting them down as they try to find a way back to the middle? At the Academy, you learn the lessons of an after-lifetime.
CL GABER is the author of ASCENDERS, the first book in the ASCENDERS saga. She's also the co-author of the YA book JEX MALONE and the sequel due in 2016. Muggletnet.com, the world's largest Harry Potter site, did a rare review of a non-Potter book and called Ascenders, "a book we wish we could read over and over again." Book 2 in the Ascenders Saga will be published in spring, 2015. A trailer for the book series contains original music by Roger O'Donnell of the iconic rock band The Cure and was produced by Orian Williams ("Control," "Shadow of a Vampire.").
As Cindy Pearlman (her maiden name), Cindy is a well known senior entertainment journalist for the New York Times Syndicate, with stories appearing worldwide, and the Chicago Sun Times. A pop culture expert, her work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, People, TV Guide, Elle and National Geographic, and many other publications. Cindy has co-written over 40 books for actors, musicians, athletes and wellness experts including several New York Times best sellers. She is the author of her own film anthology book "You Gotta See This." A native of Chicago, Cindy lives outside of Las Vegas.
I was there. And then I was gone.
My mother gave me no notice that we were relocating.
Suddenly, we had just moved without all that annoying planning and packing. Somehow my clothes were thrown into boxes with shoes that were missing mates. Someone had packed my books and CDs, and had even reached under my bed into that secret hiding place I counted on to protect my treasures; like the iPod loaded with the best and worst of everything from Nirvana to the Stones, plus my lucky green rabbit’s foot—because you just never knew when you would need a little extra luck.
My mother must have remembered the family photo album because there it was on our brand-new living room coffee table that I passed on the way to my very own bedroom and a bed I had never slept in a day in my life.
It was strange because we could barely afford to pay the rent each month, let alone buy something as nice as a hand-carved oak table imported from someplace far, far away. When I had looked, the tag didn’t say from where. It was just imported.
It was one of those times when you go from A to Z so fast that you hardly remember any of the in-between. Or as I—Walker Callaghan—senior at Kennedy High School in suburban Chicago and news editor of the school paper the Charger liked to say, “Maybe it’s not about the happy ending. Maybe it’s about the story.”
Flopping onto my new, handsome, four-poster bed with lovely little tulips carved into the wood, I thought it was so unlike my mother, the master planner, to do something this off-the-cuff. My mother was a woman who made a battle plan to go to the local 7-Eleven for almost-expiration-date milk. Even weirder was the fact that we had moved farther away than anyone imagined. A lot farther.
“So run this by me one more time, Mom,” I shouted. “I must have been heavily medicated or feeling really sorry for myself. We moved? You pulled the trigger. Bang-bang—relocation?”
I didn’t give her time to answer.
“A new school in my senior year of high school?” I called out to her on a murky, cold winter morning on Burning Tree Court.
Even though I was letting the heat escape and Mom had always said we didn’t live to “support Commonwealth Edison,” our old electric company, I still opened my bedroom window wide and found that the air drifting in was stun-your-senses Arctic cold. It smelled green and fresh outside and those dense marshmallow patches of white fluff in the sky could only mean serious snow because they were roasted dark on the bottom.
I tried to shiver, but couldn’t. I was perfectly warm despite the window and the fact that I was wearing faded jeans and a well- washed blue cotton tank that read: Normal People Scare Me.
In true dramatic fashion, I couldn’t resist needling the one 12
person responsible for our fate, our new house, and everything in it that was unknown and strange. “Mom, new school. Senior year. I’ll have no friends here. Are you trying to kill me?”
Without knowing how or why, I was now enrolled in this elite- sounding new school called the Academy, which sounded quite upscale and serious to a girl whose educational pursuits consisted of a generic public-school education outside of a big melting-pot city, where you were either rich (if you were lucky) or you were normal (if you were like everybody else). Our family worked hard at being desperately normal.
“Great, it will be a bunch of rich, stuck-up snobs who will hate me—and cheerleaders. There are always cheerleaders. They’re like cockroaches. You can’t get rid of them,” I concluded, yelling from my new room to hers, which was somewhere down a hallway that I had never really navigated before.
“I hear it’s quite fancy,” Mom called from her room. “A Callaghan going to a private school. Imagine.”
I didn’t have to imagine it as I was living it. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but when I had asked that question, Madeleine Callaghan, my mom, the mover and shaker in my life, had cringed and then cried hard into a brand-new washcloth she didn’t recognize—the thick kind we could never afford. The weeper was the one who had given me the odd-for-a-girl first name, which was her maiden name before she married my father, steel worker Sam Callaghan. We weren’t just blue-collar, but faded blue-collar from clothes that had far too many seasons of washings. In our family, the rule was “Don’t throw it out unless it’s dead-dead.”
Running my finger along the smooth wood of my expensive new dresser with the intoxicating just-cut-tree smell, I ducked down on the ground to read the label on the bottom. Imported from R-19877. Really? Did we win the lottery? And what was with the secret spy code?
“Honey, please, I’m begging you,” Mom answered after appearing in my doorway. “For once, let’s not do the Diane Sawyer investigation act. I can’t do twenty rounds of questions. Not today.” Her voice sounded thick like she had a cold, so I closed the window.
“There is no need to insult Diane who probably doesn’t even have a dresser this nice,” I replied.
“Walker, let me make you some breakfast,” Mom said. “Everything is always better after a little oatmeal and orange juice. You’ll see.”
2.
Back home in suburban Chicago, Principal Amanda Stevens was toying with the loudspeaker at Kennedy High School. It was time to make an announcement that drifted across her desk once or twice a year (every year)—and it always pulled her heart right out of her chest. She couldn’t dwell on herself, but had to think of her students. Many of them knew this girl from her work on the school newspaper. What would she say about her? Principal Stevens went through the usual lines in her head: It was a terrible shame. A waste. A tragedy. It was all those sentiments that meant nothing really because they were just words.
This was a heart ripper—dead at seventeen. Good night, Irene.
Ms. S knew that she better just do it. So she clicked the on button on the PA system, took a deep breath, and said what needed to be said. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“I regret to tell the student body that we lost one of our own last night. Walker Callaghan, a well-respected senior and news editor of the Charger, has died.”
She released the on button and grabbed for a bottle of extra- strength aspirin, wishing there was something stronger. Then she clicked the PA back on again. “Of course, counselors are available,” she added.
