You’re going to love this newsletter! Amaranthine Kiss is finally out! It’s 99c for a short time (link:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JKHL4HZ/ ) and all the details, blurb and an excerpt are at the end of the newsletter. First, though, I have extras for you 🙂

Maria E. Schneider, of Bear Mountain Books blog fame, has organised an amazing 99c promo with magical mysteries and other delights. It runs until Oct 26 and has some fabulous books in it. Link:  http://www.bearmountainbooks.com/october-99-cents-extravaganza/

 

Also, PG Forte (who wrote the magical Oberon series that I’ve raved about here) has In the Dark, the first book in her vampire series, Children of the Night, at 99c for a short time. This isn’t vampires as you’re used to thinking about them. The series is an awesome vampire soap opera with tangled relationships and loyalties that span decades.

Buy link for In the Dark by PG Forte:  https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Children-Night-PG-Forte-ebook/dp/B073TSCFF7

 

And now for Amaranthine Kiss – the blurb and an excerpt from Chapter 1.

Buy link:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JKHL4HZ/ 

Blurb

Army doctor Angelo Sanderson is an unlikely veteran of supernatural combat. A classified mission thrust him into a world most people never have to fear; a world of monsters, mysteries and magic. Coming home to Boston was meant to be about returning to ordinary life. After all, he has no magic of his own.

But Doctor Effie Eliades does. Effie is a healer by profession and by magic. She’s known Angelo forever. He’s her brother’s best friend. She grew up knowing that she could trust him with anything. Now, she’ll have to trust him with her secrets and her life because a supernatural threat is killing her patients, and she needs Angelo’s help to save them.

The threat is real, but Effie is wrong about its target. The Amaranthine Kiss isn’t after Effie’s patients. It hungers for her.

***

The sixteen-year-old girl looked as if she was ninety years old. Straggly gray hair wisped around a wrinkled, sunken face. Her heart was failing. Her lungs barely inflated. Every additional second of life was a struggle.

Dr. Effie Eliades leaned close. “Who did this to you, Jess? What did this to you?”

Soft as a sigh, final and heart-breaking, the dying girl answered. “A kiss.”

Excerpt

Doctor Effie Eliades strode through the unfamiliar corridors of the military hospital, concentrating on reaching her brother’s room and what she had to do when she found him. She’d cried herself out, yesterday, so that she could be who he needed, today.

People had offered to cover for her at work, but she’d completed her shift. She was a second year medical resident, living and working in Boston. She knew how overworked and understaffed the ER was, and to be honest, she’d needed the distraction of her patients and their problems. She’d known it would take hours to settle Mike after his arrival back on US soil, and then, her parents had first right to visit him since Mike was divorced without children.

Her mom and dad would have cried over him.

Effie had taken the time to change into a t-shirt from a concert Mike had taken her to years ago. It was a bit tight. She’d grown since she was sixteen, but Mike remained her hero. What other soldier would have spent precious hours of his leave escorting his teenage sister to a boy band concert? He’d bought her the t-shirt, and she’d bought him the same one. He’d even worn it once, to wash their gran’s dog.

Faded jeans, sneakers and an old leather jacket completed her casual appearance. She’d tied her hair in a jaunty ponytail, letting the black curls be as messy as they liked. She wanted Mike to see her as his little sister and not as a doctor. Patients in Mike’s condition could be furious with medical staff, and she needed his trust, not his anger.

She’d also dressed this way to encourage everyone else to disregard her. Being overlooked was important for what she intended to do. What she had to do.

Familiarity with the logic of hospitals meant she located Mike’s room in intensive care easily enough. Just as her Aunt Judy had texted, the waiting area was free of Eliades family and friends. They’d been shooed off so that Mike could sleep. At his request, they’d taken his parents with them.

Effie approached a nurse who was busy at a computer and introduced herself as Major Michael Eliades’s sister. “My aunt said he’d agreed that I could visit him.”

“Major Eliades has a visitor at the moment.”

Effie glanced at the door to Mike’s room. She shuffled sideways for a better view of its occupants. “Angel.”

The male nurse’s head jerked up.

Effie corrected herself. “Dr. Angelo Sanderson is with my brother. I recognize him.” Mike and Angelo had been best friends since before Effie was born. As children, neither had had much time for a six years younger girl, but they’d always been kind—in-between sports, video games and homework. “I won’t wake Mike if he’s asleep,” she promised.

The nurse frowned before nodding.

Effie walked silently into the room. She ignored the machines hooked up to Mike and the flattened blanket where his feet and lower legs should have been.

“Mike, Trouble’s here,” Angelo said softly, noticing her. He looked scruffier than she’d have expected from an army doctor. He had days’ worth of stubble, and his dark blonde hair had outgrown its regulation cut. But his hazel eyes were clear and sharp, and held both sympathy and a warning for her.

Mike’s eyes opened a bare slit.

Effie walked confidently up to the bed and punched Mike on one of the few places on his body that appeared uninjured: his upper left arm. “That’s for rushing home.”

The machine readings spiked.

“It’s all right,” Angelo said to the nurse who hurried in.

Mike’s eyes opened fully; his pupils narrowed to dots from the drugs dripping in through his IV. “Effie?”

“We could have waited till Christmas to see you.” She dragged up a second chair, sitting on the opposite side of the bed to Angelo. “You didn’t need to take the expedited option home.”

Her lame joke failed to raise a flicker of humor in her brother, but she had established that she wasn’t going to baby him.

She clasped his left hand in both of hers and concentrated, even as she continued her determinedly light conversation. “And I don’t know how you got Angelo here. Last time Mom mentioned him, he was stationed somewhere in Africa.”

“Asia,” Angelo murmured.

She shrugged. “Mom never was great at geography.”

“I’ve got a couple of weeks leave,” Angelo said.

“Don’t waste them here,” Mike slurred.

Effie squeezed his hand. “Ssh, you. Angel’s here to see me.”

The corners of Angelo’s wide mouth quirked upward. “Is that so?” Tiredness had etched deep lines in his tanned face. “You are the only person in the world who gets away with calling me ‘Angel’.”

“Because I’m special and you love me?”

Mike coughed and winced. “Don’t push your luck.”

***

Amaranthine Kiss is 99c for a short time. Happy reading!

Buy link:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JKHL4HZ/