Laura Anne Gilman, Joely Sue Burkhart, and Angela Korra’ti take us back to the days of the Civil War with ministering angels, magical creatures, and death. Each of the women in these stories refuses to take on the role she’s been assigned by birth, race, or circumstance. Each woman demonstrates life changing defiance.

Shannari is destined to unite the Green Lands. All she has to do is survive a battle with a barbarian, marry the barbarian, escape the very sexy barbarian and his elite warrior band, kill her former fiance, and make it home in one piece.The men in Shannari’s life don’t take no for an answer easily, and she’s definitely worth fighting for. She doesn’t believe in love with good reason–her last lover tried to kill her at a most inopportune time. It’s a good thing she has fast reflexes, even when she’s distracted. Now Rhaekhar has to convince her that his love is worth fighting for, and keep her alive while doing it.

The long awaited sequel to Joely Sue Burkhart’s first Shanhasson novel, The Rose of Shanhasson, is finally here. The Road to Shanhasson is the second in the “Blood and Shadows” series, and continues the breathtaking story of Shannari, rightful queen of the Green Lands.

Shannari is about to be made the Khul’lanna of the Plains, wife to the Khul, leader of the 9 camps of the Sha’Kae al’Dan people. Unusual in the land of her birth for her skills as a warrior and prized as the rightful ruler of the Green Lands before being stolen away by Rhaekar, the Khul of the Sha’Kae al’Dan, Shannari is as foreign to these people as they are to her.

Shannari has admitted her love for Rhaekar, and, reluctantly, that she also loves Gregar, the Shadowed man who, along with the other eight Blood guards, protects Rhaekar from danger. Rhaekar, far from being angered by her love for another man, is man enough to give her what she wants, and determines that Gregar shall be her co-mate.

Some of her new people welcome Shannari, but others are angry that a hated Outlander is to become their new queen. Controversy and danger swirls around Shannari and the men she loves, threatening to tear apart the camps. Shannari works with Rhaekar, Gregar, and some new allies to bring peace to the camps, but she forgets that Theo, the current ruler of the Green Lands, will stop at nothing to debase and destroy her, and his bloody pact with Lygon, the god of Shadow, will bring Shannari to her knees.

Eleni is fighting for her life and her sanity in the Green Lands. She’s so desperate she believes barbaric Keldar is her only hope. Having convinced her brother he should send her as an ambassador, she allows herself to be captured and sold to the Keldari warrior Zahar.Zahak has plans for Eleni. Her unique bloodline means she can appear to fulfill a prophecy that will make the man who holds her the ruler of all of Keldar; so he’s going to give her to his brother.

The gods have other plans for Eleni and Zahak; plans that may not leave them alive at the end.

Humanity has been nearly destroyed by by an alien virus. Some have become monsters, a few have remained human, and far too many are dead. A vaccine saves a remnant of humanity and they begin to rebuild, taking on new names to represent their new lives and their hope of a better future.

Isabella Thanatos, Beautiful Death to the people of New Olympia, is a killing machine who has dedicated her life to protecting her people. Athens, her city, is the jewel in the crown of the civilization they’ve built off of the ruins of their old lives and she won’t let any monster run loose in her city except Hades, the seductively beautiful alien whose people loosed the virus on humanity and caused their ruin. He is a welcome visitor and sits on the city council–but not by her choice. He missed his opportunity to kill her long ago, but she won’t miss hers.

When Isabella discovers she’s been mysteriously contaminated with the virus, she knows she should kill herself before she becomes the very thing she hates. Fearing for her people but desperate to find out how and why she was contaminated before she has to die, Isabella runs to the only one who can help her, the monster Hades.

Outside the city she discovers that everything she was taught is a lie. There is no chaos, the contaminated live in harmony with humans, what Hades wants to do to her–with her–doesn’t include death, and the city she loves is controlled by a monster in the guise of a man.

In 2001 Tim left the day to day practice of law to devote himself to writing. Since then he has completed two novels and over 20 short stories, all of which he hopes to publish someday.

When not writing, Tim manages the largest project management publishing company in the Midwest United States. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and two children.

“Monday Night at the Vampire Lounge” and the other Paul Altimari stories set the tone for our Bump in the Night anthology.

Compared to the Vampire Lounge, Vegas looks like a church social. When you step into the world of blood letting, daytime morality is irrelevant. This is the world of cold pointy tongues, sharp teeth and razor blades, where pain and pleasure come together in a red cocktail. Come in, see what you find. Wipe the blood off when you leave.

Most importantly, keep your mouth shut.

When former police officer Paul Altimari stumbles across a dying girl, he does what any good citizen would do–he calls the police. Too bad the body’s gone when they get there.

As more bodies pile up–some of them on Altimari’s front lawn–things get worse. Sure, he figures it out but the police aren’t going to believe him; they don’t like him much. Too bad the killer vampire likes him a little too well.

Bump is an EPIC Awards finalist for best anthology. The EPIC Awards are given annually to recognize outstanding achievements in e-publishing.

The very first thing Angela Korra’ti ever wrote, at age 8, was a short story about a girl spirited away to rule over the leprechauns for a day. She progressed rapidly to pretending to take notes in class when she was actually writing novels, and writing fanfic before she had any idea what fanfic was! And music has been a part of her life almost as long, thanks to six years playing flute and piccolo in school band and an adulthood dabbling in guitar, bouzouki, and mandolin; in anything she writes, music is likely to make an appearance.

Angela (Anna the Piper to her friends) lives in Kenmore, Washington, along with her partner and housemates, two cats, two birds, and a whole heck of a lot of computers and musical instruments. And despite the fact that she is a mild-mannered former employee of a major metropolitan newspaper, rumors that she is a superhero are exaggerated. (Even if she did pull the door off a refrigerator.)

Kendis Thompson is an average, ordinary software tester in Seattle. She has great friends, great housemates, a cat she loves, and her beloved violin. The aunt who raised her lives nearby and is always ready to share her love and comfort.

Then one day, Kendis goes biking and is attacked by a troll. In Seattle. A Real. Live. Troll. She fights back, but she’s no match for a creature made mostly of stone. When she screams for help, it arrives in the form of Christopher MacSimidh, who gives the troll what for—until the troll gets the upper hand.

And then everything starts going wrong.

There are faerie in Seattle, and Kendis is a target. Her mother was a faerie princess and her father was human. She didn’t know, since both died when she was a young child, but now her magic is starting to show up and both courts are determined to get something out of her. But what? and why?

With the help of her best friend, Jude; the Warder of Seattle, an old woman named Milly; her Aunt Aggie; and her new friend Christopher, Kendis is going to hold her own against both courts and all the trolls, sprites and assorted other creatures they can bring against her. Probably.

Though she didn’t count on the fairy biker gang, or the elven Elvis impersonator.

Laura Anne Gilman, Joely Sue Burkhart, and Angela Korra’ti take us back to the days of the Civil War with ministering angels, magical creatures, and death. Each of the women in these stories refuses to take on the role she’s been assigned by birth, race, or circumstance. Each woman demonstrates life changing defiance.

Nora Fleischer was born near Boston, spent high school in Northern California, and currently live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She’s been writing since she was very little–her parents have a copy of her first novel, written when she was in elementary school, about a princess who marries a dragon, which she illustrated and hardbound herself. She is currently working on a zombie romance novel, but expects to leave the binding to the publisher.

OVER HER HEAD is swimming in charm and wit. Fleischer has created a romantic, compelling story with a bright, unusual heroine and a mysterious, sensual hero.  I was dragged under and didn’t come up for air until the last page! A great read.

–Tate Hallaway, best selling author of author of HONEYMOON OF THE DEAD

A bicycling young lady scholar writing her thesis on the historical meaning of merpeople tales visits a well-known collector of literature on the subject, determined to get him to let her read his books. She comes armed with cookies, that well-known advent to a man’s heart, and is surprised to discover he’s not at all the old curmudgeon she had imagined him to be. In fact, he’s almost dismayingly handsome, putting her far out of any running, were she so inclined, which of course she’s not. She just wants his books, despite what her landlady may say.

A long time ago, a girl saw a movie set in a galaxy far, far away, and the potential of Story exploded in her mind. It started with “Well, but what happens next?” and went to “Wouldn’t it be cool if this had happened instead?” and ended with “I’ve just had a very interesting idea.” Now Connie follows the interesting ideas that pop into her head to see what story unfolds.

“Monday Night at the Vampire Lounge” and the other Paul Altimari stories set the tone for our Bump in the Night anthology. Three sections explore the worlds of vampires, ghosts, and zombies from the pens of some very strange authors.

Compared to the Vampire Lounge, Vegas looks like a church social. When you step into the world of blood letting, daytime morality is irrelevant. This is the world of cold pointy tongues, sharp teeth and razor blades, where pain and pleasure come together in a red cocktail. Come in, see what you find. Wipe the blood off when you leave. Most importantly, keep your mouth shut.

When former police officer Paul Altimari stumbles across a dying girl, he does what any good citizen would do–he calls the police. Too bad the body’s gone when they get there.

As more bodies pile up–some of them on Altimari’s front lawn–things get worse. Sure, he figures it out but the police aren’t going to believe him; they don’t like him much. Too bad the killer vampire likes him a little too well.

Bump is an EPIC Awards finalist for best anthology. The EPIC Awards are given annually to recognize outstanding achievements in e-publishing. Edited by Deena Fisher. Cover art by George Cotronis.

Cindy Lynn Speer loves books and the written word, and has spent much of her life involved in them in some way, from working as a librarian to freelancing as an editor. She’s also written several book reviews and articles. This is the part that she usually attempts to be clever, saying something like “When not chained to the computer or reading she can be found doing something else, usually something exciting and mysterious.” Sadly, this would be fantasy, and she likes saving that for her readers. Her first book, Blue Moon, was published by Zumaya. If you want to find out more about her, please visit her website.

Tasmin, William’s wife to be, was chosen by a spell, as all wives and husbands are chosen. It’s a nice, tidy way to find a reasonable mate for almost everyone. Unfortunately, Tasmin is from the North, a place of magic and strange ritual, and William is from the South, where people pride themselves on being above the kind of insanity practiced by the Northerners, which has nothing to do with the fact that most people in the South have lost their ability to practice magic.

William doesn’t seem in a hurry to send for Tasmin, for which none of his family blame him. After all, she’s a barbarian. She, on the other hand, would like to know what’s keeping him. When he’s framed for murdering his patron, Tasmin takes matters into her own hands, harnessing the wind to bring her to William’s side. She’s gotten to know Wiliam from his letters. He’s not a murderer and she’s going to help him prove it.

William, incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit is shunned by his family for the embarrassment, and for giving up the family shipping business for foolishness, and for saddling them with a Hag for a wife, which means he can’t protect Tasmin from his family’s cold dislike of his barbiaran wife-to-be–but that’s not the worst of it.

Someone out there doesn’t like him and is beginning to dislike Tasmin almost as much, and that someone isn’t at all averse to making sure William and Tasmin aren’t around long enough to celebrate their wedding.

Tasmin, of course, has other plans.

The stories in StereoOption are fairy tales in split vision because they’re not, not quite, the fairy tales of childhood, but they evoke that same sense of wonder. A handful are re-imaginings of old favorites, such as David Sklar’s Little Red Riding Hood, “Red ’Hood”, which could have happened—be happening—in any major city today; C. S. Inman’s lyrical Beauty and the Beast, “The Castle of Masks”; Cindy Lynn Speer’s regency-flavored Bluebeard, “A Necklace of Rubies”; and Imogen Howson’s futuristic “Falling”, a retelling of Rapunzel.

Some of these stories are entirely new but still tell us tales we know in our heart of hearts. In “Dream-Drinker,” Heather Ingemar’s Isabele must rise to a frightening occasion and be the heroine she never dreamed she could be. In “Flame in the Night Regions,” J. A. Howe’s heroine fights to give the woman she loves exactly what she wants. Which, you know, in fairy tales never ends as well as one might like. Bree Donovan takes us to a thoroughly modern Ireland for a tale of a kind of green knight, a man who uncovers the best in everyone he meets.

An unmarried girl of little means has nothing to offer a wealthy, powerful king. Nothing but her heart—until a kind fairy grants a wish that makes her irresistible to every man on earth.

But such a gift comes with a cost. And love is a very high price to pay…

Travel and a fascination with reading and religion spawned The Devil’s Backbone, which draws from Egyptian myth and is influenced by Jungian and Gnostic themes. Michael sees writing as a brilliant excuse to tramp across the world, and it has taken him abroad as a leader of Antarctic expeditions, crew of a tug boat on the Baltic Sea, paddling the Zambezi River, climbing in Sumatra, spelunking in Belize and, of course, singing inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid while lying in its rose-colored sarcophagus.

In addition to his writing and business careers, Michael is a four time world champion dragon boat athlete, father of two girls, and husband. He tries very hard to keep life an adventure both on and off the page.

Michael’s favorite charities are the Multiple Sclerosis Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Samiya, an Egyptian woman, and Taggart, a Canadian professor of Comparative Religion, have nothing in common, until they find themselves on opposite sides of a bloody war for causes neither is sure they believe in.

The Balance is in jeopardy, and either The Fullness: humanity, law, and reason; or The Void: animal instinct, chaos, and death; will soon rule the world.

But which is the right side? Reason has ruled for centuries. Is it time for Chaos to have a chance?

Her novel ‘Middlewitch’ could be described as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jeeves and Wooster and was inspired by her life in a small English village, although naturally there are no witches or ghosts there—as far as she knows. She should perhaps add that none of the characters bear any resemblance to her friends and neighbours—particularly those in the Women’s Institute.

She has won prizes in several major literary competitions and many of her stories and articles have been published in popular magazines including The People’s Friend, The Weekly News and The New Writer. Other publications include Space and Time, Bards and Sages, Abandoned Towers, Big Pulp, Glassfire, Expanded Horizons, Sniplits, Woman’s Weekly, Outercast, Hackwriters, The Ranfurly Review and others. Her stories also appear in the Out of Line Human Rights Anthology 2009, Little Sisters Mystery Anthology and the upcoming Sonar 4 and Absent Willow Review anthologies.

Being a witch isn’t always easy. Alicia Meldrew has managed to learn love potions with only one real mistake, and that was hardly her fault. She can whip up a mean maths retention spell, but it’s not all cake and roses. Take dating, for instance. As Alicia herself puts it, how does one even bring it up? “Hobbies? Yes, I usually practise the black arts on Mondays, Thursdays and every other weekend. You?”

Alicia is a young witch with a mission: to protect the citizens of Middlewitch, a sleepy little hamlet consisting mostly of a church, a senior citizen’s home, a pub, and two constables. You’d think such a small town wouldn’t have problems with dark forces, but you’d be wrong. With the help of her cats, Domino and Tango, the Women’s Institute, and even the Vicar, Alicia faces down demons, vampires, satanists, an American…and even the City.

She finally has a boyfriend, but is she really able to learn to share her life with James? And if she can, is she strong enough to learn to get on with his mother?

E. Grace Diehl started devouring folklore and fairytale anthologies at a very early age, and her folktale habit has only gotten worse with the propagation of online collections. She often used world folklore in English translation as a teaching tool when she taught high school ESL (English as a second language) in Japan. Her bachelor of arts degree was in Musical Theatre, and in the course of her studies she played the parts of fairies, damsels in distress, and even the odd toad. She is currently working on an MFA in Asian Performance and can add the Chinese folktale heroine White Snake to the list. Naturally, folk and faerie tales have so strong a foothold in her that they can’t help but come out in the stories that escape her pen. Her other literary influences include William Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, and Niel Gaiman. Kinlea Keeper is the first in a series of mixed-folklore/fantasy stories about Keepers and Haneth’s End. The series community can be found at http://kinleakeeper.com and the author’s personal homepage (which details her other writing and acting work) can be found at http://worldsofwords.org.

Kinlea Waltham has spent his entire life being told he’s dying. He’s never left his house or made a single friend. Everything changes when his parents send him to stay with family friends in the country (to “die in cleaner air”), and his hosts tell him that he is not actually ill. Instead, he discovers that he has been cursed with a powerful enchantment.

Born to be the Keeper of Haneth’s End, a small but pivotal corner of the world’s magical realm, he must stand up to enemies he can’t understand in order to protect everything he loves. His enemies want something besides Kinlea’s death, but he’s not sure what. Their perplexing actions endanger his Keep, the world, and even magic itself. It’s his job to stop them, for without Kinlea to stand in the way, everything might fold in upon itself, and the world might have to learn the true meaning of the words “the end.”

Not ashamed to admit she reads romance novels (at a rather discerning and voracious pace, at that), Meredith is also an avid collector of illustrated books in the vein of Edward Gorey. Her love of the macabre and Gothic also influences another aspect of her life: belly dancing. Involved in the art since the age of sixteen, Meredith now dances with one of her area’s premiere Gothic belly dance troupes and teaches lessons in dance.

Growing up in the South, Meredith was very drawn to folklore and the Southern Gothic style of story telling and hopes that carries through in her writing. She has had the opportunity to travel to several European countries and a large part of the United States and in each new place she visits, collects local tales and lore and brings them back home to join her muses in collaborating on new story ideas.

When not involved in a book or shaking her coin belt, Meredith is usually telling a long and involved story that somehow ends up including the most random facts you can ever imagine. Visit her blog to see what’s new with her writing and what’s going on!

When Alfhild was a little girl, her grandmother called her a fairy princess and told her all of her favorite tales.

She’d never imagined they were real.

Anxious to avoid the swarming reporters and ghoulish souvenir hunters who won’t leave her alone when her brother Gulliver is tried and acquitted for multiple murders he almost certainly committed, a grown up Alfhild changes her name to Lorelei and flees Louisiana to the sanctuary she inherited from her grandmother, the ancestral home in England.

All is well until she wakes one morning to find a naked man in her rosebush.

And the games begin …

Lorelei’s inauspicious introduction to Cadfael, the seductively beautiful Unseelie prince, does not prepare her for becoming a pawn between the ancient queens of the faerie courts, Iseult and Mabd. Her big mouth and smartass attitude turn tension into war between the faerie clans: the Seelie, hiding behind golden lies and their resplendent beauty; and the Unseelie, long considered the fearsome things that go bump in the night.

Her brother works for the Seelie queen. The man she loves is in line to inherit the Unseelie throne. And both of them are determined to have Lorelei on their side. The real world thinks she’s been murdered, her house has been turned into a crime scene, and there are creatures on both sides of the war who call her a traitor. She doesn’t want to know what they do to traitors. Too bad the excitement didn’t end at a naked man in her rosebush. Things are a lot weirder now.

Each story is described individually here.

Heather Parker lives in the Lake District with a collection of cats, dogs and a husband. Until recently she worked for the University of Cumbria but now writes freelance.

Her novel ‘Middlewitch’ could be described as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jeeves and Wooster and was inspired by her life in a small English village, although naturally there are no witches or ghosts there—as far as she knows. She should perhaps add that none of the characters bear any resemblance to her friends and neighbours—particularly those in the Women’s Institute.

She has won prizes in several major literary competitions and many of her stories and articles have been published in popular magazines including The People’s Friend, The Weekly News and The New Writer. Other publications include Space and Time, Bards and Sages, Abandoned Towers, Big Pulp, Glassfire, Expanded Horizons, Sniplits, Woman’s Weekly, Outercast, Hackwriters, The Ranfurly Review and others. Her stories also appear in the Out of Line Human Rights Anthology 2009, Little Sisters Mystery Anthology and the upcoming Sonar 4 and Absent Willow Review anthologies.

Being a witch isn’t always easy. Alicia Meldrew has managed to learn love potions with only one real mistake, and that was hardly her fault. She can whip up a mean maths retention spell, but it’s not all cake and roses. Take dating, for instance. As Alicia herself puts it, how does one even bring it up? “Hobbies? Yes, I usually practise the black arts on Mondays, Thursdays and every other weekend. You?”

Alicia is a young witch with a mission: to protect the citizens of Middlewitch, a sleepy little hamlet consisting mostly of a church, a senior citizen’s home, a pub, and two constables. You’d think such a small town wouldn’t have problems with dark forces, but you’d be wrong. With the help of her cats, Domino and Tango, the Women’s Institute, and even the Vicar, Alicia faces down demons, vampires, satanists, an American…and even the City.

She finally has a boyfriend, but is she really able to learn to share her life with James? And if she can, is she strong enough to learn to get on with his mother?

As a child, Imogen Howson loved reading so much that she not only read in bed, at the table and in the bath, but in the shower and—not so successfully—on her bicycle.

She enjoyed books in a slightly unorthodox way, too—many of her childhood books have ragged edges where she tore paper from the margins in order to eat it.

When Imogen and her younger sister became bored on long walks or family outings, Imogen entertained them both with stories about fairies or, in defiance of biology, “the people inside your body” who made everything work.

Sometimes this storytelling talent was put to a less benevolent use. For weeks, Imogen convinced the little girl next door that the fairy queen was planning to take the little girl on a wonderful trip to fairyland. When Imogen’s conscience got the better of her and she had to confess the truth, she did try to comfort the little girl by telling her about heaven instead, but she never managed to make it sound as appealing as fairyland.

Some years later, Imogen only tells stories clearly labelled “fiction.” She writes novels and short stories—in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, young adult and romance, for preference—and is a member of EPIC.

Imogen lives near Sherwood Forest in England with her partner and their two children. She still reads in most places, but she no longer eats paper.

The short paranormal romance Meeting in Darkness, which she wrote for the Romance Divas Valentines Day Challenge is available at her website.

On Fern’s 18th birthday, she discovers she’s a fire-starter. It’s a gift, and she’s glad to have it. But fire starting is a curse as well as a blessing. Fern must learn how to control it, and to do that she has to leave her home and family, lest she burn them all by accident. Fern travels to a place where other young people have gathered to learn how to manage their gifts. Though none are firestarters, they understand self-control, and there are books to help. And that’s where she meets Nik, the enigmatic magician who seems to understand her and her gift better than she does herself.

From the moment they meet, sparks fly, sometimes literally. Nik makes her lose her temper faster than anyone else can, but he understands her better than anyone else, too. Fern realizes something she didn’t look for and didn’t expect; she’s falling in love with him.

But can Nik be trusted? Or is he hiding dangerous secrets of his own?

Candy is living a fairy tale dream. She has a rich husband who will buy her anything. She has a maid. She gets to have cocktail parties and trade banter with witty, rich, important people. Except… their friends are really his friends and, crazy or not, she sometimes feels like they watch her. It’s a problem because she keeps losing her shoes and her husband thinks bare feet are trashy.

She knows she should just tell him that she likes going barefoot and expect that he’d learn to love her just as she is, only he’s older and more sophisticated than she is, he takes such good care of her, and he loves her so much. Mostly, though, she’s afraid of what he’d do.

Authors Adrienne J. Odasso, Jennifer Moore, Batya Deene, Fraser Sherman, Angela Rega, Imogen Howson, Jo Thomas, Joselle Vanderhooft, Jessica Tudor, Greg O. Weatherford, Hilary J. Nowack, Genevieve Valentine, Skadi meic Beorh, H. Anne Stoj, David Sklar, Lee Pletzers, and Teresa Wymore re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood in poetry and prose, illustrated by the art of Anna Repp. In these stories, Red is sometimes innocent, sometimes less so; and the wolf is sometimes a monster, and most often human, monstrous or not.

She grew up as an army brat in Kentucky and Korea, Japan and Germany, with a long enough run in Maryland to think of the place as home.  An initiate in the Blue Star tradition of Wicca, she has presented papers on Neo-Pagan concepts of sacred text at the American Academy of Religion and the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Her poetry has appeared in Calyx, Free Lunch, Feminist Studies, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and a sword and sorcery story is forthcoming in Black Gate. Feel free to visit her blog, Ask Dr. Pretentious. Sarah lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.

Closing Arguments is a story about the family you make when the family who raised you wasn’t enough. It’s about love, and sacrifice, and doing the right thing because it’s right instead of easy, and it’s for everyone who ever felt weird or out of place being just a normal “guy.” Part occult mystery, part domestic comedy, Closing Arguments plants the quest for enlightenment and immortality in the suburbs of the Jersey Shore.

Divorced Wiccan Female, 32, seeks realistic rebound guy. Petite and trim brunette. Enjoys the ocean, 19th century novels, long Sunday mornings with the New York Times. Atlantis cranks need not apply.

Seems like something there scares the guys at pagansingles.com.

Anyhow, it’s just as well Jane’s not ready to date, because her roommate/landlady/coven sister/whatever Sophie has her eye on the mysterious young man the coven finds washed up on the beach after their last “skyclad” ritual of the year. What is he, really? An Atlantean, or just a lost Greek sailor with, um, gills? Complications like that, Jane doesn’t need.

She needs Hurricane Nora to leave her sandbar town unscathed. She needs the guy who might be from Atlantis to go away and take his worldview-disrupting gills with him. Eventually, she needs to meet someone sensible, someone kind, someone who can cope with a woman who’s damaged goods.

And she needs the help of her coven, definitely to get through storm season, sometimes just to get through the day. That, at least, she can always count on.

Shannari is about to be made the Khul’lanna of the Plains, wife to the Khul, leader of the 9 camps of the Sha’Kae al’Dan people. Unusual in the land of her birth for her skills as a warrior and prized as the rightful ruler of the Green Lands before being stolen away by Rhaekar, the Khul of the Sha’Kae al’Dan, Shannari is as foreign to these people as they are to her.

Shannari has admitted her love for Rhaekar, and, reluctantly, that she also loves Gregar, the Shadowed man who, along with the other eight Blood guards, protects Rhaekar from danger. Rhaekar, far from being angered by her love for another man, is man enough to give her what she wants, and determines that Gregar shall be her co-mate.

Some of her new people welcome Shannari, but others are angry that a hated Outlander is to become their new queen. Controversy and danger swirls around Shannari and the men she loves, threatening to tear apart the camps. Shannari works with Rhaekar, Gregar, and some new allies to bring peace to the camps, but she forgets that Theo, the current ruler of the Green Lands, will stop at nothing to debase and destroy her, and his bloody pact with Lygon, the god of Shadow, will bring Shannari to her knees.

The gods have other plans for Eleni and Zahak; plans that may not leave them alive at the end.

Isabella Thanatos, Beautiful Death to the people of New Olympia, is a killing machine who has dedicated her life to protecting her people. Athens, her city, is the jewel in the crown of the civilization they’ve built off of the ruins of their old lives and she won’t let any monster run loose in her city except Hades, the seductively beautiful alien whose people loosed the virus on humanity and caused their ruin. He is a welcome visitor and sits on the city council–but not by her choice. He missed his opportunity to kill her long ago, but she won’t miss hers.

When Isabella discovers she’s been mysteriously contaminated with the virus, she knows she should kill herself before she becomes the very thing she hates. Fearing for her people but desperate to find out how and why she was contaminated before she has to die, Isabella runs to the only one who can help her, the monster Hades.

Outside the city she discovers that everything she was taught is a lie. There is no chaos, the contaminated live in harmony with humans, what Hades wants to do to her–with her–doesn’t include death, and the city she loves is controlled by a monster in the guise of a man.