Description:Release Date:August 27th, 2015
Patrick and Maeve Dolan left the safety of their New York human settlement on a sultry summer night and never returned. Ambushed by the Winter Court guards during their search for information on how to free humanity from faery rule, they are now ensnared in the Winter King Landric’s web, and he has some questions of his own.
The Winter King is curious about the way the Dolans run their city. In a surprising turn of events, he’s determined to learn all about their 16-year-old son, Eirnin. Landric separates the couple, threatens and tortures to the best of his ability, but the Dolans won’t give up the information he’s after.
Murphy, one of King Landric’s guards has been a ward of the Winter Court for as long as he can remember. Trained from childhood to be as quiet and obedient as possible, he’s always been the perfect servant. At least, until Princess Lumi strolled into his life and made him question everything he believes in.
When the princess vanishes without a trace in the middle of the night, Landric is determined Patrick’s people had something to do with it. Without the only connection to kindness and humanity they had, Murphy and Patrick both find themselves falling into very different kinds of insanity.
Will Murphy follow his heart just this once, choose his own side and find Lumi? Will Patrick’s hope dwindle before he can escape and save his family? Or will their unyielding resistance be the death of them all?
The year 2102--the world as it was no longer exists. Ravaged by nuclear war and polluted almost to the point of no return, Earth was dying. When the faeries came and brought their healing magic, humanity was grateful at first. Centuries of damage repaired in just five years, and during the course of that rehabilitation, they invaded. Quietly overthrown, the human race is now enslaved. The majority doesn’t even realize they have no free will. Branded, herded and kept only to further the agendas of the Fae Courts, humanity could be facing extinction.
But a resistance is coming…
Fianna Dolan has spent her entire young life preparing herself for an uprising against the Fae. One scorching summer night Fi's parents leave and never return. Thrust into a position of power she never expected, Fi struggles with her new position and the responsibility it entails. When a secretive fae man known only as Flint breaches the city’s defenses claiming he can help, Fi begins to doubt everything she's ever considered truth. As betrayals and deception come to light, will Fi want the answers she’s been seeking, or will trusting Flint lead to her destruction?
About the authors:
Allana Kephart has been making things up and bending people to her will from a very young age. She loves animals and reading and spends a large amount of time thinking up ways to torment her characters. She loves coffee and the color purple. She is the co-author of The Dolan Prophecies Series, Gumshoes & Grifters Series & Fractured Fairytale Standalone series with Melissa Simmons and has published two short stories on her own in the Best Thing I Never Had & Happily (N)ever After anthologies.Melissa Simmons loves music, reading, her cat and her husband-not necessarily in that order, of course. She is obsessed with all things Disney, Supernatural (tv show) and comic book tv shows/ movies and doesn’t care who knows it. Her favorite superhero is Batman and she will defend his awesomeness to her last breath. When she isn’t writing and plotting, she loves to bake and spends her days helping other authors promote their work. She is the co-author of The Dolan Prophecies Series, Gumshoes & Grifters Series & Fractured Fairytale Standalone series with Allana Kephart and has published a short story on her own in the Best Thing I Never Had anthology. She resides in upstate NY with her husband and their adorable cat.
Website ** Allana Goodreads ** Melissa Goodreads ** Facebook ** Twitter ** Pinterest
Patrick and Maeve Dolan left the safety of their New York human settlement on a sultry summer night and never returned. Ambushed by the Winter Court guards during their search for information on how to free humanity from faery rule, they are now ensnared in the Winter King Landric’s web, and he has some questions of his own.Description:Release Date:August 27th, 2015
Patrick and Maeve Dolan left the safety of their New York human settlement on a sultry summer night and never returned. Ambushed by the Winter Court guards during their search for information on how to free humanity from faery rule, they are now ensnared in the Winter King Landric’s web, and he has some questions of his own.
The Winter King is curious about the way the Dolans run their city. In a surprising turn of events, he’s determined to learn all about their 16-year-old son, Eirnin. Landric separates the couple, threatens and tortures to the best of his ability, but the Dolans won’t give up the information he’s after.
Murphy, one of King Landric’s guards has been a ward of the Winter Court for as long as he can remember. Trained from childhood to be as quiet and obedient as possible, he’s always been the perfect servant. At least, until Princess Lumi strolled into his life and made him question everything he believes in.When the princess vanishes without a trace in the middle of the night, Landric is determined Patrick’s people had something to do with it. Without the only connection to kindness and humanity they had, Murphy and Patrick both find themselves falling into very different kinds of insanity.
Will Murphy follow his heart just this once, choose his own side and find Lumi? Will Patrick’s hope dwindle before he can escape and save his family? Or will their unyielding resistance be the death of them all?
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About the authors:
Allana Kephart has been making things up and bending people to her will from a very young age. She loves animals and reading and spends a large amount of time thinking up ways to torment her characters. She loves coffee and the color purple. She is the co-author of The Dolan Prophecies Series, Gumshoes & Grifters Series & Fractured Fairytale Standalone series with Melissa Simmons and has published two short stories on her own in the Best Thing I Never Had & Happily (N)ever After anthologies.Melissa Simmons loves music, reading, her cat and her husband-not necessarily in that order, of course. She is obsessed with all things Disney, Supernatural (tv show) and comic book tv shows/ movies and doesn’t care who knows it. Her favorite superhero is Batman and she will defend his awesomeness to her last breath. When she isn’t writing and plotting, she loves to bake and spends her days helping other authors promote their work. She is the co-author of The Dolan Prophecies Series, Gumshoes & Grifters Series & Fractured Fairytale Standalone series with Allana Kephart and has published a short story on her own in the Best Thing I Never Had anthology. She resides in upstate NY with her husband and their adorable cat.
Website ** Allana Goodreads ** Melissa Goodreads ** Facebook ** Twitter ** Pinterest
Whether I'm soaring through the air as a flyer for Specter University's cheer squad, or speeding down the steepest mountain with only grace and balance keeping me from an icy end, I've always needed to feel a rush.
Cover Artist: Shari Ryan
Published: May 9th, 2015
I've always felt like an average girl ... except for my strange relationship with death. You could say I like to court it. Whether I'm soaring through the air as a flyer for Specter University's cheer squad, or speeding down the steepest mountain with only grace and balance keeping me from an icy end, I've always needed to feel a rush. But now Death is courting me―in more ways than one. First, there's Rishi, a rogue death deity who has a penchant for annoying me nearly to my grave and whose intense gaze has the power to see right through me. Then there's Hades, who I'd rather had stayed just a myth. Now that he knows I exist, he's not going to leave me alone until I meet the same end as my mother.
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention her? I spent my whole life thinking she had died when I was a baby, but now I've found out she's much more than dead. Fifty years ago, Hades banished my mother from the underworld and took away her ability to cross over souls―souls that have wandered lost through the world ever since. Now she wants me to clean up the mess.
You may have heard of her before...
They call her the Grim Reaper.
GUEST POST
The Modern Reaper and Humanity
I wouldn’t consider myself a connoisseur of reaper stories, but I have read a few. My first was probably Mort by Terry Pratchett, which I read a long, long time ago. Pratchett’s take, while still refreshing and humorous, doesn’t necessarily reflect the “modern” reaper, but there’s a sense of humanity that threads through that book that is now in many others. So here’s my take, based on what I’ve read more recently.
What I know is today’s reapers are often females, whose lives suddenly come to a halt when they’re called to aid Death or become reapers themselves. In Western culture, Death is often depicted as a man. But today, I believe many authors, females particularly, have begun to remake that image into young women. These are women who are full of compassion, sometimes selfish, who don’t necessarily want the gig of crossing over the dead. But they do it anyway, becoming more selfless as time wears on because most often it’s the right thing to do. There’s a moral code usually involved: when Death knocks, there’s no changing fate.
In The Reaper’s Daughter, the Grim Reaper is the main protagonist’s mother. The character, who has forever been depicted as a skeletal man, has now become a woman. The feminine reaper plays a large role in this story, and Santa Muerte, a popular Mexican death deity who is worshipped in feminine form, is the Grim Reaper’s sister in my twist.
Modern reapers aren’t just ghastly visitors, they’re complex characters—ones who have hopes, dreams, and love interests. Death is truly common because it happens to everyone, no matter a person’s status in life. The modern reaper reflects this by not just putting on a human face, but by truly being human in a deep and honest way.
EXCERPT
I sighed. I didn’t want to be here.
When her eyes met mine, I knew she saw me for who I really was—what I really was. She reached out an eager hand to take mine. I didn’t want anything to do with it. But it wasn’t because her fingers were slick with blood, deep crimson dripping down her arm and fingernails from where she’d so precisely placed a razor blade to her vein and dug deep, thinking she’d be free of her pain. It was because her face reflected back to me all the times I’d felt I’d been given a shitty deal. Current situation: case in point.
“Hi,” she whispered, her once pink lips fading with every pump of her life, which was idly dripping away from her to the plush white carpet below. I could smell the newness of it, the fresh aroma of a recently laid floor. That’s going to be a bitch to get clean.
I looked around her bedroom, at the dance trophies and pictures of smiling friends, and wondered why. Why me? “Blake …” Hearing my mother's warning tone, I looked over at her where she stood in the shadows, overseeing my tutelage.
“Why can’t we just call an ambulance? It’s not too late. They could save her,” I whispered fiercely, staring at the girl’s hand stretched out to me as if I were her savior and not her end. “We should save—”
“It’s not for us to decide, you know that. We are only here to bring souls over, not save their mortal lives. Take her, she wants to go.”
“And will she still feel the same when she’s looking down at her body?” I asked, not even bothering to check my mother’s expression when she didn’t answer. Suicide wasn’t a peaceful death. It was pain―that much I knew.
I choked back the tears that wanted to rise in my eyes for this girl, for me … I turned to her once more and leaned down, brushing a strand of her hair from her graying face. “What’s your name?”
Barely blinking, her pale eyes darted to me. “Carly,” she said, choking around her words.
“Just hold my hand and I’ll help you cross,” I said softly, forcing myself to meet her gaze so that someone would witness her ending as they had her beginning.
She smiled slowly, and I saw that in life she had been pretty. When she’d believed. When she’d had hope.
“The light?” Her eyes widened, glittering green for a brief moment in their otherwise colorless depths at the prospect of going somewhere beautiful after this life had been so cold.
I nodded, although I didn’t really know where she would go. I was only in training, but I hoped it was someplace good, where her tormented soul could rest.
She had small, feminine hands, I thought, as she laced her slippery fingers around my longer warm ones. She didn’t last long, her pulse giving one last flutter before sputtering out.
The room was suffused with the silence left behind in the absence of such a simple thing. The thundering lack of a person’s heartbeat had never seemed quite so loud. As life departed Carly’s mortal coil, her soul lifted from the body, but unlike some souls I’d seen that were light and buoyant, at peace with the next step in their existence, hers was outlined in darkness, and it rippled, suspended in space like a special effect in a bad horror film. Her gaze turned from her body to me, sorrow coming to settle on the slope of her bowed shoulders and in the recesses of her eyes. Regret was a fickle creature. It always came too late.
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About the author:
As a girl, K.M. always wished she’d suddenly come into magical powers or cross over into a Faerie circle. Although that has yet to happen, she instead lives vicariously through the characters she creates writing fantasy and paranormal. When K.M. is not busy writing her next novel, she serves as a freelance editor and writer. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree in English-Lit from Nazareth College of Rochester. K.M. lives in Upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region with her husband, her extremely energetic little boy, and their crazy goldendoodle Luna (short for Lunatic)
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