Published July 1st, 2013
Description:
How do you fight the monster when it is inside of you?
The black lake beneath Dublin’s medieval city holds a secret. Imprisoned there for millennia, an ancient race of demi-gods have found a way to the surface and are preying on humans to feed their sexual appetites. Hunted to near-extinction, these half-men, half-beasts have been without a single female to breed a new generation. Until now.
All her life, Ashling DeMorgan feared her dreams. She kept her head buried in ancient mythology, because the real world seemed so much scarier. On returning to Dublin to settle her invalid grandmother’s affairs, Ash discovered a city plagued by the same wolf-like creatures that killed her mother. Their bite is like sexual heroin and Ash has been bitten. Now she is trapped in a waking nightmare, with the monster who ordered the death of the only man she’s ever loved. Made to doubt if she ever really knew the assassin-turned-guardian who stole her heart and gave his life for hers, Ash finds herself betrayed by her own changing body.
In a dangerous world of suspicion and divided loyalties, Ash must come to terms with what she is becoming. Worse still, her infuriatingly arrogant captor may just prove to be her most unlikely ally in what will become a life and death race for survival.
MacTire, king of a once formidable race, has lived his life in the shadow of a half-brother who took everything from him. Connal Savage seduced his mate and engineered a genocide that all but exterminated their species. Finally, he has a chance at retribution. Connal’s woman is his for the taking. But are the bonds of brotherhood so easily severed and are the ghosts of the past ever truly dead and buried, or will they come back to haunt him?
He was too late … God, there was nothing left of her.
Scenting his aggression, the pack paused in their gorging and, as one, cranked their blood-dripping muzzles in Connal’s direction. In the chill of the moonlight, steam rose up from their thick pelts and from what was left of the gored prey at their feet. Aoife’s body was unrecognisable, except for the matted clumps of blonde hair.
A huge beast at the left flank of the pack growled, commanding Connal’s attention. From its jaws hung a rag-doll form, dark curls ruffled by the wind, giving an illusion of life where clearly there was none.
Connal’s gorge rose, hackles bristling as a wall of red slammed down on his vision. His bones began to snap and twist. Hatred was a powerful anaesthetic, rage an adrenaline shot to the heart of his fury. The wolf in him took full possession, blacking out all memory of the carnage that left a bloodied trail of slashed carcasses littering the sands of the arena. No quarter given, one by one, often two and three at a time, Connal hacked them down in a hot slaughter of fangs and claws, until panting and shivering with the overdose of bloodlust coursing through his veins, he slumped, human once more, cradling the cold body of his baby son, grief jagged in his chest.
That was how the Morrígan found him, broken on the ground, keening the loss of a child and a lover and a stolen future.
He didn’t think to question how she got inside the arena. He was aware of black wingspans cutting shadows across the full moon, circling, drawn by the fresh scent of carrion on the sands. Between one sweep of darkness and the next, she stood over him, a vision of alabaster skin and blood-red lips. Midnight hair grazed her lower back, its wild waves contained by a silver headband that met in the centre of her forehead in a pair of raven heads.
‘What evil could do such a thing, to an innocent babe in arms?’ she asked, kneeling to brush slender fingers to his dead son’s skin.
Connal lifted tortured eyes to the face of this woman who spoke, not in the guttural Norse tongue of the Fomorians, but in the old Gaelic lilt of the village where he was raised. She touched the stubble of his blood-spattered jaw. ‘What have they done to you?’
‘Who are you?’ Connal rasped.
‘I am Death. I am Vengeance. I am War.’ Her voice deepened and the earth trembled as the woman rose up, arms spread like dark wings, suspended in the moonlight. A preternatural aura pulsed blue around her silhouette and her hair writhed like a nest of eels. ‘I am Morrígan,’ she said, ‘I have what you seek, if you will bargain for it.’
Book one of The Becoming series. A new voice in paranormal fantasy and romance.
‘You got me back. You always said you would.’
Ash DeMorgan, graduate, orphan, ice maiden, has long since consigned the fairytale nightmares of a troubled childhood to the realm of fantastical childish imagination.
Now, lured back to Dublin, the scene of her tragic past, Ash encounters a city pulsing under the dangerous sexual influence of a new street drug the locals call Rave. Nothing is as it seems. Ash is about to discover that her nightmares are real, ancient Irish myths are larger than life and roaming the streets of the medieval city, and she has become the prey in their erotic hunt. A step back into her past is about to become a high adrenaline race for survival.
Connal Savage, outcast, assassin, and living, breathing hunk of ancient mythology, has lived a thousand years servicing a debt of revenge. Dead inside. Until he encounters his boss’s granddaughter, an infuriating woman who threatens to lead him to hell with all his good intentions, who manages to chip away at the hard encrusted defences of a lifetime spent at war and burrow herself deep into a part of him that hasn’t breathed for centuries. He is about to discover that when it comes down to the wire, when you’re bargaining with the Grim Reaper for the life of the one you love, you will do anything...
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About the author:
The writing duo of Jess and Paula met online through their mutual love of paranormal and urban fantasy romance. They sparked creatively and have been writing together for the past three years. Paula lives in Dublin, Ireland with her family. She set aside a career in medicine to raise her three children. Jess lives in Manchester, England with her mother and dog, Simi. When she isn’t writing up worlds with Paula, she’s a wedding planner for a large retail store.
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