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Children of the Cursed Blitz

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Fantasy
Publisher: Next Chapter Pub
Date Published: 8/21/19
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 In a kingdom in turmoil, people only care for riches and power. As a war breaks out between countries, a godly power is awakening.
Two boys train at the Academy to become Knights of Valor. Best friends, one is filled with light while the other leans towards darkness.
They both have the power to change the world – or destroy it – in their battle for what they believe is right.
Excerpt

This was one of my favorite scenes to write. Began the book off with a bang.
Alistair pulled off his helmet, his long blonde hair fell down his back. His blue eyes were filled with rage, aimed at Ballard. “If you do not move out of my way, I will be forced to move you,” Alistair hissed, this time his hand on the hilt of his sword.
Ballard slyly grinned, “So you would be willing to do battle within these walls?”
“If it means getting to see the King, then yes,” Alistair replied, standing tall and unwavering.
Ballard unsheathed his blade, “If you refuse to back down, then have at thee.” His determination was just as unwavering as Alistair’s.
Alistair felt as though his hand had been forced, and he too unsheathed his blade. The two men were now set to do battle. Ballard was the first to strike with his blade, but Alistair parried the attack, “Not bad, Chamberlain. But now it is my turn,” he said, then lunged at Ballard.
Ballard knocked the blade away without even trying, “Not bad yourself Knight, but you will have to do better than that if you want to best me,” he sheepishly grinned.
The sound of steel clashing against steel could be heard all throughout the castle as the two men fought each other. Hearing the sounds echoing through out must have drawn the ire of King Edward, for he stormed out of the throne room, and unbeknownst to the two men he used his blade “Kings Defender” to knock Alistair and Ballard’s swords from their hands, sending them both to the floor without trouble. “What is the meaning of this? Fighting inside my castle walls is forbidden.”
The King was infuriated with the both of them. “Tell me. Why would my first Knight and most trusted adviser be in my halls fighting like two fools,” he shouted at them both. “I want answers, or so help me I will have both of you locked up in the dungeon for months.” Instead of answering King Edward. Ballard made a big mistake by reaching for his sword and King Edward took notice by stepping on the blade, keeping the sword just out of reach, “Reach for your blade one more time Chamberlain, trusted or not I will cut off your hand,” the King yelled. “Now which of you are going to give me the answer I seek?”
Alistair on one knee placed his arm across his chest and bowed before he spoke, “Your majesty. I have urgent news for you, but before I could deliver. The Chamberlain here refused to let me have an audience, and this is urgent and I did what I felt was right. Even if it meant fighting inside these walls. I do apologize, I should have thought this through.”
Edward then looked over at Ballard, “Is this true, Chamberlain?”
“It is my Lord,” Ballard answered.
King Edward’s anger was solely upon his Chamberlain now, “Why would you stop my First Knight from coming to see me? You know it is important whenever he rushes in like this.”
“My Lord, you’ve been ill lately and do not need the stress. I was only thinking of you your majesty,” explained Ballard
“You had no right,” the King responded. “As long as I am the King of Drasal, and have the aid of my blade, I refuse to be treated like an old frail man. I shall always be here for my knights and my people. Get out of my sight, Ballard!”
“But your majesty-” the Chamberlain tried to speak but the King would have none of it.
“I said to get out of my sight,” King Edward shouted again.
The Chamberlain stood up and asked if he could have his sword back, of course, the King was not a heartless man and allowed him to take back his blade. But Ballard did not go far, instead, he hid out of sight and listened in on what King Edward and Alistair had to say to one another.
“Go on Lord Alistair, tell of this news you speak of,” the King said, now in a much calmer state, but still as serious as ever.
Alistair sheathed his sword and picked up his helmet. “The Dark Knights have returned and are on the move, your majesty.”
Edward’s face had now changed to a look of despair, “What? The Dark Knights have returned? You must be mistaken, Knight. That evil was laid to rest a lifetime ago.”
“Yes, I remember my Lord. I was just a kid when you vanquished that evil with the King’s Defender, and a handful of knights to aid you. But believe in my words, I have seen them with my own eyes. They have returned and are not far from here, my Lord,” said Alistair.
King Edward held tightly onto the hilt of his blade, “If that is the case, then I shall ride out with you and vanquish that evil once more.”
“King Edward, you musn’t. You are ill! And who knows what could happen out there. Your people need you now more than ever. If you would, please allow me to take some more men and go out to scout, and see what they are up to that is. At least allow me that before you get involved, my King. Please. I beg of you,” Alistair pleaded.
Edward was reluctant but agreed to do as Alistair had wished, “Okay, Alistair. I will do as you wish and allow you to take a few extra men out with you, under one condition.”
“Of course.” He bowed. “Name your condition.”
“You take only a few men, and some from the Academy as well. And under no circumstances do you engage the Dark Knights. Understood,” King Edward explained.
“I understand your majesty. I shall do as you ask,” replied Alistair.
“Then go now Knight Of Valor, and assemble your team. I shall be awaiting your return, may the gods watch over you,” King Edward said.
Alistair crossed his arm over his chest and bowed to the King, “I shall take my leave now, your majesty. And thank you for placing your trust in me once more.”
King Edward stood there for a moment, mumbling a few words under his breath before turning and walking back into the throne room. However, there lurking in the shadows was the King’s Chamberlain, and he heard every word that was said. “So the Dark Knights have returned from the ashes, that must mean “the dark powers” are up for grabs again. And all the mythical blades powers must have been resurrected as well. Which would explain why the King took us down so easily while being so frail.
“This could be good for me,” Ballard whispered, before disappearing back into the shadows.
About the Author

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I am the author of Albert: Killer In The Woods and many more. I love to write horror novels and short stories as well. I live in Powell Wyoming with my fiancee and two kids.
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Annabel Horton and the Black Witch of Pau Reveal

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Fantasy
Release Date: Oct. 1, 2019
Publisher: Chattercreek
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Annabel’s husband, who has been missing for years, is finally discovered among the bowels of White Chapel England during the horror of Jack the Ripper. His discovery brings Annabel and her family to the turn of nineteenth-century England hoping to rescue Michele from the Black Witch’s cage. What they discover is that the Black Witch has been forced into an insidious pact with the devil and the devil, with malicious intent, is luring them all into a web of death. Can they escape his grasp?
About the Author

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Olivia Hardy Ray is the pen name for Vera Jane Cook. The Author has published Three fantasy novels as Olivia Hardy Ray and five women’s fiction titles as Vera Jane Cook. The Author is writing a sequel to Pharaoh’s Star called Fox Hollow Road. The author’s women fiction title, Kismet, is due out this winter.
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Werewolf Cinderella by Amanda Milo – Cover Reveal

Werewolf Cinderella

by Amanda Milo
Publication Date: September 10, 2019
Genres: Adult, Romance, Fantasy

Every eligible female must attend the ball by decree of the king.

On account of my tendency to suddenly turn from a woman into a wolf, I’d really prefer if I wasn’t being forced into attending.

Anger burns in my throat, making me growl.

Stepmother covers my hand with hers, gently squeezing my fingers.

That’s my stepmother. Grace above all; even under fire… or the threat of a noose. She’s a better woman than I.

What? You thought the rumors were true? That she’s my wicked stepmother, who’s kept me as her indentured servant under the stairs?

Oh my friend, you don’t know the half of this story.

To tell it, I’d best begin at the beginning.

About Amanda Milo

Amanda and her better half enjoy hiking the trails near their home. They take their dogs and leave the ferret–most of the time. The ferret is their ‘poor man’s otter’. Amanda has been researching otters as pets. They’re not going to get one, but she loves to dream.
When she’s not entertaining grand plans to smuggle wildlife into their bathtub, Amanda can be found with the keyboard on her lap and her next story on the screen.

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Pharaoh’s Star – Tour

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Science Fiction, mystery, fantasy
Date Published: February 6, 2018
Publisher: Chattercreek
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The mystery that unfolds on a dark, eerie back road in upstate New York sends Nick Dowling on a frantic quest to understand his past. What he discovers about himself slowly drives him toward madness. Where does the truth unfold, in mystery or in the dream? Is truth the illusion he can’t embrace? Just who is Nick Dowling?

Excerpt

Suddenly he noticed lights, as if coming from a house. Thinking he might finally be off Fox Hollow Road and onto something that would take him into town, he breathed a sigh of relief. 

“Shit,” he said, as he got closer to the house. “Looks like a frigging dead-end.” 

He slapped his hand on the steering wheel. He decided to knock on the door and ask for directions as he stopped the jeep near the driveway. It was quiet, desolate. He took a deep breath and confronted his fear. “Get hold of yourself, man,” he said. 

Nick stared back at the farmhouse. It was familiar, which was not unusual. At every turn in upstate New York there was a farmhouse. 

“A compelling sight,” he said. 

The house was stately and white. Lace curtains moved with the wind, like the porch swing. He could hear the creak. The house stood against the night in shades of grey, like an old postcard photograph picked up at a flea market. Nick could see bicycles lying on the grass. A dog lifted his head from the porch and stared at him. Nick felt strangely nostalgic. 

He’d assumed years ago that he’d been raised in Phoenicia, New York, because that’s what it said on the hotel register when he checked out of the room he’d awoken in, with no memory at all of how he had gotten there. Phoenicia, New York, was another small town within biking distance. He must have been on a lot of country roads in his childhood, staring at houses just like this one. He never went to Phoenicia, though, it was too frightening to confront a past he couldn’t recall, but he’d insisted on buying a second house in New Kingston after finding the town on a Google search for vacation homes. Had he subliminally chosen to be near Phoenicia? 

He didn’t have any answers, perhaps he never would. Perhaps he didn’t want them. As he stared at the house, it drew him in, engulfing him in a black and white fantasy, like an old film. He couldn’t have any connection at all to this farmhouse. New Kingston wasn’t written on the hotel register. 

Nick stared at the house for several more minutes before the image faded, simply drifted off into the night, leaving behind a phantasmal mist. Nick drifted into the ebbing image, falling into a mindless stupor, as if inebriated. 

“God,” he cried out. “What the hell is happening to me?” 

He struggled to escape the blank plateau into which he had fallen, but he couldn’t. It was as if his thoughts were being gripped by a distant hand. He suddenly felt floated right up to a shadowy shape in the sky. 

“Leave me alone!” he shouted. 

His head fell sharply to his shoulder, an action that seemed to come from somewhere else, another person―another body. 

“Stress can cause people to black out,” Jenna once told him. 

“Yes, of course, that’s it―stress,” Nick whispered. He looked back at the house again. The noise returned, overbearingly loud―the drill into concrete…deafening. 

Quickly switching the radio back on to fight the noise, he thought about screaming out for help. The sound hovered above him, precariously close. 

He turned the radio up louder. Nothing but staticDamn. 

The noise continued…threatening to use its power…devour him. It was directly over his head, so very close. He felt lifted by it, lifted up to someplace far, as far as space. 

“This is madness,” he whispered. “This is impossible.” 

He had spent his entire adulthood distracted by the ordinary pressures of survival. He never considered himself particularly introspective, not much caring to delve into the remnants of feelings hidden beneath the debris of inconsequential information―feelings his wife insisted were vital links to his mental well-being. Nick never questioned his life after waking up in a Chelsea hotel with no past. He walked out into the city and survived. Surviving took up all his time, owned his thoughts. He didn’t need to know the rest, the forgotten past. The only choices he needed to make were the ones he faced in his profession as a circulation vice president for a major New York newspaper. It took twenty years, but he finally had an executive’s salary. 

He didn’t want to know his inner life. The dreams he had over the years had been too disturbing to probe―images of violent anger, blood everywhere he looked, murders he could not explain. 

“My inner life is uneventful and average,” he’d told Jenna when they first met. “I can’t devote much time thinking about it.” 

And then, years later, new torment, new dreams…monsters haunted his sleep, metaphors for himself, he surmised. 

No, Nick did not want to find his past or obsess on any uncomfortable emotions, especially not with his dreams, blood on his hands, a dead child at his feet…a battered woman. 

“Am I insane?” He looked out into the night and shook his head. “Am I?” 

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He switched the radio back off and listened for the quiet stillness of night to return, soft and melodic. He listened until all he heard was the wind. 

As he stared back at the old farmhouse tears came into his eyes. He suddenly wanted to leap from the car and run to the front door, as if he belonged there, behind the majesty of its silent repose. 

I’m home. Mom! I’m home, he wanted to shout. 

His eyes blinked as the lights in the farmhouse flickered. He switched the radio back on. He needed the music to ground him, but the static had returned with an irritating repetition. He tried to find a clear station. He was agitated. He wanted to get the hell out of there. He knew that by now the only general store in town would be closed and he’d have to deal with the supermarket for a 

lousy quart of milk. He hated the supermarket: big, cold places…so why the hell can’t I get off this damn road and make it to the goddamn general store? 

“Shit,” he said, switching off the radio altogether. 

The lights from the house flickered again, as if an electrical storm was passing over, but the night was clear. Nick backed the jeep up, deciding he would leave the way he had come in…no need to ask for directions. As his breathing returned to normal, he was grateful for its steady rhythm. He was making rational decisions like his old self. It had all been imagination, just imagination. 

As Nick backed up the jeep, he noticed a man at the window of the old house peering through a torn shade. 

“What the hell happened to the lace?” He whispered as he stared in awe at the tattered blind. He quickly thought of his wife and the look in her large dark eyes as she gave him that half parted smile and suggested therapy. How the hell would he ever explain any of this to her? 

He sat quietly. His eyes drifted back to the house. He looked quickly for the dog. All he saw was a tired old porch―empty…no porch swing. No dog. 

“Shadows playing tricks,” he said. The oblique shape in the sky expanded and lowered itself closer to the Earth.

 

About the Author

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Olivia Hardy Ray is the pen name for Vera Jane Cook, who is the author of Dancing Backward in Paradise, 2007 winner of the Indie Excellence Award for notable new fiction and an Eric Hoffer Award for publishing excellence, also in 2007. Dancing Backward in Paradise received a 5 Star Review from ForeWord Clarion. The Story of Sassy Sweetwater was a finalist for the ForeWord Clarion Book of the Year Award and the recipient of a five star review from ForeWord Clarion. Where the Wildflowers Grow was her third southern fiction novel and is receiving 5 star reviews from Amazon.com. Her latest southern fiction novel just released is Pleasant Day. Her woman’s fiction novel is Lies a River Deep and the soon to be released ‘Kismet’. Under her pen name she is also the author of Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem, and Pharaoh’s Star. The sequel to Annabel Horton, Lost Witch of Salem is Annabel Horton and the Black Witch of Pau. That novel will be released this summer. Jane, as she is called by friends and family, writes in the genres she loves: southern fiction, women’s fiction, mystery and fantasy paranormal fiction. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her spouse, her Basenji/Chihuahua mix, Roxie, her Dachshund, Karly, her Chihuahua, Peanut, and her two pussycats, Sassy and Sweetie Pie.
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GSR Blitz – THE KINGDOM OF NERETH

 

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TJ Amberson hails from the Pacific
Northwest. With a love of writing in several genres, TJ strives to provide
well-written, age-appropriate, & original novels for tweens, teens, and new
adults.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

  
~ Facebook ~ Website ~
  
THE KINGDOM OF NERETH cover
Dark times are upon the land of
Nereth. Centuries have passed since the rightful heir to the throne was
banished. The people are losing hope in ancient legend, which foretells of one
who will rise up, overthrow the evil king and queen, and restore peace. Like
all others in Nereth, Edlyn has suffered greatly. Orphaned as a child, Edlyn
grew up as the serf of a drunken lord. Now a spirited seventeen-year-old, Edlyn
works to buy her freedom while fighting off the unwanted advances of Sheriff
Hurst. One morning, Edlyn discovers a young man hiding in the stable. He is
fleeing from Sheriff Hurst and inflicted with a sword wound that will surely be
fatal without her help. In a split-second decision, Edlyn conceals the young
man from Sheriff Hurst and begins nursing him back to health. As the young
man’s strength returns, Edlyn learns that his name is Maddock, and she is
stunned to find that he has come from the mysterious land to the north. Maddock
soon comes to Edlyn’s aid, rescuing her from Sheriff Hurst. Suddenly declared
outlaws, both Edlyn and Maddock must escape for their lives to enchanted
Ravenshire Forest and then the desolate mountains beyond. As their adventure
unfolds, Edlyn and Maddock discover that their meeting may have been more than
chance, for their lives prove bound by a fate that neither of them could
possibly have imagined.

 


  
~ Universal Amazon Link
  
Snippet:
“So it is true that Sheriff Hurst
really wanted to make you his bride?” Peyton eventually inquired.
            “Sheriff
Hurst is a horrible, selfish man.”
            “He
is rich, and he has good connections.”
            “Are
you suggesting that nothing else should matter?” Edlyn challenged.
“Why should money and importance be all that a woman aspires to in a
marriage? Can a woman not want love and happiness? Or respect?”
            Peyton
shot her a sideways glance. “You think that pining after a wanderer who is
on a secret journey—and nearly being brought upon your deathbed because of
him—is happiness?”

 

            Edlyn
turned away. “I am pining after no one.”
 

 

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