Date Published: September 2014
Eric didn’t ask to be a vampire. In fact, he didn’t even believe in them. Then he hooks up with a hot babe, wakes up with a hangover, and bites his tongue with his own fangs.
Which pretty much settles the question.
Now he’s trying to hold down his day job while learning the rules of the Undead — the most important being that bloodthirsty urges and predatory instincts are a real bitch.
Upside; Eric has the beautiful Sasha to teach him the ropes, including the magic he’ll need to survive.
Downside; they’re being hunted by members of the Church of Light, who are determined to rid the world of vampires.
Then Sasha is killed, and Eric is thrust into an alternate world in his quest to avenge her death. There he becomes a Nightlord, fights a dragon with the help of his magical steed, Bronze, and upchucks a sword named Firebrand.
But things get really interesting when Eric finally finds Tobias, head of the Church of Light. Soon Eric finds himself at the center of an epic battle at the literal edge of the world in a fight to keep a terrible darkness at bay.
In other words, just another day in the life of the Nightlord.
“When you fall off the Edge of the World into hordes of demonic Things from the Outer Darkness, you really start to wonder if you haven’t made some mistakes.” –Eric, part-time undead, expectant father, and short-term astronaut.
Other Books in the Nightlord Series:
“I’ve awakened in a stone box about the size of a large coffin… I’m filthy, everything aches, and, by the various so-called gods, I smell awful.
“I’ve woken up in worse places.
“Hmm. What does that say about my life choices?” —Eric, amateur magician, part-time vampire, and accidental king.
It’s not easy, being King. Especially when you’ve got an allergy to sunrise and sunset, a fire-goddess for a mother-in-law, demonic adversaries, random assassins, and a basement full of insecurities to cope with.
Add to that his daughter, the fire-priestess/princess, a couple of lightly-deranged professional magicians, a whole city full of wizards, and enough squabbling princes to resemble a kindergarten argument.
It’s enough to make a man want to just go home.
Luckily for Eric, he has the world’s fastest pet rock, a smart-mouthed sword, and a horse that not only understands him, but likes him anyway.
“An awful lot of young ladies seem to be up all night, wandering around the halls on the off-chance they’ll bump into the King when he’s in the mood for a snack. Since when did I become sexy? And why didn’t anybody warn me it was going to be work?” —Eric, elder geek and occasional idiot.
We all have inner demons. We fight them all the time. Some of us achieve inner peace by coming to terms with them.
But how do you come to terms with inner demons that tear free and become outer demons?
Eric has been a vampire for nearly a century, and his demons are more than metaphors. While they controlled him, he was the Demon King. Now he has to avoid the monsters in his own mind, as well as angry nobles, fanatical religions, assassins, magi, other vampires, criminal organizations, and the neighborhood gossip.
He wants two things: To find Tort, and to have someplace to call home.
It may be too much to ask.
I ignored the susurrus of voices, dashed up the avenue between the ruined monuments, and took the broad stairs before the door in three skipping jumps. The door itself was a carefully-balanced block of stone. It stood about eight feet tall and was perhaps twice that in width. Opening it required it to pivot around the center, its balance. Judging by the scrapes along the dusty portico, Tobias had found it no trouble at all. I, however, shoved on each side of the block in turn without result. Maybe he locked it.
I backed off, got a running start, and jumped. I kicked it with both feet, as high up as I could manage. Something snapped in the wall as I hit the door. I came to a sudden halt, thudding into the stone like a cannonball, then fell heavily to the dusty floor. I rolled to my feet awkwardly—Firebrand can be an annoyingly large chunk of metal—and was in time to watch the whole block of stone finish a slow, majestic topple inward. It landed flat with an echoing, tomb-door thud and sent up a huge cloud of white dust.
I was over that stone and past the cloud in an instant, dashing down a long tunnel before the echoes had finished. Directly ahead, far distant, I could see Tobias out in the open air. I came out of the mouth of the tunnel like the bullet from a gun.
The plaza was large. Two football games and a cricket match could have been held concurrently in that space—complete with spectators. The tunnel I exited was at the floor level of a grandly-curving amphitheater facing Tobias. All of this was scoured from rock and worn by years of use. The floor was also natural stone, cut only to smooth it down and level it. There was no roof at all.
Perhaps a quarter-mile away, the radius of the half-circle, Tobias had his back to me. Shada was lying naked on a slab of rock just beyond him. And beyond her…
The world ended.
I once wondered about the nature of the world I’m in. Is it round? Is it flat? Does it go around the Sun or vice versa?
The world is flat. Sure, it may be round—like a coin. But it has an edge, very real, and sharply defined. I know. I’ve seen it. At least that explained why my compass never found north.
Beyond that edge exists a gulf of yawning blackness, speckled here and there by the distant stars—or are they stars? I don’t know what they are. Maybe they’re just lights on the inside of a great sphere of crystal, or holes in that sphere to an even greater space that happens to be better illuminated. Maybe the stars are really angels with flaming swords and glowing halos.
Maybe they really are distant suns… but I doubt it.
Right up near the edge live the Things. I recognized a few from having seen them before. The rubbery monstrosity from the lab in Baret, along with the multi-tentacled creature that tried to eat me outside the gata camp. They had a bunch of brothers with them, along with a whole lot of more distant relations. There were hundreds, no, thousands of the Things in every shape and size imaginable—and many I wouldn’t choose to imagine without serious drugs. They seemed to have no gravity out there. They weren’t a flat crowd, but a wall, extending up and to the sides, as though they were all pressing against a barrier of glass, trying to get in. They were clustered most thickly near Tobias, thinner out away from him. All of them were fairly frothing at the mouth to pour from the outer darkness onto the stone floor of the world. They chattered and chittered, hissed and clacked and moaned. Their sounds were muted, as though there really was a barrier, but there was nothing to be seen holding them at bay.
Tobias was chanting. He had some tools in his hands—I couldn’t tell quite what, but one seemed to be a knife.
Garon Whited was supposedly born in either 1969 or 1970; the original birth certificate is suspiciously unavailable and other records do not agree. After spending some years in college playing with computers, he finally joined a radical group of jellyfish herding nomads. Having fought zombie dolphins, quasi-corporeal spirits, and brain-sucking mole rats, he is uniquely qualified to write fantastic fiction. His subsequent attempts at professional salsa repairman and key line salesman met with similar success. He claims to live in Texarkana, on Earth, but people have been known to disagree.
