Fighting Fate: Book 2 of the Warrior Chronicles (39 page)

Morganne is currently working on a series of stand alone contemporary novels, The Dojo Chronicles, with a tie to the martial arts. Adventure, romance, and themes such as ‘what constitutes a family’, and ‘living by a personal code’ all wrapped up in a tail-kicking package that will make you laugh, cry, and feel good about the world and your place in it.

A graduate of The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, her studies included: History, Philosophy, and Comparative Mythology. Morganne graduated from Marquette University Law School in 1991.

Morganne has practiced nearly all areas of law, and now focuses on Child Advocacy and Elder Law with a primary focus on family mediation, putting children’s needs first.

Morganne is a fourth degree black belt in Okinawan Shorin Ryu karate. She has continuously trained over a twenty year period, actively training with Master Daniel Schroeder in Hales Corners, Wisconsin. She also holds a fourth degree black belt in Matayoshi Okinawan Kobudo; weapons training. Morganne has taught self-defense for women and practical defense sequences for writers.

Morganne is an avid motorcycle enthusiast. (There’s nothing like a TRIUMPH!) Most summers (when she’s not out riding) you can most likely find her in Highland Gear walking her Scottish Deerhounds and promoting Macski’s Highland Foods at local Scottish Games and Festivals.

You may visit Leigh at: www.leighmorganauthor.com

For speaking engagements and martial arts seminars, please email Leigh at: [email protected]

For the best tasting Scottish foods and custom Highland Gear this side of the big pond please visit: www.macskis.com

here are short blurbs and excerpts from two of my friends’ latest novels:

STARDUST MIRACLE

by Edie Ramer

A miracle is going to happen

Becky Diedrich is the cheesemaker’s daughter.

The minister’s wife.

The good sister.

What she’s not is her own woman.

What she can’t be is a mother.

And then she catches her husband with another woman.

And she moves in with her sister.

And she starts to see sparkles.

And this is just the beginning...

Excerpt:

Becky ran across the grass and laughed at her brashness. She wore her tan trench coat – her church coat – over her red negligee. Tonight she felt free. With a sexual appetite and playfulness she hadn’t felt for a long time.

She couldn’t swear that what she planned had never happened in the church, people being what they were. But it had never happened in the church before with her and Jim.

Laughter spilled out of her mouth again, and only stopped because she was breathless from an overload of excitement. The need to experience something more with her husband had been building inside her for a long time. Now it was finally boiling over – leaving her lightheaded and unlike her usual self.

She liked these feelings. Liked this side of her a lot.

Something happened to her tonight when she’d stepped out of the car and looked up at the stars. For so long, she’d been carrying a dark weight around with her. Going through the days and nights trying to say and do all the right things, when inside something had felt all wrong.

She’d lost the joy of life. Not fully living...just going through the motions. At only thirty-six, she’d felt old and dried up.

Now she felt young again. Free.

Jim wouldn’t know what happened to his proper wife.

She reached the church’s back door, using it instead of the front doors because she didn’t want anyone passing by to see her. Not that there was anything wrong with going to see Jim. But if anyone mentioned her late night visit, her face would probably turn the color of a ripe tomato and give away what they’d done.

She slipped the key into the lock but it turned easily. She stepped inside. Jim must’ve come in this way and forgotten to lock the door behind him. He was always preoccupied with his work and his parishioners.

She admired that. She did. But once in a while, she wanted his mind, plus a few body parts, to be on her.

And not just when her body temperature was right.

She started toward Jim’s office, and her heels clicked on the linoleum floor. Laughing under her breath, she stopped and took them off. She wanted to surprise Jim with a good surprise. No. A wonderful surprise.

His door was closed. Habit, she supposed, since no one was here except him. She heard him speaking. Couldn’t make out the words. Just his voice. Probably saying lines from the sermon he was preparing. Then his voice stopped, and she imagined him frowning at his computer screen while he wrote the next line.

She started to undo the buttons of her coat, then decided it would be sexier to do it inside with him watching. Kind of like a stripper.

Stifling a giggle, she turned the handle and threw open the door.

“Surprise!”

You may visit Edie at: www.edieramer.com

BLACK DIAMOND JINN

(A Hot SF/Fantasy Novella)

Copyright © 2012 by Mary Hughes

Have sex, avert doom, save the world.

The Mayan Doom is real. Government witch Amaia Jones has the spreadsheet to prove it.

Amaia is a desk-bound research wizard, living uncomfortably in the shadow of her famous Venus-magic parents, when she discovers the world is ending. Tonight. But her bulldog of a boss not only refuses to believe her, he won’t give her the secret to calling the one force powerful enough to help—the jinn. Amaia turns to her mental guardian angel, Rafe, the darkly handsome presence who has comforted her since her parents died.

Rafe has a secret of his own. He’s a black diamond jinn, one of the deadliest and most powerful of his kind. He’s detected a ruthless enemy using blood sacrifice and stoking Y12 public panic in order to summon the nightmare gods. Rafe needs to get into the human realm to stop the Doom. But when Amaia finally calls him, she’s threatened by his scorching sensuality.

Amaia’s guardian angel is a stunning jinni and suddenly her job is way more complicated. Jinn are known for taking their pound of flesh in exchange for magical help, but the only flesh Rafe wants is hers, taut with delight. Venus magic is the very thing that drove a wedge between Amaia’s parents, but her alternatives are rapidly dwindling. With four hours to go on humanity’s darkest night, the only alternative to surrendering her flesh may be surrendering her life.

This title contains explicit sexual language and may not be suitable for all readers.

Excerpt:

December 21, 2012

7:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

“The Mayan Doom is real, Chief. I have proof!” I shoved the stack of papers under my boss’s nose, spreadsheet on top. Not because I’m a dick (just the opposite, in fact—unless you counted Mervyn’s opinion that my lady parts clanked when I walked) but because I was trying to save the world and Chief Wizard Arnie Wenkermann was as nearsighted as a myopic bull dog and twice as stubborn.

“Damn it, Jones!” The Chief jerked back. “Your job is to reassure the public, not fan the nonsense higher.”

His ex-drill sergeant bark nearly blew me away, but I stood firm. “It’s not nonsense. The world is ending tonight. Look.” I shook the papers.

My boss clamped his eyes shut. “Numbers mean nothing to me.”

“Fine.” I pulled out a page. “See the pretty graph?”

He cracked an eye at the plummeting black arrow, squinched it shut again. “That can’t be right. The adepts would’ve noticed it. The ones who bothered showing up for work, anyway.”

“Adepts?” I snorted. “Part-time school kids?”

“You’re barely out of school yourself.” He upped my snort with a Chiefly sneer. “Class of 2012.”

“I’ve had six months in the real world,” I said, stung. “And Mervyn…I mean Wizard Analyst Johnson will back me up. Chief, we’ve already gone beyond what a team of adepts can handle. Look at my numbers and you’ll see—”

“Wizard Jones.” The title was a slap. “It’s just numbers. You’re overreacting.”

“Really Chief, I’m not.” Didn’t he understand that, as a government witch, this was the part of the job that I knew cold? In case it was his myopia and not his stubbornness blinding him, I traced the line with a finger, starting at business-as-usual and plunging to screaming end-of-world oh-shit. “We’ll be past the help of full wizards in a couple of hours. Ground zero in four. We must attack this immediately.”

“Jones, I have enough shit to shovel in the final hours before Y12. I don’t need a newbie witch gone Chicken Little.”

I held my temper, barely. Thank you, mandatory unfunded anger management classes. “Fine. It’s almost too late to chart a neutralization spell anyway, much less set it up. So give me the secret.”

“Secret? What secret?” He slit both eyes, cutting-narrow. Yeah, he knew what secret but wouldn’t say it first. “What are you suggesting?”

No less than counter-doom, but the world was mere hours from getting fucked without a fondle and I was dying anyway. With the cancer eating my lungs and my life, I was down to months, so this was my last chance to make a real difference. No time to hold back. I took a long, shallow breath. “I want to call a jinni.”

“A jinni—! No way.” He went red, paper white, and back to red. “No fucking—”

“Chief Wenkermann, please. We can try other things first, but we have to be prepared to take extreme action. The end of the world—”

“No.” He grabbed my graph, ripped it in two and tossed it behind him. I guess he’d flunked his anger management. “The Mayan calendar is ending, not the world. Even a desk-bound research wizard like you should know better than to panic just because an arbitrary cycle is ending.”

The desk-bound comment pinched but I pushed it aside. “Arbitrary, except John Q. Public doesn’t think so. Something’s shoving mass gullibility darkside, stoking fear and paving the way for the ultimate destruction. The nightmare gods will be loose, Chief. It’ll be Armageddon.”

He popped at the A-word. “For fuck’s sake, Jones. No end-of-world scare has come true, not the 2011 rapture or Y2K or the Disasters of ’88 or Comet Kohoutek in ’73. Y12 is just more of same. The public loves its disaster drama but doesn’t know shit about karmic physics.”

“Hey, Y2K was a real problem that came out okay because smart, dedicated people—both wizards and not—worked years at it. This is a real problem too—and we have less than four hours before all hell breaks loose. I’m not saying a jinni would be my first choice, but we have to be prepared.” I straightened to my full five-two. Even desk jockeys were sometimes combatants in war. “Chief Wenkermann, as a Research Wizard for the National Center for Behavioral Physics, with all the rights that entails, I officially request the secret of calling the jinn.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not, Jones.”

“Why not? I’ve met all the requirements. I filed a form S-1519J. I have clearance and as a full witch I’m more than capable—”

“I said no!” He speared a hand through the thin strands atop his shiny dome. “Do I need to spell it out? You’re a full witch, ten times as strong as adepts which makes you some hot shit, yeah. Except jinn are a
thousand
times as powerful, which makes them scary dangerous.”

“But—”

“Shut up and listen. Not only are jinn damned dangerous, they don’t give away jack shit for free. To pay the karmic balance that jinni’ll take a pound of
your
flesh. The harder the task the more he’ll carve. End of the world?” He made a loud, rude sound. “End of your world, because you’ll be the one to die.”

Dying already, so that didn’t scare me. But I wanted to save everyone else the grief. I wedged my original spreadsheet under his nose. “Armageddon is coming, Chief. Humanity has exercised its free will and united behind a single idea—fear. We think the world will end so it will. The nightmare gods set free, the world plunged into chaos, terror darkening each and every human mind and soul.”

He snatched the spreadsheet and ripped it too. “For the last time, Jones, it won’t come to that. That’s what we’ve been working on, what
you’re
supposed to be working on—Project Y12 Serenity, remember? Which has been entirely successful, so your numbers are wrong. They must be wrong. For fuck’s sake, do you think I’d send the teams home if we were in danger?”

“Nobody’s chanting Serenity on seven?” My cheeks iced. We’d had round-the-clock Serenity chanting on the seventh floor since the first squeak of Doom. If Chants, Rites and Rituals had stopped production…no wonder the graph was plummeting.

“Listen up, Jones. The problem’s solved. Damned good thing too. The overtime was eating my budget alive. Which reminds me—it’s quarter to eight and you’re not salaried. Go home.”

“I can’t. Those numbers clearly show—”

“Shut it.”

“Just give me the secret—”

“No. And in case you have a problem with English,
nein
,
non
,
nyet
, fucking N-O!” He spun and stalked away.

“Oh, you’re no better than the Mayan kings,” I shouted, snatching up the torn halves of my proof. “Stupid knowledge hoarder.”

He spun at his office door, every inch the sergeant, so much that I expected him to bark “down and give me twenty”. He gave me the civilian equivalent. “Go home!” He slammed into his office hard enough to rattle the window.