Vampires and demon hunting, oh my!

Another new short story release! It's been a big week…

Hunter's Heart is what you might call a good, old-fashioned vampire romance. With demons and violence and juicy smexxin'. You know you want one, right?

Here's the cover copy:

A reckless young demon-huntress longs for the ultimate excitement—but is a powerful shadow demon more than she can handle?

For vampire Colleen O’Hara, work is also play. She hunts demons not just for the paycheck, but also for the thrill of the fight. It’s better than sex, at least the sex she’s had so far. But then she meets Seth, a smoldering-hot shadow demon. With him she feels an undeniable, untamable urge to blur the lines between ally and enemy, predator and prey.

Meanwhile, as the barrier between hell and earth grows weaker, threatening thousands of human souls, Colleen must track down the traitor who opened the rift. Only with Seth at her side can she defeat the villain. Colleen must risk everything—including her soul—to both follow her desire and save her city from impending damnation.

For those of you familiar with my books: Hunter's Heart is in the same series as Hunter's Blood, but with a new romantic couple. The heroine is Colleen, Gina's sassy BFF. The hero… well, he's kinda bad… :D

You can feed it cookies on Goodreads. Or, here's the Kindle link.

Here's a teaser; you can read a bigger excerpt on my website.

~

Such a beautiful enemy.

In his shadow form, Seth drifted above Colleen’s head, a silent breath of blackness in the night. Invisible. Deadly.

And fascinated. The fiery glint of her spell-wreathed knives mesmerized him. Her lean shadow slipped along the moonlit alley wall like a ghost. The power that flashed in the magical bloodstone at her throat made him tingle. If he’d had a mouth right now, it would have watered.

He’d been watching this Hunter every night for a week. Stalking the stalker, tracking her sweet vampire scent through midnight streets, as she killed imps and fleshcrushers, her lethal blades flashing. Her victims were lower-level minions, hell’s dross, mere lumps of flesh and hatred. Expendable, easily replaced . . . yet her grim taste for death intrigued him.

He drifted closer, whispering his shadowy fingers over her braided red hair, and his particles shimmered, aroused. Hellfire, she smelled good, of strawberries and female sweat. She hadn’t detected Seth—but this was no reflection on her fighting prowess. Seth was a shadow demon, ancient and powerful. Just a strange shiver down your spine, a warm whisper on your shoulder, a coil of blacker darkness in the night. It was pitifully easy for Seth to drink human and vampire souls.

Warm weariness washed through him. Soon, it’d be Yule, when the hellflux would be at its lowest ebb. His mistress—Jezebel, cruel demon empress, curse her oily hide to eternities of agony—was amassing her forces for a frontal assault. And these helldamned Hunters were just getting in the way.

Which was where Colleen came in. Her powerful magic-user’s soul would strengthen Seth. Feed him. Sustain his power, make him invincible, and so on and so forth. As Jezebel’s consort—and yeah, that was about as much fun as it sounded—he’d eaten countless souls in his time, both human and vampire. It was getting old, the excitement wearing thin.

Seth sighed, a stirring of shadow. Hells, he was getting old. Couldn’t recall when he’d last properly relished a meal. He didn’t even bother taking corporeal form anymore. Just dived down their throats and sucked the soul from their fleshbags.

But this prey—this juicy lady Hunter—woke something inside him that he hadn’t felt for . . . Mmm. Would she taste as good as she looked?

~

OMG. The suspense is killing you, right? What will happen? Will there be blood? More importantly, will there be nakedness and hot smexxin'?

Well, what do you think?

You can buy this cute little sucker at Amazon. $1.99. What a bargain!

Death! Betrayal! Vampire revolutionaries! Just in time for Valentine's Day...

A new release, yay! It's been a while, so I hope you enjoy this little piece of bloodthirstiness and heartbreak...

Unforgiven is a dark fantasy love story, and I'm stoked that it's been chosen as part of this cool anthology. Look at all these awesome authors.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE

Eight cutting-edge stories

of the darker side of love.

Tiffinie Helmer ~ Heartless
Alex Bledsoe ~ Tantrabobus
V.R. Barkowski ~ Just A Lie
Erica Hayes ~ Unforgiven
Lizbeth Lipperman ~ Sweepers: A Kiss To Die For
Charlie Holmberg ~ Salt and Water
Coreene Callahan ~ Fury of Fate
S.G. Redling ~ The True Love of Sherry Papers

The premise of this antho was simple: the story had to begin with the words 'love hurts'.

So, y'know. Vampire revolutionaries. Bwahaha. Just in time for Valentine's Day…

Here's the first little snippet of my story, Unforgiven.

~

Love hurts, they say.

Still, I find it an impractical tool. In all my years, I've never extracted a traitor's confession with the threat of a broken heart, for the simple reason that on the subject of love, imagination fails us. We cannot conceive before the fact how excruciating its loss can be. Whereas any torturing scoundrel will tell you that the instinctive human dread of physical pain—a dagger pressed into the eye socket, for example—is often more persuasive than the pain itself.

I poke my blade in a little harder. "Give me a name, monsieur, or by Jupiter, I'll slice your eye in two."

"Don't know what you mean." The boy's in shirtsleeves, and sweat darkens his white linen. The pleasure den's warm gaslights slant my shadow across his face. He's bleeding all over his waistcoat, poor lad, his cupid's-bow lips split and swollen, and it isn't making my job any easier.

A few feet from us, behind the half-drawn curtain, the dance whirls on, oblivious, a riot of silk and brocade, paste jewelry, painted faces, dusty relics of the bad old days. When he approached me at these revels—me, a lady wearing a gentlemen's swallow-tailed coat and breeches, rapier and dirk at her belt, glossy brown curls twisted in a red ribbon—he had more erotic recreation in mind.

Perhaps, so did I. He's handsome, this minion of evil. Delicious. The eye I'm threatening to pierce is ocean blue, bright with belladonna, and the smell of his skin maddens me. Absinthe and fear and a succulent boy's sweat, a toxic reminder of days long gone, when truth and liberty were more important than tomorrow, and my blood raced wild and free.

But I'm a different woman now. A married woman. And though I worship my lord husband with my entire heart, on evenings such as this—with the prey trembling in my grip, warm night air sparkling on my skin, the scent of satisfaction inches from my reach—the interminable emptiness of that tomorrow stretches ahead of me, terrifying.

"Your coven master's name, villain." I slide my dirk under his chin. "Or perhaps you can do without the eyeball. Should I instead slice your throat asunder?"

"Please, don't hurt me. He'll kill me if I tell you." He's sobbing now, begging in the fashion I once enjoyed so ruthlessly, and sweat trickles between my breasts. I'm burning. Eager. Parched inside, as if my soul wastes away for want.

"Yet so shall I, if you remain silent. What a dilemma." I twist his hair in my damp fist. My mouth is dry. I want to lick his swollen lips, taste that shimmering moisture. "Give me his name, minion, or you'll know sorrow."

The boy's eyes harden, the besotted glitter of the Possessed. "His name is master," he rasps. "But he signs himself Charlot."

The syllables echo backwards in time.

I taste them. Mysterious, slightly bitter, like an old wine. Enticing. Just as he tasted, long ago in those restless days of revolution, when he and I were drunk on power and fury and the sheer brilliant bliss of being alive.

Charlot.

My heart beats faster. Fear or excitement? I ought to feel nothing.

I must feel nothing.

~

Cool, eh? You can read a bigger excerpt at my website.

Buy links for the antho: Amazon ~ B&N