Showing results by narrator "Nicole Poole" in All Categories

The Emperor's daughter Mercedes is the first woman ever admitted to The High Ground, the elite training academy of the Solar League's Star Command, and she must graduate if she is to have any hope of taking the throne. Her classmate Thracius has more modest goals - to defy his humble beginnings and rise to the rank of captain. But in a system rocked by political division, where women are governed by their husbands and fathers, the poor are kept in their place by a rigid class system, and the alien races have been conquered and subjugated, there are many who want them to fail.

When a mission in New York City goes terribly wrong, Sienna Nealon finds herself replaced as head of the government agency in charge of policing people with powers beyond those of a normal human. Marginalized, humiliated, she ponders her place in the world now that her war is over. But it isn't long before another threat rears its ugly head, and Sienna finds herself outmatched and outgunned - against former prisoners bent on executing a scheme which will push Sienna past limits of ruthlessness even she could not imagine.

Opportunity is presented to Admiral Cordelia. Imperium’s Presiding Executor Gaketork sends emissaries to establish communications with her, and she responds by installing a comm system aboard the executor’s transport. The Imperium governor, who has become sentient, uses the new comm system to send her critical data. Cordelia shares the governor’s information with newly assembled Trident squadron commanders. She directs the commanders to scour another executor’s territory and free suborned worlds of mercenary Radags and Krackus overseers.

He was stationed at Area 51, a loyal soldier serving his country, and later injected with what he believed to be a standard vaccination, only it was an experiment. Now he's a weapon, a man with skills like no other, who can travel with the wind, a man with darkness within that he battles every day of his life.

In a world where wizards are relegated to ghettos, it is no surprise to see one murdered in the street. But for Stonne Caris, a young warrior monk who sees the killing and gives chase to the culprit, there is nothing ordinary about seeing a murderer disappear into a black, inky portal. The Archmage sends him in search of Antryg Windrose - a half-mad mage who understands the nature of these passages between dimensions.

The weirdest thing about my life isn't the fact my cat started talking to me. I had it all. Awesome, blossoming business. A cute boyfriend who gave me butterflies. My kids living at home and reconnecting with me. Plus, I was a witch. What should have been the most amazing night turns into a disaster. I'm crushed, in more ways than one. When I recover, it's to find my reality has shifted. My cat can speak. Some of the townsfolk appear to be possessed by demons, and I'm supposed to be sacrificed to free magic.

The Queller race has lived for millennia in isolation. However, a secret kept by the Queller senior elder and a few associates drives the elder to make contact with another race. Little do the Quellers know that they send a QASAP ship, an autonomous search ship, to engage the conclave. Not detecting an aggressive society, Julien chooses to accept the autonomous ship’s invitation, and a small fleet commanded by Commodore Tocknicka follows the QASAP’s star map to the Queller home world.

The sisters’ leader, Miriamal, and three mining chairpersons investigate an unexplored wormhole for possible economic expansion. Aboard the Dominance, they exit the wormhole and are stunned to find the nearby system inhabited. More troubling, technologically advanced warships hold station above the system’s exoplanet. SADEs witness the hasty return of the Dominance and the cessation of messages between Miriamal and Lisa Dyehouse. The Truth Matters partners race against time to save Samuel, and they’re not above leveraging an unreliable criminal hacker.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

This collection includes four book-centered mystery novellas from four masters of the craft: The Scroll, Reconciliation Day, The Compendium of Srem, and The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy.

Abbey Mei Otis's short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, and more. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the 12 stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

"Tanjiri is not for you. You are not ready to encounter what exists there." So Lezuri spoke in warning, long ago. Urban still possesses the strange gift—the impossible puzzle—Lezuri gave him that day. A needle, ultra-thin and twelve centimeters long, with a silvery surface that slices light into rainbow glints. All Lezuri's knowledge lies locked within that needle. Urban has only to discover the trick of opening it, to gain that knowledge for himself—but the needle remains an enigma.

The name's Joey Santana, and my 25th birthday didn't necessarily go as planned. In a world where supernaturals and humans live together, I was attacked, then saved by none other than the Alpha of the Los Angeles Pack. But with survival came a price. And I wasn't sure if I was ready to pay it.

Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband Wayne beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear - the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly.

Once you've felt love, it's hard to let it go. The curse has been unleashed at the stroke of midnight and everything has changed. Everyone who once cared for me is now indifferent. And the one person who loved me unconditionally now hates my guts. I've never felt more alone before in my life. Hiding out with the seelies has been my only option, but when truths unfold, even the seelie aren't safe anymore. With nowhere to turn to and no one to trust, I find an unlikely ally who amidst it all, doesn't hate me.

Widowed and penniless in the Colorado Rockies, Boston-born Laura Cheney turns to Deke Sheridan, a dangerously handsome renegade raised among the Cheyenne, when her newborn son is kidnapped.

Priest Rahandras has lived with the darkness trapped inside himself for years. Betrayed by his own brother and forced to watch his clan's brutal annihilation, the only thing Priest wants more than to escape the curse that haunts him - as both man and beast - is to rebuild. Until the mate he's longed for walks into his life with an elder from his past. She's everything he's wished for, and the key to the clan's very survival.

My name is Rachel Sambrook, and I thought I understood the world...until I discovered the world is full of living, breathing monsters. When I teamed up with Lea, I thought we had stopped the experiments on vampire blood. All we did was open a can of wolves we had not expected. The clues we find take us halfway across the world and, to my irritation, leave us depending on two men. One, a werewolf who has his own set of secrets. And the other, a Cazador like Lea...only this one is human and more tempting than I’d like to admit.

If you want to get to heaven, you’ve got to raise a little hell.... Callie Penrose is struggling to find her special purpose in life. Rather than allying with any of the powerful supernatural groups begging to sign her up - the Vatican, the vampires, the shifters, or the Armies of both Heaven and Hell - Callie has been picking fights with all of them. But when she’s abducted by a host of angels, and a greater demon begins hunting her through the daytime streets of Kansas City, Callie learns that her past has come back to haunt her.

Callie Penrose returns home to find a year has passed, and that everyone believes her long dead. Roland Haviar, once her mentor and now a Master Vampire, has become a bloodthirsty tyrant, fulfilling his vow to bathe the City of Fountains in blood until he avenges her death. And the Vatican Shepherds, once his brothers, stand in his way. In his quest for closure, Roland surrounds the city in a magical barrier that blocks all methods of escape - or help - giving him time to seek out an ancient artifact powerful enough to put an end to everyone and everything once and for all.