Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

Lt. Boca Ador remembers well being tortured, mutilated, and made a sexual slave on Lotharius. But returning there to help rescue the High Ambassador's daughter is still her choice to make. Neither her work as a healer nor her growing attraction to Doctor Chiang is going to keep her from walking the warrior's path. She doesn't care if the insistent Greggor is her mate and her destiny. Love will just have to wait.

Buffalo, New York, is still the second-largest metropolis in the state, but in recent years its designation as the Queen City has been elbowed aside by a name that's pure noir: The City of No Illusions. Presidents came from here; and in 1901 a president was killed here while visiting the Pan-American Exposition, by a man who checked into a hotel under a name that translates as Nobody.

Who would fall for an assassin...except another assassin? After a security breach is written in the sky - literally - the Bod Squad jumps back into action. An important member of the team has been assassinated by the mob, and the squad's public enemy number one, Baba Samka, is getting too close. Could his deadly work be an inside job? Only trained assassins Tyka and Mahmoud have the very particular set of skills the Bod Squad needs to solve this case.

"Stop the wedding!" No bride wants to hear those words, least of all Susannah "Legs" Carter, one of the Bod Squad's best agents. But when her colleague Jackson bursts in with news that her presumed-dead father may still be alive - and possibly a double agent - the vows are on hold, and the Bod Squad hits the road.

Eel River brings an original, hippie commune angle to horror, furthering our commitment to offering the best in innovative dark fiction.

"Mainon" was published in the anthology Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues. Author Jean Rabe has written 30 fantasy and adventure novels and more than 60 short stories. When she's not writing, which isn't often, she edits: two dozen anthologies and more than 100 magazine issues.

What happens after we die? Does our consciousness vanish at the moment of death? Or does it continue in some form? Former Los Angeles Times national correspondent Erika Hayasaki sets out to explore the controversial science behind near-death experiences. The journey leads her to forge an unexpected bond with a distant family member who becomes her tour guide and ends up teaching her not only how awesome it can be to die but how precious it can be to live.

Eighteen years ago, FBI profiler Evelyn Baine's best friend Cassie Byers disappeared, the third in a series of unsolved abductions. Only a macabre nursery rhyme was left at the scene, a nursery rhyme that claimed Evelyn was also an intended victim. Now, after all these years of silence, another girl has gone missing in South Carolina, and the Nursery Rhyme Killer is taking credit. But is Cassie's abductor really back, or is there a copycat at work?

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

From the introduction by Jonathan Santlofer: "Like film, literature has been no stranger to marijuana and hashish, going back to Charles Baudelaire's 1860 Artificial Paradises, in which the French poet not only describes the effects of hashish but postulates it could be an aid in creating an ideal world.

This short story is from the anthology Mitigated Futures. Twelve science fiction stories about the oncoming future, each of them representing a possible glimpse of what could be just around the corner... or much further down the corridor. These stories previously appeared in places like Clarkesworld Magazine, The Year's Best SF, Subterranean Magazine, and in various anthologies. They deal with the future of war, our climate, and technology's effect on our lives.

Drawing on interviews with family members, managers, promoters, and the jazz musicians who worked with her, as well as contemporary newspaper articles and reviews, Late Life Jazz tells the unsung story of one of America's finest singers, Rosemary Clooney. Ken Crossland and Malcolm Macfarlane trace Rosemary's life from her hardscrabble beginnings in Maysville Kentucky, through her first performances singing with the Barney Rapp Band in Cincinnati, through her rise to pop stardom in the early 1950s.

With her Siren mate and his mother captured by black market slave traders, Commander Gwen Jet is willing to do anything it takes to get them back, even if it means suffering through meditation and having more visions of herself as a slave. Being a trained warrior, Gwen doubts that using intuition can guide her to more answers than her stunner against Zade's captor's throats could. But she ends up using her energy gifts to locate the Sirens after all.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she'll never get out of Kentucky - but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem.

Ania Looren would have chosen death over becoming a demon host, if she'd had a choice. But her mate Liam is master of the Demon of Synar, and made that decision for her in order to save her life. Her spirit now grieves for what she has become Ania fears the great harm she can cause using the demon's power. Unfortunately, Liam's reluctant embrace of being the demon's master, along with his refusal to discuss Malachi with her, leaves Ania facing her destiny alone.

There is a tribe in Africa where, the first time a woman leaves home following the confinement period after giving birth, everyone she meets along the road greets her with a sacred song otherwise reserved for warriors returning from battle. She's honored as having lived through a rite of passage that will forever mark her womanhood as abundant and powerful and blessed. She's respected as a fully franchised member of the most ubiquitous and yet most extraordinary group of beings in our collective experience: Mothers.

Jill McCorkle's new collection of 12 short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us - flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also "animaled" with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile - also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids.

Modern stories for modern times, Crash Diet is at once brilliant and bitter, happy and heartbreaking. In 11 stories, acclaimed novelist Jill McCorkle tells the varied tales of today's southern women, the lives they end up leading, and the loves that distract them. Sandra knows that the best revenge is her ex-husband's credit card; Ruthie is stuck owning a motel that the highway has bypassed; Anna is a widow who goes to airports and looks in on other people's lives; Bunny waits eagerly for her absent sister's postcards for advice on how to live.

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves.

Being captain of his own rescue ship is the life Liam Synar has always dreamed of living. Being master of a hereditary demon is not. Coveting Malachi's power, his exiled evil brother hunts him to capture the demon that Liam's life mate unknowingly hosts. Putting Malachi inside Ania two years ago had been an act to save her when she almost died saving him. If only the demon hadn't killed again.