The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Synopsis
Nava Katz traded a lost dream for an impressively cynical attitude. The one thing she does care about? Her hard-working twin brother. Then she interrupts his induction ceremony into a secret supernatural society, accidentally torches his life-long ambition, and steals his destiny.
Wait—whaaaat?
She expects to be chastised, not thrown into a trial by fire, battling demons to keep humanity safe while she’s learning to master her powers. She’s facing her worst nightmare: a purpose.
To add insult to literal injury, it turns out that evil fiends are a delight compared to the all-male hunters, who shockingly, are not cool with a woman in their ranks.
They assign her to their most ruthless slayer: Rohan, a man whose inner demons earn nods of respect from actual ones. He’s pursuing his own high-stakes mission, with no interest in babysitting some chick that everyone expects to die soon.
But Nava excels in defying people’s expectations, and besides, spite is a powerful motivator. So, she hatches a plan to bring her brother into the fold alongside her. Sure, it involves defeating a vengeful demon out for blood, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few bones.
The Brotherhood wants her gone. The demons want her dead. First gig as a Chosen One and she's already nailing it.
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“You telegraph way too much,” a smooth voice said to me. Backyard guy was back.
Ignoring the decadent images that his voice conjured up, I shoved my hand into the Doritos bag which contained about 237% salt, crawled to the edge of the bed, and threw the crumbs in the demon’s face. “Burn, fucker!”
The demon glared at me as he wiped orange dust off his cheeks and sweater. “This is cashmere,” he said, frowning at the deep blue fabric.
I scrambled to my feet, holding the bag out in front of me like a cross. Which, incidentally, did nothing against demons. And since vampires didn’t exist, did nothing against them either. Some demon happened to get its kicks feeding from the neck and suddenly everyone was
rushing in with garlic and stakes looking to take down Count Dracula. Those who weren’t romanticizing them as life partners, that is.
“There is enough salt in this bag to blister you back to your evil dimension.” Smirking, I batted my lashes at him. “Feel free to be scared.”
He swiped the bag out of my hands, tossing it into the trash behind him. “A, if you’re gonna eat chips, at least eat decent ones. B, not a demon. And C,” he said, reading my baby doll tee, “love the outfit, Nava.”
I scowled at him. “You are absolutely a demon.”
He pulled out my desk chair, turned it around with a snap of his wrists, and straddled it. “Why?”
“For starters, I never told you my name. Probably got it from the demon text chain that went out about me.”
He grinned at me, flashing toothpaste-ad-perfect, even, white teeth. “I’m not in the group.”
I crossed my arms over my nipples which were now so hard from that grin he’d leveled at me that one good operatic scream could shatter them. I shut down all possibilities of how said scream could be achieved, locking them inside a box deep in my psyche.
“Any other proof you want to dazzle me with?” he asked.
How about the fact that his grin made Josh’s seem like a neutered puppy’s, and Josh was a lust demon. Half-demon. Which made this guy full-evil status. “You broke into my bedroom and are holding me hostage.” With your incredible looks.
Damn. Why not roll over already, idiot girl?
I hadn’t been able to scope out his body in detail from our previous two encounters, but now, under proper lighting, I could tell he’d be nicely cut under that sweater that molded to him like a second skin. Underwear model nice and not the low rent, flyer-insert kind either. One of those glorious torsos caught in haunting black and white by Herb Ritts, the stark white of his briefs throwing his generous package into sharp relief.
Then there was his face. If it hadn’t been for the slight bent of his nose, indicating it had been broken, his South Asian beauty would have been too painful and/or depressing to look at. Killer cheekbones, firm chin, gorgeous brown skin and lips that were created to do bad, bad, wonderful things. It was going to be a crime against humanity to kill him.
I leaned in toward the slight breeze drifting in through my open window, refusing to fan myself in front of him.
He sat there under my scrutiny, totally comfortable. A sign of excess confidence and further proof of evil. Though the more I stared at him, the more I got a niggling feeling that I knew him.
“Did we ever…” I made a fist and pumped away in a back and forth motion.
Amusement lit his amber eyes. “I was the lead singer of Fugue State Five.” He smirked, saying the words as if obviously I’d heard of them. Fair enough.
Rohan Mitra had been the broody frontman whose so-sensitive lyrics and rough growl singing voice induced mass hysteria at concerts world-wide. It was rumored he’d averted an oil crisis with a personal visit to a Sheik’s daughter. Watching the beautiful bastard now, I believed it.
Blood & Ash Synopsis
Ashira Cohen takes great pride in the detective agency she’s built from scratch. It may be small, but she harbors big dreams of becoming a renowned sleuth.
Thing is, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t let her stakeout go sideways.
Or find a mysterious tattoo hidden on her scalp.
Or discover it’s a now-broken ward that was suppressing dangerous magic she had no idea she possessed.
Don’t even get her started on the golem.
The only bright spot is that her new unruly powers nearly kill her long-time nemesis, Levi, the irritatingly hot leader of the magic community. No, right… that’s a bad thing.
One word from him revealing her forbidden abilities and she’ll be locked up for life, with everything she’s built taken from her by force. Definitely a bad thing.
Except…
It seems Levi requires her unique set of skills to solve a spree of abductions.
This is her shot. Sure, there’s a sinister supernatural organization pulling strings from the shadows, but Ash is positive she can rescue the captives, uncover the truth, and take her career to a new level.
Plus, after years of being underestimated by Levi, it’s Ash’s chance at payback. And she’s going to relish bringing him to his knees.
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Levi strolled behind me, heat rolling off him.
Head bowed, I stopped in the middle of the platform, gripped the cold metal railing, and flinched because I’d caught a jagged part of the railing’s seams. I tried to speak, tried to move, but I was paralyzed. My insides twisted, radiating a stabbing pain that built and built and then burst like a supernova, hot and sharp.
Fire blazed through my body, a searing agony that lit up every nerve ending. Had I not been clutching the railing, I’d have fallen because my legs had turned to Jell-O. There was a mild tug and then a punch that felt like a multi-armed giant was bashing its way out from inside my skull.
Violent shudders wracked me from head to toe and I screamed, but no sound came out.
A tiny drop of blood beaded on my finger. I sucked down a harsh breath, mesmerized by that drop that was so red and earthy.
“Ash.” Levi’s irises were no longer merely blue but the electric wild skies after a storm. They practically glowed and, between them and the glare of the moon, I had to look away. The overpowering smell of the saltwater from the dolphin pool below made me gag, but was tempered by the mild musky sandalwood scent of Levi’s cologne.
“You’re not having a seizure, are you?” he said.
Why did he have to be such a dick?
From one blink to the next, the bloody smear on my finger morphed into a solid shaft about eight inches long with a bulbous end that I instinctively jabbed Levi back with.
“Did you just—that’s—that’s a dildo,” Levi stuttered. “You hit me with a magic dildo?”
We both stared at the offending item in my hand.
“It’s a sword,” I said.
“It’s a fucking cock that you conjured up,” he growled. “You’re Nefesh?” His expression darkened in fury.
Maybe I was actually unconscious and all this was some kind of fever dream?
“As if,” I said. “I thought I’d liven up this snoozefest with a giant dick. The sword, I mean. Not you. I’ve been carrying it in my dress this whole time waiting for the right moment to spring it. Hilarious, huh?”
Okay, as lies went it was admittedly somewhere between “the check is in the mail” and “I won’t come in your mouth” for believability, but logic and coherent reasoning had fled in the face of the weaponized penis.
“Right. You carried it in your floor-length ‘come fuck me’ dress with no visible panty line,” Levi said darkly.
“I have a bra.” Stop talking, Ash. I white-knuckled the dildo. If I really had magic, thiswas what I produced? Okay, bright side. I could become a vigilante, going around giving the bad guys of my city a good dicking.
I stepped backward, wanting to get the fuck out of Dodge so I could unscramble my brain and figure out how I suddenly had magic, but I was trapped between the railing and a hard place.
Levi grabbed me by the shoulders. “Answer me!”
Panic flooded me, my pulse spiking. One second, I was standing in front of him, the next, I moved with the lithe swiftness of a jungle predator and tossed him to the ground, my knee grinding into his chest and a glinting red dagger poised at his throat.
A dagger that the dildo had transformed into, its blade sharper than any steel.
Oh good, I wasn’t a one-cock pony. A hysterical laugh burbled out of me.
Levi pushed up to dislodge me but I held him down, which really shouldn’t have been possible, and twisted the knife against his skin. There was a faint rasp as the blade scraped against his light stubble.
What was I doing? I scrambled to my feet, clutching the blood dagger, and pressed the tip against his shirtfront. “Are you going to kill me?”
His face puckered in distaste. “In this suit? It’s Armani. But I do want to know exactly what the fuck is going on.”
Excellent question, but I didn’t have an answer. In fact, there were so many I didn’t have that I could barely keep track of them.
The pounding in my ears, the buzz of magic thrumming through me, it was all too much. I lost what little hold I had. The blade disintegrated into blood, splooshing out on Levi, and turning him into one of the promgoers from Carrie.
So much for the Armani.
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Throwing Shade Synopsis
When Miri was a teen, her parents were murdered by magic assassins. These days, her aggressively normal existence as a law librarian at a boring firm has excellent medical insurance and won’t get her daughter killed.
But when her bestie, her ride-or-die, gets tangled up with some vampires and goes missing, Miriam unleashes the rare and powerful shadow magic she’s kept hidden.
It’s heady, liberating—and totally dangerous.
Now in a race against time to save her friend, this single mom is descending into the spiderweb of the secret supernatural community where not knowing the rules is a fast-track to a painful end.
Her guide? A grumpy French wolf shifter with a particular set of skills, a baffling drive to protect Miri at all costs, and the infuriating habit of constantly disagreeing with her. He may mock her To-Do lists, but he’s learned firsthand that her shadow magic literally packs a hell of a punch.
The tricky thing about shadows, though, is the past casts a long one, and if Miri isn’t careful, those magic assassins will come back for the one who got away—and she’ll lose everything.
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“The man’s body isn’t even cold and you’re robbing him?” Wolf Dude said.
“I’m looking for identification,” I said through ground teeth. There was a cracked phone but no wallet. It must have fallen out at some point during the fight. A vise tightened around my chest and I shoved the Ohrist, banking on the fact that if he’d intended to hurt me, he’d have done it already. “You ruined my chance to get information about—”
“I saved you.” The man stuffed his bare feet into motorcycle boots, which also came out of the duffel bag. “I don’t know what interrogation skills you think you have, but I can assure you that dybbuk wouldn’t have given up shit.”
“Dybbuk?”
“Merde,” he said in perfect French. Ah. “You went after him without knowing what you were dealing with?” His full lips twisted. “Fucking BS.”
He remembered.
I took two wobbly steps back, Delilah by my side, but he didn’t come after me.
He laced up his boots. Okay, he was a derisive son of a bitch, but he lacked the horror others of his ilk displayed upon meeting my kind, nor did he seem inclined to kill me.
I’d take the win.
“Alex had attacked me once already,” I said, “and if he did something to my friend—”
The shifter pulled out a beaten-up brown leather jacket and shrugged into it, his shoulders bunching. “Then she’s gone. Sorry for your loss.”
My eyebrows shot up. Yes, this guy was an ass, but surely he was connected to an infrastructure that could help me find Jude. “Sorry for your loss? How about you help me find her? Aren’t you a Lonestar?”
He laughed without an ounce of humor. “Hardly.”
Then what was he? He’d already killed one person, and yes, that dybbuk thing seemed to justify Alex’s death, but I was alone out here. If he was working on his own vigilante moral code, how safe was I?
I eyed the stairs. How many were there? Thirty? Then perhaps another fifty feet to lose myself in the crowds? He’d be faster than me, even as a human. I bit my lip. If I screamed for help, would anyone come?
Screw that. I had magic and could cloak and get away at any point, but his rudeness was grating. I threw my hands up. “That’s all you have to say?”
“No.” The man raked a shrewd glance over me. “Should we ever have the misfortune to meet again, get out of my way.”
“Or what? You’ll huff and you’ll puff and you’ll blow my house down?”
He bared his lips, briefly shifting his canines to wolf form. My, what big teeth you have. A strangled laugh burbled out of me. My epistemological crisis involved a hell of a Freudian undertone.
“I’ll do whatever the fuck is necessary,” he said.
“Is that your action hero catchphrase or something? Because it’s a little on the nose.”
He zipped up the duffel bag. “My reputation doesn’t precede me? Shocking.” His voice was laced with bitterness.
“Wow. Someone is full of themselves. I’ve got no idea who you are.”
He peered at me suspiciously. “Are you new in town?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “Then you know who I am.”
“Hate to disappoint you, but you’re just some rando who crashed my party and ruined my plan—”
“To get answers from someone who wouldn’t tell you anything you actually wanted to know. Brilliant strategy. You’ve the mind of a tactician. Even if you did get something out of him, did you think he’d let you walk away after?” His accent thickened when he got annoyed.
“I had my shadow.”
“I wouldn’t brag about that if I were you.”
“For your information, I’m doing an admirable job. Before yesterday, the only monsters I had to worry about were of the human variety.” I shot him a pointed look.
“There’s no way you didn’t know about dybbuks. You’re too—” He snapped his mouth shut.
Delilah puffed up behind me. “Oh, no,” I said. “Finish that sentence.”
The man crossed his arms, rustling the leather. “Old,” he said levelly.
My shadow bopped Wolfman in the nose with a swift jab. Ha!
The man pinched his nostrils together to staunch the bleeding, his emerald eyes glinting dangerously.
My amusement drained away, my magic swirling around my feet, ready to cloak me, but I’d hit the wall and I was out of fucks to give.
“Should we ever have the misfortune to meet again, get out of my way,” I said.
“Vraiment? Why?”
“I’m a woman in my forties who’s remembered how powerful she can be. Don’t fuck with me, Huff ’n’ Puff.” Head held high, Delilah and I sailed past him into the night.
