QSFer Amy Lane has a new queer Fantasy/Paranormal book out:
Lady Cory has carved out a life for herself not just as a wife to three husbands but also as one of the rulers of the supernatural communities of Northern California—and a college student in search of that elusive degree. When a supernatural threat comes crashing into the hard-forged peace of Green’s Hill, she and Green determine that they’re the ones in charge of stopping the abomination that created it. To protect the people they love, Cory, Bracken, and Nicky travel to Redding to confront a tight-knit family of vampires guarding a terrible secret. It also leads them to a conflict of loyalties, as Nicky’s parents threaten to tear Nicky away from the family he’s come to love more than his own life.
Cory has to work hard to hold on to her temper and her life as she tries to prove that she and Green are not only leaders who will bind people to their hearts, but also protectors who will keep danger from running rampant.
First Edition published as Rampant: The Fourth Book of the Little Goddess Series by iUniverse, 2010.
Book Four of Little Goddesses
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Excerpt
AND AFTER all of that, the bitch still insisted on coming with us to the damned vampire bar. It’s a good thing I’d had a few hours to cool off, or I might have killed her—literally and for good and forever—just for suggesting it.
But I did have a few hours to cool off, and good hours at that.
After our boat picked us up—precariously balanced with far too many people on it, but we didn’t care—we puttered around until we found a deep inlet, one with a narrow neck so none of the passing boats could see us. Lambent asked permission and then set a geas on it, a sort of “vague feeling” or repelling spell to keep the other campers away. Everybody stripped naked—Renny and Lambent, mostly—or shape-shifted, or did a combination of both, and either jumped in the water or took turns sunning on the boat, and generally we hung out as a big, rowdy, happy group. Bracken had brought an iPod and a speaker jack, and we plugged it into the boat and played that puppy as loud as we wanted. I sat in the shade and knitted with Katy and Renny, pleased that my waterproof bag had kept the water out during its little adventure. The fact that the yarn was double bagged in a ziplock helped too.
Green visited my mind as I sat—he’d been there when the water closed over my head, his presence keeping me from panicking completely—and although we did little more than bump telepathic noses, that soothed me too.
When it got too hot, I put the knitting down and Bracken came to my side and helped me in the water. No judgments were passed as I took deep breaths and clung to his hand, and the splashing and horseplay toned down even when I sighted a spot on land and took off in determined strokes to a place where I could feel, however fleetingly, slippery mud under my toes. Bracken evenly kept pace beside me, and every now and then he would go upright and extend his feet or go under to tell me how much farther I had to go.
I felt accomplished—absurd, because I’d been swimming in lakes since I was very small—but the feeling stayed with me nonetheless. I’d conquered a fucking fear, no matter how irrational. Go me!
When we returned to the boat, it was time to go back to the cabins and rest, then rehearse. The iPod jack came in handy then too. I practiced matching my voice, my pacing, and my blocking to the music, positioning people randomly and then moving seductively around the men to strip off their breakaway clothing and reveal their marks.
I could do it when the music was on—but when Bracken killed the sound to tell us to take a break for crap’s sake, I was right in the middle of tiptoeing my fingers up Jacky’s chest and crooning the throaty opening line. As the music died, we looked at each other blankly, and then personal space reasserted itself and we almost killed ourselves trying to get away. We heard a bizarre snorking sound, and together we looked down to see Teague, sitting on his ass in the dust, cracking up as though he’d never laughed before.
I blinked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh like that,” I said. Jack and Katy looked at me in complete bemusement.
“Man, it must be that random thing,” Katy said, “’cause I ain’t never seen it either.”
“Two years,” Jack said, shaking his head with affection as another round of laughter shook his beloved. “Maybe chaos isn’t such a horrible thing after all.”
That made me laugh, and then Annette walked up and shit all over our mood.
“You all practicing for a show or something?” she asked brightly, ignoring the wall of icy hostility radiating at her from the eleven of us.
“Go back to your cabin, Annette,” Nicky said seriously. She tried another sunshine-and-sugar smile.
“Now you aren’t going to hold that against me today? It was a joke—you know, like the way you were laughing just now?”
I turned toward her with a hint of laughter in my own eyes—the nasty, corrosive kind of laughter that reminds you that everyone can be fucking evil.
“Yeah, Annette, it was hella funny watching you skim across that lake. Did you want another demo? Because I think if I tried that here, you’d have some serious road rash before you hit the water.”
She blanched, and I amped that evil smile up a little, willing her to go away. Instead she tried a game smile and ignored me.
Author Bio
Amy Lane is a mother of two college students, two grade-schoolers, and two small dogs. She is also a compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head. She adores fur-babies, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckle-headed macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever, or sometimes for no reason at all. Her award-winning writing has three flavors: twisty-purple alternative universe, angsty-orange contemporary, and sunshine-yellow happy. By necessity, she has learned to type like the wind. She’s been married for twenty-plus years to her beloved Mate and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.