QSFer Lissa Kasey has a new MM paranormal romance (bi, gay, poly), Pillars of Magic: Dark Awakening book 2: Transfiguration.
Everyone underestimates the wind until it tears their world apart.
Con’s job is recovering rare books and artifacts, and learning all their secrets before handing them over to be archived. He never expected to find a little girl with an affinity to speak to the dead, and with her a strange symbol for a cult long since thought extinct.
Luca is on the verge of a change he’s feared for a long time, and he worries his lovers won’t want him anymore once his darker side is set free. With Con newly returned with a little girl in need of protection, and Sam trying to help the most powerful witch in the world solve a slew of murders, Luca feels powerless to stop the rising change.
But someone is in control of a demon and trying to capture the power of all the Pillars of Magic. Can the trio uncover the end goal before dark magic tears them all to pieces?
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Excerpt
Killing people in video games was easy. Sure, sometimes complicated moves were required, buttons to push, or intimidating bosses to beat, but the cleanup was nonexistent. People didn’t vanish or dissolve into dust in real life. An intentional lack of realism, perhaps?
Real life required being creative, and actual death was messy. People bled and left behind evidence like hair and skin cells with everything they touched.
“I don’t know what else you wanna know,” the guy whined. Tied to a chair with hemp rope, he wriggled, causing the bonds to cut into him and make him bleed. He had already sung a long sad tune of why he was what he was. Con didn’t care. He’d heard every excuse there was.
Traffickers were all worthless pieces of shit. Didn’t matter what or who they trafficked. Could have been drugs, people, magical artifacts, didn’t matter. They ruined lives. That was their job.
“Piece of shit,” Con said. Did he know what Con wanted to know? Didn’t seem like it. Con’s job as a retriever often led him down dark and twisting paths through the bowels of the shit-stained sewers of the world.
“I’m looking for a book,” Con said for the hundredth time. “On old magic. Has a sort of trinity looking thing on the cover.” Pictures, brief glimpses of it from aerial cameras or something faded on someone’s desk, led everyone to believe it was one of a handful of particular books hidden by the Dominion to limit witches and retain control of the entire world of magic. “
There are some books in a crate… it’s in a bunker. Haven’t cataloged them yet,” the man said, scrambling for something to tempt Con as he continued to struggle against the ropes. “Might be what you’re looking for.”
“Yeah? Where’s this bunker?” Out here, in the middle of nowhere Arizona, desert stretched for miles in every direction. It was why Con chose this location, away from everyone. His phone left at his hotel. The car was something that only halfway ran. He found it in a repo lot, and he’d hot-wired it. The car was old enough that it had none of those electronic parts or trackers featured in newer vehicles. Because getting rid of a body was the hard part of real life killing.
“I can take you there…” the man said.
“Naw,” Con said, feeling a chilly wind rise, contrary to the warm night. It always brought gooseflesh to his skin and a stir of something in his chest, like a ghost sliding through him. He wasn’t haunted, though sometimes it felt that way. “Tell me where it’s at. What do you need books for anyway? Can you even read?” The sand rose, the wind picking up tiny pieces and pelting them at the man like small shards of glass.
The man gasped, and lowered his head, spitting out dirt and sputtering.
“Freak windstorm,” Con said as he folded his arms across his chest. “Best start talking before we are both sandblasted.” The sand didn’t touch Con, a mild wind swirling around him in a protective bubble, gathering any shred of hair or skin cells of his own to him like static electricity. Years of practice, and a few specific runes tattooed into his flesh, clarified his power. He didn’t have to cast spells much anymore. He was a walking spell.
The man stammered and protested as the wind assaulted him with sand until his face was bleeding and he choked on mouthfuls of the stuff. Con waited. He’d rather be home playing games, snuggled with Sam, or fucking Luca. But he needed that book. He hadn’t failed a mission since he’d begun working for Hart and didn’t plan to start now. Getting rid of one more trafficker was a side bonus, like extra points in a video game’s secret Easter-egg quest.
“Fine,” the man wheezed through the assaulting wind. “I don’t know if the fucking book is there…” He rattled off a location, and Con let the wind die down long enough to ask a few more questions, refining. Something was still shady with this dude.
A boring incel type of guy who got off on stealing magic artifacts, selling them to the highest bidder, and shipping them overseas to be used in some war. This guy didn’t seem smart enough to build traps. Last time Con had encountered something like that, it had been over in the Middle East. Now those were some deserts. The loose sand, a thing of beauty to be used effortlessly by the wind.
“Nothing. Just let me go.”
That wasn’t happening. Con studied him another minute, watching the man continue to bleed and squirm. He offered no other information, but Con would use the lead he got, and hope it led to another, because this whole dog and pony show was for shit. He wondered briefly if Hart was fucking with him, sending him on some wild-goose chase. Con had studied the pictures; most of them old, faded, and yellowed, of photos taken half a century or more ago. They rumored it to be a book on necromancy, one of the forbidden magics.
Real? Or just a carrot to dangle in front of him? Con longed to talk to his sister again, but as a walking corpse? He didn’t wish that on anyone. Hart, the mob boss of the vampire world, made the rules and was always digging for new sorts of intelligence. A collector of magic and information rather than people. He took a lot of the darkest artifacts and books out of circulation, burying them in the depths of his vaults. Was that the plan? Con didn’t think so, but he’d also learned to not ask a lot of questions.
Author Bio
Lissa Kasey is more than just romance. She specializes in in-depth characters, detailed world building, and twisting plots to keep you clinging to the page. All stories have a side of romance, emotionally messed up protagonists and feature LGBTQA spectrum characters facing real world problems no matter how fictional the story.
| Author Website | www.lissakasey.com |