Showing posts with label #10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #10. Show all posts

Sunday, 7 January 2018

New snippet of "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews






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Sunday, 10 December 2017

New snippets of "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews

I knew the magic was up, because my aunt exploded into our bedroom and roared, “The child is missing!”
I sat bolt upright on the bed.  Curran groaned. I realized I was still naked from last night and pulled a blanket over my chest.
“Knocking,” I told her.  “Privacy.”
She glared at us.  “This is no time to have sex!  Your son is missing!  I can’t feel him.”
Kill me, somebody. “He isn’t missing.  He’s across his street with his other grandmother. You can’t feel him, because I strengthened the ward on George’s house to mask his presence.”
She squinted at me.  “Are you sure?”
“Yes.  I went there yesterday to check on him around one in the morning. I saw him sleeping.  Grendel is with him. There is enough werebears in that house to hold off an army.”
Erra considered it.  “Very well. Also Redacted and some blond woman are in the car in your driveway, talking.  You should probably do something about it.”
She turned and swept down the hallway, right past the remnants of the door she’d broken.
I turned over and bumped my head on Curran’s chest a few times.  “Why me?”
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Wednesday, 22 November 2017

New snippets of "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews


















That done, I sat Conlan down, got his fire truck out of storage, and chanted it into life.  The truck was a gift from Jim and Dali for his first birthday.  Large enough for a small child to sit in and climb on, it had a tiny enchanted water engine, which powered lights and a ladder.  It must’ve cost them an arm and a leg.  Conlan adored the truck.  He showed no interest in riding on it, but he liked to climb on the roof, which usually took him a solid five minutes and multiple tries.  Once he ascended, he would wave his arms and make strange noises.  Sometimes he fell asleep on top of it. Like his dad, my son enjoyed being in high places.







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Monday, 30 October 2017

A new snippet of Magic Triumphs (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews


Mercenary Kate Daniels must risk all to protect everything she holds dear in this epic, can't-miss entry in the thrilling #1 New York Times bestselling urban fantasy series.

 Kate has come a long way from her origins as a loner taking care of paranormal problems in post-Shift Atlanta. She's made friends and enemies. She's found love and started a family with Curran Lennart, the former Beast Lord. But her magic is too strong for the power players of the world to let her be.
Kate and her father, Roland, currently have an uneasy truce, but when he starts testing her defenses again, she knows that sooner or later, a confrontation is inevitable. The Witch Oracle has begun seeing visions of blood, fire, and human bones. And when a mysterious box is delivered to Kate's doorstep, a threat of war from the ancient enemy who nearly destroyed her family, she knows their time is up.

Kate Daniels sees no other choice but to combine forces with the unlikeliest of allies. She knows betrayal is inevitable. She knows she may not survive the coming battle. But she has to try.

For her child.

For Atlanta.

For the world. 


EXCERPTS

























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Tuesday, 19 September 2017

EXCERPTS from "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews

Kate has come a long way from her origins as a loner taking care of paranormal problems in post-Shift Atlanta. She’s made friends and enemies. She’s found love and started a family with Curran Lennart, the former Beast Lord. But her magic is too strong for the power players of the world to let her be.
Kate and her father, Roland, currently have an uneasy truce, but when he starts testing her defenses again, she knows that sooner or later, a confrontation is inevitable. The Witch Oracle has begun seeing visions of blood, fire, and human bones. And when a mysterious box is delivered to Kate’s doorstep, a threat of war from the ancient enemy who nearly destroyed her family, she knows their time is up.
Kate Daniels sees no other choice but to combine forces with the unlikeliest of allies. She knows betrayal is inevitable. She knows she may not survive the coming battle. But she has to try.
For her child.
For Atlanta.
For the world.

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My son shrugged the shreds of his clothes off himself and showed Robert his fangs. “Rawrrawrrr!”
“Is he challenging me?” Robert eyes sparkled.
I put my hand over my face.
“Rawrwrwa!”
“That’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Conlan,” Curran said, putting some growl into his voice.  “Come here.”
“Rawr.”
Curran got up and strode toward Conlan. My kid lunged sideways, but Curran was too fast.  His hand snapped out, and he lifted Conlan by the scruff of his neck.  “No.”
Conlan settled into his father’s arms, eyeing Robert like he was a cobra.  If we survived my father and I got to raise him, I was in for a hell of a time.
“I want one,” Robert declared. 

She thought about it.  “Who’s going to be watching him?”
“Adora.”
Dali wrinkled her nose.  “Is she capable of watching him?  You know how she is.  What if she sees a butterfly?”
Being former sahanu had severely limited Adora’s exposure to the outside world.  Simple things fascinated her.  She once disappeared for twenty-four hours on her own birthday, because she saw some river otter babies in the creek and followed them through the woods to watch them frolic.  We’d frantically combed the city for the entire night only to have her show up in the morning covered in mud and deliriously happy. My father’s assassins didn’t get out much.
“I will pay her.”
A few months ago Adora figured out that when she did a job for the Guild, she earned money, which she could then spend however she pleased. After she’d repeatedly shown the money to me, and I confirmed several times that it was, indeed, her own money, she went out shopping for the first time and we got to find out what $1,200 of candy looked like.  She ate candy for three days straight, then spent the reminder of the week on our couch with a stomachache. Now she worked as a merc, with the highest job completion ratio in the Guild.  She took her jobs absurdly seriously.  Through rain, shine, sleet, and hail, purple corrosive slime bubbling up from the sewers, or mysterious black snow that sparked when it hit metal, Adora would get it done. Dali knew that.
“Okay,” Dali said.  Her tone told me she didn’t like it.
That was okay.  I didn’t like great many things, but universe didn’t give a crap, so I didn’t see why she should bend on Dali’s account.
“You will take the best care of him, right?”
“No, I will drop him into the nearest sewer and throw dirt on his head.”

Luther sighed and picked up the ledger.  “Item number 43.  Logged by Joyce Cunningham.  Description: squished-looking doohickey.  Observed magical effect: Turns stabby.”
Brilliant.
I walked into the circle, removed the lid from the plastic bin, and peered at the contents. A dented sphere about the size of a basketball and made of twisted metal strips lay inside.  They didn’t even bother packing it in the dust.  I thought the plastic bin felt kind of light.
I turned the bin on its side, giving it a little nudge, and the sphere rolled onto the floor.  It didn’t look like anything special.
“Where was this found?”
Luther checked the ledge.  “Unicorn Lane.”
Oh boy. Long and narrow, Unicorn Lane retained power even during tech waves, as if someone drove a colossal dagger through the heart of Atlanta’s former downtown and the wound kept bleeding wild magic.  Anything coming out of there had to be bad.
The sphere lay there, perfectly innocent.
“Right then. Deploy the diagnostic rod,” Luther said.
I retreated to the far edge of the circle, picked up the seven-foot-long metal stick that used to be a pool brush handle, and poked the sphere with it.
Poke.
Poke.
Po—
The sphere’s metal strips unrolled, sprouting metallic thorns that looked like fangs, and lunged at the stick, wrapping around it.  Metal screeched as the thorn-fangs ground at it. Sparks flew.
Luther jumped off his chair, grabbed the nearest emergency crate half-filled with magic dust, and dropped it just outside the circle line.  I swung the stick with the screeching metal thing at the top and forced it into the magic dust.  Luther yanked the other crate and dumped the dust from it onto the metal sphere, burying it. I turned the stick, shaking it back and forth.
“Let go. Let go, you damn thing.”
Suddenly it came free.  I pulled the stick out, and Luther slammed the plastic lid onto the crate and locked it in place.
I exhaled.
Luther squinted at the crate.  “Twenty bucks.”
“Eighty.”
“What?”
“I can sell it for a hundred at least.”
“What possible use could it have?”
“Home defense.”
Luther glared at me.  “You’re going to let this thing out there with the general public?”
“Hey, I’m a merc, remember?  Of the two of us you’re the one with the duty to safeguard said public.  I’m just after the money.  Make me an offer.”
Luther opened his mouth and sneezed.
I froze.  An odd green dust was drifting through the room.
“Luther, are you seeing this?”
He didn’t answer.
“Luther?”
He straightened, his eyes blank behind his glasses.
The curtain of dust floated around him, licked the salt boundary of the circle, and stayed on the other side of it. I’d put a fair amount of power into that ward.  Luther could probably break it, but he would have to pour a lot of magic into it.  He could also simply walk into it, since I made it open to humans, but the dust didn’t like it.
Sarrat rested just under the table, out of my reach.  Getting to my sword meant walking through the dust, which wasn’t a good idea considering Luther’s glassy stare.  Running to the door was out of the question. I couldn’t let it contaminate the rest of the Guild.
Luther didn’t move.  The green dust grew thicker. I could barely see the walls now.  It shrouded the entire room in a soft diaphanous veil. The circle remained clear.
Luther opened his mouth.  A puff of dust broke free from his lips.
“Traitor,” he said, his voice sibilant.

Outside the car, Atlanta crawled by.  Magic drenched the city.  Ever since I claimed it, the invisible currents gained definition.  If I concentrated, I could sense them ebbing and flowing, like the waters of a sea.
“No!”
Curran took his gaze off the road to glance in the rearview mirror for a second. “You okay there, buddy?”
“No!”
“He just likes the sound of the new word,” I told him.
“He needs a venison leg bone to gnaw on,” Curran said.  “They were my favorite.”
Kill me somebody.  “Can it be a cooked leg bone?”
“He is a shapeshifter,” Curran said. “We don’t have to worry about bacteria and diseases.”
“I would feel better if it was cooked.”
Curran studied me for a moment, reached over, and squeezed my hand. “What’s bothering you about this?  Did you want him to stay human?”
“No.  I love him whoever he is. I spent thirteen months worrying that he will stop breathing at night, or get sick, or hurt himself somehow, and raw deer femurs don’t go along with that.”
“Cooked bones splinter.  He will hurt himself.”
“Then maybe we can skip the bones altogether.”
Curran turned onto Jeremiah Street. “I let him eat a mouse in the forest yesterday.”
“You what?”
“He caught it himself.  I’m not going to take his kill away from him.”
Why me?
Curran leaned forward.  “Is that who I think it is?”
I peered through the windshield.  A tall broad-shouldered man sat on the steps in front of our office.  He wore a white T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and heavy work boots.  A worn Atlanta Braves cap sat on his short brown hair.
“It’s just Teddy Jo.”
Curran gave Teddy Jo a dark look.  I reached over and squeezed his hand. “What’s bothering you about this?  Is it because he’s Thanatos, the angel of death?”
He bared his teeth at me.
I stuck my tongue out.
The cart in front of us stopped, blocking the street.
“It’s because whenever he shows up, he drags you off and then you come back beat up.”
“I always come back beat up.  I don’t see what Teddy Jo has to do with it.”

“He just fell from those clouds.  How is he still alive?”
“He is a Suanni.”
I blinked.  According to Chinese myths, the dragon had nine sons, each with a different creature. Suanni was the hybrid of a lion and the dragon, a being of fire and the closest thing to a dragon we had.
“Julie.  He’s been to the house. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She waved her hands.  “It didn’t come up.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t come up?  The next time you bring a half-dragon to the house, I want to know about it.  That’s the kind of essential information I should have.”
“He’s just a guy I go to school with.  We don’t make a big deal about it.”
Argh.


“He’s landing,” Derek announced.
Ahead Teddy Jo swooped down. For a moment he hung silhouetted against the bright sky, his black wings open wide, his feet only a few yards above the road, a dark angel born in a time when people left blood as an offering to buy their dearly departed safe passage to the afterlife.
“Show off,” Derek murmured.
“Green doesn’t look good on you.”
Teddy Jo lowered himself on the road. His wings folded and vanished into a puff of black smoke.
“Do you know what he is when he’s flying?” Derek asked.
“No, enlighten me.”
Derek smiled.  It was a very small smile, baring only an edge of a fang.  “He’s a nice big target.  You can shoot him right out of the sky.  Where is he going to hide?  He’s six feet tall and has a wingspan the size of a small airplane.”  Derek chuckled quietly.
You could take the wolf out of the woods, but he would always be a wolf.

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Tuesday, 18 July 2017

Excerpts from "Wildfire" (Hidden Legacy #3) and Magic Triumphs (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews

"Wildfire" (Hidden Legacy #3) by Ilona Andrews
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 "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews
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Saturday, 15 July 2017

Excerpts from "Magic Triumphs" (Kate Daniels #10) by Ilona Andrews

Outside the car, Atlanta crawled by.  Magic drenched the city.  Ever since I claimed it, the invisible currents gained definition.  If I concentrated, I could sense them ebbing and flowing, like the waters of a sea.
“No!”
Curran took his gaze off the road to glance in the rearview mirror for a second. “You okay there, buddy?”
“No!”
“He just likes the sound of the new word,” I told him.
“He needs a venison leg bone to gnaw on,” Curran said.  “They were my favorite.”
Kill me somebody.  “Can it be a cooked leg bone?”
“He is a shapeshifter,” Curran said. “We don’t have to worry about bacteria and diseases.”
“I would feel better if it was cooked.”
Curran studied me for a moment, reached over, and squeezed my hand. “What’s bothering you about this?  Did you want him to stay human?”
“No.  I love him whoever he is. I spent thirteen months worrying that he will stop breathing at night, or get sick, or hurt himself somehow, and raw deer femurs don’t go along with that.”
“Cooked bones splinter.  He will hurt himself.”
“Then maybe we can skip the bones altogether.”
Curran turned onto Jeremiah Street. “I let him eat a mouse in the forest yesterday.”
“You what?”
“He caught it himself.  I’m not going to take his kill away from him.”
Why me?
Curran leaned forward.  “Is that who I think it is?”
I peered through the windshield.  A tall broad-shouldered man sat on the steps in front of our office.  He wore a white T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and heavy work boots.  A worn Atlanta Braves cap sat on his short brown hair.
“It’s just Teddy Jo.”
Curran gave Teddy Jo a dark look.  I reached over and squeezed his hand. “What’s bothering you about this?  Is it because he’s Thanatos, the angel of death?”
He bared his teeth at me.
I stuck my tongue out.
The cart in front of us stopped, blocking the street.
“It’s because whenever he shows up, he drags you off and then you come back beat up.”
“I always come back beat up.  I don’t see what Teddy Jo has to do with it.”




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Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Snippet from Silence Fallen (Mercy Thomspon #10) by Patricia Briggs



Mercy has escaped her captors, and is doing her best to flee. She knows very little about her enemies, and has stolen a few clothes and an e-reader with internet connectivity. Her panicked flight has brought her to Prague. With some trepidation she enters a small internet cafe . . .

In Prague, apparently, they do not use euros. They use something called koruna. Also in Prague—or at least in the little wifi restaurant in Prague—people are kind.
There were ten people in the restaurant, including the staff: five Czech women, three Czech men, and two Russian tourists, both women. We spoke roughly a dozen languages between us, though I might have missed one or two, but no one spoke English.
One of the Russians spoke a little German. She didn’t have quite as much as I did, though to be fair, my German tends to be Zee German—what is not centered around cars and things mechanical is closer to the language spoken in Iceland (which hasn’t changed in the last thousand years) than anything spoken in modern Berlin. So maybe her German was fine, and mine was the problem.
I think she understood that I had gotten separated from my tour—which is the story I made up on the spot. My bus, I explained, had gone on to Milan with my luggage and things. I was going to use my e‑reader to get on the Internet and call home. Home would then relay information for me.
It was actually useful that none of them could speak to me because it reduced the lies I had to tell them. And also made it harder for them to offer me a place to stay—which is what I think one of the Czech men was offering. No one appeared worried, so I don’t think he was offering me what it looked like he was trying to.
They (collectively, it felt like) took my twenty-euro note and, after consulting a cell phone for the current exchange rate, carefully counted out 550 koruna in various bills and coins. The waitress brought me out a soft drink and a thick sandwich, waving away my attempts to pay her.
I pulled out my e‑reader (stolen) and turned it on. There had been no charging cable, or I’d have taken it, and the power bar on the screen told me I’d have to be fast—which was interesting with an e‑reader that probably had less than half the computing power of Adam’s watch. Setting up a generic e‑mail account at one of the big anonymous servers—CoyoteGirl was taken as were several variants—took up too much time. I needed something that would cue the pack without attracting attention. I didn’t have to just worry about the vampire, I was pretty sure that various government agencies were doing their best to keep track of our correspondences. 
1COYOTELOST worked.

I wrote a short e‑mail that said:

Dear People,
Prague is lovely this time of year. You should visit.

M

I sent it to everyone in the pack (and a few out of it, like Zee’s son Tad and Tony) whose e‑mail addresses I remembered. Then I turned the e‑reader off to conserve its battery. I ate the sandwich and drank the soda.
Just before I turned it off, the e‑reader had told me it had 20 percent power and I should plug it in or it might shut itself off. I knew I should leave the café, wait a few hours, and come back. That’s what I’d planned to do.
But the lure of contacting home was too strong.
I told myself I needed to know about the Prague werewolves. If I could round up some support from them, it could be useful. If not, then I could hop a bus for somewhere else and try again. Waiting until later might not be practical, I reasoned. I’d run across the scent of three different werewolves on the way here. In a city the size of Prague, with only one pack, that either meant that the pack was centered in Old Town or that they were hunting me.
Even if they didn’t know about me, the kidnapped by the Lord of Night but subsequently escaped mate of the Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, coyotes don’t smell like dogs—not quite. Eventually, if I kept running around on four feet, they’d get interested and track me down. I had gotten lucky last night, and I didn’t like to rely on luck. I needed to know if the Prague werewolves were tied to the Lord of Night right this minute.
Really.
I turned on the e‑reader and checked my e‑mail.
I had one response from Benjamin.Shaw@IT.PNNL.gov, it said:
OMF**KING G*D*MN Flyingf**kingMonkeys. WHERE? Are you safe? How did you get away? DID you get a f**king way?
The asterisks were his, apparently his work had had a discussion about swear words in professional e‑mails with him. Being Ben, he’d actually increased the swearwords, but added asterisks. It made me laugh even as my eyes watered with relief. Of course Ben would be checking his e‑mail—computers were his job.
Prague. As ever. As usual. Yes. What can you tell me about our coworkers in Prague? Considering dropping in for consult.
Ben was from Great Britain originally, so he might actually have more insight into the werewolves here than I did.
Hairyb*ttbunnies, girl. Good for you. Prague boss is dangerous bast*rd. Has a real h**don for the boss at your first job. No one but the two of them knows why that I ever heard—and there has been a lot of discussion about it. So someone is suppressing information. It wasn’t helped when we came out of the closet—​ ­something our colleague in Prague was very unhappy about. Can you avoid?
Okay, so there was bad blood between the Alpha here and . . . the boss at my first job. If I called the werewolves coworkers, then my first job would be the werewolf pack I grew up in. So Bran. Well, that could explain why I thought there was an issue with the Alpha here. I might have overheard a conversation sometime. It wouldn’t have been important to me at the time, but I’d filed some alert concerning the Prague Alpha.
Is he working with the Italians?
E‑mailing back and forth wasn’t as good as texting. The anonymous e‑mail server took its own sweet time downloading.
No. But the next closest company, in Brno, is. They were a part of Gévaudan and are now running scared of Prague. Am on phone with Sam’s brother right now. Sam’s brother says that Prague CEO, Libor, might get a kick out of helping you as a One‑Up‑Manship move on Sam’s father—and because he hates Italians more than anyone. He owns bakery in Old Town. Don’t know address. My boss is headed to Italy. Does he know you are visiting Prague?
Ben was on the phone to Charles, the Marrok’s son who was, among a lot of other things, an information guru. If he said Libor was a good bet, I’d take it.
He knows I’m on my own, and he can find me via GPS if he needs to find me.
He’d know that GPS was our mate bond because that was one thing it was pretty consistently good at. The e‑reader gave me another warning.
Out of battery on borrowed e‑reader, sorry.
I sent the e‑mail, then the e‑reader died. I wasn’t sure if it had had time to upload my last message or not. I turned the device off and slipped it back into my backpack. As I got ready to go, one of the men—I think he was the restaurant manager—brought a bag of food to the table and gave it to me.
He was an older man with kind eyes, a rumbly voice, and he smelled of cigars and coffee. He said something solemnly as if he were making a vow, reaching out and gently brushing my bruised cheek. Behind him, the older woman who had brought out my free lunch wiped away a tear.
I had no idea what he said, but my nose could smell the memory of his sorrow and his sincerity now. I felt like a fraud for a moment, deluding these people into believing I needed help. And then I remembered that I’d been violently kidnapped, hauled to Italy and was now wandering Prague with one stolen set of clothes, 550 koruna, which translated to a little more than twenty dollars, and a defunct e‑reader. Maybe I did need their help.
I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. The whole place burst into applause.
People are pretty cool.

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