Fantasy Realism

Welcome to the original, unedited version. The balance between Light and Dark is disturbed when a human meets a vampire... Cassandra meets the father of vampires and is entranced by him and his story. As she starts falling for him and is enticed into joining him and his family of vampires to venture to a mysterious island, she is thrown into a world of magic, power, and darkness like none she has ever encountered. Dark and Light fight for power, and it's Cassandra and Lharkin who are caught in the grey. Who will win? Who will lose? And at what cost? The game between Dark and Light begins in...

Damon Ich, an introverted and lonely workaholic, lives in a paradise with power to do anything, and to go anywhere, at any time. He uses this gift to help people in need.One night, he rescues a man who is revealed to be the founder of his way of life - and suggests a rescue mission he can't refuse. The meeting and the rescue set off a train of events that shatter everything. Damon Ich realises that he isn't alone in being able to do anything. Two invincible forces collide in a torrent of bewildering, revealing and eventually catastrophic events, dramatically changing Damon Ich's life ...

While traveling to Reno through the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, The Four Wizards, a talented but unheralded cover band, encounters a thick and unusual fog. Unable to see or stop their RV, the group careens off the interstate and down a mountainside. Their vehicle plows straight into an unfortunate and strange battle, running over and killing numerous people that they mistakenly take to be cast members on a movie set. Annora St. Clair and the rest of her band soon discover that this is no movie set and that their intrusion will have real-life and death consequences. Captured, bound, and ...

Ofelia Archer has a full life...which only gets fuller when a dead body lands in her backyard. As owner of New Orleans’ premier supernatural speakeasy, Ofelia is always in the thick of things when the witch hits the fan. Zach Sully has a colorful background. As a panther shifter, he keeps his true origins secret while walking the colorful streets of the French Quarter keeping law and order. Ofelia and Sully will be forced to get over their inner misgivings and unite if they want to solve the crime...and stay alive in the process.

Sarah... "She looked almost like any typical teenage girl that you might see congregating at the mall or movie theater. She had an innocent ‘girl next door’ beauty with a smattering of tiny freckles across her nose overlooked by sparkling gem-like sapphire blue eyes. It was only when you looked closer that the Barbie image wavered a bit. First of all, this girl was ripped. She had the muscle tone of an Olympic athlete. The long legs barely covered by her brief pink pleated skirt rippled with muscle. And the arms shown off by her short sleeved white silk blouse displayed the hard, dense ...

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker, moonlighting as a dance hall girl to help pay off her mother’s Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for. Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master’s dying wish: that Ren find the man’s finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master’s soul will wander the earth forever.

In the sandy Mojave Desert, Madison is a small town on the road between nothing and nowhere. But Eldon wouldn't want to live anywhere else because in Madison, everyone gets one wish - and that wish always comes true. Some people wish for money; some people wish for love. But Eldon has seen how wishes have broken the people around him. And with the lives of his family and friends in chaos, he's left with more questions than answers. Can he make their lives better?

Marvin Deitz has some serious problems. His mob-connected landlord is strong-arming him out of his storefront. His therapist has concerns about his stability. He's compelled to volunteer at the local Children's Hospital even though it breaks his heart every week. Oh, and he's also the guilt-ridden reincarnation of Geoffroy Thérage, the French executioner who lit Joan of Arc's pyre in 1431. He's just seen a woman on a Los Angeles talk show claiming to be Joan, and absolution seems closer than it's ever been . . . but how will he find her?

Amy's grandmother, Lady Mairead, insists that Amy must read while she resides at Lennox House - but not in the usual way. It turns out that Amy is a book jumper, able to leap into a story and interact with the world inside. As thrilling as Amy's new power is, it also brings danger: someone is stealing from the books she visits, and that person may be after her life. Teaming up with fellow book jumper, Will, Amy vows to get to the bottom of the thefts - at whatever cost.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.

In isolated British Columbia, girls, mostly native, are vanishing from the sides of a notorious highway. Leo Kreutzer and his four friends are barely touched by these disappearances-until a series of mysterious and troublesome outsiders come to town. Then it seems as if the devil himself has appeared among them.

I've been living in a small town working for the vampires for the last six months. All I want is to save up enough to open an apothecary so I don't have to heal the neckers anymore. Of course, nothing in my life can be that simple. Two detectives show up at my door asking questions about a dead girl and trying to pin the murder on my employer. Next thing I know, I'm dodging fireballs in parking lots.

A killer has come to Isle, and suddenly the grand reopening of Tilly Hudgins' family hotel has gone from celebration to crime scene. Tilly Hudgins has poured her heart and soul into restoring her family's historic beachfront hotel. With her sassy familiar, Smudge, offering commentary at every turn, and her well-meaning but meddlesome Aunt Pearl "helping" in her own chaotic way, Tilly's grand reopening weekend should be perfect. That is, until a local real estate developer turns up face-down on the hotel’s lawn—very much dead and very much on Tilly's property. With the local paper ...

Warlock Anna Atticus Stone is on her final year at the academy. As head of student council, academic prodigy, and champion arena dueler, she seems the perfect pupil. In reality, Anna is grieving, overwhelmed, and so lonely she talks to herself. Above all, she fears assassination if people find out her father’s dying gift to her was a scion. Only seven of these powerful artifacts exist, one in each kingdom—a precarious balance that maintains peace.

Powers are determined by geographic birth locations, and only the rich and powerful are permitted access to prized sites. SC is the first person born in space. The punishment for unauthorized births is death. Out of fear, SC keeps his strange abilities as his darkest secret. But when his mother is kidnapped by an unknown organization, SC has no choice but to act.

WHEN TWO WORLDS GET TANGLED, TURMOIL FOLLOWS In February 1872, the big news in the sleepy Cathedral City of Wells is that a new choirmaster is about to take up post. Clarence Makepiece and his young family are given a charming house in the picturesque old street known as Vicars’ Close. What they do not realise was that they are sharing the space with the faerie Japes family. In fact, they might never have realised because the two families dwell in different realms, parallel worlds divided by a barrier which for most of the time keeps humans and faerie folk separate. Apart, that is for a ...

I was pleased to discover in this novella a memorable protagonist I first met in previous novellas from Estrada’s La Bruja del barrio Loco series. Mona, feisty and head-strong, meets her match in Sally, a fellow apprentice of time. One masters different spells than the other as they both try to earn praise from their mentor. When Mona’s life is threatened by an enemy she doesn’t know about, she and Sally must unite to defeat it. Of course, Estrada throws in an unexpected surprise from our Latin folklore and the adventure begins. Suspenseful, entertaining, and magical—this author ...

Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusual man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin. As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins from Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies.

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.

Darren Shan and his best friend, Steve, get tickets to the Cirque du Freak, a wonderfully gothic freak show featuring weird, frightening half human/half animals who interact terrifyingly with the audience. In the midst of the excitement, true terror raises its head when Steve recognizes that one of the performers - Mr. Crepsley - is a vampire! Steve confronts the vampire after the show finishes - but his motives are surprising!