Showing results by narrator "J.S. Arquin" in All Categories

After a player-led event turns his once peaceful town into a band of ravenous monsters, Hirrus obtains a sentience usually unobtainable by non-player characters. It might be a gift of the gods, or a mistake, but Hirrus doesn’t care. It means he can track down and find the players responsible and stop them from doing it again.

Jason is grief-stricken after his loss and considers giving up, but his community of tenacious survivors needs his leadership. The threats to the group are growing, and they must abandon their compound to return to a setting from their past. In the darkened, chaotic world, the weak and the suffering look to Jason's fighters for hope, but are they up to the challenge?

Six weeks ago, Lieutenant Justin Spencer was just another reservist in the Coalition Defense Force. Becoming a lifer wasn’t in the cards—until the League of Sol brutally attacked the Terran Coalition. With several pivotal battles now under his belt, friends and strangers alike call Justin a hero. But he finds the accolades difficult to swallow when the night only intensifies images from his first taste of combat.

Garran Holt is a troubled young man. Unable to tolerate his self-destructive ways, his mother sells him into indentured servitude as part of work crew building the King Remiel’s new trade road. When mercenaries sent to disrupt the road’s construction attacks his work camp, Garran discovers an inner power capable of turning him into a warrior of unparalleled ability. Recognizing Garran as being one of the transcended (a fighter able to slip into the swifter currents of time), he is trained as an agent, one of the kingdom’s elite spies.

Lasadi doesn't like strangers on her ship, but she'll need a bigger crew if she's going to steal a mysterious artifact from a dead pirate's long-lost space station. She takes a chance on a charming grifter named Raj, along with a skilled hacker and her genius little brother. And it's...nice? If Lasadi isn't careful, she's going to start enjoying having a crew aboard. Raj's last bit of luck capsized right before he ran into Lasadi, and this job could finally get his life back on track—as long as Lasadi never learns the truth about his past.

The second wave of the Siberian Flu catches the country completely unprepared. Instead of killing the old and frail, the young and healthy are dropping . . . in hours, not days. Kate, a new doctor, will sacrifice everything to break her and her sister free from a controlling stepfather and a dead-end small town existence. Moments from landing the critical job she needs, St. Louis falls apart around her.

Madison only joined the Koyesta Online's early access because her brother begged her. Of course, the fact that they're awarding brand-new cryptocurrency to the early players for in-game actions might have something to do with it too. Thrust inside the world's most immersive fantasy VRMMORPG, Madison, her brother, and two cousins find themselves in some backwater little town. Determined to make the most of it, they set out on a series of adventures and stumble upon hidden ruins and a secret quest capable of reshaping the face of the game before it's even been officially released.

Home is on everyone’s minds, but none so much as General David Cohen. The weight of the universe grows heavier with each passing week as the CSV Lion of Judah searches the Sextans B galaxy for answers to how they ended up four million light-years off course. But all they find are more questions as one solar system after another turns up empty.

What once was his downfall becomes their saving grace. Hard-fought skirmishes leave Captain James Henry and the Shadow Wolf limping into Lusitania’s port. Payday awaits once the undercover operative is safely delivered planet-side to brief authorities on the League of Sol’s activities within neutral territory. But Jim learned long ago never to take anything at face value.

Captain James Henry has finally gained what he long desired - redemption. Yet not even his restored military honors and reputation can wipe away the bitter taste in his mouth after 15 years weighed down by guilt and shame. Before deep-seated betrayal sends Jim to the bottom of another whiskey bottle, the past again rears its ugly head when the Shadow Wolf’s first mate is kidnapped by an unholy enemy alliance. To rescue her from their clutches, Jim swallows his injured pride and accepts assistance from an unlikely source.

Gage Cross was a retired assassin from another world. A world he only vaguely remembered as Earth. Since being dropped onto this new world as a boy, he’d become one of the best assassins on this planet. He’d left the life of an assassin behind—given all of it up for a woman named Alani and his daughter, Shaunna. He was supposed to live a simple, peaceful life. Then his old life caught up with him. Assassins came. They burned down his house. They killed his wife and child. Now, Gage will find the person responsible and make them pay—and no one will stop him.

Sex. Horror. Discomfort. In five stories and one poem, you'll find questions and answers, and you might learn something about yourself along the way. Something uncomfortable. Something dark. Come on in and join us. Lean back, open up, and let us take a look at that tickle. We're sure it's nothing serious. Just...something in your mouth.

Captain James Henry is caught between a rock and a hard place - again. Merchant ships operating in neutral space near the Terran Coalition and the League of Sol are disappearing without a trace. The latest report has something the others didn’t: a survivor. When news reaches the planet Lusitania during a cargo offload, Captain Henry and the Shadow Wolf’s crew are hired to extract the surviving operative before she’s silenced and the information she has is lost.

It's been eleven years since high-powered attorney Sarah Morgan defended her husband, Adam, against the charge of murdering his mistress. Sarah haslong since moved on, starting a family with her new husband, Bob Miller, and changing careers. After discovering Bob engaged in a one-night stand, Sarah wastes no time filing for divorce. However, amid their ugly separation, new DNA evidence is uncovered in the case against Adam, forcing the police to reopen the investigation and putting Sarah right back in the spotlight.

Valora Keri’s problems are multiplying like moles. Every time she whacks one, three more pop up. First, a good friend turns up dead under mysterious circumstances. While Val is busy trying to figure out why, witch hunters show up at her door, demanding she stand trial for crimes committed years ago. She needs time to sort it out, but instead she’s coerced into a new job she doesn’t want, forcing her to rub shoulders with powerful people. Add in a dash of necromancer and a pinch of pissed off vampire queen, and Val is in a stew bubbling with all the ingredients for disaster.

The Widow never rests. She takes the ship Dominion-427 across the galaxy to chase down her ex-husband and his friends. Athanasia and Glaxu duel on far-flung planets, and double-cross one another again and again, until someone dies. And Valentinian keeps running. Dominion-427 - the fourth novel in the Shadow of the Dominion series - puts friends in danger while continuing to explore this fascinating new galaxy of characters!

When Duncan MacGuire sets out to help a slave escape the Great Houses of the South, little does he know they'd send a demon to capture them. Set in the Boston Metaphysical Society alternate history universe, this short story is a prequel to the award winning novel, Boston Metaphysical Society: A Storm of Secrets and the popular graphic novel, Boston Metaphysical Society.

Valentinian won a treasure map in a crooked card game. Its call brings him back to the planet Kryuome. There, he and the crew must outsmart the locals, the mutants, as well as the Widow aboard her new warship, in order to uncover a secret two thousand years in the making. Or die trying.

Martial arts master Lin Su Yoshimura is a force to be reckoned with. Now in the US after being shunned as a mixed-race Chinese-Japanese girl, then kidnapped as a teen and sold into the sex-trafficking trade, Lin Su is rescued from an abusive New York pimp by one of the city’s top-level cocaine dealers. Navigating both back alleys and opulent venues with lethal grace, Lin Su finds her way forward through the underbelly of the city, as she wrestles with the horrors of her past.

When Valora Keri was six years old, she was tired of being bullied. So she did what any kid in her shoes would do: She freed a cat-demon in exchange for the power to fight back. She might have accidentally killed her mother in the process. Since then, she’s tried to balance the scales by living a good life in post-collapse San Francisco, tending bar in a seedy club and acting as protector for the girls who work there.