Search Results for: they-never-come-back

Xhea has no magic. Born without the power that everyone else takes for granted, Xhea is an outcast-no way to earn a living, buy food, or change the life that fate has dealt her. Yet she has a unique talent: the ability to see ghosts and the tethers that bind them to the living world, which she uses to scratch out a bare existence in the ruins beneath the City’s floating Towers.

When a rich City man comes to her with a young woman’s ghost tethered to his chest, Xhea has no idea that this ghost will change everything. The ghost, Shai, is a Radiant, a rare person who generates so much power that the Towers use it to fuel their magic, heedless of the pain such use causes. Shai’s home Tower is desperate to get the ghost back and force her into a body-any body-so that it can regain its position, while the Tower’s rivals seek the ghost to use her magic for their own ends. Caught between a multitude of enemies and desperate to save Shai, Xhea thinks herself powerless-until a strange magic wakes within her. Magic dark and slow, like rising smoke, like seeping oil. A magic whose very touch brings death.

With two extremely strong female protagonists, Radiant is a story of fighting for what you believe in and finding strength that you never thought you had.

THE BALANCE BETWEEN LAW AND CHAOS has long been maintained by the rulers of Béarn, but the death of the current king has enabled the elves to magically substitute one of their own on the throne. And, under the leadership of Dh’arlo’mé, the dark elves are preparing to claim their long-sought vengeance on mankind.
But when the small party which set out to find and bring back the last possible heir to the throne returns to Béarn, Dh’arlo’mé realizes that even magic and murder combined will not be enough to overturn the balance. Now his solution must hinge on Béarn’s burden and treasure: the Staffs of Law and Chaos. Within these plain-pieces of wood dwell the essences of Law and Chaos, each eternally seeking its Champion to destroy the other.
Lured into one Staff’s power, Dh’arlo’mé seeks to seduce the mortals into championing the other. And with all the worlds teetering on the brink of doom, it falls to Colbey Calistinsson – son of the god Thor and the greatest of Renshai warriors – to select that Champion. If he chooses wrongly, all life will come to an end. Yet even success will come at a high price. For the only way to insure that this danger can never arise again, is for both Champions and Staffs to be totally annihilated.

Johnny Mays has the moral conscience of a selfish child in the frame of a plain-clothes cop. The city is his playground, the rest of us his toys. He likes to find out where we work, and where we live, and what will scare us most. And Johnny never had a toy he didn’t break.

But Johnny starts a car chase, and he pushes it too far. Soon they’re fishing for his body at the foot of a dam, and his partner Nick Frazier has been left behind. They were friends, once, a long time ago. Nick had hoped that he might save Johnny.

Johnny’s last words still echo in Nick’s mind: “I’m going to remember this,” he said, a dark fire in his eyes. “I’m coming back for you.”

Then the killings start. Killings of people Johnny didn’t like. And Johnny’s car is dredged up, empty.

The Far Traveler was hardly the sort of starship to use in the study of lost space colonies. Lost colonies were likely to be desperate, eccentric and otherwise unappreciative. And The Far Traveler was a rich woman’s toy, constructed of gold and directed by an omniscient, dictatorial and feminine computer known as Big Sister.

John Grimes had become that golden vessel’s captain. A captain in name only because nobody could talk back to Big Sister or the haughty beauty who owned everything aboard. But Grimes was a man of many resources and lost space colonies were placed that did not observe the civilized rules. You could be sure, therefore, that the man known as the Commodore Hornblower of Outer Space would be likely to come through okay, even if the ladies – mechanical and physical – never expected him to!

There are some parts of the world where change comes slowly. There are other placed where it scarcely comes at all. In really remote areas time stands still. The passing of the centuries means no more than the passing of clouds across a leaden sky.

In the wilder regions of eastern Europe and the dark forests of Transylvania ancient derelict castles moulder away in medieval gloom. There are deadly secrets behind the decaying walls.

Karina was running away from the Secret Police. She accidentally stumbled upon the hidden headquarters of a coven of witches, warlocks and necromancers and as a result she found herself pursued by a thing that was not of this world. Karina had three desperate problems; to rescue her lover from the Secret Police; to save her brother from the coven; and to escape from the inescapable.

When Sara Dacre comes across a large red pendant at a twenty cent jewellery stall she is tempted to buy it – especially when she bumps into her friend Gerry Hone, who persuades her that it will brighten up her old grey taffeta.

But soon she finds herself at the centre of some strange events. On leaving the shop she and Gerry witness the scene of an accident – but nobody can agree what happened. And when Gerry takes her to an automat for coffee he goes to the counter to order – and never comes back …

‘Explosive’ Birmingham Post

Cobwebs hung in weird, grotesque festoons from the vaulted roof. There was a strange odour in the ancient cellar. A bent figure crouches over forbidden books and mixes indescribably strange ingredients in a cauldron. The cauldron bubbles and foul fumes arise. The alchemist transfers the secret formula to a flask. It travels carefully and ceremoniously from flash to retort and back again. Unnatural things happen in the flask… terrifying things. Suddenly a human figure appears, yet it is not human in all respects. Has the alchemist made this strange, frightening thing, or has it come from realms beyond? The alchemist finds himself involved in a series of breathtaking psychic adventures such as he had never imagined possible even in his wildest dreams.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a modern young professional, proud of her legal skills but weary of childcare, of senior law partners who put the moves on her, and of her deadbeat ex-husband. Following a ghastly day of dealing with all three, she falls into bed asleep – and awakens the next morning to find herself in a different life, that of a widowed tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D.

Delighted at first to be away from corrupt, sexist modern America, she quickly begins to realise that her new world is as complicated as her old one. Violence, dirt, and pain are everywhere – and yet many of the people she comes to know are as happy as those she knew in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Slavery is a commonplace, gladiators kill for sport, and drunkenness is taken for granted – but everyday people somehow manage to face life with humour and good will.

No quitter, Nicole manages to adapt to her new life despite endless worry about the fate of her children “back” in the twentieth century. Then plague sweeps through Carnuntum, followed by brutal war. Amid pain and loss on a level she had never imagined, Nicole finds reserves of strength she had never known.

Gifted novelist Fowler (Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season) delights in the arcane, and, as a result, these 15 clever tales are occasionally puzzling but never dull.

In the long title story, temperance activist Carry Nation is resurrected in the 1990s (“We’re talking about a very troubled, very big woman,” says one shaken barman to reporters) and becomes such a nuisance that the DEA is forced to dispatch her with voodoo. Other plots are only slightly less outrageous in conceit. In “Lieserl,” a lovesick madwoman dupes Albert Einstein into believing he has a daughter; in “The Faithful Companion at Forty,” Tonto admits to second thoughts about his biggest life choice (“But for every day, for your ordinary life, a mask is only going to make you more obvious. There’s an element of exhibitionism in it”). “The Travails” offers a peek at the one-sided correspondence of Mary Gulliver, who wants Lemuel to come home already and help out around the house. The homage to Swift makes sense, for, when Fowler doesn’t settle for amusing her readers, she makes a lively satirist. The extraterrestrials who appear in her stories (whether the inscrutably sadistic monsters in “Duplicity” or the members of a seminar studying late-1960s college behavior in “The View from Venus: A Case Study”) seem stand-ins for the author herself, who, in elegant and witty prose, cultivates the eye of a curious alien and, along the way, unfolds eccentric plots that keep the pages turning.

Contents:
Black Glass (1991), Contention (1986), Shimabara (1995), The Elizabeth Complex (1996), Go Back (1998), The Travails (1998), Lieserl (1990), Letters from Home (1987), Duplicity (1989), The Faithful Companion at Forty (1987), The Brew (1995), Lily Red (1988), The Black Fairy’s Curse (1997), The View from Venus (1986), Game Night at the Fox and Goose (1989)

Kaeti branches out, moves farther from her beloved London. In the process she makes a whole range of new, intriguing friends; and lands herself in some scrapes startling even by her standards. The shadows she sprays on the pavement of a Thames Valley town come alive to haunt her; later, the magic Tiger Sweater she acquires does more than haunt the subjects of her wrath. While for a time her latest experience of France also looks like being her last. In a Thames-side hotel she conjures Hell on request; on a deserted airfield, and in the Green Palace, Glasgow, Hell returns to haunt her. In the West Country, she meets an eighteenth century benefactress; or is she? Certainly the experience lands Kaeti in hospital; for a while it seems she’s about to cross the Bridge of Dreams herself. Finally she circles back to London’ but a London neither you nor she has never seen…

But it’s all in a day’s work for Kaeti, the Bow Bells actress who is in touch with things magical and eternal.

When the cities left Earth, they exchanged a simple environment for one of constant, sometimes shattering change. The Universe was littered with cultures in every conceivable stage of development. Only the iron hand of the germanium-backed economy and occasional interventions by the Earth police imposed some kind of order on the spaceways. Even John Amalfi never got used to the life – and he had been mayor of New York for nearly five hundred years now.

During the day a blazing and merciless sun beat down on “the boy” and at night a friendless and cold darkness enveloped him. It was a bleak and lonely countryside over which he had been wandering for ten years. A rare tree, bird or wild animal was the only life he encountered during his desolate trek through his young years of roaming. Infrequently, he was fortunate enough to find shelter and food in the shops of deserted villages; otherwise he foraged what he could from the nearly barren land. Contact with other humans was his innermost and greatest fear.

But the day came when his curiosity overcame his sensibilities of self-preservation and he was drawn to the sound of a great wailing not far from a place where he had come to rest.

Form that moment on his whole existence took on a radical change. His wanderings became a kaleidoscope of adventures, emotions, and responsibilities – never static, forever mobile, and potentially dangerous. There were moments when it would have been easier to turn his back, return to old ways, but somehow he knew this was an impossibility. He accepted his new fate, but still feared the greatest of all commitments until it was too late for him.

This fantasy adventure will not fail to excite and stir in every reader memories and emotions of seemingly forgotten times and moments.