Guest Post | The World of Hellbound by Alexa Piper

March 11, 2022March 10, 2022 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

Today, we have Alexa Piper on a visit and she’s here to tell us about her Hellbound series. Welcome, Alexa!

The writer brain converts whatever it can get its synapses on into story, into whole worlds. One of the ones my writer brain especially enjoyed creating is Lucy’s and Nelly’s world in Hellbound (don’t let the names fool you; they are both guys, and one’s the Devil. He explains why he goes by Lucy in book 1.)

Hellbound is a world in which magic is a part of reality and everyday life. People know it exists. There is fear and bigotry toward magic users, but that doesn’t feature very prominently into the plot of this series. There are also gods or immortals, and their powers differ quite a bit from the average human magic user. Hellbound comes at the world more from the divine perspective, but of course there are some contact and friction points. Basically, when the Devil knocks on your door and wants you to return a favor (with interest,) things will be set in motion.

The Devil sounds a bit bleak and dangerous, but Lucy isn’t that dangerous (unless you are the necromancer he wants.) Lionel, aka Nelly, is a powerful necromancer, and he uses his powers as a police consultant. He doesn’t like all the blood and gore, but at his core, Lionel wants to make sure to get the victims of violent crimes justice. In fact, Lionel is the kind of softie who will let even a cursed poodle live. And give said poodle to the Devil because in Lionel’s apartment, pets aren’t allowed.

Now, add a dragon mother and an angel who cares, and you have a dark rom com (with steam.)

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, give the Hellbound series a try! Book 3, The Devil’s Demigod, is available now, and it will not be the last you get to hear of the Devil and his necromancer.

~~~

The complete series at various vendors: https://books.bookfunnel.com/hellboundmmromanceseries

The Devil’s Demigod (Book 3)

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09S14DZ34

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60381631-the-devils-demigod

Haven’t met the Devil yet? You can, today:

The Devil’s Necromancer (Book 1) Contains #dubcon elements.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G1Z9M8N

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58990719-the-devil-s-necromancer

The Devil’s Boyfriend (Book 2)

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Q4MY2M7

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60097979-the-devil-s-boyfriend

The Devil’s Demigod (Hellbound 3)

Release Date: Mar 11, 2022

Lionel must deal with new magic and unfamiliar love while struggling with the truth of his origins.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09S14DZ34

Barnes & Noble: https://bit.ly/3gDipR3

Kobo: https://bit.ly/3swKK0X

Apple: https://apple.co/3oyiHgb

Changeling Press: https://bit.ly/3uHNcUT

#paranormalromance #romancereaders #paranormalbook #devil #demonromance #bdsm #LGBTQromance #urbanfantasy #mmromance #gayromance #demonromance #necromancerromance

Blurb:

Not long ago, necromancer Lionel didn’t know who his parents were or why they abandoned him. He’s starting to think that ignorance was bliss as the fact he has a death goddess for a mother is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. That his father is a murderous magic user comes as an even darker revelation.

Lucifer is well aware that his boyfriend and powerful necromancer Lionel is not the easiest person to love, but Lucifer is the Devil, and he doesn’t lie, not even to himself. He’ll take Lionel any way he can get him, and Lucifer will do whatever it takes to keep Lionel safe. It’s turning into a fulltime occupation with Lionel’s penchant for attracting murderous individuals.

Lionel will have to come to grips with his own still unfamiliar demigod magic before the past can catch up with him, but he also needs to figure out if and how he can love the Devil. Lucifer cannot wait for his long game to tame his stubborn necromancer to bear fruit, but before the Devil can savor his prize, he might have to rescue Lionel yet again, this time from getting lost in the labyrinth of the past.

EXCERPT:

The Devil’s Demigod (Hellbound 3)

Alexa Piper

Lucifer

I stood in the too-high snow outside of the dragon mother’s house, leaning on the shovel and staring at my phone.

Sleeping in your arms was nice, Nelly had texted. Well, if it really was the PTSD getting him to soften up finally, I approved.

I love holding you, babe, I texted back. I’ll do it whenever you need me to.

He didn’t immediately respond to that, so I cleared away some snow, which was a damn workout. Across the street, one of the dragon mother’s neighbors was watching me unsubtly from a window. I ran a gloved hand through my hair and hoped it made them gasp.

After five minutes, Nelly hadn’t texted back, and I leaned the shovel against the dragon mother’s house.

“You are not done,” she said from where she looked down on me from a window on the second floor.

“Tiamat, I am the Devil, and I am taking a break,” I said, trying to use lack of candor to circumvent the truth.

“Dodging your chores is how even the Devil gets a permanent bad-hair-day curse, Lucy.”

Well, to hell went the circumnavigation of truth. “Nelly didn’t text me back, so I need to go check on him. I’ll get my chores done, Tiamat.”

“Ah, the tribulations of young love. You’ll need the good hair, then,” she said and closed the window back up again. What I wouldn’t give to know what was going on in her head sometimes. And I was more than my perfect hair. I had character. And he loved my wings.

I teleported to the station, to right outside Nelly’s office, which was basically a broom closet. The door was closed, and I heard wet noises from inside that made me burst straight in.

Marc Deacon, instead of doing what I knew he wanted to with my boyfriend, was sitting in a cheap folding chair and crying. Good for him. I’d have given him a genuine reason for tears if I’d found him fondling Nelly, like a missing tongue or twisted testicles.

“What? I didn’t think you’d be the gloating type,” the unskilled necromancer said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Lionel picked you.” He shook his head and rubbed at his swollen eyes. “He’s too good for you. I don’t care if you turn my bones to jelly, but Lionel is smart and shy and sexy and really funny when he opens up, and you don’t deserve to use him for your own amusement and cheat on him while you do it.” He looked back up at me, but even my hellpoodle had a more intimidating glare. “You could have anyone, I’m sure. Several anyones. Let him go, please. He just — he just deserves something real, and I can give that to him. I want to.”

When had my charm ever failed me so massively? With Marc Deacon, I understood, a little, because he wanted my boyfriend, and badly. Still, he didn’t even have a little crush on me, hadn’t even fantasized a little about a threesome? And Christine was a mystery of a different order. I had to find out about whether she liked poker or not already.

“You have no idea what Nelly wants and definitely don’t know what he needs. You’d do better finding another man to pine after,” I told Marc Deacon and closed the door behind me. Necromancers. They all came with issues, apparently.

Before I could look around and locate my once again errant boyfriend, I felt the sharp sting of one of the defense spells built into his necklace activate. It was close, so I ran rather than teleported, and good thing, because it allowed me to feel the magic that was being hurled at him, even as I cracked open the office door behind which I could sense the necklace’s protective spell flare bright and hot.

This was siphon magic. It wasn’t so common that I knew it well, although I’d felt Sephy use it when I’d visited her and Hades.

This siphon magic was something else entirely, and just from the strength of it, from the elegance with which the siphon wove its magic, from the sheer, irrefutable force of it, I could tell the immensity of power the person who’d made it had access to. And since I had no doubt at all that the maker of this siphon was Ariadne, I knew where Nelly got his brutish power. Once he learned to really own and use it, refine it rather than just go smash with it, my boyfriend would be magnificent, something to behold. I’d take him even if he weren’t. But the more powerful he was, the more I would flaunt him, of course.

I pulled the office door open all the way. Several equally concerning things made up the scene ahead of me, and all of it was so dramatically crafted by the terrors of the real world that it should have been a painting set in oil rather than happening.

If reality were a painting, it would be called something to invoke hubris, like The Reclamation of the Prodigal Son, because the man on my left, beautiful like Nelly was, but darker in every aspect of his features and with cruel lines around his mouth and eyes, was without a doubt the man who wanted to be a bull, the beast trapped in a labyrinth by the goddess he had loved or lured into loving him.

I could guess what the Minotaur wanted with Nelly.

About Alexa Piper:

Alexa Piper writes steamy romance that ranges from light to dark, from straight to queer. She’s also a coffee addict. Alexa loves writing stories that make her readers laugh and fall in love with the characters in them.

Follow Alexa on social media: linktr.ee/AlexaPiper

Guest Post | London Calling by A.L. Lester

March 8, 2022March 8, 2022 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

Guest-Post

We have the lovely A.L. Lester on a visit today! Welcome, Ally!

Hello everyone! Thanks so much to Ofelia for letting me drop in today. My mission this week is to tell everyone about the release of London Calling, the box set of my 1920s London Border Magic series. It comprises Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border & The Hunted and the Hind. And I have a giveaway!

Lost in Time was the first book I had accepted for publication, by JMS Books in 2017. I’d tried self-pubbing it the year before and it hadn’t gone well—I was very inexperienced and my proofing and editing was sub-par. I was very lucky JMS took me on and beat both me and my manuscript in to shape!

When I finished it, it was supposed to be a stand-alone with a happy-for-now ending. Generally speaking I think it’s quite hard to write happy-ever-after stories when your setting is the inter-war years in Europe; and even more so for LGBTQ+ people given the law and social attitudes of the time. Looking at the book with the experience I have now, the ending was quite tentative. It’s clear Alec and Lew have reached a resolution; but I don’t demonstrate at all what that resolution might be. I had a vague idea I’d write a sequel; but again, I really didn’t know where I’d go with it.

Shadows on the Border was a bit of a surprise to me—this is one of the things, good or bad, about ‘discovery writing’…you can end up with something you really weren’t expecting. I was expecting to write about Fenn and Will, I think, for the whole book; and instead it turned out to be more about Alec and Lew, the end of their story; and the beginning of Will and Fenn’s. I then moved on to try and tie Will and Fenn’s tale up in The Hunted and the Hind. And that…well. I struggled not to write a fantasy tale set in another world—I ended up taking a load of stuff out that will be a great foundation for an otherworldly high fantasy if I want to!

All in all, although Lost in Time does work as a standalone and Shadows on the Border ties up Alec and Lew’s story nicely, they work best as a series, all three together. And I am really pleased to present them here as the box set!

I am also very happy to tell you that the three books are available in audiobook, narrated by the most excellent Callum Hale, British Narrator Extraordinaire. You can listen to him reading the first half hour of Lost in Time here. I was so lucky to find Callum as a narrator—we found each other at Audible and since then we have worked out an independent relationship. He exactly gets each of the characters in this universe. The audio for Lost in Time was being produced as I was finishing The Hunted and the Hind and eventually as I was writing it I could hear the characters talking in the voices Callum had given them.

All in all, I am really pleased to finally have them out in a box set and to have all three available in audio to accompany it. It feels like I’ve done my best for the trilogy and I hope you feel the same way after reading and/or listening! For a chance to win copies of all three of the London Calling audiobooks, pop on over to the Audiobook Draw and throw your hat in the ring!

With best wishes and happy reading,

Ally

London Calling

London Calling box set

Queer British Lovecraftian historical romantic suspense set in 1920s London.

Lew Tyler is dragged from 2016 to 1920 by an accident with border magic whilst he’s searching for his missing friend. He’s struggling to get to grips with life a century before he was born. Detective Alec Carter is trying to solve gruesome murders in his patch of London, weighed down with exhaustion and a jaded attitude to most of his fellow humans after four years of war. In the middle of a murder investigation that involves wild magic, mysterious creatures and illegal sexual desire, will Alec and Lew work out who is safe to trust?

Sergeant Will Grant, Alec’s right-hand man, is drawn to the mysterious Fenn. Is Fenn a man or a woman? Does Will care? And Fenn…Fenn has a secret. They live beyond the border between 1920s London and the magical Outlands and they need to get home. Are they prepared to achieve that by double crossing Alec, Will and Lew?

Two couples hold the fabric of reality in their hands. Will it make them or break them?

Buy London Calling now if you like murder, time-travel, grumpy detectives, the blues, magic, gay romance, m/enby romance, tea and not-quite-elves. With swords. Well, one elf. With one sword. And he’s very decent about it.

Buy London Calling – Enter Giveaway Draw

Read an Excerpt

Carter on his doorstep when he got home again was just taking the piss. All Lew wanted to do was climb into his bed and sleep and pretend he was in his comfortable flat-share in 2016 and could wake up and listen to his iPod.

He didn’t even bother to greet Carter this time, just wordlessly locked up the bike and opened the door into the flat so he could come inside. He was glowering again. Lew wished he could say it didn’t suit him. “Come in. Glowering doesn’t suit you.”

Carter grunted wordlessly and suddenly Lew had had enough of it.

“No, honestly. It makes your face all scrunched up—” he demonstrated, “—and I’m sure it’s bad for you. Wrinkles or something.” He couldn’t seem to shut up. Poking a bear would probably have been safer. He wanted to get through to him, though, he wanted to make him growl. The other day and being punched in the face had at least proved Carter had some emotion in there somewhere; he couldn’t feel anything from him, most of the time. He chucked his biking goggles onto the small settee and turned to the kitchen cupboard. “Do you want a drink? I’m having a drink. I’ve had a shit day so far…a shit week, in fact.” He paused, considering, “…maybe even a shitty two years. And so, I’m going to have a drink. You’re welcome to join me.”

He clattered the bottle and a couple of glasses out of the cupboard and smashed them unsteadily down on the counter top. He felt unsteady all over, actually, as if he’d already drunk too much. Adrenaline, and lack of sleep, probably.

He pulled the cork out of the bottle and started to slop spirit into the glasses. Then, all of a sudden, Carter moved to stand close behind him, still not speaking. He hadn’t been expecting it and it made him even more mentally off balance.

He could feel the warmth of the other man’s body through the back of his shirt, although they weren’t touching. He was boxed in by his arms, either side of him, hands flat on the counter. It was shockingly intimate, although Lew didn’t think Carter meant it to be. He meant it to be intimidating. The otherman said, softly, “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. Why have I got more dead men turning up with the same wounds as your friend Fornham?”

Bloody hell. More of them. That was very, very bad. “Get off me.” Lew spoke equally quietly.

There was a pause for a second. “No,” said Carter.

“You don’t know what you’re messing with. Get off me.” Again, that pause.

“No.” His voice was rougher this time.

Lew noticed Carter’s knuckles were white where he was holding the countertop either side of the whisky bottle and the glasses. He shivered.

Suddenly he could feel things coming off Carter after all: the want and the fear and the desperate sense of disgust at himself. The anger and the confusion he felt toward Lew because he wanted Lew and yet he didn’t trust him, with this or with anything, and it was all against his better judgement. The emotions hit him like a wall coming up out of the dark all at once and completely floored him; and he gasped.

Slowly, he pushed the bottle away from him—always with the drink when Carter was around, he absently thought—and turned around, careful not to touch him. They were nearly of a height—he didn’t have to tilt his head much to see that Carter’s eyes were green. Lashes long and dark. He didn’t pull back. It was mid-afternoon and his beard was coming through.

Lew swallowed. “I don’t want to lie to you.”

It came out rougher than he had intended and Carter’s eyes dropped to his mouth.

“Then don’t!” He pulled back angrily and turned away, hands shoving fiercely through his hair. “Tell me what’s going on!”

“Carter…Alistair…” He couldn’t bear the wave of confused anger and emotion coming off the man and he stepped forward and put his hand on his arm, turning him back toward him.

“Alec…”

Carter jerked back as if he’d been burned.

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About A. L. Lester

Writer of queer, paranormal, historical, romantic suspense, mostly. Lives in the South West of England with Mr AL, two children, a terrifying cat, some hens and the duckettes. Likes gardening but doesn’t really have time or energy. Not musical. Doesn’t much like telly. Non-binary. Chronically disabled. Has tedious fits.

Facebook Group : Twitter : Newsletter (free story) : Website : Link-tree for everywhere else

Update | Getting Ahead?

March 7, 2022March 6, 2022 ~ Ofelia Gränd ~ Leave a comment

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

— Mark Twain

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Getting ahead? Last month, I wrote that if you only gave me a month, I’d be halfway done with Holly’s stories for 2022 – yeah, that didn’t happen. I thought I’d write Holly’s June story quick and easy. That quick and easy story is now over 40k.

I didn’t write it all this month, I’d started before, hence the belief that it was gonna be quick and easy. I only needed to wrap it up… that was 21.748 words ago. But! That means that I’ve now written 60.379 words this year.

According to WordKeeperAlpha, I’ve written 928 words per day and will reach my goal of 250.000 words on December 7th. We’ll see about that. I’m about 24% done, so that’s good. It means I’m ahead on the words, at least. Lord knows I’m not ahead on the deadlines 🥺

But give me another month… Ha!

The good news is that the naked gardener stories have been submitted, so come May, we’ll be drowning in naked gardeners. There will be stories from Nell Iris, Ally Lester, K.L. Noone, Amy Spector and Holly Day, so yay 😄

Before then, there will be a Rain or Shine story in the same series as The Drunken Dog. It’s called The Cake Shop, it was called The Memory Vault, but I changed it so now every time I check my notes and see The Cake Shop, I’m confused. It’ll all work out… hopefully.