Blog

Sample: Dragon Twilight

Dragons have awakened, attacking both the Eranoran Bond and Banat Republic. As the rival nations scramble to respond, Heir Imperator Andras Tundaer must lead an invasion of the Isle of Dragons. But with his reputation in tatters and children from both nations held hostage by the dragons, Andras races against time to uncover long-buried secrets and save innocent lives.

 

 

Prologue

My children!

Dilongaria, queen of dragons, roared her anguish. Her limbs, weakened from her long sleep, gave out and her torso fell to the stone floor, shaking the cave that she once thought would protect her family during their slumber. She closed her slitted eyes and didn’t want to look upon the nightmare that had greeted her.

All dead!

She roared again, long, mournful, agonized. The multi-colored crystals that made up her tribe’s lair trembled with her roars. She heard them crack. She heard them crash to the cavern floor. She didn’t care. She continued roaring her grief. If she brought the whole mountain down on top of her head, then so be it. It wouldn’t kill her and end her pain, for she was an earth-dragon. She would simply transform into the rocks and soil above her, a process as uncontrollable as her heartbeat, and then reform once she escaped the tomb. For there was no such thing as a tomb for her. Except, perhaps, one of pain.

Her throat turned ragged and her roars disintegrated into groans and sobs.

Then she did the hardest thing she ever had to do in all the eons of her life. She opened her eyes again.

Dozens of shrunken dragon corpses lay within the deep mountain chamber her tribe had called home after the gods retreated to the Core. Their glorious colors were gone, replaced with the gray, desiccated skin of mortal bodies. She could only tell them apart by the shapes of their heads.

At her feet lay Jax, an air-dragon who’d had the most beautiful blue scales of any dragon she’d known in her long life. He’d brought joy to them all when he’d turn clouds into ridiculous shapes.

Next to Jax lay Yan, her water-dragon skull as smooth as a porpoise. Yan could bring the sea to a boil or calm it into gentle lapping at the shore. She loved nothing more than to race beneath the waves among the sea life or dive into the deepest, darkest ocean trenches with nothing but her clicks to guide her.

Past Yan lay a smaller body. Dilongaria choked on a sob. It was Bajh, a fire-dragon. The serpentine corpse of her youngest child was curled into a fetal position as if he’d died in terrible pain. She lumbered across the chamber and stroked his delicate skull with a talon. She remembered how he’d virtually leaped out of his birthing crystals, ready to create new islands or burn away a dead forest so that a new one could grow.

A glint of metal caught her eye, and she looked up to see the body of her eldest son, Harak. His body still retained most of its silvery, metallic scales, but they simply covered her son’s metallic bones like a shroud. He lay near one of the leya crystals, which glowed with an unhealthy purple light. One of his left talons was embedded into the crystal as if he’d struck at it with his dying breath. His right talons held something close to his chest, but Dilongaria could not see what it was.

She crawled slowly toward Harak on her powerful hind legs, her claws digging into the rock as easily as soil. She took care to avoid crawling over her children, for her bulk could crush their remains to dust. She would ensure their bodies entered the Core as intact as possible.

Leya crystal shards were scattered about the lair. She didn’t know if they were the result of cave-ins during their long sleep, her anguished roars, or something else. Regardless, she paid no heed to the crystals she crushed beneath her claws and torso. Her only focus was her oldest son.

She stopped beside Harak’s corpse and gently used her right talon to pry his talon from beneath his chest. She winced at his cracking bones, but she had to see what Harak held. She sensed its importance. Knew it was something for which he’d died.

When at last she pulled Harak’s talon free, she looked upon a ragged and dingy piece of black cloth. Her mind still reeled from her grief and her abrupt awakening, so it took her several moments to remember that humans once wore things like these.

But that was impossible. How could humans have entered her lair? There were no entrances. The only way in was for Dilongaria to tell the earth to allow them entry. Humans couldn’t do that. They were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but animals without the divine spark of a soul.

She stared at the leya crystal and Harak’s left talon embedded in it. A sickening horror arose from her empty belly, warring with the grief in her heart. The leya crystal should not be glowing purple. It should be a healthy red, like the horizon at sunset. It could only be purple if it were somehow corrupted.

Dragons could not have done this.

Realization struck Dilongaria. It came with explosive white anger, anger she had never felt in the thousands of years since the gods fled to the Core.

She leaped toward the cavern’s crystal ceiling, transforming herself to earth just before her body slammed into it, and then raced up through the granite and rocks as smoothly as Yan—she choked back a sob—had slid through the oceans in her water form. She slid past veins of gold and iron, along with the roots of evergreens that grew along the mountainside. She tasted them all with her senses, a lush diversity of elements that made up this one mountain.

This had always been her favorite moment after she’d awakened from a long sleep. But now, it was gutted with rage. There would be no joy for her while traveling the earth or for the rest of her eternal life.

When she reached the summit, she sprang forth and reformed her body. She landed with a graceful thump that raised clouds of snow around her mountainous bulk. It was night, the full moon shining down upon her with a pale light that was no longer comforting.

She scanned her island from its highest peak. The evergreen and oak forests surrounding it were dark. It was summer down below, for the moonlight glinted off the green leaves of the oak trees. Beyond the trees were hills and grasslands. Her divine sight could pick out the movement of her servants. They had multiplied and thrived on the island during her sleep. At least they had not died.

Her dragon vassals still slept, though, deep within their own caverns. She would have to be strong when she awoke them and told them of her family’s murder.

Dilongaria looked beyond her island and toward the distant horizon in all directions. The continental lands that she remembered on the east and west of her island were still there.

But now, she saw the glow of the leyas rising from the continents like a soft orange mist in the darkness.

She roared again, but this time there was no sorrow in it. There was only rage and hatred.

Sometime during her sleep, they had figured out how to take what was not theirs to take. They had stolen the divine leya energy from her children. They had murdered her children.

If the gods in the Core had not yet punished them, then she would.


This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress fantasy novel, Dragon Twilight (also a work-in-progress title). If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!

 

Sample: Paladin of a Dead God

In a world where the Shining God was defeated, a lone paladin seeks redemption for his part in her death. Wielding a divine sword, he battles the Enemy’s forces alongside a disillusioned priest and two gifted boys. As they confront slavers, corrupted soldiers, and new horrors, the paladin must resist temptation and guide his companions towards hope in a broken land. Read the first chapter below.

 

Paladin of a Dead God

 

Chapter 1

The boys fled from the devils down the foggy railroad tracks and skidded to a stop before the paladin blocking their way. They looked up at him like he was some arrogant statue from the ruined churches of the Old Faith, holding back the Enemy all his own.

“You boys are runnin’ like you got all the hells on your heals,” the paladin said. He eyed the fog behind them. Black forms darker than hate flitted in the mist.

The paladin saw the confusion in the boys’ faces and didn’t need to be one of the Enemy’s mind rapers to know their thoughts. Who’s the bigger threat, their eyes said, the ravenous devil pack or the gaunt, bearded man with a ragged white cloak?

“Mister,” one boy croaked, “them’s devils back there!”

“I know what they are, boy. Get behind me now.”

They scrambled around the paladin, keeping as far from him as the tracks allowed, and resumed their flight. The paladin didn’t turn to see where the boys ran, but he hoped they watched what he did. He was about to give them a tale to delight their folks later to their warm hearths.

A score of devils hurtled from the mist. Glistening red and black skin pulled tight over lean muscles. Mouths with sharp yellow teeth wrapped halfway around their heads. Where there should have been eyes and ears were only smooth, mottled skulls. Some shrieked while others snapped their teeth like the clacking of dry bones. Some galloped on four limbs, while others loped on two legs.

The paladin drew the God sword from the scabbard on his back and touched it to his forehead. Then he dropped to one knee, closed his eyes, and prayed.

***

Jacob and Adam hadn’t run far before Jacob stopped and turned.

“What’re you doing?” Adam screamed at him, slowing.

“What’s he doing?” Jacob asked.

The man kneeled with his head bowed against his fancy sword. He seemed to ignore the oncoming horde of gibbering teeth and claws. Jacob had seen the cold resolve in the man’s eyes, heard the breezy courage in his deep voice. Pa had told him stories about brave men wielding beautiful swords, but he never thought those men or swords still existed.

“He’s praying,” Adam said breathlessly, tugging on Jacob’s arm.

“Praying to what? Everyone knows God’s dead.”

“We’re gonna be dead if we don’t go!”

The devils were almost upon the man, yet he didn’t move.

“Jacob, please, let’s—!”

“I want to see,” Jacob whispered, staring at the man.

White light burst silently from the kneeling man, forcing Jacob to shut his eyes and turn away. Adam gasped beside him. When the light faded, Jacob slowly opened his eyes…and felt his jaw slacken.

The man stood facing the oncoming devils with blue-white flames encasing his body. He didn’t seem to mind the flames, though, and strode toward the devil horde, his sword aimed at them. When four devils leaped at him, he cut them in half with a one-handed backswing, never missing a stride. The devils had time for a surprised scream before a blue-white flame turned their bodies to ash that floated to the ground.

The devil horde stopped as one. They cocked their heads, unsure.

But the man was not. He danced into their midst and hacked through the devils with inhuman speed. Each devil he cut down erupted in blue-white flames, their ashes drifting away. When some tried to flee, the man appeared before them with a grin and smote them down without a single wasted movement.

The battle was over in moments.

Jacob once saw two devils devour a ten-foot brown bear. This man had single-handedly destroyed twenty.

The flaming man turned his head toward the boys and bowed as if they had applauded. He walked toward them, and as he did, the blue-white flames extinguished like a candle before bed. He gave the fancy sword an artistic twirl so that he held the hilt, but with the blade resting against the back of his right arm.

Adam dropped to one knee. Jacob figured he’d better show the same respect and imitated his friend.

The man stopped. “Get up, you fools. I’m good, but I ain’t God.”

Adam looked up. “Then what are you, sir?”

He stared at the walled town behind the boys a quarter mile down the tracks. “Just a man,” he said. “And there’s a deceiver in yonder village whose head needs separatin’ from his neck.”


This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress fantasy novel, Paladin of a Dead God. If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!

 

Sample: The Arena

Augustine Ward, the sole survivor of a devastating alien battle, must lead a ragtag team on a desperate mission to stop humanity’s extinction in four months. With treacherous allies, Ward races against time to stop an alien signal that could destroy Earth. Can this broken soldier find redemption and save mankind from annihilation?

 

 

Chapter 1

Despite wearing the best space suit the Olympians had offered humanity, Callisto was still colder than a hag’s left tit. My fingers were popsicles inside my thick gloves, my nose was numb within my plexisteel helmet, and my balls had snuggled their way back into my pelvis. My heads-up display said all systems were normal, but without my nanos it was hard to be sure. Lots of tech had fallen into the shitter over the last five years. It could’ve also been in my head. Walking across a dirty glacier in vacuum with Jupiter filling the sky messes with your mind no matter how many times you’ve done it.

My name is Augustine Ward, and I find lost things, including people. My job ain’t legal in the Commonwealth, and they will shoot you on sight if they catch you in quarantine zones like Callisto. But it was a living at a time when not many were available.

The cold wasn’t even the worst part. Nah, the worst part was my dread over grabbing the girl, Betty Grable. I shit you not, that was her name. Her Pathist parents were the traditional types, I reckoned. They’d paid me handsomely to bring her home, and she was gonna be none too happy to see me. She’d likely sunk so deep into the Hedon cult that I was gonna have to either drag her back to my ship or splint her. I hated splinting. Always messy.

But hell, I’m an optimistic fellow. Things could turn around.

At least Jupiter was goddamed spectacular.

I finished planting my insurance in the Hedon shipyard and hightailed it to the old Callisto hydrogen factory’s airlock. That’s right, the Hedons parked their ships outside, suited up, and then walked to the airlock. My recon over the last two days told me they either didn’t have the know-how to hook the docking tubes to their ships, or the docking tubes just didn’t work anymore. Or the Hedons were so wasted out of their gourds they didn’t care to figure it out.

I tapped the airlock controls, and the door slid open with a slight rumble that I felt through my boots. I closed the door behind me and activated the atmospheric controls. Air hissed into the compartment. My suit told me it was breathable, though high in mold and God knows whatever the Hedons were smoking these days. Probably wouldn’t kill me. I didn’t plan on sticking around any longer than I had to, anyway.

“I’m inside, Arial,” I said into my helmet com. “Keep the home fires burning, would ya, doll?”

“If by ‘home fires’ you mean the ship’s engines,” my ship replied in a female voice, “then I have not turned them off since you left. If you are referring to the song written during World War I titled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning (‘Till the Boys Come Home)’, I have located a copy of that song which I can play for you now.”

“I meant the ship’s engines, doll, but thanks for the offer. I’ll contact you when I need a pickup. Ward out.”

“Be safe, Auggie.”

Arial’s helpful interpretations of my Georgia idioms—and her use of my nickname—would’ve been endearing if she weren’t the multi-dimensional hall monitor of the Olympian aliens who had pledged to kill all humans in four months. Tends to put a damper on a friendship. But more on that later.

I decided to trust my suit’s assessment of the air and unlocked the helm. The air smelled like I thought it would. Reminded me of the dive brothel me and some basic training comrades visited on Luna twenty years ago: funky tobacco, cheap perfume, and an overflowing commode.

I slapped the helmet on the magnets behind my head and opened the door to the factory proper. It slid open on squealy, un-greased wheels. I made sure my earbuds were secure and then entered the Hedon den of sin.

Lots of people think the Hedon’s are a death cult, especially all the good Pathists that make up most of humanity now. They say the Hedons would rather kill themselves than live through whatever extinction event the Olympians were gonna throw at us.

I didn’t think they worshiped death so much as they just didn’t give a shit anymore. Their security was a case in point. Nobody challenged me at the airlock or when I strode through the shadowy corridors. Where there were lights, they sputtered between glaring white and sickly green.

I’d studied the factory’s layout before arriving, so I knew where I was going. But even if I hadn’t, all I would’ve had to do was follow the loud music—with all its thumping and bumping and groaning vocals—that shook the whole moon. Took me less than a hundred paces to arrive at the dance party.

The former warehouse was mostly dark, but colored lights flashed in time to the music and illuminated the writhing bodies on the dance floor. I figured a couple hundred of them, men and women in various stages of dress and undress. They leaped around and rubbed against each other in ways that would’ve made an Quickened blush. The air temp and humidity were more oppressive than Savannah in August. A sheen of sweat broke on my forehead.

I scanned the crowd looking for Casper Bonny’s throne. The man was born and raised a pirate before the Virus, which meant he never had nanos and therefore had not gone batshit crazy when the Virus struck. My intel said he gave up piracy after the Virus and decided to splurge his ill-gotten-gains on sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs. Because, why not? The Virus destroyed humanity’s ability to wage war, therefore we couldn’t fulfill our promise to the Olympians and would thus go extinct. Hedon membership swelled with Pathists, ironically, who didn’t want to hunker down in their shelters, pray, and wait with stoic patience for the apocalypse like the rest of their brethren.

For me, I reckoned it was my work that kept my mind off those things.

Betty’s parents said she’d been kidnapped by the Hedons and forced to serve in Bonny’s harem. I highly doubted that she’d been kidnapped because that would’ve required initiative and planning by the Hedons. The girl had more likely joined the Pathist exodus to cults awaiting the end in their own ways. I figured mommy and daddy preferred to think someone had kidnapped their little girl rather than she had chosen to spend her last days grinding in a broken-down factory on a Jovian ice ball.

On the far side of the dance floor was a dais with an old, leather sectional couch. Over the couch hung a Hedon flag—black with a crude white circle and an equally crude “H” over the top. Casper Bonny sat in the middle of the couch surrounded by young, sycophantic women and men. He wore a dark red, satin bowling shirt with flared collars. His black hair was coifed into a pompadour, with large sideburns that had hints of gray. Despite the relative darkness of the place, he wore sunglasses that dipped down his nose so that he could look over the tops of the lenses at his followers. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth and his tattooed arms hung around two young women on either side.

The girl on his right was Betty Grable. She’d dyed her natural black hair all white, and she wore a tight black tank-top and matching leather shorts. Her bare left leg was covered in ivy tattoos. She looked quite different from the photo her parents gave me of a smiling 16-year-old in her Sunday’s best, but the upturned nose and triangular face were the same.

I pushed my way through the crowd toward the asshole king.


This was a sample chapter from my work-in-progress sci-fi novel, The Arena (also a work-in-progress title). If you enjoyed it, please sign up for my newsletter to get updates on the novel’s release. Thank you!

 

A new LitRPG adventure!

Well met!

Few things are as exciting to an author as announcing the release of the first book in a new series, so here goes.

Announcing … [drum roll]

The Tomb of Angelus, the first book in my new Undying Lairs LitRPG series!

The Tomb of Angelus

For those of you unfamiliar with LitRPG, it’s a relatively new (but hot!) genre where the characters enter a fantasy or sci-fi world and use game mechanics to gain power and defeat monsters.

If you’ve ever played a table-top RPG like Dungeons & Dragons or a computer game like World of Warcraft, then you’ll feel right at home.

Here’s the cover blurb:

 

Nothing good slurps in the dark...

Chris Able is as risk-averse as they come after losing his job with the Atlanta PD and his recent divorce. So he looks forward to a weekend of safe, table-top gaming with his old college friends in the beautiful North Georgia mountains.

Instead, he’s pulled into a dank, monster-infested fantasy dungeon, where his survival depends on mastering the skills, magic, and personality of the player character he’s possessing. At least his friends are with him, but in the bodies of their own player characters. And none of them know how they got there.

Chris soon learns that to get home, he and his friends must do the impossible – defeat a god-like being at the center of the dungeon that knows far too much about their Earthly lives.

But can they do that when they’re also fighting against the wishes of the characters they inhabit?

It’s not the weekend a guy with anxiety issues needs.

 

So be sure to grab your ebook copy of The Tomb of Angelus today! And please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon, as that’s about the best thing you can do to support your favorite authors.

FREE BOOKS!

Well met!

This isn’t a new release announcement, but I wanted you all to know that the first books in my two major series are FREE for a limited time.

That’s right, CITIZEN MAGUS and MUSES OF ROMA are now FREE on all major ebook platforms. I don’t know how long I’ll keep them free, so grab them now while you can!

Love,
Rob


 

Remington Blakes, a magus from a 21st century where magic powers the world, has a big problem.

His former mentor, William Ford, stranded him in ancient Rome without a memory as to how or why. Well a guy has to eat, so he’s forced to eke out a living as a magus-for-hire among Rome’s plebeians. He calls himself “Natta Magus” since his real name sounds too Germanic to the discriminating Romans.

When Natta learns that Ford has conjured daemons to kidnap a senator’s young daughter, he jumps at the chance to track Ford down. Natta chases him to Rome’s Germanic frontier to not only rescue the child, but learn the terrible secret behind why Ford left Natta in Rome.

CITIZEN MAGUS is the first book in the Journals of Natta Magus series.

Download CITIZEN MAGUS for FREE!

Get it on Kindle | Get the EPUB

 


 

Marcus Antonius Primus began a golden age for humanity when he liberated Roma from Octavian Caesar and became sole Consul. With wisdom from the gods, future Antonii Consuls conquered the world and spawned an interstellar civilization.

Three weeks before the millennial anniversary of the Antonii Ascension, star freighter captain Kaeso Aemelius, a blacklisted security agent from Roman rival world Libertus, is asked by his former commanders to help a high-ranking Roman official defect. Kaeso misses his lone wolf espionage days – and its freedom from responsibility for a crew – so he sees the mission as a way back into the spy business. Kaeso sells it to his crew of outcasts as a quick, lucrative contract…without explaining his plan to abandon them for his old job.

But Kaeso soon learns the defector’s terrifying secret, one that proves the last thousand years of history was built on a lie.

Can Kaeso protect his crew from Roman and Liberti forces, who would lay waste to entire worlds to stop them from revealing the civilization-shattering truth?

MUSES OF ROMA is the first book in the Codex Antonius series.

Download MUSES OF ROMA for FREE!
Get it on Kindle  |  Get the EPUB

The End is Here!

Natta MagusNo, not the end of handshaking. It’s the end of the Journals of Natta Magus! Been a long time coming, but NATTA MAGUS, the fourth and final book in the series, is now published.

Natta has seen and done a lot in ancient Rome after he got stuck there, but nothing has prepared him for the decision he must face in this last book.

Here’s the blurb:

Natta Magus has a chance to do the one thing he’s wanted since he got stuck in ancient Rome: Go back home to 21st century Detroit.

But there’s a catch. He must do one last job for Octavian Caesar Augustus. The same tyrant a-hole who had him kidnapped from Carthage where he was celebrating with his friends and new girlfriend, Helva Ptolemy. A rogue Roman agent is accumulating magical weapons from the 21st century to overthrow Augustus and start a new Roman civil war. Augustus wants Natta to guide a team of Praetorians into modern Detroit and bring the traitor back to Rome for justice.

If Natta refuses, he never gets the chance to go home, and Rome descends into a brutal civil war fought with 21st century magics. If he accepts, he can go home…but he’ll never again see the people in Rome he’s come to love.

In the final chapter of the Journals of Natta Magus series, Natta must decide where he truly belongs.

NATTA MAGUS is available on Kindle and all major ebook retailers for $4.99, and in trade paperback for $12.99.

Get it on Kindle | Get it on EPUB | Get the trade paperback

Download All Four Books in One

Now that the series is ended, you can get all four volumes (CITIZEN MAGUS, SHADOW MAGUS, WOUNDED MAGUS, and NATTA MAGUS) in one ebook for $9.99 on Amazon Kindle and all major ebook retailers.

Get it on Kindle | Get it on EPUB

WOUNDED MAGUS is here!

Well met!

No question that life was hard in ancient Rome. Especially for Natta Magus, that time-traveling wizard from an alternate 21st century where magic is real.

In the all new WOUNDED MAGUS, book three in the Journals of Natta Magus series, Natta graduates from saving Rome to saving the world.

Here’s the blurb:

Natta Magus watched Helva, the granddaughter of Cleopatra, literally leap into hell to save him and Augustan Rome from annihilation.

The least he could do was bust her out. His twenty-first century honor would accept nothing less.

So along with Cana, a slave-turned-magi apprentice, and Paetus, his self-appointed chronicler, Natta sets off for Alexandria, Egypt, where he hopes to find a way into the Egyptian underworld to rescue Helva.

But his ship is attacked and sunk along the North African coast, bringing him face-to-face with a former adversary who has somehow gone from every day, first-century human to magical demigod. And not only that, the adversary wants Natta’s help in bringing about a magical apocalypse that will change the world and the history he knows.

Natta has to fight his way through pirates, daemonic hordes, and his own dark temptations to not only stop the apocalypse, but save Helva from the Torture Goddess herself.

Just another day for him in the Roman Empire.

WOUNDED MAGUS is available on Amazon Kindle for $4.99, and in trade paperback for $12.99.

Need to get caught up? Read CITIZEN MAGUS and SHADOW MAGUS, the first two books in the Journals of Natta Magus.

Check out the first chapter of WOUNDED MAGUS below.

And remember: Semper ubi sub ubi!

 

WOUNDED MAGUS:
Chapter One

I awoke to darkness and the sounds of lapping water. The smells of moldy wood, old sweat, fish, and the sea all mingled into a miasma every bit as potent as Rome’s. After a disorienting moment, I remembered where I was: on a sea galley crossing the Mediterranean to Carthage.

The darkness wasn’t absolute. Cana had set a dim spark globe above us before we had gone to sleep. We were in the captain’s “cabin,” which was about the size of my apartment’s closet back home in twenty-first century Detroit. Cana lay on the cot, and there was barely enough room for Paetus and me to lie curled up on the floor next to her. It was my letters of credit from Caesar Augustus himself that had earned Cana, Paetus, and I the best sleeping spot in the galley.

But none of that had awoken me. It was the muffled cries of alarm from above us, followed by thumps of bodies falling to the deck. If there had been rousing bouts of laughter, I would’ve chalked it up to drunken sailors and gone back to sleep. But it was the ensuing silence that kept me awake.

Our galley was under attack.

Out of all the travel methods in the ancient Roman world, boat travel always seemed the most dangerous to me.

No, Natta Magus, you’re from the future, Paetus and Cana had said, for once in agreement on something. It is the best way to get to Egypt. It would take weeks to travel the roads through Anatolia and Palestine. You’re too used to your aero-planes and horseless trollies, Natta Magus. Trust us, Natta Magus, this way is best.

The four-day crossing from Sicily to North Africa was a nightmare. We encountered monstrous swells that almost toppled our galley and made me yack up the meager porridge they served onboard. The hull leaked in six different spots, which required slaves armed with buckets to monitor them round the clock. And then there was the whole day without a breath of wind to move our sails. It made me wonder what it would be like to die of thirst on a salty sea. And this was only the first half of our journey. Once we reached Carthage, we’d board another galley that would hug the North African coast and take us straight to Alexandria.

All part of a normal voyage, the Carthaginian captain explained. Nothing to worry about.

I’m not an “I told you so” kind of guy. When I realized the ship was under attack, I simply nudged Cana on her cot. My apprentice’s brown eyes shot open.

“Don’t panic, leerling,” I whispered, calling her the Dutch word for apprentice. “We’re under attack.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but Paetus shot up into a sitting position next to me. “Attack? Are you—?”

Both Cana and I shushed him at the same time. The whites of his eyes were almost as bright as the spark globe above us.

A man screamed on the deck, and we all jumped. Heavy feet creaked and bent the floorboards above our heads. We stared at the ceiling in silence. Then came a thump and the sounds of many feet rushing across the deck.

“We should help,” Cana said, still watching the ceiling.

“Are you mad?” Paetus hissed. “It’s probably pirates. They’re monsters. I’ve heard horrid tales. They’ll slice us open from neck to groin and let the gulls feast on our innards!”

Cana rolled her eyes and whispered, “Piracy has been extinct for decades. You read far too many fantastical tales.” Her tone was impatient as it always was with Paetus, but her Latin’s Gallic accent was far more pronounced. It meant she was scared.

Paetus’s wan face turned pink with anger. “Just because Pompey Maximus destroyed them doesn’t mean he made them ‘extinct’. They could still lurk in every cove and—”

“Paetus,” I said. I kept my voice low, calm, and firm like a leader should. “Whoever they are, Cana’s right. We either do something now or wait for them to find us.”

Paetus groaned.

“I have practiced slapen,” Cana said. “I can get at least four.”

More likely one, I thought. Cana had a habit of overestimating her strength. But what she lacked in strength—at the moment—she more than made up for in confidence and shear stubbornness to learn. She’d grown more in the last two months that I’d known her than I had in all four years of secondary academy in Detroit. I never believed that magi of her strength could naturally develop so early before the Great Awakening. She’d surpass my strength in the next few years.

If we made it through the next five minutes.

“Only if they’re kind enough to bunch up for you,” I said to her, “and if none of the crew are among them to dissipate the spell. If so, go for it. If not, we need another plan.”

A shout came from above in a language that certainly wasn’t Latin. It sounded similar to the Carthaginian captain’s words when he gave orders to his crew and slaves. The freedmen rowers just outside the cabin’s thin curtain murmured nervously in their rowing bays.

“Paetus,” I said, “do you understand what they’re saying up top?”

Paetus knew about a dozen languages, Carthaginian Punic being among them. He looked sick with fear, but he cocked his head and listened. His shoulders slumped and he looked even sicker, if that was possible.

“They just killed the captain,” he whispered. “The pirate leader told his men to search the rest of the boat.”

My throat seized up and my bowels cramped. I wasn’t surprised by my physical reaction to danger. I’d been in many life-and-death scrapes during my three years in Augustan Rome, versus zero in my twenty-first century life. I’ve fought vampire-like monsters called strix, a sewer basilisk that almost killed Augustus himself, ghosts, daemons, and, most recently, the magically conjured avatar of the Roman revenge goddess Invidia. You’d think I’d laugh off a few mundane pirates.

But this was how I always felt before a fight, from a brawl with drunken Roman plebs to an arena-destroying battle with a deity. And somehow I’d survived all those. I had a destiny, supposedly, and it wasn’t to die here.

“Cana,” I said, my voice level, “grab all your spell components. We may not be coming back here. Paetus, take only the scrolls and bags you need. Leave your trunk.”

Cana was already cinching her leather components pouch before I’d finished my order.

Paetus gave a shaky sigh and then gathered the scrolls on which he’d been writing before we went to sleep and stuffed them into his shoulder bag. He eyed his trunk, filled with even more scrolls, books, and clay tablets, and sighed again.

I made sure my trusty old Wolverines baseball cap was firmly set on my head, secured my own components vest, and fastened my gladius belt around my waist. I also slung my watertight leather bag, which contained Augustus’s letters of credit, over my shoulders. I sealed the scroll tubes with these journals you’re reading and the cherubic statue of my dearly departed house spirit Lares. I left behind my other sacks with a change of clothes.

I glanced at the wrists of both Cana and Paetus. They both wore the enchanted leather bracelets that I’d given them. I reached out with my cell magic and could feel my feet wanting to walk toward them. As long as they wore those, I could find them if we got separated.

“Think you can swing a blussen?” I asked Cana.

“Yes but how will we see?”

“Use cell magic to filter your eyes to heat. You’ll see them, but they won’t see you.”

She nodded, then gave me a worried look. “What are you going to do? Are you going to use—?”

“No,” I said firmly.

“I can stop you if you lose control. I know the words—”

“I said no!”

Things weren’t that desperate for me to give up a bit of my soul. Yet.

A girl’s scream came from the cabin across the hull from us, and then a young man’s angry shouts. There were two Carthaginian girls in that cabin, one eleven and one sixteen, traveling with their brother who wasn’t much older than them. The brother was yelling something in Punic. The other girl was screaming now, and the harsh laughter of the pirates finally got me moving.

“Put out the spark globe and cast the blussen!” I hissed to Cana.

I turned my Wolverines baseball cap around so that the bill faced backwards and flung the curtain aside.

Continue reading on:

Kindle | Trade Paperback

SHADOW MAGUS published!

shadow_magus_20160613_ebook_smWell met!

Natta Magus, that time-traveling wizard from an alternate 21st century where magic is real, is back for an all new adventure in SHADOW MAGUS. Here’s the blurb:

Natta Magus is getting used to life in Augustan Rome. While it doesn’t have twenty-first century perks like baseball or coffee, at least his unique magical skills can help his Aventine Hill friends.

But the Roman government has noticed his talents, and they call on him when a religious artifact from Rome’s ancient past is stolen. Natta discovers the thief is a magus as powerful as him, which should be impossible in this era. Unlike him, the magus wants Rome to die screaming.

Play ball.

SHADOW MAGUS is available on Amazon Kindle and in trade paperback.

Kindle | Trade Paperback

I’ve included the first chapter below. Happy reading!

SHADOW MAGUS: Chapter One

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A time traveling magus from twenty-first century Detroit walks into a bar in ancient Rome—

No? Oh this is a good one.

I was that time traveling magus—stuck in Rome going on two years now—walking into the seediest tavern along the Tiber riverfront during the reign of Caesar Augustus looking for the scion of an equestrian family whose paterfamilias claimed the teenage boy had been “bewitched” into joining an acting troupe. And just so you know, prostitutes in Roman society were looked upon with one tick more respect than actors.

Told you it was a good one.

Like most Roman taverns, it was in the garden level of a rickety tenement that was ancient when the Republic was founded. I walked down five worn, brick steps, left the blue skies and bright sunshine of a fine Roman afternoon and entered the open doorway into the dark tavern.

The stench hit me first: spilled wine, stale posca, and human body odor. Pretty much what you’d expect from a Roman tavern. And it was so dark I might as well have been walking into the underworld. When my eyes adjusted, I saw long tables with benches, each holding a couple of lit candle stubs. Two large men almost my height sat at one table across from each other, their heads in their arms on the tables with wooden cups next to them. I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping, passed out, or dead. Three plebeians sat at a table to my right taking turns rolling dice from a tin cup, alternating between cheers and groans depending on the rolls.

One of the sleeping men suddenly belched and then threw up on the stone floor next to him. I grimaced and looked away. That guy was still alive.

“Oy!” came a voice to my left. A man with large forearms shuffled out of a room in the back carrying two huge clay jugs with sloshing liquid and set them down behind a stone counter. I figured him to be the owner, since he wore a solid black tunica, and not the drab gray of a slave. He glowered at the nauseous drunk. “I told you to use the bucket at your feet next time, you cac stain!”

The drunk grumbled something and then went back to sleep.

The owner was about to say something else, but then noticed me standing in the doorway. He gave my black Wolverines baseball cap a long look, and then said, “Fancy a drink, dominus?”

I was about to ask for my runaway actor when I heard a burst of laughter come from a hallway in the back. The opening was covered by a thick red curtain, and sunlight peeked around the edges. The finder spell that I’d cast back at my shop to locate the actor wannabe made my feet want to walk toward the curtained doorway.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m here to see the show.”

“Two denarii, dominus.”

I fetched two coins from the money pouch on my spell components belt and put them on the counter as I walked past the owner toward the curtained door. I pulled the heavy curtain aside and headed down a short corridor toward a sunlit courtyard at the end. I passed one room on the right that was filled with jugs and sacks. Another room on the left must’ve been the owner’s residence: a woman sat in a chair next to a bed breastfeeding her infant child. She gave me a tired glare, and I felt my ears heat up. I quickly averted my eyes toward the courtyard.

The courtyard was about forty feet square with tenement balconies on all four sides of the three-story wood buildings. A small stage was set up at the far end where maybe a dozen plebeian citizens sat on stools laughing raucously at a bawdy comedy act that…well, let’s just say that the Romans can’t get enough of large, fake penises being used to humiliate their enemies. In this particular demonstration of quality drama, an actor playing a young Octavian was using his large penis to smack around Marc Antony and his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra, who had apparently persuaded Antony to do himself up with Eastern eye liner and clownish makeup. The actors playing Antony and Cleopatra—both men—ran around the stage trying to flee Octavian’s raging manhood.

Apparently not even the thirty years since Antony’s defeat at Actium was enough to diminish the humor from that bit.

My finder spell told me that “Cleopatra” was Septimius Naevius Balbus, the equestrian kid that I was looking for.

I sat on a stool in the back to watch the comedy unfold. Once Octavian finally stabbed Antony with his, um, weapon, the show took an even stranger turn. Octavian strode off the stage, proud of his victory, while Cleopatra wept over Antony’s body. A troupe of musicians stationed behind the stage began a haunting tune with their horns and lyres. Then “she” began an equally haunting, yet beautiful dirge that literally gave me chills. The kid’s voice went up and down in the tradition of ancient music that I’d become used to over the last two and a half years. I’m no musical genius, but to my untrained ears, he seemed to hit every note. The kid had talent and obviously loved what he did.

Which made me wonder about ratting him out to his father.

I admired many things about ancient Rome. My Praetorian friend, Gaius Aurelius Vitulus, was one. He was the epitome of ancient Rome’s virtues: honor, bravery, and a righteous sense of justice. He didn’t hesitate to protect the innocent, but if you crossed him, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill you dead. Vitulus’s wife, Claudia, was another. She knew my weird history, knew the danger I occasionally put Vitulus in during the “delicate” cases for which the Praetorians called on me—the only practicing magus in Rome—for help. Yet she never hesitated in opening her family’s resources to me if I needed help. Even with a newborn son, she found time to send baskets of food to my shop on the Aventine Hill whenever she’d hear that business was slow for me.

But there were many things about ancient Rome that made me cringe. As a man of the twenty-first century, slavery, of course, was at the top of the list. A close second was the almost religious preoccupation with social status that was practically written into every Roman law. I grew up in Detroit, a city in the mid-western American Union, where even the poorest people had a decent shot at being successful if they worked hard and persevered. In Rome, it was also possible to rise up the ranks, though freedmen and citizens usually did it by “marrying up” to the next social rung, or distinguishing themselves in the legions, or becoming talented orators in the Forum (this, of course, only applied to the guys; the gals could only pray to Juno that daddy married them off to one of the above).

One of the things that annoyed me about the social system here, though, was that once your family did scratch and crawl its way to the top of the ladder, it was the height of scandal if anyone in the family wanted to descend a few rungs. Like the kid Balbus singing his heart out on stage. Balbus’s father, the senior Septimius Naevius, had hired me to find Balbus and report back on the kid’s location. I assumed so that the Naevius goons could drag the kid back home kicking and screaming and force him to be a good future paterfamilias. I took the job because, well, business had been slow lately, and while I appreciated Claudia’s gift baskets, I was tired of feeling like one of her clientela. Vitulus and Claudia were my Roman family, not my patrons, and I wanted to keep it that way.

But this case was bringing back memories of when I struggled to tell my parents that I wanted to study the Finder arcanum, not Energy like they had. It certainly wasn’t the dire situation Balbus was in, but I had an inkling as to how he felt. My parents had just assumed that I shared their passion for developing magical batteries, routing magic via the Aether to power homes in Detroit, or just tinkering with magic-powered devices to make them more efficient. They were surprised when I told them that wasn’t my thing, and I had seen the disappointment in their eyes. But they understood that my passions just didn’t match theirs, so they went on to support my endeavors.

I couldn’t imagine living in a place where my parents could’ve forced me to study Energy rather than Finder.

So once again, my conscience wanted to overrule my stomach.

I hadn’t realized how transfixed the rest of the audience was with Balbus until he finished singing. The small crowd erupted in appreciative applause. The rest of the troupe joined Balbus on stage, all of them smiling as they bowed. I waited until the troupe had exited to the small, curtained backstage before getting up and making my way toward them.

I found the actors joined by the three hidden musicians. All six performers held a cup of wine in their hands and were drinking to a well performed show. They seemed filled with post-performance energy, laughing and joking about different parts. They still wore the garish makeup, and metal costume jewelry dangled from their ears, around their necks, and on their wrists.

When they finally noticed me standing there, I nodded to Balbus and said, “You’re a good singer. I haven’t heard a performance like that in years.”

“My thanks, citizen,” Balbus said, nodding back to me with a grin. “You can show your appreciation by telling your friends about us. We play here every evening just before sundown.”

“Your father hired me to find you,” I said.

Balbus froze, the grin on his face turning into a rictus and his eyes widening. His friends also stared at me with the same shocked expression.

“Look, I just wanted to let you know before your father sends…”

Balbus’s eyes flickered to something behind me. He gave a quick nod.

I turned in time to see a fist the size of Mount Vesuvius heading toward my face before all went black.

###

Continue reading on Kindle or in Trade Paperback.

SHADOW MAGUS: The Kindle Scout campaign

shadow_magus_20160613_ebook_smLast October I ran a Kindle Scout campaign for CITIZEN MAGUS, the first book in my Journals of Natta Magus series. While Kindle Press didn’t select the book for publication, I got a lot of great feedback and encouraging words from folks who nominated it. With that in mind, I’m running a campaign for book two in the series, SHADOW MAGUS.

The campaign works like this: Readers can nominate my book for a publishing deal with Kindle Press. If Kindle Press picks up my book, your nomination will earn you a free copy once they publish it. The more nominations I get, the better my chances for a deal and a free ebook for you.

Nominating is easy, quick, and a great way to support new authors (check out the other campaigns on the Scout site, too). Please see my campaign page for more details and an excerpt from the book.

Thanks in advance for your support!

From the book description:

Natta Magus is getting used to life in Augustan Rome. While it doesn’t have twenty-first century perks like baseball or coffee, at least his unique magical skills can help his Aventine Hill friends. But the Roman government has noticed his talents, and they call on him when a religious artifact from Rome’s ancient past is stolen. Natta discovers the thief is a magus as powerful as him, which should be impossible in this era. Unlike him, the magus wants Rome to die screaming. Play ball.