Release date: January 14, 2015
Subgenre: Urban fantasy
About The Innocents:
For thousands of years, they have roamed the darkness, subsisting on the blood of men - the deraphs - though most people would only know them as vampires.
For thousands of years, they have been hunted, pursued in secret by scores of men who tried and failed to exterminate them.
For thousands of years, the fight has been fair.
Now, a group of North Atlantic hunters have discovered a weakness - the synjuments - a subspecies of humans with whom the deraphs share a mortal link. Far more vulnerable to attack, these innocents pose an imminent threat to the clan of Haydn, a thousand-year-old deraph whose unsettled history with Lilith poses its own pressing complications.
To prevent their extinction, Haydn and her clan are forced to take on a paradoxical assignment, as guardians of those they are inclined by their very natures to seduce and consume.
The Innocents is a stand-alone urban dark fantasy novel in the Faith & Fury collection. The Faith & Fury collection is a group of stand-alone novels and series set in the same universe, sharing a common canon.
Due to violence, sexual content and language, it is recommended for mature readers.
Excerpt:
Five darts of tranquilizer coursing through her, and still the deraph ran. Though, her pace had certainly slowed. Trailing her in the direction of the concert hall, they could almost catch up on foot, but it wasn’t the strategic move.
Blitzing the deraphs in the crowded, public square was risky
enough. Only they knew what it was they were after. To onlookers, they probably
looked like a gang of terrorists pursuing a harmless woman. People had to see
what she was, what she could do, so, even if they couldn’t understand it, they
would at least doubt everything their eyes had seen.
In the spotlights of the concert hall, they tightened their
positions. Advancing from the front with Sean, Slade glanced to where Jim and
Fiona covered the sides.
“Nowhere to go but up, Bitch,” he uttered, and the deraph
realized it too.
Spinning in a whirlwind, she bounded the ten feet to the
corner column of the portico, hauling herself up in spite of her weakened
condition, and swung to the gable above. As she turned for the higher sloping
gable, Garcia and Armand were there, appearing on either side with their
weapons drawn, and, with no other way to go, the deraph jumped to the flat
portion of the roof below Garcia and Armand’s strongholds.
A sixth dart from Armand’s gun sinking into her neck, the
deraph staggered back against the roof’s railing, finally truly subdued.
Watching Garcia and Armand slide down the gable slopes to
close in, Slade marched closer with the others, and, a moment later, the deraph
dropped over the roof’s edge, arms and legs bound, and they caught the tidy
package on its way to the ground.
“Dose her,” Slade said when sleek fangs snapped his way. Her
eyes glowing red, the deraph was hungry for blood, theirs - fueled more by fury
than famine - but, though Fiona pulled the syringe from her pocket, she
hesitated to use it.
“You’re sure that won’t kill her, right?” Garcia asked as he
made it to the ground with Armand, and the entirely out-of-character question
may have been the real reason Slade was willing to take on this job. From
everything he’d witnessed, it was clear Garcia’s main mission in life was to
kill deraphs. The fact that he wanted this one alive was a mystery Slade
couldn’t wait to unravel.
“Not completely,” he said. “But she dies, we get to do this
all over again, right?” Yanking the syringe out of Fiona’s hand, Slade plunged
it into the deraph’s neck, watching her eyes dull as he pumped her full of
sedative.
When she went limp between Fiona and Jim, he felt the same
fucking rush he felt when he killed the first one, and again when he put the
bolt in Haydn and thought he was going to put an end to the leader of the pack.
Felling a beast that seemed unconquerable was a helluva rush, and, as Fiona and
Jim started away with the unconscious deraph, Slade kept pace, not about to let
them get away with his trophy. Wearing a pointy little souvenir of his last
kill, a reminder of his exceptional badassery, on a rope around his neck,
whatever they needed with this deraph, he was going to make sure he got his
memento.
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About Riley LaShea
Riley LaShea grew up in an Ohio town that looks like a dust speck
on most maps. It was boring and awful, so she got the hell out of there.
Now, she doesn't know where she wants to be, so over the past several
years she has lived in Nashville, Orlando, Fort Worth, Allentown,
Columbus, Kansas City, Raleigh, outside LA and inside Manhattan.
She won a lyric contest judged by the Indigo Girls in high school and a screenplay contest judged by Creative Screenwriting Magazine once. Her first published novel became a bestseller at one indie bookstore in Oakland that has since gone out of business.
Known to take great risks in the noble pursuit of creativity, sometimes she prefers to just sit around eating chocolate yogurt and doing KenKen in pajama pants.
She won a lyric contest judged by the Indigo Girls in high school and a screenplay contest judged by Creative Screenwriting Magazine once. Her first published novel became a bestseller at one indie bookstore in Oakland that has since gone out of business.
Known to take great risks in the noble pursuit of creativity, sometimes she prefers to just sit around eating chocolate yogurt and doing KenKen in pajama pants.
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