In case you missed it, I very quietly launched a new series last year: Spero Heights. It debuted with a short, 99¢ novella titled Blood Moon. It was quite a change for me from the Lana Harvey novels. For starters, it's written in 3rd person rather than 1st. It's still in the urban fantasy club, but it leans more heavily toward paranormal romance. Each book focuses on a different couple, and while all series are more enjoyable when read in order, these books can be read out of order and still make sense. The setting is a bit cozier too.
Spero Heights is a small, fictional town set in the Ozark Mountains. It was founded by a vampire, werewolf, and psychic who wanted to create a safe haven for monsters who have lost their bump in the night. Of course, ventures this big don't happen without complications. Even for supernatural folk.
Here's a little peek at book 2, Death at First Sight, available August 30th. (The cover reveal and back flap copy follows below.)
*********
Lia lay awake in bed, her face
upturned and eyes squeezed shut. She didn’t need an alarm clock to know the sun
was rubbing elbows with the horizon. Dawn would break any second now. The hitch
in her heart rate told her that much. Her breath grew shallow and her skin
clammy as she waited.
She tried to imagine what her
mornings might be like if she were normal. The fantasy was a simple one, but
with precise details—the sun greeting her through gauzy curtains pushed aside
by a warm breeze, children giggling in the distance, someone’s moist breath
tickling her neck.
A breakfast scene followed, with
a checkered tablecloth, steaming cups of coffee, and buttermilk pancakes
drenched in maple syrup—the real kind, like her father used to make, not the
generic crap that Saunders delivered every Wednesday. An imaginary, blissfully
happy family would join her at the table. A slew of children would bicker over
whose stack of pancakes was tallest, while her pretend husband winked at her
over the rim of his coffee cup.
Lia wondered if anyone actually
had mornings like that. Then she wondered if she had just seen one too many
Folger’s commercials. Her breath steadied long enough for her to expel a
disheartened grumble. Then the sun broke the sky.
She couldn’t see it through the
boarded up window of her bedroom, but that never seemed to make a difference.
Her back bowed and she knotted her fists in the bedsheets, trying to hold
herself in place. Pain spiked through her brain in two lines that began in her
eye sockets and felt like they exploded at the back of her skull. The room
tilted sideways and she was thrown to the floor.
Lia panted against the weathered
hardwood as her mind split open, her consciousness stretching out for miles and
miles until it crumbled at the edges like a pie crust rolled too thin. Her
breath ached in her lungs, and a hoarse whisper slipped past her lips before
she braced herself for the main event.
The faces came next. They poked
holes through her fragile mind, searing their swan songs into her memory as she
relived their final moments with them. She never recognized them, but each one
left a scar.
The first was a boy on
a skateboard. He glanced over his shoulder—a split second before a van smeared
him across the blacktop. Lia strained to pick out details, like the van’s
license plate, but the letters blurred at the edge of her sight. The street
sign was easier to read, even with the streak of blood running down one side.
Someone screamed, but it was drowned out by the shrill horn of a nearby train.
The scene spun away from Lia, as if she were
on a merry-go-round, and then there was an old man, clutching his chest in a
tattered recliner, a television remote squeezed in his opposite hand. For a
second, Lia could hear the channels clicking through too quickly in the
background. A blue and orange lunch tray lay upside down on cheap carpet, the
letters LV stamped into the plastic.
Last, she saw a woman reading in
a park. There was a concrete bridge behind her, leading to a wide lawn where a
dog show was taking place. Lia smelled lavender perfume and felt the aged paper
under her own fingers as the woman turned the pages of a novel. A man watched
her from the shadows, but she didn’t notice until it was too late. Then there
was gunfire and blood on the grass.
Lia pressed her cheek into the
hardwood and her eyes closed tighter, as if she could block the image out. Her
body shivered, drumming her shoulders and knees against the floor. And then,
just as suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it was over. Her mind rolled back
in on itself, feeling loose and too large for her head. The visions’ parting
gift was a migraine from hell.
The nameless faces were still
there, their deaths imprinted on her as if she’d experienced them firsthand,
but she’d learned a long time ago to distance herself from them as quickly as
possible. They were all strangers, and that was her only comfort. Every
morning. For the past twenty years.
She pulled her aching body up
off the floor and shuffled through the small house without flipping on any
lights. It seemed a neat trick, unless she thought too long on how she’d come
by it. It had been nearly a decade since she’d been out in the world—out of the
house even.
Once in the bathroom, Lia
stripped out of her tee shirt and shorts. She left the lights off as she
stepped into the shower stall and turned the water on as hot as she could
tolerate it. Steam filled her lungs, but the chill in her core was hard to
shake. She turned her face into the harsh spray coming from the rusty
showerhead and let it wash the tears and snot from her face. Then she took the
bar of soap from the plastic ledge along the top of the stall and pretended she
was a normal person for a few minutes.
Her eyes still hurt too much,
even after she’d dried off and put on her robe, but she went ahead and clicked
on the small lamp by the back door in the kitchen. As she filled a tea kettle
and put it on the stove, the sound of keys jingled outside. Lia couldn’t see
her caller through the blacked out window that overlooked the porch, but she
didn’t have to. Only one person ever visited her.
Her heart raced again, but this
time from elation rather than dread. She shielded her eyes as the door opened
and quickly closed.
Garrett Saunders was a handsome
man with broad shoulders and a confident gait. His dark hair was peppered with
the beginnings of forty, and his muscled limbs colored richly from the sun. He
was made for the crisp, blue uniform he wore like a second skin. He rattled a
bottle of pills and set it on the counter with a tight smile.
Lia opened a cabinet with
shaking hands to retrieve a glass. She filled it halfway at the tap before
prying the bottle open and dumping three pills in her hand. She swallowed them
down and refilled her glass before slumping down at the kitchen table.
A few moments later, the stress
lines creasing her face faded. The pressure in her head muted to a dull throb,
and her breath rolled from her lungs with more ease.
Saunders stayed near the door,
shifting from one foot to the other with both hands on his belt. “Let’s have
it, Lia. I got a lot on my plate today.”
It was a familiar routine. Saunders
showed up every morning, ready to exchange a bottle of pain pills for her
visions. That was the deal—at least the one he reminded her of most often. The
other deal, the one he didn’t mention unless she rubbed him wrong, was that she
could live in his dead mother’s home, all expenses paid, as long as she never
stepped foot outside.
Saunders cleared his throat, her
last cue before things would turn ugly between them and he’d skimp on her
Wednesday delivery of essentials—all the best off-brand crap one could get for
twenty bucks or less.
Lia wet her lips and tried to
recall the traumatic details without letting her voice crack. Saunders was
unaffected by her blubbering, as if
her tears were a ploy for his sympathy. “Late morning, Tenth and Hawthorn, a
boy on a skateboard is hit by a white van.”
“Late morning?” Saunders
scoffed. “Well, that sure narrows it down.”
Lia closed her eyes and frowned,
trying to pick through the details for something useful. “A train is passing
nearby, right after it happens.”
Saunders shrugged. “Guess I
could send a couple of the boys over there to check on the signage before their
coffee break. Might get lucky.”
Lia moved on. “Around lunchtime,
an old man has a heart attack—I think he’s in a retirement home, something with
the initials LV.” She paused and looked up at Saunders.
“Might be Lakeview,” he said,
folding his arms across his chest, right below the embroidered sheriff’s badge
of his uniform.
“He had a white mustache and a
gray beard, if that helps.”
Saunders shrugged. “Old folks
whose time is up don’t concern me much. Let’s stick to the homicides.”
Lia sucked in a sharp breath and
turned away from him, focusing on the daffodil curtains hanging over the boarded
up bay window. She wondered if the late Mrs. Saunders had picked them out
herself. She wondered if her son would have bothered saving her if Lia had been
around to predict her demise.
“Tick tock, girl,” Saunders
snapped.
Lia flinched. “Afternoon, a
woman reading in a park is shot by a man. She’s wearing a green dress, and he’s
in black slacks and a white shirt. He’s wearing sunglasses. Dark hair. Clean
shaven.”
Saunders perked at the shooting.
It would look fancier on his resume than the other two incidents. “What park?”
She shrugged and took a sip of
her water. “There’s a bridge and a dog show going on.”
“That it?”
“I didn’t see anything else.”
“Rest up. I’ll see you
tomorrow.” Saunders slipped back out through the kitchen door.
Lia didn’t close her eyes this
time. Morning light creased the sky through the woods that lined the backyard.
It was pink and orange, making the trees look like they were on fire. She
vaguely wondered if her brain would explode should something that catastrophic
ever happen in Barton County. Then she almost wished for it, because this was no
way to live.
*********
Lia James would give anything to be normal. Struck with horrific, daily visions of death isn’t what any sane person would consider gifted. Her only consolation is that Sheriff Saunders, her shady keeper, does what he can to change the outcome of her visions—at least, the ones that might lead to a swanky promotion.
Christian Delph is not a normal doctor, and his patients’ maladies are not found in the average medical journal. As the head therapist of Orpheus House in Spero Heights, he sees everything—and usually before it happens. The one thing he didn’t see coming was Lia, and all the ways she would turn his fragile world inside out.
Available August 30th, 2016
to be notified on release day!
