Books Tagged With who - religion - pagan

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Summary: WANTED: Counselor for child trauma victims at scenic boarding school in northern Arkansas. Must be open-minded, flexible, and ready to travel at a moment's notice. Patience, extreme vigilance, and discretion required. Generous compensation guaranteed. Veteran teacher and counselor Delaney Frost accepts a job at Havenhart Academy and soon learns that not only are her new charges “gifted," but that within her resides a power so rare and precious, it can be used to heal others. When danger arrives at the academy gates, Delaney and her mysterious yet alluring boss will fight to protect the children from a megalomaniac out for revenge and the destruction of all she holds dear. Welcome to Havenhart Academy.

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Summary: Even a pacifist vampire can be pushed too far. Threatening his love is a hard limit. Vampire Creed Lowell’s life was altered fifty years ago at the hands of an ancient being known only as The Source, right before rogue members of the cult he belonged to destroyed their way of life. Just as Creed discovers the identity of the responsible party for that terrible tragedy, temptation is placed in his path in the form of grad student Roman San Angelo, a stubborn, proud, infuriating man who’s everything Creed ever wanted in a partner. When Creed’s past catches up to them, Roman is snatched from his grasp and Creed is forced into hiding, saddled with the care of his former mentor. He’s the only one strong enough to heal them and prevent a catastrophic event, though his rage builds the longer he’s kept from his love. When Roman’s safety is threatened once more, the two are finally reunited, and Creed is devastated to see the physical effects of Roman’s run-in with The Source. He wants nothing more than to secret Roman away and share whatever time they have left on this Earth in peace. But once again, Creed is forced to sacrifice everything when an old enemy sets their sights on his unique genetic makeup and skills. This time, it’s Creed who’s taken, and Roman will do whatever it takes to rescue him, even if it means trusting the being that nearly ended his life. With the help of Roman’s long-suffering uncle, a determined FBI agent, and a mysterious benefactor with a multitude of resources at his disposal, they’ll need to bring down a shadowy financial powerhouse and put an end to their villainy before it’s too late for Creed to have a life with his beloved. Moonwish is a continuation of the events in Sundowners and the books should be read in order. The events of this story are resolved by the end, but Roman and Creed will continue to work towards a resolution of the series’ story arc in future books. For readers 18 and over.

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Summary: When Heavy Metal Meets Serious Magic, Get Ready for Some Monstrous Consequences. Lottie Ferro lives her life by order and rules, but on stage it’s nothing but chaos. While leading goth metal band The Furies on their first tour of the year, Lottie uses her band’s witchy theme to hide her magic in plain sight. As Lottie struggles to keep their manager, Trenton from sabotaging their careers, she starts to suspect she isn’t the only one who’s hiding something. Trenton discovers her secret and offers her an ultimatum: perform a ritual for him or get shut out of the industry forever. Lottie has no choice but to tell her bandmates the truth. Together, they agree to find a way to give him what he wants. When the ritual goes wrong, it opens the door to bigger dangers than any of them are prepared for. From author N.J. Ember and USAT Bestselling Author Amir Lane comes a story of music, magic, and mayhem.

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Summary: Armand Tarkanian is trapped in the ultimate dead-end job: embalming decedents under his abusive uncle’s watchful eye. Every day he goes through the motions, making death look beautiful while his life is anything but. A car accident leaves him indebted to Berj, a mysterious man with rune-carved gold teeth and a penchant for worshipping old gods. Blackmailed and desperate, Armand feels more trapped than he was under his uncle’s thumb. But the embalmer harbors his own dark secret, a bloodline curse that allows him to communicate with the dead. When the spirits show him how they were murdered, Armand must choose between fealty to the sadistic and manipulative Berj, or joining the Legion of the Lamb, a monster-hunting biker gang with their own agenda. What began as a dangerous game between secret societies has led Armand on a frightening quest to save the only family he’s ever known and a chance to get closer to the rebellious misfits who saved him.

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Summary: Step through a portal in time - and steal a piece of history! Iria and Madge, witches extraordinaire, have summoned Joshua Norton I, self-declared Emperor of the United States, back from the nineteenth century to help them save the city of San Francisco from a demon of greed. Mammon, their infernal adversary, is running a real estate scam to end all real estate scams, and he's got his own helping hand from the city's past: Etta Place, famous in her day as the accomplice of Butch Cassidy and partner of the Sundance Kid. As Norton dodges mafia foot soldiers alongside another of San Francisco's larger-than-life figures from yesteryear on the fog-shrouded streets of Chinatown long ago, Iria and Madge find themselves face to face with Mammon and Etta in modern day - and trapped in very different timelines. It'll take all their ingenuity, bravery, and prowess to fix time itself, steal the prize, and get these three heroes back together!

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Summary: In November 2039, marine scientist Wend Taylor heaves themself aboard a zero-emissions boat skippered by elusive nature photographer Viola Yang. Guided by instinct, ocean dreams, and a shared birthday in 1972, they barter stories for passage across the Pacific. Aljon, Viola’s younger cousin, keeps a watchful eye and an innovative galley. Story by story, the trio rethink secrets, flying dreams, and how they experience their own minds. When they reach Hawaiʻi and prepare to part ways, opportunity and mystery pull them closer together. Both scientific and personal discoveries take shape as they join with ex-lovers, lost friends, and found family. Wend must navigate an ever-shifting future, complicated by bioengineered microbes and a plot to silence scientists, entangled with inexplicable dreams and a calling to Be the Sea.

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Summary: A twist of fate changed both their destinies. The wyrbears, once a long-lived species, were being lost to the forest in their prime. A people borne of a curse, their abilities not a gift but something wrongly taken, they nonetheless live in harmony with their animal spirits. But over time the curse they lived under changed, mutated, and now what once was a refuge from the world when they became too weary is culling mathan in their prime. Ewen mhic Friscalach, the leader of his peoples, lost his father too early and is now a widower with four children. The vow he made as a youth to break the curse afflicting wyrbears has been buried by grief and responsibility. Roi mhic Alric, a priest of Cerridwen and seer, watched his fellow priests slaughtered and his temple desecrated. The only thing that kept him going the last three horror-filled years was the vision Cerridwen had granted him of his emancipation. If freedom came at the cost of his life, well, he was more than ready for the Otherworld. A fated meeting upon a bloody field of battle. A wrong done long ago. Their choices could save a people… or send them into extinction. Either way, their love will be legend.

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Summary: Eclectic, imaginative, and unexpected, Community of Magic Pens features forty genre-spanning flash and short stories--including fantasy, humor, science fiction, romance, historical fiction, satire, and mystery--bringing together a rich group of diverse voices from a wide range of backgrounds and intersections. Fountain pens, markers and ink, charcoals, spy pens, a braille writer, a printing press, virtual reality, and a supernatural pizza: whether revealing unspoken truths, fighting injustice, or finding friendship and love, our pens have power. Join us as a recent graduate of superhero school struggles to understand her gift, a disabled android interviews for a job, a queen’s conscripted artist must pull reality from illustrations on parchment, and a grandmother’s secret room is…better kept a secret. Tales of struggle and triumph, compassion and hope: Community of Magic Pens is a celebration of our shared story.

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Summary: Aurora Rose slumbers in the city of Oldpass, a cursed kingdom once allied with Grimvein. The victim of a malicious spell, she is powerless to control her own fate. At least, that’s how the story goes. Now, as Grimvein faces attack, Prince Amir has been tasked with the life-threatening rescue of Aurora, his parents hopeful he will marry the princess and secure safety for their kingdom. Talia, the strongest spell-caster in the known lands, protects and guides the prince in his quest to save a woman that threatens to change their lives forever. In finding Aurora, the pair will realise the truth about themselves and each other, coming to understand just what – and who – they really want in life.

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Summary: Free bird? Don't make me laugh. Mom tossed me out of the nest with five dollars and the clothes on my back. Why? I visited my snitch brother in Danvers Sanitarium. Pariah or not, I refuse to abandon my favorite sibling. Did I forget to mention mom made me homeless on the night before my first day of high school? The principal took pity, but she stuck me in the boarding house with a nosy roommate. I refuse to flunk out of high school like the rest of my family. Breaking the cycle is a tall order. Three of my classmates decide to grief me because of my shady family. The others are part of an exclusive and mysterious clique. My only friend is Ed, a scrawny medium I rescued from a gang of psychic bullies. At least he doesn’t mind my obsession with ghosts. How will I get through the first month at this rowdy school, let alone three whole years?

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Summary: Bobby Gene is a man who stands out even among his people. Guided by the knowledge of his heritage as a backwoods shaman and more perceptive than many, he's grown to be a valuable asset to those he knows. While he isn't surprised to be the first to know when the woods around him begin to show clues that something isn't right, he doesn't expect just how much these omens and signs will prove to foretell something far more sinister to come. Soon strange dreams and inexplicable encounters have him questioning everything he knows- and then the people who live in his woodland Appalachian community begin to disappear. It's his job to protect and guide the others, what will he do when he's the only thing between them and the end of life as they know it?

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Summary: Qwyrk is having a bad day; several, in fact. One of the Shadow folk tasked with keeping an eye on humanity, she’s ready for a well-earned break in Yorkshire, but now she’s (literally) run into a girl, Jilly, who just saw something quite supernatural and truly awful happen in her town. As Qwyrk tries to unravel the mystery, layers of villainy are exposed, and she’s stuck with an assortment of unlikely folk that she’d rather not have “helping” her. Together, they confront ancient magic, medieval conspiracies, and the possible end of the world (that again?). It’s not the holiday Qwyrk was hoping for! Qwyrk is the first in a series of four novels about the adventures of a group of misfits at the edge of reality in modern northern England, a world of shadows, Nighttime Nasties, sorcery, intergalactic councils, tacky nightclub attire, an abundance of sarcasm, and even elves… though they are a bit silly.

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Summary: In a world where death magic is sometimes the lesser of the evils, a dark mage risks everything for redemption. To win a pardon, Raven must play a dangerous game of double agent. His mission: help the Guardians bring down his master William, the most powerful dark mage alive. His only Guardian contact is Cassandra, his former lover and the apprentice he once betrayed. His best weapon is the Ravensblood, a fearsome magical artifact his master thought destroyed. As Raven struggles to regain Cassandra's trust, the two of them devise a desperate plan to defeat William. If their plan fails, Raven could lose everything: his freedom, his love, his life, and his soul. And if William acquires the Ravensblood, he will gain the power to bring the world to its knees. First in the award-winning Ravensblood series, set in an alternate Pacific Northwest.

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Summary: A Paranormal Excursion in Four Acts. It should have been a simple field experiment. Go in, prove I can do what I claim, and walk out with the cash. If they could see what I see. Feel the helplessness I do when something else takes over. I’ll bet they’re not kept awake at night by the voices in this place. They don’t see the darkness with eyes that follows us all around this estate as we gather proof. This money was going to help my little sister with her surgery. Good intentions and the road to Hell.

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Summary: THE TIME TO STAND UP FOR YOURSELF IS NOW – AND ALWAYS! Past and present shatter like glass as Iria and Madge, lovers and witches in modern-day San Francisco, send their friend and ally Emperor Norton back in time to snatch a key to the city’s soul from one of its most turbulent events: the Compton’s Cafeteria riots! As the abused and exploited LGBTQIA+ people of the Tenderloin neighborhood rise up against their violent oppressors, our heroes find their plans foiled by Mammon, their demonic foe, when he sends his lieutenant Etta Place to ambush them in the present while he attacks them in the past. As Norton and Place dance a deadly duel in the shadow of one of the city’s greatest monuments, Iria and Madge must use their most powerful arts and quickest wits to wage a battle of wills and weapons across multiple moments in time. Betrayals abound and secrets are revealed as everyone involved—good and evil, wicked and wise—joins the battle for their own soul, the soul of the city, and their place in its future! Servant/Sovereign is the time-bending urban fantasy series from award-winning author Michael G. Williams, set in the Shadow Council World of Quincy Harker.

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Summary: Free bird? Don't make me laugh. I'm Mavis Merlini and I want out. Of my shady family, this rowdy school, maybe even the world. My brother got kicked out of Gallows Hill School for inciting mermaid violence. I'm determined to cut out all distractions and be the first of my six siblings to actually graduate. Which means living on campus and ignoring my extroverted roommate. All my plans are doomed to failure when a goth lion shifter in a trench coat drops his feather. Of course I pick it up. It's shiny and I'm a raven shifter. I swear I meant to give it back. But now it's magically bonded to me and I can't. Now I've got obligations to a Faerie Monarch on top of everything else. And if I shirk them, I'll spend a hundred years in his dungeon. Can I soar through this double life, or will I end up failing to launch?

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Summary: Varon Cambeul has made it to the top: Royal Magician of the Kingdom of Lothia, at the right hand of the King, who is his lover. He has always kept the promise he made to his mother and his apprenticeship master: he has used his magic for good. This promise is tested when the King asks him to make a curse, a curse that will be cured by the King and so everyone will love him. Helping the King is using his magic for good, right? But, is Varon doing this because he has fallen in love with the King? What about those who will suffer from the curse and slowly transformed into ghosts, people like Theo and Russell in the town where the curse is released?   Can Varon undo this great wrong? Can he save Theo and Russell and the others as they turn invisible? How can he love someone who is not doing good?

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Summary: The Big Cinch embeds readers in a magic-laced St. Louis, once known as Mound City, home of the indigenous Americans’ Mississippian ancestors. Little evidence of their civilization survives in 1924, apart from the popular Piasa monster image, invoked to sell plows as well as ornament civic pageants. Sean Joye, a recent Irish immigrant, tried to avoid fae attention and ignore his magical abilities since childhood. A young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, he aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean life in America.  Sean helps a wealthy, powerful, magic-dabbling family—founders of the most exclusive club in town, the Piasa Lodge--with a discreet inquiry or two. Sexually involved with a secretive, high-society flapper, he falls hard for her fiancé, a Great War flying ace with a few secrets of his own. But Sean asks the wrong questions about a kidnapped toddler and missing Native American artifacts and becomes a suspect in his lover’s bludgeoning and a tycoon’s murder. Can he master the paranormal abilities he’s rejected for so long in time to protect the innocent and save his own skin?

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Summary: WILL YOU BE ONE OF THE INVITED? A forbidden midnight market is coming to town. The Night Bazaar isn't new. In fact, it's as old as civilization. Its first recorded appearance was in Sana'a, around 700 B.C.E. with secretive merchants from the East who presented covered stalls of exotic goods and arcane services. Various mentions appear in obscure and controversial works from around the world. The only common element is that the market opens at midnight, closes before sunrise, and may appear for up to a week in the same city . . . Paris, 1796 . . . London, 1888 . . . Berlin, 1936 . . . San Francisco, 1906 . . . but never in the same venue each night. And never again in the same city. There's just one catch: In order to find it, you must be Invited. Tonight, The Night Bazaar opens in a parking garage somewhere in Manhattan. A whole subterranean city full of antique costumes, alchemical treatments, magical dentistry, palmistry, Tarot, tea leaf-reading, and water-, glass-, and crystal-gazing, oddities and objets d’art, medical curiosities and surgical instruments. Other lost arts and body alterations are offered in certain alcoves. Through the narrow aisles throng jongleurs, freaks, charlatans, mountebanks, faeries, prostitutes, and acrobats. The scents of opium, perfume, tobacco, greasepaint, incense, plastic explosive, alcohol, and sex permeate the air. But each object or service comes with a gift, a curse, or a haunting. (This is the summary of volume one. However, The Night Bazaar anthologies need not be read in any particular order; they are all designed to stand alone as well.) The Bazaar sells that which cannot be had elsewhere. Everything you’ve read about but thought had passed away, or perhaps never existed. How wrong you were! Your guide is Madame Vera, a tall, thin woman of uncertain age, ethnicity, and trustworthiness. The stories within are your invitation to join us. It seems you have already spotted something you desire . . . but don’t head off that way, not just yet. You have all night . . . but not a moment more.

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Summary: Welcome, Gentle Stranger. The Night Bazaar is open to you, once more. But this mysterious midnight gathering isn’t the usual marketplace. It’s a vendor's faire not constrained by geography or time. One week it appears in present-day New York, the next in . . . well, let’s say 14th century Venice, shall we? For this time, Madame Vera and the other peripatetic denizens of The Night Bazaar return to the Bazaar’s roots. Its origin story and inaugural appearance, as the exotic marketplace pitches its colorful tents in La Serenissima, the city of a hundred canals, host to fancy glassworks, masked revelries, and singing gondoliers. And – you guessed it. Unfortunately, in 1348, to the Black Death. The market's aisles are still crowded with vendors of the rare and unusual, exotic dancers, assorted faeries, jongleurs, acrobats, mountebanks, courtesans, and purveyors of curious objets d’art. Booths feature medical oddities and strange instruments of all sorts. Tents offer passersby unusual, uncanny services. But this time, the Plague threatens the complacent citizens of Venice. Who will survive, and at what cost? The Bazaar always sells that which cannot be had elsewhere, at any price. Everything you’ve read about, but thought had passed away, or perhaps never existed. How wrong you were! For Madame Vera and her staff can take you anywhere, and anytime. You need only be Invited . . . and now you have been. (Volumes of The Night Bazaar can be read in any order; each anthology is designed to stand alone as well. Time is relative, after all!)