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NEW RELEASE: Dead Woman’s Revenge – Elle E. ire

Dead Woman's Revenge - Elle E. Ire

QSFer Elle E. Ire has a new FF paranormal suspense book out (bi, lesban), Nearly Departed book 2: Dead Woman’s revenge.

Flynn Dalton doesn’t want to be a hero. But for Genesis, she’ll do whatever it takes.

After her first, deadly brush with the paranormal, Flynn just wants to get back to her life: construction work, semiprofessional bowling, and her fiancée, Genesis. Unfortunately, Flynn’s abilities have caught the attention of the National Psychic Registry, and they have their own agenda. Wherever Flynn goes, the registry follows, setting up tests of her abilities, hounding her to attend the conference in Atlantic City for evaluation and training.

Flynn can handle the registry’s heavy-handed tactics, threats, and guilt trips. She’s even convinced herself she can deal with her own growing—and increasingly dangerous—powers. But the offer to heal the wounds she sustained in Dead Woman’s Pond, wounds that are making it almost impossible to do the work she loves, is much more tempting.

And if the registry learns of Gen’s addiction to dark magic, agreeing to do whatever the registry wants might be the only bargaining chip Flynn has left.

Unfortunately, the registry’s plans for her are much deadlier than a simple series of tests….

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Excerpt

Chapter 1
Heroes

Every town has its heroes. Festivity, Florida, has three.

Their names are engraved on a concrete wall encircling a large tree at the center of town. The first is Simon, a teenager who dedicated the last years of his short, cancer-ridden life to funding and building a veterans’ memorial in one of Festivity’s many parks. I never met him, but I’m glad he has a memorial of his own.

The second name on the wall belongs to Charlie, the eighty-three-year-old crossing guard who threw himself at a kindergartner, knocking the child from the path of a speeding van and taking the fatal hit himself. Didn’t know him either.

And the newest addition is me, Flynn Dalton, immortalized with a bronze plaque for diving into Dead Woman’s Pond at the edge of town and pulling a woman from her wrecked, sinking car. I did a lot more than that, actually, including a later scuba dive to the lake’s bottom to retrieve a cursed charm that was drawing in all the vehicles in the first place. Town Hall doesn’t know about that part. Regular folks, or nulls, as my girlfriend, Genesis, calls them, don’t know about a lot of things, and we need to keep it that way.

I’m the only one of the three to be honored while still alive—a dubious distinction, I’ve come to believe.

Six weeks ago, when all this first happened, I would have declined the honor. Saving a life is what anyone would have done. Who would watch a woman drown and do nothing? Now, as I stand in the heat of a late-August evening, looking down at the names, I accept hero status with a numbness that’s become almost second nature to me.

Shit. I don’t need a plaque or free meals at the Festivity restaurants or a 10 percent discount at the kitschy little gift shops.

Not that I wouldn’t have appreciated the complimentary food a couple of months ago, when I could barely make my pay-by-the-week hotel room rent. But now….

I rub the spot on my left shoulder where a water moccasin bit me during my scuba excursion—one of three bites, actually, all engineered by the evil asshole who made the charm and spelled the snakes, good old Leopold VanDean. Dead now, officially and incorrectly ruled natural causes—heart attack trying to save me from the same water moccasin bites. Good riddance.

My right leg twinges in sympathy with the shoulder. The one bite that healed completely is on my neck. Genesis took care of that, but she had to use dark magic to do it, and she killed Leo in the process. In her own way, she’s as scarred as I am.

So yeah, I paid the price for my heroics, and I’m still paying. Gen doesn’t know it, and I don’t intend to tell her. I can hide pain pretty well. But my limp is getting worse, and my left arm’s range of motion is deteriorating.

And every few nights, Gen awakens me with her sobbing.

I don’t want a plaque or meals or discounts. I want our fucking lives back.

#

Genesis tossed and turned, her afternoon nap disrupted by the nightmares. She helplessly gave in to their grasp, once again startled by the clarity, the detail, which made her wonder if these weren’t mere dreams, but something else… punishment.

“How old is his sister?”

Genesis frowned, standing beside her brother’s hospital bed, watching the artificially induced rise and fall of his chest. The equipment noises and the thin partition curtain didn’t drown out the voices beyond the plastic divider.

“Seventeen.”

“Damn.”

A social worker, and the hospital representative who’d called her.

“She’s a senior in high school. They run a business together. Their parents left it to them, along with a lot of money.”

“She can’t run it by herself.”

“No.”

A choked sob escaped Gen’s throat.

No, she couldn’t run the Village Pub alone. (Would a minor even be allowed to try?) But she wasn’t going to have to do that. Chris would recover. He had to.

“Not sure what we’re going to do with her, or what she’ll want to do with herself.”

The two women stopped talking as more footsteps echoed on the tile floor. Visitors for the room’s other occupant, an elderly woman who’d fallen down a staircase. She spent much of the previous night moaning and begging for God to take her. Gen listened from the room’s easy chair, to that stranger on the other side of the curtain, wishing someone could ease the woman’s pain, take away the sorrow of her family.

Someone other than Genesis. Because she had nothing to spare.

The hospital rep and social worker murmured a few comforting words to the other woman’s relatives and left without pushing aside the partition to see Gen. Just as well. She would have told them to get out.

No, she would have told them to go to hell.

If she were stronger, trained, Gen could have done something. As it was, she’d poured all her magical energies into keeping Chris alive. Sudden Florida downpour, slippery asphalt, car accident. No one’s fault.

Brain damage.

He could survive the broken leg, the cracked pelvis, the fractured collarbone. But he’d slipped into a coma, and despite all the doctors’ efforts, he hadn’t come out of it. Too risky to operate with him in this state, and he needed that operation. They gave him one day, maybe two, before the rest of his body shut down.

They’d just lost their parents. She couldn’t lose him too.

Genesis sank into this side of the room’s only chair. It crunched around her, brown faux leather with a foot panel that swung out if she pulled a lever. She could sleep in the chair. She had slept in it.

On the other side of the curtain, someone started crying—a child or a young woman. Grief was universal.

“I love you, Grandma.”

Gen swallowed hard.


Author Bio

Elle Ire writes science fiction and paranormal romance featuring kickass women who fall in love with each other. Her published novels include VICIOUS CIRCLE (2015 and 2020), the Storm Fronts series (THREADBARE in 2019, PATCHWORK in 2020, and WOVEN in 2020), DEAD WOMAN’S POND (2021) and REEL TO REAL LOVE (2021). She is represented by Naomi Davis at the BookEnds Literary Agency.

Author Websiteelleire.com
Author Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/ElleE.IreAuthor
Author Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ElleEIre

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