QSFers Carole Cummings and Andrew Q. Gordon have a new MM urban fantasy romance out (gay, bi), Lateral Parallax book 1: Relativity.
In a world where talent can kill or save, Nathan Duffy’s nearly did both. Nathan thought the accident that left him unable to walk was the worst pain he would ever experience. He was wrong.
After years bottling up his talent, it finally breaks through. The resulting hallucinations are unimaginably painful. So is the fact that he’s now a danger to everyone around him.
Cam has spent the years since the accident taking care of Nathan—or at least trying to. Now something is happening to his best friend and Cam can’t help. Then again, “can’t” has never stopped Cam before.
Crazy-smart college guys who turn dumb when there are feelings. BFFs and twin sisters who want to knock their heads together. Magic, mysteries, conspiracies, road trips and government coverups and cool science. And somewhere in there, there might just be time for a lovely, awkward romance.
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Excerpt
It wasn’t a dream, though it wasn’t not a dream, either.
He could feel his legs, for one thing, both of them, and not just the constant vague ache from the one that still sort of worked, or the bone-deep phantom pain in the one that didn’t. He could feel everything, like he hadn’t been able to in years, and though what he could feel was pain, horrible and encompassing, he still couldn’t really get over the fact that he could feel at all.
He could control his actions, such as control was possible. His voice, when it ground out of him on another exhausted scream, was his own. He could feel the power, saw-toothed and visceral, every time she slid another rope of it through him, shoved his face into a black slab of polished stone and asked him, “Where. Is he?”
He couldn’t answer, though it had nothing to do with dream or not-dream—he just didn’t know. He didn’t even know who she was talking about. He didn’t know who she was.
“Wh-why?” was all he could stutter out on a ragged gasp, clotting in his throat and runneling out his mouth with the drips and drabs of blood that bubbled up from somewhere inside him that had gone very wrong. He could see himself reflected back in the stone, eyes wild and wet, face white and ghostly, and beringed by glyphs he should probably have known but didn’t. The stone pulled at him, the depths of his own eyes like well-deep pits, twice-terrifying because it was him in there, wrenching at his own core, like he was dragging himself down to hell.
She snarled, vicious, and jabbed a bolt of power deep into his guts. His own talents were smothered down inside him somewhere, just as much a prisoner as he was, chained up and locked down, throttled at his core and misfiring all through him. It only made everything hurt more. It brought broken-edged pictures and sensations to the fringes of his mind—hospital rooms and tubes and sympathetic eyes over sterile masks—until it was all wrung from him with another stiletto-fine jab of pain.
He writhed, breathless, voiceless, body arcing away from the heavy table he could sense was made of a power so black he felt like he was strapped across the open throat of something cold and dark and empty. Restraints dug into wrists and ankles and torso, sucking everything important out of him and feeding it to the void, draining him, and oh God, why couldn’t he just wake up?
It must’ve come out his mouth somehow, the pathetic wish-question-prayer, because she laughed, though there wasn’t even a tiny bit of humor in it. She leaned down, otherwise attractive face made ugly by the sneer and the bared teeth and the stripped-stark hatred he didn’t understand. Her hand slid into his sweat-grimed hair, and she clutched, right at the nape, right where it would hurt the most if he could feel pain so relatively superficial anymore.
“Tell me which world,” she snarled.
Author Bio
Award winning author Carole Cummings lives with her husband and family in Pennsylvania, USA, where she spends her time trying to find time to write. Besides various collegiate and amateur awards she won for her writing back in the dinosaur days, she’s also the recipient of multiple professional prizes, including a Rainbow Award, and an EPIC eBook Award, as well as glowing reviews from Amazing Stories Magazine and the Gay & Lesbian Review Magazine. Several of her individual works and series have been voted reader favorites on multiple review blogs.
Andrew Q. Gordon wrote his first story back when yellow legal pads, ball point pens were common and a Smith Corona correctable typewriter was considered high tech. His books blend LGBTQ characters with his lifelong love of fantasy and the paranormal to produce a different voice for readers. Though most of his stories fall into the epic fantasy or contemporary paranormal molds, the occasion contemporary LGBTQ work will push its way to the front. Andrew currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his husband of twenty-two years, their young daughter and three dogs.