Now Available Club Revenge
Dysfunction at its Finest, Book 1
Amora Medina-Jackyl knew one thing well—vengeance. She’d inflicted pain without mercy to those who deserved the punishment. She’d lived by one motto her entire existence--family was to be protected above all else. An ancient cult murdered her parents and siblings when she was little more than a child. The Order of Angelus hadn’t understood the Hell they’d brought down on themselves that one brutal night.
Amora was many things in her four centuries. A daughter and a sister, a mother, yet she was best known as a killer. When she finally meets her end, Amora will have hundreds, maybe thousands of lives to answer for. Her only wish is to find one moment of peace. She denies her need as much as she fights to protect it. When the one woman who can bring her serenity comes into her life: can Amora destroy century old walls to let her in?
Lies and conspiracies tear at the fabric of sanity—of what’s right. Can truths come to light that change the reality of a family who’s known only the taste of revenge and loss?
Excerpt:
The deep bass pounded beneath the thick soles of Amora's boots. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked around Club Revenge with a sense of pride. She had been in New Orleans off and on for several years, walked the streets every night before she decided to settle in. Blues and jazz flowed from every open bar and club door. She’d lived countless places in her four hundred years of existence, but this one was the only one that called to the remaining vestiges of her soul.
Bodies moved on the dance floor, hands stroked over exposed, silky flesh or along corded muscle. Lust tinged the air, everyone in the room felt it and sensed the urgency. Any other night she would make her way onto the crowded dance floor, become lost in the sea of bodies. She'd find a warm body for the evening, draw the woman into her and get lost in the sensory overload--the scent of sweet skin devoid of the cloying stench of perfume, hear the breathlessness of her voice, and taste the salt of heat-dampened skin. But not tonight.
A few nights had passed since she had a perfect armful of female. Owning Revenge made it easy to find a lover for the night, but she grew weary. Her reputation, the thrill of lying with a monster, and they submitted easily. Sex was sex, too simple to get. Some lonely souls craved contact, unconcerned with the temporary nature—a well-cultivated cover for what they wanted. Amora shook her head and lifted her hand, whipped her towel from its perch and wiped down the shiny bar.
Last call approached, she signaled her performers, they wandered from the direction of the stage and dressing room. Soon, Amora would lower the music and tell everyone it was time to go home then she and her people would relax for the rest of the night. It was the only time she had a moment’s peace, because when dawn made its inevitable arrival, the nightmares—or more like day-mares—would come with the promise of strangling fear.
She tipped her driving cap lower over her eyes, she went about setting up the customers at the bar with another round. Amora joked where it was appropriate, flirted with the women in hopes she’d find a distraction from what would come. Her lovers never stayed the day, she always ushered them out before dawn, her pride, or as some would say, arrogance wouldn't allow anyone to see the weakness of her fight against her demons. They were real ones, not just the ones who sprang from the bowels of a mythological Hell, but also flesh and blood ones. Witnesses to her every weakness—the blubbered pleas for her life, for sustenance. They’d starved her, and turned her into a weapon—they had stolen too many years.
Eighty-seven years locked in a cell, dying in small measures of time, flesh became paper-thin. Gums receded, her body emaciated from the withholding of blood she had needed to survive. She learned the exact smell of her flesh as it burned, what it looked like falling as ash to the dirt floor. The horrors she had faced, the acts she had perpetrated haunted her, but she merely wanted to sleep, to find contentment and peace.
Her greatest regrets came to her in blaring clarity, all her mistakes, the faces of all the innocents, and the not so innocent, moved in a macabre play behind scratchy eyelids. Amora would feel the wetness of tears trailing down from the corners of her eyes as she fought each day to remain somewhat sane. Those tears failures she wouldn’t let anyone else see.
Amora always woke to screams and hisses, lingered pasts, realized the agony wasn’t hers not that of her mother. She would curl upward, wrap her arms around her raised legs and rock, force the clinging memories away. Amora didn’t know when or if she would find peace. With each year, decade and century that passed, her doubts of some happiness faded or shattered in the reality of her existence. All she had was an existence. She survived and little more than that. She found bliss in warm bodies, in the clasp of feminine legs and arms. An empty momentary sexual oblivion.
Genre: Lesbian Dark Fantasy Paranormal
Word Count: 59,000
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