Edge of Oblivion
Night Prowler Novels Book #2
J.T. Geissinger
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Montlake Romance
ISBN: 1612184197
ASIN: B007SX0246
Number of pages: 384
Word Count: 98,000
Amazon
Book Description:
Morgan Montgomery is waiting to die. Branded a traitor by her tribe, the Ikati shape-shifter has no hope for mercy—until Jenna, the Ikati’s newly crowned queen and Morgan’s former ally, offers one last chance for redemption. Morgan must infiltrate the Rome headquarters of the Expurgari, the Ikati’s ancient enemy, to destroy them once and for all. The beautiful renegade has just a fortnight to complete her mission or forfeit her life. Because she does not travel alone…
Xander Luna is a trained assassin and the Ikati’s most feared enforcer, famed for his swift brutality and stony heart. Fiercely loyal, he is prepared to hate the traitor under his watch—until they come face to face. For Morgan Montgomery arouses something unexpected inside of him, something that threatens everything he believes in and the fate of the tribe itself: a love as powerful and passionate as it is forbidden.
Sensual, thrilling, and action-packed, Edge of Oblivion will enthrall readers with nail-biting suspense and heart-pounding passion.
A life-long lover of reading and a self-professed “book addict,” J.T. Geissinger didn’t realize her dream of writing a novel until a milestone birthday forced her to take stock of her goals in life. Always believing the right time to commit to putting pen to paper would magically announce itself, it took waking up one cold January morning with a shiny new zero as the second number in her age to kick start her determination.
More than a year and two unsold novels later, it was time to take stock again.
But her determination matched her initial procrastination, and she kept on writing and learning and trying to improve, trusting that if it was meant to be, it would be.
Then, during a trip to Italy in honor of their 10th wedding anniversary and the honeymoon she and her husband never took, she received an email that would change her life. It was from a literary agent, and it contained the three words every aspiring author longs to hear: “I loved it.”
The manuscript was sold to Montlake Romance who published it six months later. Hitting the Amazon bestseller lists in both the US and the UK within weeks of publication, Shadow’s Edge was book one of the Night Prowler Novels. Book two, Edge of Oblivion published October 2nd, and book three will follow in the spring of 2013. Three additional installations in the Night Prowler series are planned for the future.
Read an excerpt:
Once, we were gods.
Ages ago, idyllic, uncounted centuries before man or his sly, sprawling civilizations had even been dreamed, we ruled sovereign over all other creatures in the deepest, virgin heart of equatorial Africa. Divine and resplendent, reveling in the bounty and glory of our many Gifts, we took the name Ikati—Zulu for “cat warrior”—because it most closely described our stealthy perfection, our feline, sinuous grace, our cunning and lethal prowess.
We lived and loved and raised our children there, beside the pristine, glimmering waters of the Congo, beneath the nourishing sun and the endless blue sky and the lush, dappled shade of the baobab trees. We wore crowns of gold and green garnet and tanzanite, we walked naked among nature and one another and knew no shame. We honored our dead and hunted our food and slept in the fat, crooked arms of acacias and marulas, we passed the stories of our illustrious history to the next generation. We celebrated our Mother Earth and her great magic, and all was well. All was perfect.
But Time is a merciless thief, even for creatures so blessed as we, and slowly things began to change.
Invaders came. Clumsy, ugly, two-legged beasts with spears to stab hearts and arrows to pierce flesh and fire to burn homes. They stole through our forests and poached in our grasslands, they poisoned our rivers and captured our children, our old and weak. We fought our enemies back; we had no choice. Year after year we fought, decades of struggle, war, blood, death. Battles were won, only to begin anew with the next generation. There were so many of our enemy, and so few of us. In time, our numbers dwindled. In time, our enemies gained the advantage.
So, like all creatures must, we adapted to survive.
We learned the human ways. We spoke the human tongue. We wore human clothing and raised human crops and built homes of mud and grass, then wood, then brick, as they did. We learned to hide our true nature. And in this way, we began once more to thrive.
In secrecy. In silence. With seething hatred in our hearts.
Then one day came a different sort of man, a man with no spear or sword, a man with open arms and a gentle voice who claimed to be our friend. He offered a truce and the return of what was already rightfully ours, the rivers and the mountains and the verdant, untouched forests. Trust me, the man said, and, tired of so much war and bloodshed, we did.
For a long, long while, the arrangement suited us both and we prospered. Our children grew up together. Our clans lived side by side. Because we were so beautiful and Gifted, unfixed as they were in a single aspect of flesh and bone but mutable, pliable, evanescent, the two-legged invaders began to worship us as the gods we truly were. Offerings were made, statues of gold and ebony and oiled stone were carved, temples were built—the Sphinx, most famously—all in our name. We even mated with our former enemies, bearing half-Blood children, offspring that might one day be as Gifted and blessed as the pure-Blooded were.
Or might not.
A Queen arose from one of these unions. Cleopatra she was called, meaning “the glory of her father,” because he was Ikati, one of our own Blood. More beautiful and cunning and sensual than us all, she ruled empires and seduced hearts and convinced a human man to turn against his king. And with that, she sealed all our fates.
The coup failed. The Queen and her lover died. And the Ikati were hunted once again. We were hated. We were driven out of our homeland, nearly extinct.
The few that remained remembered how they had survived before the human pestilence came, before clever deceptions blinded their eyes and stole their glory, and made a pact to return to the old ways of pretending and lying, of keeping to themselves. They fled their beloved Africa and found other places in the world to call their own, small, wooded places, cloaked in silence, far away from prying eyes.
Untold eons have passed, and still we live in secrecy and silence, bound together by honor and betrayal and a tradition of iron-clad rules to protect us from the greatest threat of all: Forgetting.
Our kingdom of peace and perfection was stolen from us by you, covetous, ambitious, treacherous Man. And though we have learned to live alongside you, though we have learned to survive, though we may smile and nod as we pass you in the street, we are always, always ready to eat out your hearts.
Beware.
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Thanks for hosting me, Liz!
ReplyDeleteBest,
J.T. Geissinger