Title: Into the Mystic, Volume 2
Author: Elna Holst, Valentine Wheeler, A. Fae, Sita Bethel, CC Bridges, Laura Bailo, Jacqueline Rohrbach, MK Hardy, Lina Langley, TS Porter
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: October 16, 2017
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 94100
Genre: Paranormal, lesbian, bisexual, romance, short stories, selkies, werewolves, wicthes,
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Synopsis
Ten lesbian/bisexual paranormal short stories…
Green Love – Have you heard about the aspen clone in the heart of Blackwood forest? Some say it’s enchanted, while others…
Dead Letter – Signed, sealed, delivered…or was it?
Seaside Escape – Just because it’s been done for generations doesn’t mean it should be.
Dressed in Wolf Skin – She was never particularly fond of werewolves, but she hated skinwalkers.
Unraveled – Summer can hack their magic, but she can’t hack her own heart.
The Holy Company – On an ancient holy path, they will come face to face with one of the local legends.
Vampire Hours – One’s a vampire. The other is human. One wants forever. The other wants everything to end.
To the Sea – Sometimes you just have to hold your breath and dive in.
Holy Water – She might be the most dangerous being in the world, but Clara is still in love with her.
Lighthouse Five – Is it possible for a mermaid and a human to build a relationship?
Blurbs
Green Love
Elise, a serious-minded environmentalist, hikes into the forbidding forest of Blackwood to find the clonal colony of aspen said to exist at its centre. Her journey is as much a struggle to break free of the overprotectiveness of her older sister and make peace with the loss of their parents as it is a mission to save the woods from the threat of deforestation. Once arrived at the aspen grove, she seems to have stumbled across more than she bargained for. Is someone, or something, out to get her? Will she make it out of Blackwood alive?
Dead Letter
Rosie’s new job as a letter carrier is much harder than she expected. The discovery of a haunted letter box certainly doesn’t make it any easier. For years, Olive has been waiting for the right person to talk to, and it seems Rosie might just be the one.
Seaside Escape
Helping men acquire wives from an ocean of beautiful selkie is a generational thing with Fiona. It’s part of being a witch. Until the day Kinley swims into her world and turns everything she ever knew on its fin. Through Kinley and her selkie sisters, Fiona finds love, a new outlook on her life, and a chance to rectify her past.
Dressed in Wolf Skin
A werewolf with no pack is in danger of becoming the most powerful addition to a skinwalker’s wardrobe. She’s rescued by a witch who lives alone in the desert. Although both are stubborn and independent, they develop feeling for each other while the witch nurses the werewolf back to health. However, the skinwalker still wants his trophy and will do anything to claim it.
Unraveled
Unlike other witches, Summer doesn’t make her own spells. A former foster kid, she learned not to waste anything. She hacks old enchanted items and sells them as good luck charms to poor college students. Her one mistake is in giving a powerful charm to her crush, Imogen, a brilliant biology grad student. That gets Summer noticed by another witch on campus, Imogen’s science professor. Now she must either give in to the professor’s blackmail or risk her wrath. Either way, Imogen’s life hangs in the balance.
The Holy Company
Sophie curses the day she said yes to Anna’s idea of walking Saint James’s Way in Spain. She’s exhausted, and she doesn’t think she can keep her feelings for her a secret for much longer. But a day of rest soon turns into a nightmare when they come face-to-face with one of the local legends, and Sophie’s secret is no longer safe.
Vampire Hours
Janna and Stacy disagree on a lot of things but not on how much they love each other. Realizing that bond isn’t enough, Janna turns Stacy into a vampire, hoping she can be convinced that life is a quirky trip best taken together.
To the Sea
While working with a beach clean-up crew in the aftermath of an oil slick, Kay meets Rose. A reserved and melancholy soul, Kay is utterly enchanted by Rose’s energy and optimism. But everybody has their secrets, even Rose. As the two grow closer, will Kay accept and understand Rose for who she is?
Holy Water
On her eighteen birthday, Clara comes face to face with the spirit that has been calling to her, the one that everyone in her pueblo is afraid of. Despite warnings to stay away from her, the spirit is all that Clara can think about. Soon, she finds herself in an impossible position: stay away from the woman she loves for her own well-being or help her despite the immeasurable risk to her own life.
Lighthouse Five
Chris is happy living a solitary life on her tiny lighthouse island. When she discovers a stranded mermaid named Jewels, and carries her get back to the water, it marks the beginning of a strange new friendship. As they bond over sharing bits of their cultures and finding out their similarities and differences, Chris begins ask herself—how close can a human and a merperson get?
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Unraveled by CC Bridges
Unlike other witches, Summer doesn’t make her own spells. A former foster kid, she learned not to waste anything. She hacks old enchanted items and sells them as good luck charms to poor college students. Her one mistake is in giving a powerful charm to her crush, Imogen, a brilliant biology grad student. That gets Summer noticed by another witch on campus, Imogen’s science professor. Now she must either give in to the professor’s blackmail or risk her wrath. Either way, Imogen’s life hangs in the balance.
Excerpt
Summer understood why street witches used glass in their charms—it was readily available and, most importantly, cheap. However, it cracked easily and made her job that much harder when it came time to untangle the threads of someone else’s magic and inject her own. The charm sitting on the edge of the coffee shop’s granite table was nothing special—a shard of glass from a beer bottle threaded with copper wire that held a gray bird’s feather. Simple magic that a twelve-year-old witchling could have done.
Maybe it had been done by a twelve-year-old.
“How much?” Karen—Summer thought that was her name—leaned forward, her chin nearly clipping the top edge of Summer’s open laptop, strategically placed to hide any bits of magic she might do in the corner table of the shop.
“That depends. If you want me to replace the focusing component, that’s going to be expensive. I can recharge it as it is now, but that will only give you another two or three weeks of use, tops.” Sometimes she wondered if these broke-ass college students who came to her even believed in the magic they were asking for. Hard to tell. Karen had been a client before—with a charm she’d used to stop her roommate’s snoring. Clearly, she was a happy customer.
“Three weeks is fine. That will get me through finals.”
Summer shrugged. A more fastidious witch might insist on replacing the glass. Crafting a good quality charm said something about the witch’s reputation. But she was a magic hacker, tearing apart other people’s work and inserting her own, sometimes changing the very nature of the charm.
It paid the bills.
“Twenty bucks.”
“Okay, great. When can I pick it up?”
This piece of crap? Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. Still, Summer liked to keep up an image of mystery. “Come back at six.”
“Can it be seven? I have class till six thirty.”
Summer had kickboxing at seven. “Sure. But go to the counter and ask for Celeste. Pay her, and she’ll give you the charm. Tell her Summer sent you.”
“Okay, got it. Thank you.”
Odds are Karen would forget Celeste’s name and everything Summer had told her about the charm lasting only a few weeks. Still, it meant another twenty bucks. Summer printed out an ID code from her label maker and stuck it to the edge of the wire. She’d learned the hard way to keep things organized. It didn’t help if she forgot what belonged to what client, or what exactly they wanted done.
She looked up at the counter and nodded at Leah, who was taking orders. She and Celeste owned the shop and had taught Summer everything she knew about magic. They’d even let her stay in their spare room until her business picked up enough to let her get a place of her own, although she still took a shift behind the counter to supplement her income every now and then.
She relied on them a bit too much. Summer couldn’t help it. They were the first witches she ever met. They opened the door to magic for her. And it wasn’t like she had any blood family around. She hadn’t even joined the local coven, preferring to be solitary.
Summer ran her fingers over the smooth glass of Karen’s charm. It pulsed with a barely there sense of life. Whoever had made this had more skill than power. Summer could see the magical text circling the charm with a faded red light. With a quick check that no one was looking her way, she hovered the charm between her hands, behind the shield of the laptop.
Celeste had taught her there were three things you needed to make magic.
Components—here glass and wire, gathered by someone else.
Intent—a barely there scrawled spell. Summer nursed it into brightness, discarding text that didn’t work, imbuing it with her own wishes—that this charm would bring Karen good luck in her exams.
And as for the last…perhaps the feather had served, but by now, the living nature of it had long gone. Summer surreptitiously spit into her palm, and rubbed her saliva onto the glass.
