Love Bytes is happy to welcome back to their blog author Rhys Ford , who is joining us today to talk about the release of Jacked Cat Jived, the third book in the Kai Gracen series.

Rhys tells us about the book and shares a fabulous exclusive story part that you can read throughout the tour.

She also brought a amazing giveaway with her!

Welcome Rhys 🙂

It is hard to believe that we are at the third book in the Kai Gracen series. Black Dog Blues was one of the first full-length novels I’d written inside of an urban fantasy genre I’ve always wanted to explore. The best part about writing Kai Gracen is creating not just the personalities but also the world they inhabit and it’s been great to blend in the fantastical with the mundane.

In his third outing, Jacked Cat Jive, Kai is faced with unique challenge of realizing he really is not as human as he thought and that the Court and its inhabitants mean something to him other than a thorn in his side. And of course, there is always Ryder, the Sidhe Lord who gets under his skin in the best of ways. I’ve enjoyed writing the push and pull of their relationship but also the growth between them as characters. They started off at very different points of view and are slowly working towards an understanding while also fending off any challenges that come at them.

This time out, Kai is not only set to rescue a group of refugees from the Badlands beneath San Diego, he also has to come to grips with his growing friendship with Ryder and how the humans in his life are getting older, something he won’t experience himself for quite a long time.

So I hope that you join Kai and his next adventure and also enjoy this serialized story of Ryder and the trouble he gets into when he doesn’t listen to what Kai says.

Also, I invite you to enter the giveaway on each of the blogs during the tour and get a chance to win a $25 USD gift certificate from an e-tailer of your choice.

You can purchase Jacked Cat Jive at:

DSP Publications

Amazon

And other places books are sold.

Ryder’s Folly. Part Five

Dinner was some kind of chicken. Or at least I thought it was a chicken. There were times when it was just best to not look too closely at what Kai offered me to eat. I’d learned from experience he not only had an iron stomach but also a questionable idea of what constituted as food. There were times when I thought he was pulling a prank on me but after knowing him for more than a few months, I realized he literally ate everything and anything offered up as a meal.

Regardless of its dubious origins.

Since making his acquaintance, he’s fed me wondrous things like sushi burritos and carne asada fries as well as lau lau and pho bo kho. Unfortunately, Kai has inordinate fondness of less palatable things like rolled flat cuttlefish jerky drenched in sugar and soy sauce, canned peas swimming in mayonnaise, and my personal, all time least favorite thing I have ever been given to eat, a roasted beetle maggot the size of a large carp served with a side of chili oil.

This was offered up to us while standing next to an understreet kiosk, waiting for Cari to finish shopping at a witch supply store. Kai handed over the money to the little old lady manning the wheeled cart, accepting the bulbous white lump with a murmur of pleasure, thanking her profusely when she slathered it with the hot red sauce I soon learned was a close approximation to sipping lava. I took the bite he offered me, eating it off of the fork he’d just had in his open mouth and I could taste him on the bit of flesh he held out, a kiss of cinnamon and cloves on the plastic tines. Then the taste of the gelatinous flesh hit and I ran to find someplace to be sick. By the time I came back, he had finished his meal and was now scouring the kiosks for something sweet.

That was his one weakness. Besides throwing himself at impossible flights. Kai Gracen loved chocolate.

So, I made sure to bring some with me on this trip.

I cut my teeth and paid my dues some of the most nerve-racking, mind bending politically fraught arenas and I’d been taught to exploit the weaknesses of both my enemies and friends but this was different. I’d first given him chocolate as a way to build a bridge between us, hoping to take advantage of his somewhat feral nature and have him acquaint me with pleasure of his favorite treat yet knowing him, growing to know him, I now brought some along simply because I knew it made him happy.

I loved to see him happy. I didn’t think he got enough of it and if anyone deserved a bit of joy, it was Kai.

Even if he fought tooth and nail every step of the way.

“Do you think the watering hole will be enough of a lure?” I asked, pounding in another stake into the ground with the rubber mallet Kai gave me. Once we had them in place around the car, they would serve as an activated boundary, keeping wildlife away. Or at least that’s what I was told in theory. It was always my experience things never seemed to work as they were intended. For all I knew, they were meant to draw the allegedly pygmy unicorns to us so we could document their existence. “It’s kind of like trying to capture a cloud, isn’t it? We know nothing about their feeding patterns or mating rituals. You’re out here chasing shadows.”

“Yeah but it’s a job and I took it,” Kai murmured from his crouch near one of the ice coolers he was using as a table, working the flesh free from the bones of the creature he’d brought back after five minutes of hunting. He worked swiftly, dumping the bones into a pot of water while setting the chunks of meat into a basket made of foil sheets. “Let me finish up with this and I will bury it under the coals of a fire to cook. It’ll be done in a couple of hours. Just in time for us to get settled and begin our watch. Watering holes usually get visited at dawn or dusk so we’ll want to be in the car by then. We’re far enough above the rise to not bother anything coming down to drink. Anywhere closer and we would  spook them. It’s why I had us up on the cliffs over there but I can’t trust you not to jump off of them again.”

I said nothing. Sometimes silence was the best option. His skill with the knife was scary and not for the first time I wondered at the sanity of falling for a man who could slit my throat before I blinked. On the other hand, those skills kept us alive in some of the most precarious situations and despite my pushing every single one of his buttons — a very quaint human phrase — he hadn’t stabbed or shot me yet.

Yet.

“What exactly are we eating?” I pounded in the last stake, activating the glyph on its top, bringing the warding circle up around us. It was elfin magic but low-level enough I hoped it wouldn’t bother Kai. He had an adverse reaction to the arcane, some of it because it tangled with his chimera nature but mostly because of his repulsion and the memories of how his own father used blood magics to torture him. “It looks like a bird.”

“Nope. It’s actually lizard. Not sure what kind but it was fat and we have an added bonus of unfertilized eggs.” He grinned at me, plopping a handful of yellow orbs he’d pulled from the creature’s innards into a skillet. They rolled around, coming to rest near pieces of onion he’d chopped up earlier. “Now, I just need to find where I put the dried sparrow spit.”

Jacked Cat Jive Stalker Kai Gracen knew his human upbringing would eventually clash with his elfin heritage, but not so soon. Between Ryder, a pain-in-his-neck Sidhe Lord coaxing him to join San Diego’s Southern Rise Court, and picking up bounties for SoCalGov, he has more than enough to deal with. With his loyalties divided between the humans who raised him and the Sidhe Lord he’s befriended and sworn to protect, Kai finds himself standing at a crossroads.

When a friend begs Kai to rescue a small group of elfin refugees fleeing the Dusk Court, he’s pulled into a dangerous mission with Ryder through San Diego’s understreets and the wilderness beyond. Things go from bad to downright treacherous when Kerrick, Ryder’s cousin, insists on joining them, staking a claim on Southern Rise and Kai.

Burdened by his painful past, Kai must stand with Ryder against Kerrick while facing down the very Court he fears and loathes. Dying while on a run is expected for a Stalker, but Kai wonders if embracing his elfin blood also means losing his heart, soul, and humanity along the way.

And if it’s even worth it.

Follow the rest of the Jacked Cat Jive Tour!

Rhys Ford is an award-winning author with several long-running LGBT+ mystery, thriller, paranormal, and urban fantasy series and is a two-time LAMBDA finalist with her Murder and Mayhem novels. She is also a 2017 Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Florida Authors and Publishers President’s Book Awards for her novels Ink and Shadows and Hanging the Stars. She is published by Dreamspinner Press and DSP Publications.

She’s also quite skeptical about bios without a dash of something personal and really, who doesn’t mention their cats, dog and cars in a bio? She shares the house with Harley, a grey tuxedo with a flower on her face, Badger, a disgruntled alley cat who isn’t sure living inside is a step up the social ladder as well as a ginger cairn terrorist named Gus. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep a 1979 Pontiac Firebird and enjoys murdering make-believe people.

Rhys can be found at the following locations:

Blog: www.rhysford.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/rhys.ford.author

Twitter: @Rhys_Ford

On Your Alexa device on the Alexa Skills at: https://www.amazon.com/Witlingo-Rhys-Ford-Casting/dp/B07N7MJ7C8/

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