Do you have to be a monster to fight one?
Erin Evanstar is a demon hunter, a protector of humanity from nightmarish predators that feed on people’s fears and flesh. They are settling into their dual life of being a teen and hunting demons.
When a tentacled horror abducts Erin’s partner, José, Erin and their family go on the hunt to get him back. But Erin gets an ultimatum: help the Fallen Angels bring on the apocalypse or watch José die. Erin will do anything to save José, but fighting monsters comes with a grim price–becoming one themselves.
Warnings: Violence, Death, Death of a Minor Character, Temporary Death of a Main Character, Mention of Past Abuse, Mention of Miscarriage, Pregnancy of Side Character, Self-harm, Suicidal Ideation, Guns, Grief, Kidnapping/abduction, alcohol use, brief depiction of humans enslaved by a supernatural creature
NineStar Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
While it is not the only genre I write, urban or contemporary fantasy is my favorite. The level of world building is more manageable than high fantasy, and I love being able to take the mundane and twist it into something magical. To me, that is a much better escape than creating a new world entirely.
Holly Black’s Modern Fairy Tale series was one of the reasons I fell in love with this genre. I enjoyed how the story was so rooted in the real world, but was also magical. I’ve always loved old things and abandoned places, so the idea that a kelpie might be lurking in an old arcade or that you might be able to have breakfast in a diner with a faerie night was so much more exciting than books set in alternate worlds. It was an escape that almost felt like it had the potential to be real.
When I sat down to write Power Surge, my goal was to infuse the world I knew with magic. In the opening chapter, the main character, Erin, was jogging with their cousin on a route that leads them to the beach. While Erin stared at the sun and its glistening reflection on the water, when they let their eyes drift out of focus, they saw mermaid tails and heads breaching the water. When they looked at their cousin, she glowed. The next day, when they were watching birds in a tree to avoid looking at a girl who was bullying them, some of the birds flicked back and forth between appearing to be birds and pixies. Throughout the book, in the moments when I focused on nature and imagery, I’d infuse the real world with little bits of magic.
There is a little bit less of that in the sequel because Erin is more integrated into the supernatural world and not only just discovering it. The sequel also focuses on the darker side of the supernatural and what happens when the Demon hunters fail to keep it from spilling over into the human world. However, in some ways, Erin has become the magic in the mundane. They’re not just an ordinary eighteen-year-old but an extremely powerful magical being on a mission to save their boyfriend and stop an apocalyptic war between Demons and Angels.
Stories like these are an escape that is far more accessible than some medieval inspired sword and sorcery world. It’s an escape that seeps into my day to day life. Even if I’m not writing and reading, I’m looking for little bits of magic in my reality. I look at a dragonfly and imagine it’s a pixie. I see a gnarled bush and think it is an ancient woodland creature watching from the side of the road. I imagine clouds are angel wings beaming golden rays of sunlight down from the heavens.
In 2020, when the world seems to be falling apart around me, it is so easy to feel hopeless. But when I escape into worlds where a young nonbinary person fights evil and wins, when I look for magic in nature, it’s just a little easier to bear, to keep going, to keep living on this messed up planet.
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This moment deserved savoring.
Breathing deliberately, I slowed my perception of time until the caps seemed as if they were falling through cold honey on their way to the ground.
The late-spring sun beat down on me, but a breeze kept the temperature bearable. Some tassels lilted southeast—away from the towering clouds bruising the northwest sky. The weather wasn’t going to hold much longer, but I was okay with that. Thunderstorms awoke something wild in me—a pulse-racing, dance-around-like-no-one-can-see-you kind of wild—a rush of adrenaline almost as good as what I’d get from battling a Troll or sparring with Mel.
With my sense of time slowed down, the distant thunder sounded like a lion purring. The clouds glowed purple as lightning forked through them like an X-ray, temporarily revealing a mass of tentacles undulating in the clouds.
Mel, did you see that? I thought as loudly as I could, hoping my telepathic cousin would hear me.
I’d seen a lot of different Demons in the three months I’d been hunting them, but based on the stories and the Lexicon, the massive tentacled ones only materialized in oceans, and they certainly could not fly. Yet, every time lightning flashed, there they were, waving as if violent updrafts were a gentle breeze.
My heart sped up. My hands closed into fists. Mel didn’t reply.
I shut my eyes, opening my mind so I could feel all the energy around me. Most humans were blobs of buzzing heat, but Mel, a hybrid of human, Angel, and Elf, had a hotter, more intense aura with a spritz of simultaneously depressed and optimistically peppy texture. I found her near my Elven grandmother, who felt like a condensed thunderstorm.
Mel? Niben? Can you hear me? Did you see that?
Of course, there was a good chance they were both shielding. What telepath would have their mind open to other people’s thoughts when there were so many other people around?
One who hasn’t been able to properly shield in months. Mel’s melodic yet squeaky voice was a welcome presence in my mind. Shut down the hyper drive. You’re giving me a headache.
I exhaled over the course of ten seconds, willing my sense of time back to normal.
A garbled din of stretched-out voices morphed to something more akin to a clattering avalanche of pots and pans. A shoulder jostled mine. The corner of a graduation cap crashed into my head.
Erin? What had you wanted to tell me?
There were tentacles in the clouds, I thought at Mel, turning in the general direction I sensed her in.
I crashed into José, who, of course, stood right next to me.
“You okay?” he asked. Tears glistened in his midnight eyes and trickled down his sun-kissed cheeks. One snagged on the crooked tip of his nose. He clutched two graduation caps, his and mine, so tight that the scars on his knuckles were visibly stretched.
“Yeah. Are you?” I wondered if I should tell him what I’d seen. He’d been hunting Demons longer than me, but he also thrived on keeping school and the supernatural as two separate entities. And what if they hadn’t been tentacles? What if the storm had just appeared that way with the lightning in slow motion? I didn’t want to ruin his day if there wasn’t an actual threat.
“I’ll miss everyone.” He stuffed the caps under his arms and hugged me. While I wanted to celebrate because I’d made it out alive, he mourned the loss of a place that had been a haven to him for four years.
I leaned my head on his shoulder, listening to his heartbeat, trying to let his steady warmth calm the worry growing in my mind. José’s body was a rock in the sense that it was hard and athletic, but also because it anchored me when I felt as if my mind was running away.
Have you ever watched a storm with time slowed that much? asked Mel.
I shook my head before I remembered there were dozens of people between her and me. No. Do storm clouds in slow motion look like tentacles?
José kissed my hair and whispered, “Are you talking to Mel?”
I nodded.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s having trouble shielding. We should go meet up with her and the others anyway.” I stepped away from him and walked uphill.
Students, who wore white graduation robes, and their parents, who were dressed mostly in summer dresses, slacks, and collared shirts, were clumped all over Saint Patrick’s sprawling lawn.
José draped his arm over my shoulder as I wove around groups of people. The pressure was calming, lulling panic monsters back to sleep with its warm weight. I glanced up at the clouds. They were closer and darker. The wind sped up, stealing programs from a dozen people’s hands. The clouds lit up with lightning, but I didn’t see any tentacles.
Mel’s voice popped back into my head. I don’t sense anything in the clouds, and neither does Niben. I guess she’s been restraining the storm for half the ceremony. Perhaps you were seeing her power mingled with it?
Maybe. Some tension unraveled from my chest. I’d heard stories about my grandmother, Niben, controlling storms, but I’d never seen her do it. In fact, I’d never witnessed her do any magic unless she was modeling something she wanted me to try. She’d come on a few hunts, but she’d just watched with her unblinking feline eyes and later quizzed me on what I did right and wrong. For all I knew, her fabled storm magic could resemble tentacles.
.
If Sara isn’t writing, they’re probably teaching, swimming in the lake, reading fantasy, or walking their dog.
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