Title: Blood Which Burns
Series: Liquid Onyx, Book Five
Author: BL Jones
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 05/06/2025
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 128900
Genre: Fantasy, family drama, gay, sci-fi/fantasy, superheroes, vigilante
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Description
Three months ago, Rex discovered a world-shattering truth about what it means to be a Liquid Onyx survivor and experienced devastating losses in the process.
Rex, momentarily gripped by raw fury and freshly torn grief, committed an act of shocking violence and was reforged by it.
Unable to face his new, fractured reality, he ran away from everyone who loved him and threw himself into the life of a morally grey vigilante.
Every choice Rex makes pushes him one step closer to embracing his father’s legacy. But there are other legacies who won’t let Rex fall into that darkness without a fight.
At his lowest point, will Rex find the strength and courage to step out of Alex Nova’s shadow and finally become the man—and the hero—everyone needs him to be?
Blood Which Burns
BL Jones © 2025
All Rights Reserved
When I left FISA and Rohan offered to let me stay in his flat until I got myself sorted, it was only supposed to be temporary, but after we started going on these missions, my leaving date became a question mark.
Living together makes it easier to share any information we’ve gathered and plan strategic raids on Obsidian Inc labs.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. In truth, I don’t know where I would go if I left Rohan’s flat.
I can’t go home to Colbie yet. I’m nowhere near ready to face it, all the people and the questions and the torrent of well-meaning sympathy. I just can’t deal with it, not even after three months of dwelling and grieving.
If grieving is what I’ve been doing. The general tone of the conversations I’ve had with Green over the phone would suggest I’ve been doing nothing of the sort. She keeps indicating I should either come to the agency or go home for a while. She wants me to rest, to stop going out as Wrath, to stop going out on missions entirely.
I’m honestly charmed, more than angry, that she thinks I have the kind of restraint it would take to set aside my Wrath persona for longer than a handful of hours.
These days, I spend more time in the suit than out of it.
I think I’m beginning to worry Green. But that’s all right. She’ll learn. I stopped worrying about myself months ago. Hopefully she’ll find the same damning freedom in it as I did, although perhaps not as destructively. A supervillain Green would likely be a horrifying thing to contend with. I’d stand no chance, I don’t think. She knows me too well at this point. Could be the most dangerous thing in the world; a psychiatrist gone rogue.
Rohan answers my question with an infuriating shrug, and an even more infuriating verbal response. “As sure as I was all the other times.”
I puff air out through my nose, containing a sigh by the grip of my fingernails. He’s like this, Rohan. He’s so ridiculously nonchalant during our missions. No matter what happens during them, and sure as shit some panic-worthy stuff has gone down, he just shrugs his way through it like we’re living in a video game and we’ll both come back to life if someone shoots at our car with a grenade launcher.
The only reason I let Rohan drive is because otherwise he’d just be there hanging out of the window, laughing manically and spraying the OI vehicles chasing us with bullets from the multiple machine guns he seems to have stored in every one of his cars. I swear he only has a hanger full of cars because he needed somewhere to circumspectly store all the various and seemingly unending number of weapons he owns.
Dr Sathe, the somewhat shy man I met six months ago, has officially dropped the act and raised the curtain. I can now see him for the out and out lunatic he truly is. Trust me, you’ve never seen a man take as much pleasure in carnage as Rohan.
It makes me wonder if maybe that’s why he likes me so much, since I’m currently the human equivalent of a forest on fire. I thought I was before. Before the factory. But these past few months have taught me otherwise. I didn’t even know what that much heat and smoke felt like until I got up the nerve to press my face into the flames and take a deep breath.
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BL Jones is a twentysomething British author who spends all her free time reading and writing and taming her three much younger brothers. She works as a BSL interpreter in Bristol and lives with a temperamental bunny named Pepsi. She’s been writing stories since she was five, rarely sharing them with anyone except her numerous stuffed animals. BL has had a difficult journey into discovering and accepting her own queerness, and therefore believes that positive, honest, and authentic stories about queer people are very important. She hopes to contribute her own stories for people to have fun with and enjoy.
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