Hollywood Demon is out, today, and for a short time it's at the special launch price of 99c.
Feel the Earth move!
A camera can’t steal your soul—but a demon can! Mark Yarren suspects a demon has found a way around the spell his great-grandfather cast to prevent demons sucking souls through the camera’s lens. Digital photography dangerously omits the silver wash that was photography’s century-old defence against Hell.
Mark is Hollywood royalty, descended from the early Hollywood stars: the studio bosses and directors, the producers and actresses. Now he lives alone in his palatial Beverly Hills estate.
Well, not quite alone.
Clancy Ramirez is back! She’s tried life in New York, in Iceland, and in Hawaii, but she missed California. She missed the grumbling roar of the San Andreas Fault with its leagues-deep molten geology. Clancy is a geomage and she can make the earth shake—or grow still. But California isn’t her territory. She has no place intruding or tapping its energy.
But a demon shackled for a century is breaking free, and Collegium rules, old heartaches and strained family loyalties will break, too.
The Big One is coming.
*Hollywood Demon is a completely stand-alone novel in The Collegium series.
Excerpt
Chapter 1.
Clancy Ramirez jumped down from the 18-wheeler, and reached back for her duffle bag. The heavy throb of the big rig’s engine rumbled like a hungry beast; or like the bear-were who drove it. Try stealing Stewart’s honey and you’d hear just that sound, right before you lost a hand.
“You gonna be all right, girl?” Nearly seventy years old and ready to jump out of his truck and defend her. Stewart was a sweetheart in a flannel shirt, dungarees and a flowing white beard.
“Of course.” Clancy put a smile in her voice and on her face. “I’m home.”
Home was stretching things. They were in Beverly Hills, at the gates of the Yarren Estate where Clancy’s grandma worked. Not exactly home. And the wealthy, celebrity neighbors wouldn’t be loving this early morning wake-up call from the rumbling big rig.
“Thanks for the lift, Stewart.”
He grunted that little chuffing sound bears make that could mean anything.
She took it to mean good-bye, slammed the passenger door closed, and waved as he reversed the huge truck back down the curving private road. As confident as she was driving a big rig along the highway, she wouldn’t want to reverse it here. She rolled her shoulders, remembering five days of driving; swapping shifts with Stewart as they headed west from New York. The land had stretched out, calling to her with its different energies—shouting at her in the Rocky Mountains—but she’d ignored it. Coming home meant suppressing her magic.
“I will be normal.” She wanted an ordinary life. She wanted family: someone to love who loved her; a dog; children, one day. She was twenty five and she ached to have a place where she belonged.
Stewart reached the road, straightened the big rig, and with a defiant blast of its horn, drove off.
Well, if anyone had missed her arrival, they’d be awake now.
Her grandma was going to kill her.
Clancy sighed. The duffle bag over her shoulder suddenly weighed a ton. Even more daunting was the knowledge that it held all her belongings. Everything else she’d sold or given away before she’d left the Collegium and New York.
She was officially unemployed, homeless and…determined. Determined! I’m going to build an amazing life.
She’d even sold her cameras. What was a photographer without a camera?
“Free,” she whispered the answer to the quiet morning.
I hope you enjoy Hollywood Demon!
Jenny
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