Completed Novels
Mercury Mirror
Four Magicians at a military academy compete for a glimpse at the Mirror, an enigmatic device rumored to grant its viewers power over destiny. Except destiny won’t wait to be overpowered.
Jaq, an assassin-in-training, vies to avenge his parents’ death. He even agrees to experimental brain surgery to forge a stronger connection to his magic and hasten graduation. But when he almost kills a teacher during a training session, delaying graduation indefinitely, Jaq is forced to question how much control he sacrificed for power.
Reed, a shy newcomer, is always wrong place, wrong time: he happens to see the school’s assassin almost kill a teacher. Worried the assassin will come for him next, he confides in Ward, a cleric who grew up in the school. Ward assures him that there’s nothing to fear, since Jaq can only be commanded to kill by their teachers.
Ward, however, is in love with Jaq after years of patching him up after sparring matches. Convinced that the incident is just a misunderstanding and not a dreaded consequence of Jaq’s experimental surgery, Ward asks his lifelong friend, Javelin, to investigate what really happened.
As an aspiring paladin, Javelin readily volunteers to question Jaq—and, if it comes to it, defeat him in combat. He’ll defend Reed, earn his right to see the Mirror, and win back Ward’s love. But when destiny knocks and presents him with infinite power, Javelin’s reckless choices may leave his friends defenseless against his jealous crusade.
Adult Dark Fantasy
The Breath of Teloria
(Adult-YA Crossover Fantasy)
For Ephraim, every day is a betrayal. His spymaster father constantly lies to him and his only friend uses him to eavesdrop on the king. When a winged diplomat his father imprisoned offers to tell Ephraim the truth about his mother’s death in exchange for his freedom, Ephraim shouldn’t agree to help. But he will do anything for the truth, even if it means dying for it. What he doesn’t count on, however, is the truth being more than he can live with.
Travis might be in love with his best friend — his only friend — except he’s condemned to spy on him. In this country knowledge is currency, especially when you’re heir to a penniless province. When Travis meets Ephraim’s imprisoned, winged diplomat, he certainly knows one thing: the diplomat is hiding more than a secret about Ephraim’s mother. They won’t figure it out by following the prisoner into enemy lands, but if that’s what Ephraim wants to do, Travis would be lying to himself if he says he doesn’t want that, too.
Xhella wants nothing more than revenge. After their country’s gutless spymaster kills her father for helping an injured prisoner, she sets out to find it. When instead she finds the spymaster’s son, Ephraim, she helps him (and the prisoner) escape. But when she discovers that the Breath of Teloria, a vial of life-sustaining air from the highest sky, has fallen into the spymaster’s hands, she pursues a new justice: help the prisoner, a Telori himself, reclaim it. Until she realizes that he would trade anything to get it back.
When the trio’s quest to uncover twenty years of buried family history reveals a conspiracy to trade their lives for the vial, Ephraim, Travis, and Xhella must decide if the ideals they’re desperate for — truth, love, and justice — are worth dying for.
The Delegate
(Young Adult Sci-Fi)
Sixteen-year-old Dinah survived the Disease, an illness created in a nuclear war, but lost her ability to speak. It hasn’t stopped her from becoming her city’s best mechanic. She will fix her sandcruiser and acquire as many nuclear batteries as it takes to drive her and Mordecai — the only person who understands her sign language — out of their desperate city. When instead Mordecai is imprisoned for plotting to kill the city’s dictator, Dinah must win his freedom back. She builds a mechanical suit of armor that will do the talking (punching) for her and enters one of the dictator’s brutal competitions.
When Dinah reaches the last battle — a fight to the death — she questions how far her loyalty to Mordecai extends. To add complication, her opponent is the girl she’s fallen in love with. Dinah must choose: she can kill the girl she loves to free Mordecai or she can lay down her own life to spare her opponent’s. Unless she can engineer a way to save them all.
Pale Yellow Disc in a Pale Blue Sky
(Adult Sci-Fi)
Nineteen-year-old Douglas feels too much. His emotional see-saw, which catapults him from laughter to explosive anger, just cost him his job in the lab. Without his job, he’ll lose underground housing. Without underground housing, he’s toast. Literally. The solar radiation burning through Earth’s ozone layer will roast him just like it has most of the human race. Before they kick him aboveground, a scientist offers him a job: protect the lab by participating in an emotion-deletion program, one designed to create better soldiers. As it will provide both housing and respite from his waking nightmares, Douglas gladly enlists and swallows the experimental pills.
Douglas transforms into such an exemplary soldier that even before he’s finished with treatment, he’s assigned to protect the lab’s most important asset: Selena. She’s one of three solar-powered teenagers created to repopulate the planet. When Douglas realizes that Selena is not a celebrated second Eve but a prisoner, subjected to painful experiments and forced into producing offspring on the researchers’ schedule, he’s only weeks away from his last emotion-deletion treatment. Weeks away from freeing himself, and erasing any chance Selena has to escape.
If Douglas helps Selena, he’ll lose everything — his job, his housing, the pills that save him from his volatile emotions — but if he doesn’t, he may lose everything that makes him human.
Works in Progress
Ideas Brewing…
I’m probably crocheting, reading, or, in all honesty, taking care of my newborn!
Some fun pages: