New Book - Found Priestess
Hello, all you fabulous readers!
I know I haven’t been very communicative, but if you’re still around, thank you! and I have a new book for you!
Found Priestess is the third book in the City of Temples series, and the ebook is LIVE! (Amazon, B&N, iBooks, should be everywhere you buy your ebooks, and if you can’t find it, let me know :D )
The paperback should go live next week, assuming the stars align and the various publishing entities and I can all get along.
Here is a partial sample of the first chapter:
Sumi
Faith is hard.
Faith is especially hard in the City of Temples, where the city is run by the goddessi. Two sides of the same coin— Maldita and Bendita, nasty, vicious, lying, soul-eating goddessi who may or may not actually be demoni, if the people to the south were to be believed.
Maldita had owned me. Now Bendita did, blood, bone, and soul.
To get my life back, my love back, my soul back—
The bright goddess Bendita had to die. And maybe Her sister Maldita, too. Would killing Them solve all my problems? No. But it would be a good blessed start. Both goddessi I now believed might be demoni, pulled by magic into our world, grown fat on the sacrifices our city made to Them. They didn’t belong here.
And I would stop Them hurting my people.
How to kill demoni or goddessi or whatever They were…? What— goddessi or demoni or something else entirely— didn’t much matter. What mattered was how.
How to pry the spells out of those who had them, how to kill or excise the leeches consuming our resources, how to save our city while doing it?
I had no faith left in the horrors masquerading as goddessi, so I had to have faith in my own ability to make change, in my found-family’s ability to love me… because the people of the Blessed Third certainly would not.
Three days ago, I’d been living in the Rest Third, powerless and happy, a Red woman of middling skin and eyes and hair living with my husband, Jay, and our boys, Wil and Andy, and Jay’s sisters, and Mouse, a girl he’d brought in from the streets. I’d worried about making our coins stretch to buy enough food for us all. Now… now my family were back in the Rest Third, safe from Bendita, while I had my own rooms in the blessed temple, my own humongous soft bed, anything I wanted to eat, and a temple full of people to command.
And magic.
So much power, just pooling around me here in the Temple of the Blessed that it was hard to remember not to use it. Every breath brought me more power. It seeped in through my pores. Sitting— sleeping— was challenging because it surrounded me, lifted me, all the time, and all the careless little magics I did as easily as breathing just made it stronger.
And Bendita, the blessed goddess, hovering but thus far letting me do and say what I wanted… when would She disagree with me? Make Her wishes known in a painful manner? I had no allies here, no found-family, and I needed to deal with Her followers— force them into a semblance of sanity, one temple-inhabitant at a time.