Urban Short Stories

From cakes to stakes, a celebration of everyone's favorite bloodsucking subculture by a baker's dozen of favorite authors. Each of these 13 original stories offers a fresh and unique take on what birthdays mean to the undead. From Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse attending a birthday party for Dracula to Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden battling bloodsucking party crashers, these suspenseful, surprising, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous stories will ensure paranormal fans will never think of vampires or birthdays quite the same again.

The sequel to the best-selling Zombie, Ohio, this explosive supernatural thriller from Scott Kenemore tells the story of three Chicagoans who have been thrown together by a bizarre, interconnected series of events during the first 24 hours of a zombie outbreak in the Midwest's largest city. A partnership is crafted between a pastor from Chicago's rough South Side, an intrepid newspaper reporter, and a young female musician, all of whom are fighting for survival as they struggle to protect themselves and their communities in a city overrun with the walking dead.

I can stop time, but I can't change anything. I can access memories, but not far enough. My name is Mira, and my life is about finding the Russian mobster who killed my family.

"Next of Kin" by Astrid Amara: Jay Yervant is a Hell Cop so powerful that his bare skin incinerates anyone he contacts. Isolated, he is tortured by desire, until he meets Brian, a sensual young man who touches him with impunity. But Jay's burgeoning hope is threatened when a malevolent sorcerer unleashes a host of demonic assassins against Brian. Keeping his lover may cost Jay his life.

A mother and her daughter come to the remote Orkneys to grieve and find themselves instead dealing with a ghostly Viking legend. A Dark Ages king doesn’t realise his wife carries another man’s child and she is desperate for him not to find out. A young woman, who has spent her whole life hiding her supernatural strength, discovers on the eve of her wedding that she is Odin’s daughter. Sir Percival’s sister finds herself trapped in a castle of bloodletting sorcerers with only her sexuality as a weapon.

When an innocent boy goes missing on Halloween, Helena vows to do everything in her power to find him. With the help of a few shape-shifting friends, they pick up the scent of the vampire responsible for the child’s disappearance. Helena is no stranger to dangerous villains. She’s fought more than her fair share, thanks to her own strange supernatural heritage.

From her first days at Virginia’s Hampton University, impressionable, creative Nia falls smitten with Chris Eidos Alleyne, an athlete and a scholar. “Love is sweet nothings and beautiful promises”, Nia writes in her journal. What her girlfriends know, and her mother doesn’t, is that Chris’s expression of love is deeply physical. Wielding powerful charisma, Chris soon has Nia abandoning innocence for experience.

From Nebula Award winner Gregory Benford comes this ambitious hard SF anthology that collects five original novellas. Each one takes the very long view - all are set at least ten thousand years in the future. The authors take a rigorously scientific view of such grand panoramas, confronting the largest issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.

Paranormal romance authors Alexandra Ivy, Nina Bangs, Dianne Duvall, and Hannah Jayne present four original novellas in this exciting anthology.

New York Times best-selling author MaryJanice Davidson "continues to put her own unique spin on paranormal romance" ( Fallen Angel Reviews), and in this all-new anthology, she’s three times as outrageous as ever before.…

Everyone loves a well-catered event, and the supernatural community is no exception. Enter Sin du Jour, the expert caterers to demons, goblins, faeries, and everything in between. In their first month on the job, Lena Tarr and Darren Vargas, the newest line chefs at the supernatural catering agency, have had to approximate angel meat, evade amorous lizards, and provide craft sacrifices for a Hollywood debut. Their coworkers have contended with zombified clowns, fought off the Easter Bunny's hit squad, and captured a golden fish for a goblin royal wedding.

Herbert George Wells est un écrivain britannique considéré comme le père de la science-fiction contemporaine. Cette nouvelle est issue d'un recueil d'histoires qui nous embarquent dans la quatrième dimension fantastique. "L'Étoile", le passage d'une étoile sème comme un vent de panique. "Dans l'abîme", une descente au fond de l'océan dans une sphère à la découverte d'êtres fantastiques. "L'oeuf de cristal", dans un magasin d'antiquités, se trouve un étrange oeuf en cristal.

Akira's plans are simple: write wedding invitations, bake Christmas cookies, and eat red meat. (The last surprises her, too.) But when Rose, the ghost who haunts her house, asks for a favor, Akira can't say no. Although she's faced danger before, even death, a toddler who doesn't like peanut-butter-and-jelly might be her worst nightmare.

On a hot summer’s day in Boston, US Marine turned Homicide Detective Reid Halsey finds himself in the middle of a deadly shootout with a murder suspect. When Lucas Soul, a seemingly innocent victim, rises from the dead moments after a fatal gunshot wound to the head, Reid comes to the shocking realization that the world he believes in may very well be a carefully fabricated lie masking an unearthly reality.

The three awarded short stories for 2016: a short story full of suspense and thrilling events showing how to murder someone, pinning the kill on someone else; a quasi-biographical short story revealing embarrassing moments in a woman's life and her decision to take her life back (better later than never); the revelation of a quirks in the life of the inhabitants of a building that is about to be sold, the owner not knowing what he'd bring upon himself, had he sold the building.

As war rumbled through the heavens, the seas also boiled with battle. Poseidon was one of the first to succumb. Now, the alliance of evil gods turn their sights on the Inuit pantheon. Barely surviving the initial strike, the goddess Sedna seeks the sanctuary of the oceans and her old friend Jormungandr. She knows the Norse world serpent isn’t the evil people believe him to be.

A fugitive from the Sprytes, one of the most dangerous supernatural cults on Earth, Betty has refashioned herself as a revealer of dark conspiracies and a killer of misogynous conspirators. On her crusade, she has successfully stayed off the radar for months. When the Sprytes close in, however, Betty may find herself entangled in a conspiracy too dark to escape.

Even though he’s one of the Heartland Security Agency’s Peacemaker agents, a man sworn to help protect and preserve the morality of the United States, Neal can’t give up his habit of patronizing prostitutes. When one of them steals the prototype of a top secret device, however, he has no choice but to come clean in order to rally fellow agents for a recovery mission. His situation goes from bad to worse when he is tricked into a plot to take down one of the Agency’s most powerful secret allies.

The Order of the Three Spears. Founded at the turn of the ninth century by the Lotus-Born Second Buddha and inspired by the most powerful immortal warrior who ever lived, this secret Buddhist society has kept the existence of immortals hidden from ordinary humans and maintained peace between the races for twelve hundred years.

When hunted half-breed immortal Lucas Soul hears tales of legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto during his travels in the Far East, he sails to Japan to meet the great man and convince him to take him on as an apprentice.