Kelly Meding has a new urban fantasy series launching today and we’re stoked to be featuring Stray Magic here on Book Binge. Stray Magic is the first book in Kelly Meding’s Strays series from Harper Voyager and we’re pretty excited for you readers to know all about it.
Check it out!
Stray Magic (Strays #1) by Kelly Meding Series: Strays #1
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Publication Date: June 19, 2018
Genres: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 336
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Shiloh Harrison was hoping for a few days off to recover from a particularly nasty assignment, preferably with the help of the talented hands (and, well, the rest of his body too) of her sexy boyfriend, Vincent. But when a group of vampires takes an entire trailer park hostage, there’s nothing to do but make her apologies and get to the scene.
Such is the life of a Federal Marshal in the Paranormal Investigators Unit.
Yet this isn’t like her typical track-and-nab case: something is going on that has vampires scared, and it takes all her strength not to imagine what could frighten such powerful creatures. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have that option. Her boss is MIA, someone is snatching vampires, and there’s a ticking clock that can only end one way: a bloodbath.
Unless she can stop it.
Excerpt
“A bunch of vampires are holding a trailer park hostage.”
I nearly dropped my phone. While it wasn’t the strangest phone call I’ve ever gotten in the middle of the night, it certainly ranked in the top five. And if the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t from Novak, our team’s third-in-command, I’d have accused the caller of playing a sick 2:00 a.m. joke. But as a disgraced incubus, Novak’s rare displays of humor leaned toward the bawdy side. Hostage-taking vampires just wasn’t his style.
“Which trailer park?” I asked as though the taking of small communities was an everyday occurrence. I padded across the room and yanked open a dresser drawer, knowing without saying that my time off—my time with Vincent—was officially revoked.
“Little place called Myrtle’s Acres.”
“Am I supposed to have heard of it?”
Novak snorted in my ear. “I’m surprised the vamps heard of it. Forty-six trailers, rough population of a hundred and twenty people, in the middle of Nowhere, Delaware, surrounded by forest and two cornfields of all blessed things.”
“And they’ve got the whole trailer park?”
“Surrounded and locked down. It’s blessing unreal.”
Years of practice made the act of putting on panties and jeans one-handed relatively easy. The bra was going to be harder. So far, Vincent hadn’t commented. He accepted my job as a US Marshal in the Paranormal Investigations Unit and the odd hours I kept, and I appreciated him for not asking questions I couldn’t answer. Questions about the creatures I encountered on a daily basis, the methods we used to trap the nasties, the lengths we’d go to save the nice ones, and most importantly, why I was part of it.
In the nine months Vincent and I had been together, the whole “my father was an earth djinn and I inherited some of his powers” conversation hadn’t been broached. Even though we’d been intimate in both the hold-my-hair-while-I-barf way, and in the much more exciting lick-me-until-I-scream way, I wanted to keep my parentage under wraps as long as possible. It had a nasty habit of being used against me when people found out I could grant wishes.
“Shiloh?”
I snapped back to the phone. Had Novak been talking? “What?”
“I said how long before you can be at the crux?”
“I’m almost dressed, so fifteen minutes. I’ll call you when I’m there.”
“’Kay.”
I hung up, tucked the phone into my jeans pocket, and finished dressing. Green lace camisole under a fitted black jacket. Over the jeans, it seemed a little dressy, but our unit boss Julius Almeida never stood on formality. He cared more about how we did our jobs than what we wore while we did it. Plus the jacket hid my shoulder holster and gun, its clip filled with standard issue silver-jacket bullets.
“Real estate problems?” Vincent asked.
“That’s an understatement.”
From STRAY MAGIC. Used with permission of Harper Voyager. Copyright © 2018 by Kelly Meding.
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About the Author
Kelly Medging
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Born and raised in Southern Delaware, Kelly Meding survived five years in the hustle and bustle of Northern Virginia, only to retreat back to the peace and sanity of the Eastern Shore. An avid reader and film buff, she discovered Freddy Krueger at a very young age, and has since had a lifelong obsession with horror, science fiction, and fantasy, on which she blames her interest in vampires, psychic powers, superheroes, and all things paranormal. She is also a mama to two amazing fur-babies named Jinx and Puck.
Three Days to Dead, the first book in her Dreg City urban fantasy series, follows Evangeline Stone, a paranormal hunter who is resurrected into the body of a stranger and has only three days to solve her own murder and stop a war between the city’s goblins and vampires. Additional books in the series, As Lie the Dead, Another Kind of Dead, and Wrong Side of Dead, are available in both digital format and mass market paperback from Bantam. Books five and six, Requiem for the Dead and The Night Before Dead, are published in digital and paperback by Smedge Press.
Beginning with Trance, Kelly’s MetaWars series tells the story of the grown-up children of the world’s slaughtered superheroes who receive their superpowers back after a mysterious fifteen-year absence, and who now face not only a fearful public, but also a vengeful villain who wants all of them dead. Trance and Changeling are available now in both digital format and mass market paperback from Pocket Books. Tempest and Chimera are available in digital format only via Pocket Star. All four books can also be purchased as a digital bundle.
Writing as Kelly Meade, her paranormal romance trilogy with Berkley Intermix features three shifter brothers and the women they come to love, starting with Black Rook, and continuing with Gray Bishop and White Knight.
This does sound appealing! Thanks for the excerpt, Rowena.
I’m excited to read this one! It sounds great!