'Tween Heart's Fire and Devil's Delight
BlurbAstra’s world is flipped upside down when she’s called to a demon nightclub to rescue her magic-phobic sister, Darma. Turns out the event is only a precursor of the weirdness to come. A veil of twisted magic is descending over the Earth and it’s making everybody crazy. Humans are killing humans, magic users are killing other magic users, dark worlders are attacking humans at an alarming rate and madness is rolling over everyone in waves. When the guardian angels start succumbing to a rare disease called Devil’s Plague, Astra decides a visit to the prophet is in order. But before Astra can get her arms around it all, she finds herself facing the biggest challenge she’s ever had to face—being surrogate parent to a baby dragon. No way!
It’s a whole lot of stuff for one little Tweener to manage. But Astra Q Phelps is definitely up to the challenge.
"This is one of those series filled with all the good things I want in fiction. I can't imagine ever getting tired of books like these where the characters and dialogue make the action come alive for the reader!"
The Romance Studio
“Astra! We’re leaving.”
I jerked my head toward the nails-on-blackboard sound of my sister’s voice and looked upon her with dazed eyes. “Huh?”
Dazzling wit aside, I was shocked to see her clutched in Torre’s delicately muscular arms. “Wait a minute. You and I need to have a little talk.”
She actually looked a little guilty for a split second but she quickly regained her equilibrium. “I agree. But not here and not right now. We have…plans.” She looked up into Torre’s eyes and smiled. The smile made me distinctly uncomfortable. Partly because I so rarely saw her smile and partly because it was a smile filled with secrets and intimacy. My sister didn’t do intimacy. She barely did civil. And with a Royal? Impossible.
I opened my mouth to argue but she had already forgotten me. She and Torre turned away and melted into the crowd. I started to follow them but Dialle’s hand on my arm stopped me.
“Let them go. You can talk to your sister tomorrow.”
I pulled my arm from his grasp, suddenly angry. Not at him, of course but he seemed to be the only one available for me to pound on verbally. “What the hell is going on, Dialle? How long has my sister been dating your brother? Why didn’t you tell me about this relationship?”
He grabbed my hand and we were suddenly on the dance floor together, buried in the mass of humanity with a couple of feet of space all around us so we could dance. If you could call it dancing. It was actually more like mating, upright, with all our clothes on.
Dialle wrapped both arms around my waist and pressed himself against me, feathering kisses over my face and nibbling in strategic spots to take me completely off my game. I started to forget what I’d been mad about. Lifting my arms I wrapped them around his neck and clasped my hands loosely behind his head, sighing happily.When he spoke in my ear a moment later it felt less like conversation and more like an extension of our mating ritual. His breath was hot and smelled of sexual musk and sweet promises to come.
“I just found out about Darma and Torre tonight. Apparently they’ve been seeing each other for months. Darma made him keep it from me.”
Calm now and refocusing my hot blood in another direction, I barely registered his words. I let my body drape around his and closed my eyes. The music that cocooned us on the dance floor was raw and wild, almost savage. The base throbbed in my mind and stomach and moved lower, causing me to press myself more completely into Dialle and wrap one leg around his thighs.
He groaned and said, “Let’s get out of here.” But before he could whisk us away the air on the dance floor changed and we were suddenly joined by my damnable guardian angel, Flick.
He pecked me on the shoulder.
“Go away!” I murmured into Dialle’s hard chest and tried to ignore him.
He pecked me on the shoulder again.
“What!” My head lifted and I fixed him with an angry gaze.
He smiled nervously at me. I was still having trouble getting used to my new guardian. After decades of dealing with Myra the cranky and firm, I now had a guardian who was shy and timid. I’d been assured that he was fully able to protect me in my…shall we say…challenging life but I was unconvinced, to put it mildly.
Flick slid a telling gaze toward Dialle, his mild brown eyes going hard for a split second before returning to me. “You are needed elsewhere.”
I frowned and stopped dancing. “What do you mean I’m needed elsewhere?”
Flick shrugged and, before I knew what he was doing, reached out and touched me with the tip of one long, pale finger.I cursed silently as we left the plane of sound and movement and wondered if this was part of their training. Guardian Angel 101, creep up on your hapless charge and shift her wherever you please, against her will.
I’d been tricked this way about a thousand times with Myra.
We landed on cracked, weed infused concrete. A strong wind blew my dark auburn hair off my shoulders. As soon as my mouth would work I started spewing foul deprecations in every language I knew, including Hades, at my sneaky, damnable angel.
This, also, was business as usual between me and my guardians.Flick just stood there looking paler then ever until I started to wind down. Then he peaked one mousy brown eyebrow at me and glanced meaningfully toward the glass and steel building that squatted beside us.
I turned to see a knot of children, probably about ten or eleven years old, huddled in a lighted doorway together, giggling behind their hands.
I turned my back on them and lowered my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me they were there?”
Flick’s mouth flapped helplessly for a minute and then a sickly smile slid onto his nondescript face. He shrugged, “You really should consider taking some anger management classes, Astra.”