Science Fiction Suspense

People on the brink of death come to me for life. I touch them, and my magic burns away their sickness. My gift is exhausting and painful, even dangerous. Which means I never intentionally touch anyone, and no one touches me. So dating? Definitely not happening. All of that changes when a cyber stalker threatens to burn me at the stake. I reluctantly hire a bodyguard, a six-foot-three mountain of temptation named Logan Smith, literally at my fingertips at all times. Every fiber of my 21-year-old virgin body vibrates for him.

Sixteen-year-old Jimi knows people change, but nothing could prepare her for what's about to happen to her best friend, Del. Del is obsessed with becoming a chimera: a person who pays back-alley geneticists, known as "genies", to illegally splice animal genes into their own. The resulting physical changes have scared lawmakers into drafting legislation declaring chimeras officially nonpersons, so when Del goes missing, Jimi is desperate to find him before he alters himself forever.

The first story ever told left a scar on the skin of the universe, with its characters doomed to an endless cycle of reincarnation and death. Trapped by his enemies, Daniel Faust - magician, mobster, and newly-minted knight of hell - has been cast in the role of the eternal Thief. Now, the story is dead-set on writing his final chapter, the one that ends with a knife in his back. The curse can’t be broken without tracking down the original Thief. The truth is buried beneath the legacy of a long-dead stage magician and a cache of occult relics from the 1940s.

Co-author of the best-selling Mrs. Murphy novels, Rita Mae Brown launches a new series with this first mystery featuring Baxter the wirehaired dachshund. When Baxter and his owner, Mags, leave New York for Nevada, they find themselves embroiled in a real head scratcher. First, the local water-pumping station is sabotaged. Then, a murdered man’s bones - dating back to the 1800s - are unearthed in a barn owned by Mags’ great-aunt.

Nile Nightingale is on the run. Fleeing across the border to rural Quebec, he seeks refuge at an abandoned church when his junked-up, overstimulated mind takes in that he has just witnessed a body drop - in a bloody sack tied with Christmas ribbon. The contents, unconscious but still alive, turn out to be 15-year-old Cleste Jonqures, who has been beaten and slashed, like wild game, to slowly bleed out. From his hideout, as he nurses his patient back from the brink and begins to face his own life, he pieces together what he has stumbled into.

My name is Leah, and I am a Cazador. Trained to hunt and kill vampires over 300 years ago, my training became essential once I became one of those monsters. The underbelly of the supernatural world has begun to bleed into the human world, and journalist Rachel Sambrook is asking too many dangerous questions. Unwittingly, she's revealed a conspiracy I had hoped would never become a reality: using vampire blood for human experiments. As I attempt to contain her, she's by my side, and the truth of just how deep the darkness goes is exposed.

Darlene Bobich, the zombie killer, is on a mission to save her family. Can she succeed, even as more obstacles are thrown in her way: survivors bent on their own selfish needs, evolving zombies, and the rotting world around her?

My name is Danica James. I'm a cop with the Arcane Division. Most mages have the ability to manipulate the elements - fire, water, air, earth, electricity. My magic only works on machines and electrical devices. They call me a magitek. That doesn't help much with demons and vampires, let alone criminals with lethal magikal powers.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead. So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now armed with his father's mysterious and deadly atheme, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay. Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage.

Out of prison and back on the streets, Daniel Faust returns home to a city on fire. The Chicago mob is making their play for control of Las Vegas, with an army of gunmen and a lethal shapeshifter on their side, while Daniel's friend Jennifer marshals the forces of the Vegas underworld. Staying on the sidelines isn't an option, especially when a Metro detective orders him to get the war under control - and if he can't, he'll expose Daniel's secrets to the FBI.

Half British Reaper, half Japanese Shinigami, Ren Scarborough has been collecting souls in the London streets for centuries. Expected to obey the harsh hierarchy of the Reapers who despise her, Ren conceals her emotions and avoids her tormentors as best she can. When her failure to control her Shinigami abilities drives Ren out of London, she flees to Japan to seek the acceptance she’s never gotten from her fellow Reapers.

Flo lives an eccentric life - she travels with a popular circus in which the main acts star orphaned children with secret shape-shifting abilities. Once Flo turns 16, she must perform, but she's not ready. While practicing jumping a flaming hurdle in a clearing beside the circus, she spots a dark figure in the trees and fears he saw her shift. The news sends the circus into a panic.

What do you do when you come home one day and discover that your parents have been kidnapped? Well, if you're a brave young guy named Charlie Ashanti, you go off in search of them. And since you happen to know how to speak Cat, your feline friends (the stray cats of the city and the caged lions on a magnificent, astounding floating circus) rally around you, bringing help, advice, and occasional special deliveries. Little do you know that in this search of yours, the fate of the world is at stake.

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

I watched in horror as dark magic sprang from my hand faster than an imp after your socks. I didn't know my name, let alone that I had such power. The man was dead. I panicked. I ran. How was I to know I was a dark magic enforcer, tasked with keeping magic hidden from the world? Yeah, total noob move, I know. But my memory is returning, and the Hidden have given me 24 hours to make amends. Cover it up. Finish the job I was given, or else. Failure isn't an option.

"Investigation, Mediation, Vindication." That's how the Yellow Pages ad starts, and if it sounds like the sort of thing a drunk teenager might come up with . . . well, you'd only be wrong about the teenager part. John Smith owns San Diego's smallest private investigation firm, but he doesn't know the first thing about mediation. Or vindication.

On the brink of a disaster that could end all human life on Earth, tech genius Robert Eisenbraun joins a team of scientists in Antarctica on a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa to mine a rare ore that can provide for Earth's long-term energy needs. But as he and the rest of the team train under the ice shelf in preparation for the long journey, trouble erupts. Before they embark, Eisenbraun finds himself the odd man out, and is put into cold sleep against his will.

Esper may dress the part. She has her own ship. She even carries a blaster - not that she ever uses it. But she violates the cardinal rule of the galaxy’s most cold-blooded profession: get paid. At least she's not alone. Her partner, Kubu, is an alien who gets mistaken for a dog. One is a wizard on the run from her past. The other is a lovable eating machine. Between them, they haven’t got a ruthless bone in their bodies. But when a client hires them, they’ll do whatever it takes to bring a target home safely. This time, it’s a teenage kidnapping victim.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.