A Shiver of Shadows (The Hell Gate Series) Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance by Hunter J. Skye ➱ Book Tour with Giveaway

 

 

A Shiver of Shadows

The Hell Gate Series Book 2

by Hunter J. Skye

Genre: Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance 

You'd think stopping Armageddon would buy a girl a bit of R&R with her freshly resurrected boyfriend. But things go south again when celebrity soul wrangler, Melisande Blythe, is abducted and dragged to Europe.
There's more to the darkness hiding in the reclusive, mountaintop country of Andorra than just garden variety evil. There's something dangerously wrong with her beautiful immortal hosts too.
Gifted with flesh again by the Grace of God, three-hundred-year-old former ghost, Colonel William Grayford, will move heaven and earth to find his beloved. But Europe's most wicked monsters stand in his way. Something more painful than death awaits Mel, if Grayford can't find her in time.
The world's been living on fifteen thousand years of borrowed time and it's just run out.

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A Glimmer of Ghosts

The Hell Gate Series Book 1

One night of filming in the wrong cemetery changes everything for a celebrity ghost-hunter with a half dead brain. When Melisande Blythe discovers that a secret society of wraiths wants her killed or worse, Mel will have to do the one thing she promised she would never do… trust a ghost.

But does the corporeal spirit of her dreams really want her heart or does he want her newfound ability to enslave souls? With Hell on the horizon, Mel is running out of time. She has to stop the fiery invasion or face the darkness warring in her soul.

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A Shiver of Shadows

Excerpt 1:

“We won’t make it in time, so I need you to do exactly as I say,” she clutched me by my arms then shoved me into a small convenience store that blazed white with artificial lighting. She dragged me down a narrow aisle, passed products with unfamiliar labels, towards a dead-faced man in a turban. His mottled eyes followed us as the woman pushed passed his small counter.

“Santuario,” she whispered to the man and he nodded stoically. Then she turned to me.

“Don’t stop. Don’t look around. Just keep moving.”

“What?” I asked as her hand closed over mine once more.

We hurtled down a dark slender hall to an ancient rat chewed wooden door with symbols painted on it in a dark, drooling liquid. Something about that viscous fluid made my skin crawl. The dingy walls pressed close and suddenly the hallway felt as though it was swallowing me whole.

“Wait.” My voice wavered. “Just wait a second.” Something big hovered on the other side of that door. Something I wasn’t ready for. It peeled away my thoughts. It knew I was coming.

“This is a mistake.” Not a bad tattoo kind of mistake. This was the kind of mistake that would burn through my being. It would hollow me out. I’d already rebuilt myself once. I couldn’t go through that kind of stripping again. “Whatever’s in there…it isn’t for me to see.”

“Then close your eyes.” She yanked the door open and pulled me through.

Excerpt 2: 

I turned as the winking white flowers next to me whispered a celestial secret. I tried to understand their jasmine gibberish, but it coiled through my mind like vines instead of words. I turned back to Prim, and my mouth fell open.

A roiling nebula of colors spread out from Prim’s back in the shape of two giant wings. I stumbled away from the pressing gravity of the rainbow feathers as they stretched and sparked in the dim light.

“Stay close,” Prim ordered, but when she turned to me, her hazel eyes were gone. Yawning orifices of blackness blinked at me. I nodded numbly. She turned back to the mummified man, and I was glad to feel the weight of those twin voids slip from me.

Slowly, Prim lowered to one knee and a blanket of silence fell across the room. The muffling suspension of sound rolled out through the doors and over the plaza. Everything in its path must have slowed to a stop because it sounded as if every soul in the marketplace had turned to listen.

“When evening comes,” the tinny reverberating sound of Prim’s voice shook the very cells in my body, “on the day next.” A sunset blazed across her wings only to be eaten by a depthless blue veil sprinkled with stars. “Old enemies will walk the Bishop’s Way.” Prim paused as the merciless night sky spread to the farthest tips of every feather and the stone bridge at the entrance to the Thieves Market sketched itself onto the vaporous feathers. She fanned her wings, and they ran red with blood. Three bandaged figures appeared on the amorphous wings—two on her left side and one on her right. It was a portrait of the mummified men standing before us minus the bandaged man who’d guided us through the market. “One will bargain. One will lie. One will die.” Her empty eyes scanned the three gauzy figures in front of us and the one to my side. Her wings folded inward. Their swathed faces oozed with hidden emotion. Sound returned to the market outside as the paralyzing experience released them. I could move again too.

“One will die? One will die! One will die!” They whispered to themselves and then shouted to each other in a scraping song of exultation.

Excerpt 3:

The driver peeled off the main street onto an exit dedicated to the graveyard, and death washed over me.

Prim paid for the ride and we stepped out of the car. The cemetery rose before us like a ziggurat of the dead. Stories and stories of tombs were carved into the hillside like a morbid honeycomb.

“Here we are.” Prim waved her arms dramatically in the fading light. “Cementiri de Montjuic—The Jewish Mountain. I’m pretty sure this is where Barcelona keeps its best ghosts.”

“Yes,” I confirmed. The rocky slopes shivered with soul streams, more than I could count, more than I could comprehend. The necropolis called to me from its dusky shadows. A whirlwind of wailing reached my ears. I turned to the clutch of tourists beside us, but they seemed unaware of the otherworldly voices.

We started ahead slowly, but just inside the front entrance my feet began to slide forward. A nervous look overtook Prim’s face, and she peered around us. A cluster of visitors wandered past. If I didn’t get hold of this pulling, someone would see. My stomach tingled. That usually happened just before my feet left the ground, but I hadn’t harnessed a single soul yet. It felt as though the graveyard itself was tugging me to its buried heart.

“Mel. Lock it down,” Prim murmured as a couple drifted toward the exit.

“I’m trying.” It wasn’t a lie, but the full truth was that it felt good to be this close to the dead again. My brain was slipping toward Stage One sleep, and I didn’t want to fight it.

“Over here.” Prim nudged me to the left, and I followed her through a set of trees and into a labyrinth of mausoleums. Long, curving walkways snaked down rows of monoliths and towering funerary sculptures. Angels guarded over almost every tomb. Some knelt in eternal prayer. Others prepared to take flight and bear the souls of the dearly departed up to heaven. Some watched with eyes too filled with awareness to be made of stone.

We cut across a row of tombs topped with skeletons carved inside flowing marble robes. Their empty eye sockets pointed toward the scudding clouds.

“It’s just down there.” Prim pointed and then skidded to a stop.

“What’s wrong?”

Her hand lifted to silence me. A legion of ghostly spiders marched up my arms as she turned slowly toward me.

“They’re here,” she breathed. Her voice was almost too soft to hear over the moans and random wails all around me.

“Can we…can we hide?”

Prim locked eyes on me and shook her head.

“It’s too late.”

“No.”

“Do you see the angel over my shoulder? The one holding the book?”

“Yes.”

“Run to it and place your apple on the open pages. If she accepts your offering, the door will open.”

“Wait. Aren’t you coming with me?”

“I can’t. I’ll try to stop them.”

“What do you mean? I’ve never been here before. I don’t know the way.” I gripped her cool hand. “You can’t stop vampires. No one can.”

“You know the way through the world of the dead better than anyone. Go!”

Paralysis stole through my muscles when she shouted. It was too much of a startle. I rocked forward, and she caught me. Narcolepsy dropped me to the ground like a stone. It would never care what peril I was in. It didn’t concern itself with my preservation. It existed to do one thing and one thing only—shut me down.

“I can’t. My legs.”

I looked up at Prim, but her hazel human eyes had emptied to twin pits of aching darkness. I tore my gaze from her doomsayer eyes before they could fix on mine and rip my future from me.

My mouth fell open as my jaw unhinged. I watched through lowering lashes as the world wept, then wavered, then washed away.

A Glimmer of Ghosts

Excerpt 1:

He was there. I could tell. His thoughts whispered down the phone line between us. They simmered—heavy, wordless, and thick with desire.

Lightning flashed outside my bedroom windows, illuminating every shadowy corner of my room, but the hall was dark. It didn’t matter. I knew he was there. I felt him inside my head watching me…longing for me. Thunder rolled across the roof, pushing against my ward. My bed shook with the force of it. Even the sky wanted in. Maybe I’d make it suffer too.

Excerpt 2:

My mind rolled on the shore of dreams. Each wave of REM stage that washed toward me threatened to sweep me away. I fought the tide as spirits spiraled past us. Where were they going? I reached into an icy current and caught another hand rough with the burdens of his former life. He closed the memory of his calloused fingers over mine.

“What’s wrong?” I asked the ghost. He fixed me with the deep-sea eyes of a faded mariner. His uniform came into view, and I heard the wet clang of a ship bell ringing.

“She’s here.” His voice trembled. “My apologies, Miss. There is no time. You must run!”

Bringing the Wicked

I spend a fair amount of time talking at writing workshops about character development and how to create an interesting protagonist, but the truth is I absolutely love writing villains too. We all need a little wickedness in our lives and if you can’t rely on haughty, eurotrash, exhibitionist vampires to bring the wicked, who can you rely on? In this sizzling installment of The Hell Gate Series, narcoleptic celebrity ghost hunter, Melisande Blythe, is the forced guest of some slightly unhinged immortals and there’s lots to dislike about this sinful crew. Allow me to introduce the Vampires of Cathar:

Mephos the Innocent is a handsome, dark-haired, copper-eyed young man still lanky and raw-boned from his last growth spurt centuries ago. It’s easy to mistake him for a nineteen-year-old party guy burning through his inheritance on the beaches of the Mediterranean. In fact, he is the owner and operator of a collection of very exclusive spas in Andorra. Europe’s rich and beautiful flock to the secluded mountain spas for the medicinal waters of the springs, but there’s more in the waters than just curative properties. A nearby hell gate is tainting the springs with dark magic and the vampires are cashing in.

Celene, at first glance, is Mephos’s arm candy. With long midnight red hair and tantalizing curves, she wields her ability to enthrall like a billy-club. Only dangerous when she’s let off her leash, look for a startling revelation about Celene toward the end of the book, and prepare yourself for her voracious sexual appetite.

Bertrand brings the class to this horrid little ensemble in his over-sized, manly way, but his hammered features and numerous scars suggest a not so polite past. As a former crusader and Knight Templar, Bertrand is haunted by his deeds, and abandoned by a church that drove him to the brink of madness. Even if time hasn’t healed all his wounds, they are cauterized, field-dressed, and mostly forgotten. Bertrand’s long golden hair, faded blue eyes, and warrior physique turn heads most anywhere he goes.

Rasmus of Gomorrah was a priest not even God could kill. Caught at the edge of town by a biblical curse whist fleeing the famed city of Gomorrah, Rasmus’s inhuman regenerative abilities keep him from eternal rest as, every second, the will of God still tries to turn him into a pillar of salt. The resulting agony has left him insane. Couple that with his talent for scheming and manipulating and you have a desperately dangerous entity with planet-ending plans for God and man alike.

If that’s still not enough wicked, add in rotting ghouls, cursed-dripping mummified thieves, and a sect of pain-loving heretics and you’ve got a touching romance. A Shiver of Shadows, the semi stand-alone sequel to A Glimmer of Ghosts, packs plenty of steamy wickedness, but the star-crossed love story between Melisande and three-hundred-year-old corporeal ghost, Colonel William Grayford is the beating heart of this romantic tale of rescued love and new beginnings.

Paranormal romance and urban fantasy author, Hunter J. Skye, was born with a rare nightmare disorder, and raised in a haunted Victorian home. Those two factors predestined her to write ghost stories. A Glimmer of Ghosts, the dark and steamy start to The Hell Gate Series won 5 RWA awards. Book 2, A Shiver of Shadows, released in May, 2021. Look for book 3: A Rapture of Wraiths, Spring 2022.

One thing about the story:

Many of the spirits appearing in A Glimmer of Ghosts are based on actual ghost stories from the Olde Towne district of Portsmouth, Virginia. Once a year, these stories are told on the city’s annual Halloween Ghost Walk. These apparitions are well known to the residents of Olde Towne, Portsmouth and the city considers them ambassadors of a sort. One such ghost, Colonel William Crawford, founded the town three hundred years ago and is the inspiration for Grayford- Melisande’s haunting lover.

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