Jd Stanley

★Book Excellence Award 2017 Fantasy Finalist★ In 3213 BCE Sumer, the Great Mountain, Enlil, banishes his sister, Ninlil, to the Netherworld for taking her temple priest as consort. But her Kurshram fights a life-sacrificing way through the flaming palace to trade his soul to free her. A thousand years later, a dark deed wakes his dead, empty flesh... Richard can't die. And he's a monster. Maybe. Sullen, and sarcastic, he's a soul divided. A healer by trade, a conflicting blood-stealing curse drives him slowly mad while people keep showing up for help. Mostly? He wants to be left alone. And that's just not working out. In eighteenth century Britain, injured, conscience-stirring Maggie falls across his threshold to challenge everything he believes is true. Until vicious pirate captain, Billy the Blackdeath, with a secret as old as his own, tangles them up in an inhuman vendetta that puts his unkempt scruples to the test. In the solitude of a remote Canadian forest in the present day, to his undying exasperation he learns everyone is looking for him--the living and the undead--while fate seems determined to serve him up existence in unexplainable harmony with people he doesn't know. When the truth comes out, it smacks of supernal collusion and though Richard protests he's nobody's hero, a manic, all-consuming need to protect human and not-so-human explodes into a fiery five-thousand-year-old destiny of epic, mythological proportion.

Pity he had not heeded his own counsel and chosen with greater care those many years before.Displaced Irish Druid, Bronan, knows the real reason for the fall of Edenshire. As fourth century Christendom terrorises earthy gods into myth throughout Roman Britain, though one of the last living agents of the Mother Goddess, She no longer speaks to him and no matter what he does, his gazing bowl reveals nothing beyond the flames of their destruction. Because the king is dead. And it's his fault.After a magical pact with his best friend, King Manfred, didn't bear out as their salvation from internal treachery, thirteen years later, Bronan flounders under the guilt of his horrible mistake. Manfred's depraved brother, Barry the Red, drowns the throne in bloody madness so heinous, the Land itself cries out for justice while Sir William and his knights still loyal to Manfred play cat-and-mouse with Barry's vicious mercenaries. Amid unsavoury plans for the orphaned, now marriageable-aged Princess Brigit, she battles lessons in ladyship and craves the sword and bow put into her hands by her adopted uncle William. And looks to her Druid warden as much more than only a teacher. Brigit is their next best hope, but she may never sit on the throne despite her stubbornness and protection by Bronan and her father's knights. They would all die for her. And will if Barry has his way.Bronan must act. The path to victory is through the forbidden truth in his heart and a painful past he trained himself to ignore, but until he breaks the unconscious bounds he placed on himself to reclaim his honour, no amount of magical fury, righteous revenge or secrets within his sacred oak grove can save them.