Excerpt from "The Third Throne: Angel of Death", by Tabitha Barret

I'm excited to announce that my third book in the Third Throne series, "Angel of Vengeance" is almost finished!  To celebrate, I wanted to release an excerpt from my second book "The Third Throne: Angel of Death" to introduce the series to new lovers of steamy Paranormal Romance / Urban Fantasy.


"The Third Throne: Angel of Death" is where Anjali's journey beings to find her ten angels who are meant to tempt the mortals and gage how far they have fallen into sin.  She decides to search for Alazar, the Angel of Death, in Romania.  Unfortunately, a group of paranormal investigators have come to explore the Romanian castle that Alazar is hiding in.  Anjali befriends the mortals to keep them safe from her dangerous angel.

Complications arise when Alazar vows to kill her and attacks the mortals.  Anjali must face another difficult challenge when she falls in love with one of the mortals, who has no idea who she really is.  Can she save the Spirit Experts? Can she stay away from the handsome mortal?

In this excerpt, Alazar has tempted Pete, the co-founder of the Spirit Experts, and Derick's best friend, to kill himself.  Anjali, using the mortal alias "Annie" desperately tries to save Pete from taking a swan dive off the tower.  Can she save him from a horrific death?

**Please note that this text is copyrighted and may not to be reproduced in any way. 

Anjali slowly moved closer to Pete realizing that Alazar was determined to win.  “Your problem is with me.  Let the boy go.  He means nothing to you,” Anjali replied calmly.  She tried not to let Alazar see her concern for Pete.

              

“Yes, but he means something to you.  That’s good enough for me,” Alazar replied darkly.

     

“Why do you still want to hurt me?” she sneered, trying to understand where his head was at.

               

Rayan’s final words to Alazar came back to him as he watched her body become rigid and distant.  “If you kill her, you will be damned forever.  You will never know peace.  Regret will be your only friend.”  After experiencing peace, however briefly, by her side, it was entirely possible that Rayan’s prophecy was correct.  Could he live without peace?  He had thus far and he was still standing.  As tempting as her power had been, he would rather live with regret and be free from her tyranny.

               

“I would rather live out my final days cold and alone, than have to beg for your forgiveness to receive one moment of compassion.  I refuse to give myself to you.  You willingly went to Lucifer to ease his pain, yet you rebuff me when I need you,” Alazar snapped.

               

“You just tried to kill me,” she replied bluntly.

                

“Lucifer did kill you, yet I have no doubt that forgave him,” Alazar hissed.  With that, Alazar waved his hand like a magician performing a slight of hand trick, and bowed.

                

Anjali watched Pete climb up the window ledge with renewed purpose.

                

“No,” she whispered.

               

"Good luck picking up the pieces, Destroyer,” Alazar nodded to her and disappeared from the room.

Pete mindlessly pulled himself up onto the windowsill.  “I have to.  I have to tell them,” he muttered as he lumbered to the opening.

               

Anjali quickly became Annie and lunged forward to grab Pete.  He was about to step over the edge when she snagged the back of his jacket and kept him from moving.

               

“Pete, no, you have to stop.  You can’t end your life like this,” she yelled, snatching his arm and tugging at him.

               

She was about to forcefully pull him back from the ledge when she heard Derick’s voice over the walkie-talkie.  She had ignored it while dealing with Alazar, but now his voice was louder.  She swore when she realized Derick was in the hallway.

               

“Derick, help me,” she had little choice but to ask for his help.  She wasn’t sure if she could break Alazar’s hold on him once she got Pete off the ledge.  Having felt his temptation first hand, she knew how alluring it was.

                

Pete was agitated and didn’t want to be pulled away from his objective.  He kicked wildly at Annie, forcing her to let go of him.

                

“I have to do this.  They need to know,” Pete growled.  His eyes were vacant.

               

Derick came rushing into the room as Annie grabbed Pete around the hips and pulled him from the window.  Pete tumbled to the ground but immediately jumped to his feet.  He retaliated by swinging his forearm into Annie’s face.  She recoiled, but leaped forward to throw her arms against his chest and hold him back.  Derick’s flashlight blinded her and ruined her night vision, but she managed to keep Pete from climbing back up.

               

“What the hell is going on?  Why weren’t you answering me?  Did you feel that storm shake the castle?” Derick yelled.  He was trying to figure out what was happening.  He stopped when he saw Pete swinging wildly at Annie.  Despite Annie being nearly a foot shorter than he was, she was actively blocking him.

                

“I found him talking nonsense, saying that he had to end his life, and that he needed to tell them.  I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he’s trying to jump from the ledge.  He smacked my walkie-talkie away.  Now help me, or he’s going to jump to his death,” she shouted and ducked Pete’s flailing arms.

                

Pete spun to his right and sidestepped Annie’s outstretch hands.  He jumped forward and threw himself onto the ledge, dangling halfway over the edge.  He scrambled to his feet on the narrow windowsill and prepared for his swan dive.

                

Derick couldn’t believe what he was seeing.  His best friend was pushing Annie away and trying to throw himself from the tower.

               

 Derick quickly propped the flashlight on the opposite windowsill so that he could see them and ran to help Annie.  He reached out for Pete’s arm, but he had to duck twice to avoid Pete’s elbow connecting with his face.

                

“Grab his arm and I’ll get his legs,” Annie said, frustrated that she couldn’t contain him.  She calmed herself and focused, not wanting to break Pete by grabbing him too harshly.  She hoped to get him out of this in one piece.

               

“Okay,” Derick grunted.  Pete twisted from his grasp and nearly toppled over into the night air.

               

They simultaneously grabbed Pete and hefted him off the ledge and down onto his back.  The second Pete hit the ground, he roared and threw them off.  Scrambling to his feet, he tried to get back to the ledge.

                

“Pete, you have to stop!  What’s wrong with you?” Derick yelled, terrified that his friend would make it to the ledge.

               

“This is the only way.  I have to see them.  They have to know!” Pete threw Derick aside and barreled toward the window.

               

 Annie had to get through to Pete or he would never stop.  She tackled him and threw him back to the ground.  Her hands came down on his shoulders and she mounted his hips.  Using her full strength, she controlled his thrashing with her arms and knees.  He snarled at her, spraying her with spit.  He was deranged.  Jumping from the ledge and dying was now his sole purpose in this world.  He no longer cared about finding spirits or filming a documentary.  The compulsion had complete control of him and he would go through her to achieve his goal.

               

“Pete.  Stop this.  You aren’t thinking.  You don’t want to do this.  Think about everything you will lose if you do this.  Death isn’t the answer.  Think about your friends and family.  They are more important than the answers you’re looking for,” she pleaded.

               

Derick knelt next to her, unsure of what to do.  He watched helplessly as his friend lost his mind.  He was snapping his teeth at Annie, trying to throw her off.  Pete was crazed and nearly unrecognizable.

               

“I have to see them.  I have to tell them.  They need to know!” Pete ranted, not speaking to anyone in particular.

                

“Who is he talking about?” Annie yelled, trying to hold down his forearms.

                

“His parents.  They’re dead,” Derick whispered.  He finally understood Pete’s motivation to die.

                

“Pete, listen to me.  You will never see your parents, not like this.  There is nothing waiting for you on the other side, but pain and misery if you throw yourself from the window.  Don’t destroy your life like this, please.  You need to stay here with Derick, Josilyn, Morgan, Wedge, and all of your friends.  You have to show the world what you have found out about spirits.  You can’t do that if you become one of them!” Annie shouted, not wanting to see his face day after day in the Realms of Torture.

               

“I have to see them one last time!” Pete howled and shook his head violently in frustration.

                

Annie debated if she should take off her ring and use her power to reach out to Pete, but she had nearly killed him when she’d lost control earlier.  She knew that she could wield death, but she didn’t know if she could bring someone back from the brink of suicide.  The Destroyer was meant to kill, not to save people from death.  It was a long shot, but she had to try.

               

“Derick, grab his head, and hold him still.  I don’t want him hurting himself accidentally.  He’s having some kind of episode or fit.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing.  I’m going to try to get through to him, but I don’t want him flailing around,” she winced when Pete kicked her back with his knees.

                

Derick was staring at Pete, trying to figure out why this was happening.  Annie had to yell at him to snap him out of his trance.  He blinked at her and nodded his head, comprehending her orders.  Shuffling around to Pete’s head, he looked at Annie, one last time, hoping that she knew what she was doing.  He was clueless about how to fix this, but was amazed that she had somehow taken control of the situation.  He did as she asked and gripped Pete’s thrashing head, holding it so that Pete had no choice but to look up at the ceiling.

               

Annie leaned down and stared into Pete’s eyes, searching for some rational part that she could appeal to.

                

She let her power rise as close to the surface as the ring would allow.  She spoke quietly, but authoritatively to make him understand that this was a threat, not a bedtime story.  “Listen to me Pete, there is nothing but pain if you continue in this pursuit.  You will feel like you’re flying as you fall from this height, until you hit the ground.  Agony will explode throughout your entire body, and then you will feel cold and numb.  After that comes the darkness, but it’s brief, ever so brief before you see the red glow of Hell.  Everyone who kills themselves ends up in Hell.  You will have the pleasure of experiencing every single torture that Hell has to offer.  Suicides suffer more than anyone else, because they threw away their precious gift of life.  God hates when people don’t live their lives to the fullest.  You will be drowned, burned, beaten, starved, frozen, poisoned, and ripped to pieces for what seems like a thousand years, only to start the process again.  The worst part is just when you think you can’t endure it anymore, Lucifer himself will tempt you to become his servant for eternity.  That is something you don’t want.  If you deny him, you go back into the realms until you have served your time.  Whatever you need to tell your parents isn’t worth all of that,” her eyes bore into his, trying to make him understand the truth.

 

Will Pete survive?  Will Derick blame Annie for this friend's sudden madness?  Will he figure out who she really is based on what she said to Pete?  Find out in "The Third Throne: Angel of Death", available for Kindle and in Paperback.  If you have Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, you can read the book for free!

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Author Spotlight: SL Shelton, "Waking Wolfe" (Scott Wolfe Series Book 1)

When I heard about SL Shelton and his "Scott Wolfe Series," I was intrigued by the idea of a man running halfway around the world to save his girlfriend from terrorists.  I purchased "Waking Wolfe", and "Unexpected Gaines" and was immediately hooked on the series. Wanting to learn more about the force behind the "Scott Wolfe Series", I contacted SL Shelton to find out what inspired him to create this engaging five book series.

Book Title:  Waking Wolfe

Book Genre: Thriller (Political, Espionage, Technothriller, Conspiracy)

Book Audience: 17 and up, not suitable for middle school. Violence, Sexual Situations, explicit torture in some cases with vivid descriptions from the tortured character's point of view.

Book Description:  This is the first volume in S.L. Shelton's unfolding story of corporate corruption in the

Scott Wolfe is a talented computer and electronics security specialist and an avid rock climber. He's a pretty typical twenty-something; he likes to party, he's bad at relationships, and he is a bit more adventurous than common sense would dictate.

He does have one trait that makes him atypical, though. That gift is the secret to his professional success—and it comes in quite handy when a rash decision turns his life upside down.

How much responsibility does a man have for the life of an ex-girlfriend? That's the question Scott had to ask himself when Barb Whitney, her father (a State Department Attorney) and twenty eight other diplomats and their families, were supposedly killed in a terrorist attack in Amsterdam.

When Scott gets a text message from Barb's phone after the explosion, he is propelled into an adrenaline charged operation, worthy of the intelligence agencies he is trying to avoid.

Dodging killers, organized crime, mercenaries, and the CIA, he struggles against a clock that even he doesn't know is ticking.

world's governments and the adventures of a young Scott Wolfe, who is unknowingly swept into a secret war of massive proportions.

How did you become involved in writing stories/books?  What was your motivation to become a published author? 

I've always loved spinning stories. Since I was a kid I excelled at it. Unfortunately, I wasn't a good student, so the idea of sitting down to write anything other than a few paragraphs was not palatable. When I was in a young man in the military, at a time of great upheaval in my life, I had a dream...a very vivid dream that stays with me in amazing detail to this day. In this dream, my grandfather came to New England to visit me despite having passed several years earlier. In this dream, he took me in his car (which turned out to be someone else's car) to a book store in the town I lived in at the time. He showed me a stack of books on the display table, leading me to believe he wanted me to buy a particular book. But when I looked more closely at the cover, I saw that I was the author. When I asked him what it meant, without speaking, he led me back to the car and I proceeded to get down low in the back seat, for fear of being seen by guards at a checkpoint (I have no idea why). After driving for some time, he stopped in front of a house, got out without a word and joined another older man before disappearing around the corner. 

The dream ends there. At no time did he ever say a word to me and at no time did I discover why I was "hiding" from authorities.  My grandmother later described the car, the house and the other man I had seen after I had given a very vague description of the car...I started writing my first book after that. Sadly, it was horrible. Over the years, I had started many first and second chapters, but never finished any until I retired from the tech industry after selling my company. Three months after retiring, I began writing the Scott Wolfe Series. 

What inspired you to create your main character Scott Wolfe?  When you wrote the first book “Waking Wolfe,” did you have a master plan for creating the series, or were you compelled to write more about Scott once you finished? 

Scott Wolfe is a combination of personalities; I'm in there a lot, as is my son, who I must say is often more laid back than I was at the same age. Physically, Scott's adventures are beyond me. But emotionally, I've been through the entire range, so when constructing a character like Scott, I have a lot of experience and observation to draw on. 

When writing the first novel, I had no idea it would be a series until I was almost half way through the first draft. But I realized there was too much character depth and pent up emotion not to let it spill into more books. I'm glad it worked out that way and the story arc for the series was very easy to outline once I decided to carry it forward.

You have a technical background in computers, which you have imparted upon Scott.  How much of his technical expertise comes from your experiences, and how much of it is based on research? 

The basic technical premise of data organization, flow charting, and the can-do attitude of  "yeah, I can get there from here", is all mine. But my practical experience in hacking, system security, viruses and fancy spy gadgets is nearly nonexistent. I wasn't that kind of programmer. And by the time my tech company had grown to need that sort of expertise, I had hired others to do the heavy lifting. The running joke in my firm was that "your code better pass QA or Shelton would take a look at it...he'll find the problem but it will take three times longer than it took you to write it." So, yes. I had the technical background to do most of it, but I was so excruciatingly slow at anything other than design, the techs would hide their work from me when I walked by. I did, however, over my long career, learn plausible "geek speak" to answer questions from clients and staff when asked silly or demanding questions. Sounding confident in your tech jargon usually is enough to shut down more penetrating questions and often gives you the appearance of a wizard, imparting grand mystical secrets that they couldn't hope to understand...usually with a reply from them of "Oh! Okay then. Thanks for that."

Scott and his CIA colleagues inevitably find themselves in the middle of dangerous situations, whether by choice, or accidentally due to the nature of their missions.  What are some of the difficulties in writing an action sequence or a fight scene?  

I've never found it difficult to write action or fight scenes. Like much of my "design" success, I am able to visualize in great detail. In my younger years, I also studied various fighting styles ( some are mentioned in the books) and at one brief period in my life, I was prone to fights...okay, maybe not brief, maybe it was most of my young life...Okay, I was a fighter from an early age and continued to fight well into my twenties...maybe my early thirties.  Alright, alright, I'm a bruiser and like to kick ass...okay, are you satisfied? ;)

With the release of your fifth book, “Harbinger,” do you look back on your previous books to see how you have grown as a writer and a storyteller?  How is this book different from the previous ones from a writing aspect? 

YES! Oh my God! I'm almost embarrassed by my first release of Waking Wolfe (Then it was called "A Lamb in Wolfe's Clothing") I've taken on a ritual of going back and revising each novel as I release a new one. I'm still very much developing as an author and since I did so poorly in school, am not the most educated writer. I'm very happy with the stories themselves, but the writing style has been updated in the early books a couple times...including recently with the release of Harbinger.

I look back at some early changes and cringe. For example;  I was once given advice from an author friend I respect, who told me that dialog tags could be more than just said or replied, so I went back and updated to exchange nearly all occurrences of "said" and "replied" with other, more flowery tags.  MISTAKE!  It made the dialog (something I'm usually very strong at writing) difficult to read through, clumsy and forced. I've scrapped that whole premise and have rewritten all novels in my original style of dialog.

Some readers have commented on the fact that you write in both first person and third person throughout the books.  It seems to confuse some readers while others adapt quickly to it.  What made you decide to use both points of view?  

That was a tough choice and I agonized over it for a long time. I initially had intended for the stories to be multi third person POV. But when I started to put Scott alone and with his "voice", I decided the flow would be much better if the camera was lodged directly in his skull. After rewriting the first few chapters in that style, my early beta readers liked the change of perspective. Unfortunately, I also had much back story in the form of other characters that I wanted to include in the stories. I've tried to keep the separation clear and given plenty of warning to the reader when they start a new section from another point of view, i.e. "NICK HORIATIS slammed his fist into the..."

I have to say, I'm much happier with the story that way and have come to look at it as simply "bonus footage" of events outside Scott's line of sight.

Looking ahead to the future of the Scott Wolfe Series, what can we expect to see?  Are there more books planned, or is “Harbinger” the end of the series?  What do you hope readers take away with them after reading your series? 

There are a few more books in the current Wolfe incarnation. I haven't decided if I will take the series further than the "epic" conclusion of Scott's first year in his new life, but I foresee two or three more books in the current Arc. As for what my reader takes from the series, I hope they are, first, entertained, and second, inspired to examine the world around them more closely, looking at all the subtle, hidden meanings in life and becoming curious enough to question them and pry further. But mostly to be entertained. :)

Books in the series:

Waking Wolfe, Unexpected Gaines, Danger Close, Wolfe Trap, and Harbinger (released May 2015)

Start the Series Now!  Purchase "Waking Wolfe" at Amazon.com (exclusively)

Check out my 4.5 Star Review of "Waking Wolfe" (Scott Wolfe Series Book 1)

Check out my 5 Star Review of "Unexpected Gaines" (Scott Wolfe Series Book 2)

 

Author Biography:

S.L. Shelton is a passionate, fact spouting former techie and soldier who is constantly at odds with his need to kick the legs out from under those who abuse their power (Political, Economic or Super). He lives on a tiny little farm on the banks of a tiny little river in the northwestern part of Virginia, where his semi-secret identity is somewhat protected on three sides. Despite deep misgivings about writing on subjects close to his own life, he has penned a series of books about a similarly broken, similarly gifted young man who similarly doesn't have a clue when to stop and re-evaluate life decisions.

Before building his career in the computer field for nearly two decades as a developer, designer, trainer, and a CEO, he had the honor of serving in the US Armed Forces in several roles, most involving explosives of some sort. After selling his successful micro empire in 2011, Shelton retired to his study which he hasn't left since. On most days he writes, but when left alone and to his own devices, breaks his troll like existence long enough to sneak into the sunlight and fire a weapon or two, snap a few pictures or pick some vegetables from his wife's prized organic garden beds.

Though his climbing days are behind him due to injuries (several to the head), he was an avid rock climber, having climbed for decades since his teen years. His three children are grown and living very adventurous lives of their own.

Waking Wolfe is his first published novel and the first novel in the Scott Wolfe Series, followed by Unexpected Gaines, Danger Close, Wolfe Trap and Harbinger. Predator's Game is scheduled for release near the end of 2015

 

To learn more about SL Shelton's "Scott Wolfe Series"
follow him on the following sites: 

https://www.facebook.com/SLShelton.Author

https://twitter.com/SLSheltonAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7545162.S_L_Shelton

Website: http://www.boldsteps.com

Blog: https://wolfeauthor.wordpress.com/