Immortal Confessions Book 2 is Out!

The wait is over, Ashara and Liam fans... my follow-up to DARK DUET is out. It is called MUSIC AT MIDNIGHT and is set in the L.A. music scene of the 1980s on the Sunset Strip. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter.

Chapter One: Sea of Love

Ashara was behind the wheel of her 1965 candy-apple red Mustang convertible when it sailed off a sheer cliff and into the Pacific Ocean. In the nearly forty years she’d owned the car, she had never put so much as a scratch on it. Kind of an odd thing to be thinking about, she realized, as her husband, Liam, clutched her hand, screaming her name.

I guess he’s afraid he might actually die again, she thought. Or that I can die, even now. They were vampires—true—immortal, somewhat, but a wreck like this could really ruin their night.

Time slowed. The squeal of brakes was drawn out and warped into a macabre melody, like a vinyl record being played at the wrong speed. The nose of the Mustang hit the guardrail and Ashara heard the headlights crackle, then shatter and burst at the violence of the impact. Her foot came off the brake and her body felt oddly weightless as the car went airborne. The seat belt cut into her abdomen in protest, pinning her back down into the pristine white leather seat.

Liam still held onto Ashara’s hand, but he was crushing the bones, fracturing them as he was yanked from her into the misty night air. The ragtop was down, allowing him free passage into the starry sky. She tilted her head up to look at him and saw that his seatbelt had somehow broken—it was the old lap-style from the 1960s, as shoulder belts didn’t become mandatory until 1983, and who would have thought a vampire would need a seatbelt, anyway?—and admired the beauty of his long blonde hair flying in that sexy way it did when he was onstage. He was supposed to be performing with his band, Darkside, soon…wasn’t he? She really couldn’t be sure now if that had already happened or if it was still in the future. Time was as suspended in air as everything else.

As her husband was torn from her, and as her beloved muscle car plummeted ever-closer to the rocky beach below, Ashara wondered if this was really it. She had been born mortal after all, and that primitive, DNA-embedded instinct to survive was never far from the surface. She felt cold tears racing down her cheeks and was amazed at how long all of this seemed to be taking, and how so many thoughts and details could be bubbling in her mind.

Why did we go off the road? She asked herself. No answer came. Maybe she wasn’t as lucid as she thought. Or maybe the wind tore it all away. It was so very cold, especially for a Southern California pre-dawn in August. It must have been the sea spray—her preternatural senses were honed to razor sharpness—and the chill of impending doom.

In her one-hundred-eighty-plus years as a vampire, Ashara had had some close scrapes. She was no stranger to horror, but the idea of having her skull crushed against mossy serpentinite rock was too much to bear. What if, like Humpty-Dumpty, she could not be put back together again? Would she live on somehow, a pathetic blood-sucking wraith with no mind, and no memory of her husband and her daughter?

A new thought shoved that one out of the way, demanding to be known. It was her daughter, Francesca, who had caused this wreck. Ashara couldn’t quite figure out why, or how she knew it. What a naughty little girl. No television for a week. Then she heard herself laughing out loud. She must be having a mental collapse. Perfect. I’ll die insane.

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