Release Day for The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love!

I hope you enjoyed the page-a-day posts of The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love.  Today the book releases and you can find out what happens next to Santo Castillo and Roxanne. 

RT Book Reviews Top Pick!  “Fascinating...powerful...beautifully wrought.”

Publishers Weekly:  “Intense and Satisfying”

Literal Addiction:  “One of the best books I've read all year.”

To celebrate, I'm blog hopping all week and giving away books.  You can find me:

• Tuesday, 8/27--XOXO After Dark and
• The Alpha Male Diner at I Smell Sheep (Don't let the name fool you--such a fun site!
• Wednesday, 8/28--Manic Readers and
• Manga Manic Cafe
• Thursday, 8/29--USA Today Books HEA
• Friday, 8/30--Book Monster
• Saturday, 8/31--Signing copies of The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California.

Hope you'll stop by!

Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (35)

 [Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

Her guess? “What—”

“How much do you remember?” Santo went on. “Dying?”

The questions felt overwhelming. Answering them, impossible. She shifted, realizing only then that she wore his leather jacket. It was big and warm, the sleeves long enough to cover her hands. It held the scent of the man. Clean. Masculine. Distracting.

“Do you remember dying, Roxanne?” he repeated patiently.

“I remember being shot.”

“Not the same thing,” he replied.

His indifference stung, though there was nothing apathetic in his expression. His gaze was so intense that she felt it. She studied his face, trying to get a read on what he was thinking. He gazed back implacably. He could be plotting a revolution or thinking about cheese for all she could tell.

“Why am I not in a hospital?” she asked.

“It seemed unnecessary under the circumstances.”

“Which are?”

“You can’t die, Roxanne,” he said as if speaking to a child.

“That’s a lie. Of course I can.”

His smile mocked her, but he didn’t argue.

“Is that what this is about?”

“This?” he said.

I hope you're all as excited as I am about the release of The Five Deaths of Roxanne Love tomorrow! Thank you for reading!

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (34)

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She knew from experience that dying brought with it a host of hallucinations. What she thought she’d seen could only be part imagination, part trauma. How many times had one doctor or another told her what a mysterious, indecipherable organ the brain was? How lack of oxygen could cause delusions? Her brain, after so many deaths, couldn’t be trusted.

Stains did not come alive. Bugs didn’t commit mass suicide by window for absolutely no reason. And whatever it was she thought had come through the back door—they definitely had to be a delusion.

But something had happened. A robbery. A shooting.

In her mind’s eye she saw Manny’s body on the floor. Manny, who washed dishes for a living and wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was a special needs worker they’d hired six years ago. He’d been such a good employee that they’d made it a practice to hire other disabled workers, but Manny had been with them the longest. He was like family.

Who would shoot him? Was he okay? And what about the rest of them? Reece? Jim? Sal?

“Where is my brother?” she asked. “Is he alive?”           

Santo cocked his head, as if weighing the validity of her query. The small questioning gesture set off a spark of panic.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said after a moment.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (33)

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He leaned over her, one hand braced against the back of her seat, the other resting just above her heart. Within his stare she saw a tangle of emotions. Worry, relief, victory, suspicion. The mix was too complex for her to unravel.

“Welcome back,” he said in that deep voice she’d already come to know.

He eased away and settled in his seat beside her, and immediately she missed his warmth. She wanted to follow him so she could huddle in it and let his heat sink into her bones. Disconcerted by the power of the yearning, she looked away and took stock of her surroundings. She sat in an unfamiliar SUV parked on the fringe of a half-empty lot, location unknown. The clock on the dash said 11:20. She had no idea how she’d gotten there.

“Where am I?” she asked.

He nodded at the building squatting near the edge of the blacktop. “That’s my hotel.”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of that answer. His hotel? Why was he staying in a hotel? And more important, why had he brought her here? She struggled to work it out, but a deep murk had veiled her thoughts, making it hard to distinguish one from the other. She’d been at work and he’d come in and then . . .

An avalanche of memory rumbled down on top of her. The bugs. The stench. The seeping stain and the . . . No. No, no, no. That hadn’t been real. Couldn’t be real.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (32)

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 Roxanne regained consciousness by degrees, a part of her unwilling to give up the embrace of oblivion. She recognized it—she’d been here before. Within the layered darkness she’d find him, the one who always waited there. He’d comforted her as an infant, wiped her tears as a child, and held her as a woman. He needed her, desired her . . . and frightened her all at the same time.

But now she was alone and that frightened her even more. Where had he gone? Why wasn’t he waiting? What would she find here without him? She began to search for him just as she felt the warmth on her cheek, a caress against her throat. Lips pressed to hers. At last. . . .

She opened her eyes with a soft gasp and found herself caught in the midnight depths of Santo Castillo’s gaze. 

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (31)

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He leaned closer, his mouth a breath from hers, his hand gliding down her smooth throat to settle over her silent, unbeating heart.

“Come back,” he murmured against her mouth.

Some part of him noted the irony of his actions.

Death’s kiss never restored a life, yet as he pressed his lips to hers, his senses awoke and ricocheted throughout him. He felt a jolt go through her body, racing like lightning across a stormy sky, a current that stretched from his touch to her absent soul.

Triumph welled up inside him as he felt her heart stutter and thump beneath his fingers. He stole her first shivering breath and replaced it with his own.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (30)

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Not yet. Not until he understood what he’d seen tonight.

He scowled at the relief that flooded his system, wanting to purge the remnants of the human causing it. He consoled himself with the reminder. His goal had been delayed. Not changed. He’d waited for her before. He could wait again.

He didn’t have a plan. Didn’t know what the next step would be and certainly didn’t like the ambiguity of allowing an unstable, suicidal cop to make the calls. But the reaper recognized danger when he saw it, and left without choices, he’d do what he had to do. And when it came time, he would reap Roxanne Love.

The pledge echoed in his head as he turned west and headed for the hotel he’d checked into the night before, using Santo’s credit card to pay for the room. A few minutes later, he parked in the lot and shut off the engine. In the sudden quiet, he gazed at the unmoving woman sprawled on the seat, limp and unresponsive.

Her skin looked like pearl against the hue of his fingers. He brushed his knuckles over her cheek, fascinated by the contrast in their color, by the silken feel of her. He couldn’t look away as he willed her to take a breath. To open her eyes.

She’d gone to the darkness without him there to meet her. Was she afraid? Did she search for him?

“Come back to me,” he whispered.

Gently, he traced his fingertips along the curve of her jaw, then the pad of his thumb across that full bottom lip.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (29)

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Those who broke ranks found themselves alongside Lucifer, roasting under the seething displeasure of their maker.

He’d seen Abaddon’s messengers and minions tonight and more, like the thing that had followed him. It had been unnatural, even for a creature from the Beyond. And what had been that building pressure he’d felt in Roxanne’s last moments? The hot whip of wind that couldn’t have existed?

Why had they let him leave with Roxanne? Did that mean she was not their target?

Though he was not her brother’s reaper, the twins shared more than a birthday. Reece and Roxanne shared death days, too. Four of them, counting tonight.

He disliked the turn of his thoughts. Disliked that they led him away from the prize. And he fucking hated that he could feel the human urging them on.

Creatures of the Beyond had manifested in Roxanne’s restaurant tonight. Now he couldn’t just reap her and return home as if he hadn’t seen it. Nor could he go back to the Beyond and report it. He shouldn’t be here. If he was caught, he’d be banished to Abaddon.

Both demon and domain, Abaddon stood for and personified evil and darkness. Abaddon made hell look like paradise. If at all possible, the reaper—Santo, an irritated voice in his head reprimanded—would like to avoid it.

That left him one course of action. He couldn’t reap Roxanne Love.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (28)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

And what had drawn the Others? The very underbelly of the Beyond had been at her front door. The locusts, the scavenger demon who’d shot both her and her brother, the Black Tides of Abaddon . . .

He felt a chill go through his human body. In the Beyond, identity was a luxury afforded to the very few. God, of course, stood separate from the mass of His creations. Some angels bore names and reputations—usually the wrong kind for the wrong reasons—but not all did. Entire battalions of winged entities answered to angel, just as thousands of faceless, nameless entities called themselves reaper.

But even in the Beyond—or perhaps especially in the Beyond—anomalies existed. Lilith, Mammon, Beelzebub, Lucifer . . .

And Abaddon, a name most humans wouldn’t recognize even though it was the very reason they feared death. A name that marked a place in hell all its own. Scavenger demons took delight in killing, in the terror that consumed their victims, but Abaddon had bathed in their blood. He’d been so cruel, so vicious that he’d been locked away, named for the place of destruction where he’d been banished.

What humans had never understood was that hell had been made for creatures of the Beyond, not for mortals. God would never send one of His beloved creations there, no matter how great the sin. But His army . . . His workers . . . His devoted servants . . . He expected more of them. 

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (27)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

She belonged to him, this woman who’d slipped through his grasp like a wind, who’d engaged him in a predator’s hunt, turning him into a stalking animal that needed to feed. Now was the time. Now was the chance.

And still he hesitated as Santo’s emotions whispered through his subconscious, urging him to stop. To think. Why did this female hold such power over him? Why did she defy the natural order of life and death? Why did she return to the human world when she was meant to move on?

“Why do you live, Roxanne Love?”

It astounded him that he’d never thought to ask before. He’d been so focused on how that he’d never considered the bigger question. He’d attributed Roxanne’s ability to escape her fate to some errant gene, some throwback trait. It happened. Some humans had special senses. Some could see the dead, some could see the future, and others still could move matter with their minds, start fires with a thought, heal sickness with a wish. No one understood why. In the grand scheme, what did why matter?

But once asked, he couldn’t ignore the question.

Why? Why did this woman cheat death?

Curiosity filled him as he glanced at her lifeless form. Who was she? Why had having her become so vital to him? Important enough to drag him from his world to hers?

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (26)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

Beside him, Roxanne’s head lolled to the side.

He’d come to reap her.

He meant to do it still. Even now the reaper inside him felt tight with excitement, imagining her fear, treasuring her pain. But something had soured the pleasure he’d anticipated.

No, not something. Someone. Santo Castillo. Perhaps if he hadn’t taken Santo before his natural death, it would have been different. But in his effort to preserve the vessel, he’d inadvertently saved pieces of the man. And now those pieces bobbed in his bloodstream, pulsed through his heart. Sentiment. Memories. Convictions. Despair. Emotions. . . like grit beneath his skin.

And somehow that terrible miasma of emotion had mated with his own objective. Roxanne. Like a hook sunk deep in his cheek, the crippling feelings tried to steer him from his goal, the vestiges of Santo at the reins. Santo had been unable to save his wife, whose death had crippled and finally stolen his own desire to live. But this woman, Roxanne, he could help. This woman he thought he could save.

From Death himself.

The reaper clenched his jaw and shook his head. No.

He had come to reap her.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (25)

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He’d watched the easy grace of her movements. Gazed spellbound at the way the light played off her creamy skin, glinted in the golds and rich browns of her hair. He’d caught her scent and it had twisted something inside him, making him want more.

Then she’d looked into his eyes and he’d felt . . . alive.

“Fuck,” he muttered, liking the vulgar way the human word rolled off his tongue.

It made no sense, the knot of rage and uncertainty lodged just beneath his breastbone. Human emotions as invasive as a strangling vine. As dreaded as a reaper at a wedding.

Carefully, he settled Roxanne in the passenger seat of the vehicle, then shrugged out of his jacket and pulled it around her. She’d be cold when she came back.

He circled Santo’s vehicle and got in on the other side. Gripping the steering wheel, he flexed his muscles, fighting the urge to strike out at something, anything.

In those first few hours after he’d taken the human, he’d felt trapped by the awkward form, but now the flesh and bone he’d stolen no longer felt heavy and cumbersome. It felt strong, powerful. A finely tuned machine of muscle and will. Yet he was helpless to do anything but wait as he battled his doubt.

He curled his fist and gave in, slamming his knuckles into the dash until pain cleared his head. He started the engine, tapping as seamlessly into Santo’s driving skills as he had the rest of the man, and pulled away from the curb, foot heavy on the gas pedal as he left behind the pandemonium and bodies inside Love’s.

  

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (24)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

The creature snarled at him before it disappeared back into the restaurant, leaving him with the unsettling idea that he’d been spared.

He’d never seen anything like it before, couldn’t hazard a guess about what manner of beast it was. But he’d seen cunning in those lantern eyes and he couldn’t

mistake the feeling burrowing deep inside him now. Fear.

Fear. In a reaper.

In his arms, Roxanne lay bloodied and completely still. Her heart had stopped beating. Her labored breath had fallen silent. Her skin had chilled.

Dead by any assessment, right on time.

Except he knew her lungs would fill again and those startling eyes would open. If he let them.

He’d come to reap her, after all.

He’d crossed from the Beyond, breaking the laws of the Otherworld to experience her death on both planes. He’d fantasized about it, waiting impatiently for the call that her time had arrived once again.

His plan had been simple. Fire for them both. End it all with flames that would destroy her human body at the same time it devoured the one he’d taken. It was easy. Clean. Irrevocable.

So why didn’t he act?

Was it because he’d seen her now with human vision that discerned detail and dimension he’d never known as a reaper? Vision that perceived nuance and sensitivity? 

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (23)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

CHAPTER THREE

The reaper—Santo  now, he reminded himself, while he remained in this world, his name was Santo Castillo—raced to the vehicle he’d taken from the human’s garage with a feeling of panic as alien as it was unwanted. From inside the bar came sounds of chaos and carnage that assaulted his new senses. He tried to reconcile the riotous impressions into some kind of order. But he couldn’t. What had just happened in there?

One of the creatures who’d spilled through the back door chased him out to the street but stopped short of crossing.

He looked over his shoulder as he ran with Roxanne’s soft, defenseless body clutched tight to his chest and caught a flash of burning white eyes and long, curved canines. 

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (22)

[Continued: To start at the beginning, click here]

Her eyes squeezed tight against the pain that throbbed from inside out.

She released one last wheezing breath.

And then, for the fourth time in her life, Roxanne Love died.

[End of Chapter Two]

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (21)

[Continued: To start at the beginning, click here]

“No!” she cried as a hot spray splattered her skin. Santo was dragging her through the swinging doors when something slammed into her from behind and she stumbled. Excruciating pain exploded through her, and Santo was all that kept her from falling.

He shouted something, but she couldn’t make out the words through the screeching agony. The pain became an entity that owned her.

She looked down to see that blood covered her pink Love’s T-shirt and bubbled when she tried to suck in a breath. She’d been shot. Just like Reece . . . Her thoughts blurred and her knees gave.

Santo swept her into his arms as he raced across the dining room, charging into the bug-infested night. Roxanne felt herself slipping, hurtling toward a black unknown that felt ominously familiar. They’d met before, Roxanne and death, and she knew that in the darkness, she’d find someone waiting. He always waited, that nameless, faceless presence that welcomed and terrified her at once.

Santo called her name, and for a moment she was back with him, looking into his eyes, trying to read what she saw there. What did he have to do with all of this? In a sliver of lucidity, her mind connected a dot she didn’t understand. Before she could decipher the hidden meaning, it was gone again.

She thought of her older brother and sister and began to cry.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (20)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

“Trust me, Reece.”

He shot her twin brother before she could grasp what he meant to do. Roxanne screamed again, but fear had closed her throat and all that emerged was a strangled cry. The echo of the gunfire reverberated through the kitchen, and her brother fell to the hard, tiled floor, his blood spilling from a wound in his chest. Then the man with the ghastly mask spun and she looked into the pale eyes and knew that what lurked behind that frozen blue was not human.

Not human by any measure.

As if invited by the blood spurting from her brother’s chest and the black gunk pooling on the floor, others began to pour in through the back door like roaches from a drain. Others. Not people but . . . She stared numbly, trying and failing to label what she saw. Whatever they were, they didn’t wear masks. They didn’t need to. Their appearance was hunched and gnarled, their skin so colorless it looked like paste. And their eyes . . . white except for the pinpoints of the pupils. White lanterns in the most gruesome faces she’d ever seen.

Santo jerked her away just as the man with the mask pulled the trigger two times in rapid succession and Sal and Jim hit the floor.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (19)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here]

The dishwasher was sprawled beside the sink. She could only see his legs and feet, but she recognized the rolled-up jeans, bright yellow sneakers, and hem of his too-big Iron Man T-shirt bunched around his thighs. The black ooze splattered his inert form.

Flash, flash, flash. The images bombarded her so fast that she could barely focus on one before moving to another.

Reece stood in the doorway to the small office that was tucked between the walk-in refrigerator and the far wall, facing away from her. Through the big window that allowed an unobstructed view from the desk into the kitchen, she saw a man in front of the opened safe.

“You shot him. You fucking shot Manny,” Reece shouted.

The man glanced over his shoulder at Reece, and Roxanne felt all the air leave her lungs. He wore a ski mask pulled down to hide his features, with black paint rimming his eyes. Only the whites and the pale blue irises could be seen. He’d sewn the mouth-hole closed with fat, ugly stitches so that not even his lips showed. He glanced past Reece to where Roxanne and the others now stood. Reece turned, too, and in the dread she saw on his face, Roxanne read so much more.

Reece knew this masked man. More than that, her brother had let him in. Disbelief pierced her as the man spoke. His words came disembodied from behind the stitched mask and all the more terrifying for those frigid eyes in their obsidian setting.

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Five Deaths of Roxanne Love: A Page a Day (18)

[Continued: To start at the beginning click here.]

It felt obscene and, at the same time, somehow biblical in a very not-okay way. Reece still hadn’t appeared, but a cry came from the kitchen, followed by a loud bang.

“That’s a gun,” Sal said, jumping.

A gun?

Roxanne shoved her fear aside and raced to the swinging door, calling out her brother’s name as she ran. She burst into the kitchen, aware of Santo a few steps behind.

What she saw brought her to a skidding stop. Santo took her hand and tried to pull her back, but when she refused to budge, he gave up and angled his body in front of hers. Even a man his size couldn’t block out the horror, though.

The oily tide coated the ceiling and lapped against the walls in the kitchen, stark against the stainless steel and new paint.

The back door stood wide open to the October night. The same back door that Reece and their older brother, Ryan, fought about constantly. Ryan insisted that it remain locked after five. Reece complained that Ryan was a control freak who needed to get a life. “What the fuck does he care if the back door is open? For Christ sake, let the slaves have some fresh air.”

The shelving that held pots and pans had been knocked over, its contents scattered all around it. 

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