And Never Return to the Sea

Katy never expected to see a selkie, let alone fall in love with one. But love wouldn’t keep Mark around. Selkies rarely had long-term relationships. Sooner or later he’d leave, and she’d be left alone with her broken heart, something even her witchcraft could never cure.

The old tales said possessing his sealskin would bind him to her side. Just thinking about stealing it felt wrong, but she couldn’t face the thought of losing Mark.

How far would Katy go for love?

To Speak to the Gods

Liana used to spend her days helping her cousin herd sheep on the upper slopes of the volcanic island near their village, but once she turned thirteen her mother declared this behavior unacceptable. Now Liana’s days are filled with chores and endless discussions about who she might end up marrying when she’s a few years older. No one bothers to ask if she wants to get married.

What Liana wants is to become a priestess, and speak with the gods—like Struognuli, the god of fire, who lives in the volcano on the next island over. But no matter how badly she wishes she could, she can’t speak to the gods.

When a group of strangers come to the island, everyone thinks they’re there to trade…everyone but Liana and her cousin. Why are the men really there? And when Liana finds out the truth, what can she do about it?

The Late Bloomer

The Late Bloomer

Marusia and the Monster

Kara never stays too long in any one place, and never allows anyone to get too close to her. It’s just too risky—she never knows ahead of time what the monster inside of her might make her do. She’s found temporary peace in a beautiful, isolated village on the Mexican coast. If she can keep anyone from finding out about her unusual eating habits, she might be able to stay indefinitely.

But Kara didn’t expect to fall in love.

Be Nice to Statues

Be Nice to Statues

The Porta Alchemica

The Porta Alchemica

The Wishing Thorn

The Wishing Thorn

Dance Hall Days

Kelly and her friends went all out to match the Big Band Era theme of the local humane society’s annual charity ball. They decide to take a break from dancing and explore the old, quirky hotel the event is being held at, and are having a great time…until they watch a young couple walk past them and go right through a wall! Where were the ghosts heading? The answer lies behind the wall itself…

   Dance Hall Days (standalone story – November 2020)
   Amazon ~ Universal Book Link

The Call of the Huntress

Married to the tetrarch of Galilee, Herodias lives a life of luxury, but also a life of misery. She prays to the goddess Diana, but of course Diana isn’t going to respond to the pleas of a mere mortal. When Herodias’ daughter Salome arrives for a visit, she disrupts the fragile balance of Herodias’ life. Herodias calls to Diana, just like she has so many times over the years…but this time, the goddess answers.

The Center of the Maze

Bethea and her cousins are delighted to find that the Scottish castle they’re visiting has a hedge maze! They head in, split up, and everything seems fine until Bethea realizes she’s walked much, much further than the length of the maze…and no matter which branch she takes, she can’t get out. She continues on to the center of the maze, and discovers she’s no longer in Scotland—or even in her own world at all.

   The Center of the Maze (standalone short story – August 2020)
   Amazon ~ Universal Book Link

A Better Place

Once every dell, mountain, and river had its own god or goddess, but now Dideacea, goddess of the spring Licurgha, is the last of her kind. After years of being alone, forgotten by the people who worshipped her, she decides to leave her beloved spring and go to the nearby village. What she finds on her journey is far, far different from what she expected.

The Uncollected Anthology #21: Deities

   A Better Place (standalone short story – April 2020)

Something in Common

A young Irish woman in a small town in western Pennsylvania in 1910 discovers she and a recent immigrant from Austria-Hungary have more in common than she’d realized.

To Be Remembered

Time to Play

A Different Turn

Goblin Road Trip

When the Wind Blows

After

The Tommys

Vasilisa and the Horse of Power

Diamond Betty

And Then There Are Cats

Transmogrification

The Levitation Engines

Haunted

Inside a Fairy Tale

Valentina is spending the last few hours of Midsummer by herself, unable to make the trip back home to celebrate the holiday with her coven. She’s questioned whether or not she’ll ever end up in a successful relationship ever since her third divorce, and is starting to wonder if she’ll spend the rest of her life alone.

She overhears a conversation between another couple, and finds herself filled with a strange sense of foreboding. Is she following in her aunt’s footsteps and developing the ability to see the future? Is she concerned about the well-being of the other woman?

Valentina follows the couple, and finds herself inside a modern-day fairy tale.

Twin Wishes

The Other Side of the Portal

Ilsa and the Dragon

Magic and Machinery

Maude and her brother Gerhardt head to an inn in the country for a holiday from their family business designing clockwork systems. One of the other guests is a magician who falls in love with Maude. He demands she marry him and, when she declines, transforms her brother into a stag and imprisons her in a glass coffin.

Maude works with machinery, not magic. Can she find a way to escape the magician’s grasp and free her beloved brother?

Gilroy and the Kitten

Gilroy is looking forward to spending a day alone. He’s planned it out – he’ll lie in the sun and warm his furry belly, he’ll watch birds, and maybe even scratch his claws on the carpet since Breda, his person – who also happens to be a witch – won’t be around to see.

And then Breda’s 8-year-old grandniece Delaney shows up.

Delaney, who is already Gilroy’s least favorite human, not only doesn’t go away, she also manages to trigger a spell that adds an even greater complication to Gilroy’s day.

The Kiss of the Horned God

After finding out she didn’t get her dream job at the arboretum, Holly takes her normal path home through the city park. She’s so upset she doesn’t pay attention to where she’s going, and is startled when she notices the path – and the lights of the city – have vanished. She realizes she’s in a thick forest of oak trees, even though there’s no place like that in the park.
She heads toward a dim light in the distance, and finds herself in a strange place where she meets a man with horns growing from his head. He tells her she’s needed for something that will happen at Midwinter – but what? And why Holly?

The Mystery of the Missing Presents

Jolper’s unhappiness with the inefficiency and tedium at his job at Santa’s Workshop has diminished since he met Aleana a few weeks before. Not only does she make him merry, she’s also introduced him to a group of elves who are secretly working to improve things at the Workshop.

One of the elves tells Jolper about a recent series of stolen presents. No elf would even dream of stealing anything, so Jolper chalks the story up to elves making mistakes in checking off lists. But when a toy bear that Jolper himself stuffed disappears, he realizes something strange is going on after all.

Will Jolper be able to solve the mystery and make sure the missing presents get delivered for Christmas?

Sleeping Stones

Becoming Free

It’s 1860, and it’s been a year since Charles’ best friend – and the love of his life – died in a fire in Houston, Texas. Charles kept his feelings for Jim to himself, and even Jim’s wife never suspected anything.

With Jim gone, and secession in the air, Charles has decided to leave Texas forever. On his way to Colorado Territory he runs into a pair of slave catchers – and the young couple they’ve captured. The law is on the side of the slave catchers, but justice is not.

Available on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Books2Read

The Truth About Goblins

Bean hated Halloween.

It used to be his favorite day of the year. He had fond memories of teaming up with his friends to play tricks on the older goblins, and of the music and dancing and feasting that lasted until well into the next day. But after moving to live among humans, he spends every Halloween terrified that his true nature would win out and cause him to end up eating someone.

One Halloween an old friend visits. To his dismay Bean finds himself out amongst the trick-or-treaters, where he learns the real truth about goblins.

Clyde and the Ghost Cat

The Switch

Edith’s friend Lorraine asks for help retrieving the engagement ring she’d lost over fifty years – but the ring is hidden inside a music box in an exhibit at the local museum. Edith agrees to help her friend, even though it means entering the world of crime at age seventy-two.

They find a music box that looks similar, and Edith sneaks it in to the museum to switch it out for the real one. Will what she finds cause her to make a switch of her own?

To Be a Monster

Scylla is caught by surprise when her mother, the river nymph Crataeis, shows up unexpectedly. Mother’s infrequent visits are welcome, but also serve as a painful reminder of what Scylla’s life had been like before the evil witch Circe turned her into a hideous, people-eating monster.

The cliff Scylla lives on juts out into a narrow straight of water; an arrow-shot away lives the monster Charybdis, who sucks water – and any ships unfortunate enough to be close by – down a whirlpool and into her great maw several times a day. Mother asks Scylla to allow a ship that belongs to a young man named Odysseus to pass by unharmed a few days hence; that way his boat won’t have to venture too close to the whirlpool. Scylla agrees, on the condition that her mother go to Circe and plead with her to return Scylla to her normal human form.

But when Odysseus’ ship appears, Scylla realizes that perhaps things are not as they seem…

The Faery’s Choice

Three faery boys—Nuár, Aodh, and Táinar—are spending their day pretending to be great hunters when they come across a human girl. Annie accidentally crossed from her world to the Land of Faerie, but doesn’t know how to return to her home.

Táinar tells Annie she can’t go back to her world, and offers to show her the wonders of Faerie. The children head off to visit a group of river naiads, and maybe even see a kelpie, but Nuár is troubled.

Why did Táinar tell Annie she can never return to her own world? And is he truly interested in showing the girl the magic of Faerie—or does Táinar have something else in mind?

The Scent of Roses

Lori recently moved into an old Victorian which, as is often the case with old houses, makes creaks and hisses and all kinds of noises. One night she hears three knocks in a row, as if someone were knocking on a door, and she swears she can smell the scent of roses.

A few weeks later, on a windy night, Lori’s brother teases her about the knocking sound – so Lori calls his bluff and tells whatever is knocking to come in.

And so it does…

The Next Dance

Nelle is a saloon girl in a mining town in Colorado in the Old West. Her job is to get the men who come in to spend their earnings on drinks and dancing. The ‘respectable’ women in town consider Nelle and her co-workers to be only one step above prostitutes, but there aren’t many ways for a woman to make a living.

So Nelle spends her nights dancing and laughing, getting her feet stomped on by poor dance partners, and drinking colored sugar water while the men drink whiskey and beer.

Then one night she meets a different sort of man – and he can actually dance.

The Least Merry Elf

Jolper used to like working at Santa’s Workshop with the other elves, but over time he became frustrated with the lack of efficiency and the tedium of making the same toys over and over and over.

He’s tired of his job, annoyed at being forced to wear red and green all year long, and frustrated at having to continually fend off the co-worker who’s decided Jolper is perfect marriage material.

One night he goes for a walk wearing a pair of boots that he, in a moment of anger, cut the jingle bells off of. He runs into a young woman who’s reading a book about the history of Christmas – a history Jolper has never heard of before.

The Lesson of the Love Spell

Anna’s new neighbor is a witch.

Anna tells her parents, but they don’t believe her – as if any grown-up would believe a ten-year-old girl who said that type of thing.

Besides, her parents are so busy fighting with each other that they barely seem to remember Anna even exists. If only they’d stop fighting and be nice to one another!

But perhaps the witch could help…by casting a love spell on Anna’s parents…

Bewitchery

The Cat’s Meow

Clifford, a xenolinguist, loves his job. He works with the alien counterpart, Virruni, to learn each other’s languages and culture.

Clifford’s personal life is a bit more complicated, as his girlfriend has recently begun discussing marriage and – as if that weren’t bad enough – children.

At least work is going well…or it was until Virruni decided to show his affection for Clifford by giving him not one but two alien pets.

The City Trees

Giulia moved to the city after her husband’s death, but the city trees won’t talk with her – even though she’s a dryad.

One evening, while attempting to speak with the trees in a park, she finds herself caught in the middle between a thief and his pursuer. The thief stole something magical and dangerous, but what? And will Giulia choose escape, or fight to help foil the crime?

A Good and Honorable Thief

First Dates

Learning to Sail

Good Neighbors

The Apology