Mouse gripped the Slayer Blade, the green flames licking up and down its blade. Zoey, as a golden-haired bear, roared, slaver hanging from her fangs. Both Chazzie and Pru had an Uzi machine pistol pointed upward. Uchiko stood with an Inferno arrow nocked on her black bow. Nefri drew back the dark line of the Hellstring as a black bolt appeared at her cheek. Blackfoot ran to shiver between her legs.

  Steven shifted into his True Form, towering above his Escort. Icharaam’s Crown flared on his brow as he readied ShadowFlame.

  Quinnestri, still sitting, gasped at the show of power.

  Sabina stood, gripping her white cane, her eyes like emeralds. “Hola, Señor Drokharis. Yes, we do have room for one more.”

  Shock stilled Steven’s Exhalant. For the first time in his life, he was going to be meeting a version of his real father, without the aid of any kind of magic.

  Stefan Drokharis limped over to the escalator and stopped at the top. Something was wrong with him, clearly. He gazed down on Steven and his Escort.

  “Hello, son.” A weary smile curved his lips. “Gather your Escort, acquire your Hoard, and build your Aeries. Let nothing stop you. It seems you took my advice.”

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

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  Looking for more by Aaron Crash, and need it right this minute? Check out: War God’s Mantle! Or keep reading to take a sneak peek.

  THE GODS WALK AGAIN ...

  When Marine Corps pilot Jacob Merely crashes during a routine mission off the coast of Cyprus, he was sure it was game over.

  After surviving the crash and pulling himself onto the sandy shores of a long-abandoned island, however, Jacob unwittingly stumbles headfirst into the ancient ruins of a dead city. Unfortunately, he also stumbles into an age-old battle between good and evil—and he is now its newest recruit.

  The island once belonged to the Amazons, daughters of Ares, the God of War, and stood as the final bastion between the human world and the monstrosities of the Great Below. But Jacob’s arrival has awakened the old gods and disturbed the seal holding the ravaging darkness at bay.

  Now, with the help of a sacred gem containing Ares’ power, Jacob must recreate the Amazonian defenders of humanity and fortify the island stronghold. And if he fails, Hades will unleash his army of the damned and the world of men will fall, giving rise to an age of walking nightmares.

  "You had me at mythology. You sold me at the crafting, game mechanics, great characters, and serious action. From start to finish, War God's Mantle delivers. Do not miss this book!" — Harmon Cooper, author of Cheery Blossom Girls, Monster Hunt NYC,and House of Dolls.

  Chapter One: Storm Clouds

  I DIDN’T WANT TO DO it. To break formation.

  My AV-8B Harrier II jet streaked across the sky, leaving white contrails behind while the frothing Mediterranean Sea churned below. My squadron was off the coast of Cyprus, running a routine patrol op out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Not a combat mission, but a display of force to let everyone know that the United States Marine Corps was there—standing by, ready to lay down fire and destruction at the drop of a hat. And we could if we needed to, since each Harrier was decked out with enough munitions to level a small army.

  Not that it would come to that. It never did.

  This was a standard run, no thrills, no frills, and since we were trucking along at Mach0.89—right around six hundred and sixty-two miles per hour—we’d be back on base in time for a full afternoon of World of Warcraft. Which was good because I had a World Boss raid at four.

  Unfortunately, the unexpected storm rolling in from the west could ruin my plans. The blue sky abruptly gave way to a sudden swell of roiling dark clouds, booming thunder, and crackling streaks of lightning. I didn’t want to break formation, but heading into that shitstorm was a bad move. Might as well book a one-way ticket to Crashville, population me. Harriers were kick-ass flying machines, sure, but even they couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with Mother Nature. I eased up on the stick, banking slightly right, knowing I’d catch hell for the move.

  “Gamer-Two, reporting,” I spoke into my radio. “I found a clear route through the storm. Eight-three-one-niner-niner-six. If you follow me, we can circle back around and get back to base in time for a sandwich, over.”

  I didn’t much like my call sign, Gamer-Two, but it fit me. While the other guys were always hitting the bars and hanging out with local girls, I’d be at my laptop immersed in various fantasy worlds, fighting the good fight, beating up the bad guys, and collecting sweet, sweet loot. My squadron made fun of me, and that was kind of the point of my call sign. To make it worse, I wasn’t even named Gamer-One. Nope. I was Gamer-Two because everyone teased me that I always came in second place.

  “Negative Gamer-Two,” came Sugar’s reply, cool and confident. Sugar was our squadron leader, and in the air his word was gospel. “Keep to the flight plan, over.”

  “Seriously, Merely,” Earl Echo Earl’s voice crackled in my ear, “you break formation and I’ll nail your ass to the wall. You’ll be pulling barrack duty for the rest of your tour. Swear to God, you’ll never get to play another round of War Shit, or whatever the hell it’s called, again. You copy that, over?”

  I ground my teeth, anger boiling up just below the surface. Everyone ragged on me—I was the butt of just about every joke—but only Earl Echo Earl was a complete asshole about it. Sugar was cool most days, but since Earl was next up in my chain of command, he held a lot of sway in my life. Worse, it seemed like he was always looking for any possible excuse to bust my balls. “Yeah, I copy that, over,” I replied, biting my tongue, and toeing the line.

  A thunderous crack of lightning crashed as the last word left my mouth, the flare blinding me to the world as deafening sound resounded around me like a gong. The light disappeared a second later, but somehow during the brief moment I’d moved even farther off course. The clear patch of sky was closer now, but that meant I’d veered significantly astray from the flight plan.

  “Correcting course, over,” I radioed in, but silence was my only response. “This is Gamer-Two, anyone read me, over?” I sent again, checking my gauges as I attempted to readjust.

  Static filled my ears as the channel buzzed.

  No one was responding—not Sugar, Butch, Cobra, Dizzy, Earl Echo Earl, Foxy, or Mini-Maverick. The lightning blast must’ve done something to my comm. I adjusted course farther, keeping a small patch of clear sky in view, but something was wrong. Really wrong. My dials spun wildly, my compass offered me off the charts readings, and a spark sputtered out of my control board. The stick fought me like a demon snake, jerking this way, then that, refusing to cooperate with me. What the hell was going on?

  A second later, a second thundercrack enveloped me—this one even closer than the first. It sounded like a bunker buster exploding on impact, and the smell of ozone washed through the cockpit, knocking my sense of smell into tomorrow. Sweat broke out across my forehead, and I blinked my eyes to clear away the stinging perspiration as I concentrated. Focused. It was clear I was alone. I fought with the stick as the first faint trickle of choking smoke invaded the cockpit, which was bad news bears.

  A burst of sharp static filled my ears. It was Sugar, but his words came out clipped and strangely distorted. “Earl Echo Earl, down ... lost engine. Lightning ... careful ... evacu—”

  And then his voice was lost, abruptly cut off. There wasn’t even static. Rain washed down on the canopy of my Harrier like someone was pouring an ocean on me. For a second I couldn’t see, but the entire jet trembled, the seat beneath me vibrating as my Harrier hit something. An invisible wall of compressed air maybe. Except that couldn’t be right because when I burst through the far side, the storm was gone, vanished, and the rain was gone too. I felt my mouth drop open as I wheeled the plane sharply to the right.

  Holy crap.

  I was cruising through crystalline skies, but behind me was the storm in all its brutal fury. That wasn’t the weirdest part, though. No, there was some sort of force field—a curved, magic shield like the edge of an enormous soap bubble—keeping the rain and lightning at bay. Before I could wrap my head around what I saw, the shrill alarm of my engine going out pierced my ears. Maybe I was out of the storm, but I was obviously not out of trouble. The stick trembled in my hand once more, and the trickle of smoke washing into the cockpit turned into a tsunami.

  I was glad for the oxygen mask providing me air, but I could hardly see between the sudden blast of sunlight and the gray smoke. My control panel continued to spark and spit, the gears and dials spinning insanely as lights flashed and buttons beeped. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. There was no way to avoid it—I was going down. Still, I fought to get my Harrier under control; I wheeled her to the side, and below me was a flash of green surrounded by azure.

  There was an island down there, and if I could get my jet to cooperate, I might be able to land her on or near the white sands below.

  But that couldn’t be right—there shouldn’t be an island below me. I’d flown this same route fifty times before. I knew this region upside down and inside out, including every spit of land. That was all part of mission prep. No, the island below shouldn’t exist. But there it was, a giant sprawl of green trees and white sand in a sea of blue like a giant middle finger to all reason and logic.

  But if crazy magical barriers could exist, why not a giant uncharted island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea?

  Or was it uncharted? Was I still on Earth? Could I have passed through a portal into another world? At this point, I wasn’t ready to count any possibility out. Though it might not matter one way or the other if I didn’t get my Harrier down safely.

  I pushed my fear, uncertainty, and morbid curiosity to the back of my mind as my training took over. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.” I shouted into the comm to be heard over the blare of the alarms. “This is First Lieutenant Jacob Merely of the United States Marine Corps. I am going down. I repeat, I am going down at the following coordinates.” I squinted at my dash and caught just enough to spit out my longitude and latitude. “Uncharted island below. Left engine is gone. Fully loaded Harrier, over.”

  I thought about the guns and missiles I carried. A five-barreled Gatling cannon, throwing twenty-five-millimeter bullets, mounted under-fuselage in the left pod with five hundred rounds of ammunition in the right. Two nineteen-shot LAU-5003 pods, four AIM-9 Sidewinder infrared-guided missiles, four AIM 120 AMRAAMs, and a pair of CBU-100 Cluster Bombs, plus a good old-fashioned canister of Mark 77 Napalm B. Nothing beats fucking napalm. As the Marine Corps is fond of saying, “If it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight, call the Marines.”

  I was going to be crash-landing my jet with an arsenal of top-of-the-line armament. If that weaponry fell into the wrong hands, some bad people could cause some wicked shit. Assuming I didn’t just blow myself up in the crash.

  Again, I wondered if I was still on Earth and pondered Star Trek’s Prime Directive. What if a primitive society suddenly found themselves wielding napalm? I decided that was a problem for future me to worry about. With my mayday call out, I moved to the next item on the agenda:

  Steer my smoking, spinning, beat-to-shit Harrier to a safe landing.

  With a grunt and a heave, I managed to get her into a turn, scoping out the island, though smoke from my burning engine still impeded my vision. And that damn sunlight. God needed to turn it down a notch. My sweat didn’t help matters either.

  The island was crescent-shaped and had two central mountains—one to the north and one to the south—with a deep valley between them. Cliffs lined most of the coast, and massive rocks protruded from the shallow waters, breaking the incoming waves around the isle. On the north side of the island, there seemed to be a clearing and some buildings made out of marble or stone. And were those columns? I squinted, brow furrowed. Yeah, definitely columns.

  A big central building, which looked like the Acropolis in Athens, sat in the middle of the ruins. A wide avenue split the city in half and ended at a wall surrounded by a thick tangle of green.

  What the hell?

  I spun around the island; the east side had swaying fields of grass and a sandy beach. There. I could land there.

  I was on the southern tip, about as high as the top of the southern mountain, when something slammed into my damaged left wing. Something big. It wasn’t a bird, but there were feathers and talons. Through the haze of gray, I saw huge claws ripping at the metal.

  What the shit?

  The smoke cleared for a second, and I caught a flash of the cruel face of a twisted old woman—some hag with wrinkles like cracks in rocks. The plane shuddered beneath me, hitching and bucking like a rodeo bull, and I knew in my gut I wasn’t going to be able to land the Harrier. It was a lost cause, and time to eject.

  I took a second to grab my emergency gear, then seized the lever and ejected myself up and out of the Harrier. The canopy crashed off, flinging off into the distance as humid air swamped me. Then I was tumbling through the air, flipping head over heels, wind slapping at my face. A shriek mingled with the whistling of the falling jet filled my ears, and then some piece of debris struck my head.

  I had a last thought, wondering if my parachute would auto-open, and then it was all darkness. Whatever was going to happen would happen. I knew nothing more for a long time.

  Click HERE to continue reading War God’s Mantle.

  Books by Black Forge

  War God’s Mantle: Ascension (Book 1)

  War God’s Mantle: Descent (Book 2)

  War God’s Mantle: Underworld (Book 3)

  Denver Fury: American Dragons (Book 1)

  Cheyenne Magic: American Dragons (Book 2)

  Montana Firestorm: American Dragons (Book 3)

  Texas Showdown: American Dragons (Book 4)

  California Imperium: American Dragons (Book 5)

  Dodge City Knights: American Dragons (Book 6)

  Leadville Crucible: American Dragons (Book 7)

  Alaska Kingdom: American Dragons (Book 8)

  Dungeon Bringer 1

  Dungeon Bringer 2

  Dungeon Bringer 3

  Witch King 1

  Witch King 2

  Robot Bangarang: Full Frontal Galaxy (Book 1)

  Space Dragon Boogaloo: Full Frontal Galaxy (Book 2)

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

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  Rogue Dungeon: The Rogue Dungeon Series (Book 1)

  Civil War: The Rogue Dungeon Series (Book 2)

  Troll Nation: The Rogue Dungeon Series (Book 3)

  Viridian Gate Online (LitRPG)

  Viridian Gate Online: Cataclysm (Book 1)

  Viridian Gate Online: Crimson Alliance (Book 2)

  Viridian Gate Online: The Jade Lord (Book 3)

  Viridian Gate Online: Imperial Legion (Book 4)

  Viridian Gate Online: The Lich Priest (Book 5)

  Viridian Gate Online: Doom Forge (Book 6)

  Viridian Gate Online: Side Quests (Anthology)

  Viridian Gate Online: The Artificer (Imperial Initiative 1)

  Viridian Gate Online: Nomad Soul (The Illusionist Book 1)

  Viridian Gate Online: Dead Man’s Tide (The Illusionist Book 2)

  Viridian Gate Online: Inquisitor’s Foil (The Illusionist Book 3)

  Viridian Gate Online: Firebrand (The Firebrand Book 1)

  Viridian Gate Online: Embers of Rebellion (The Firebrand Book 2)

  Viridian Gate Online: Path of the Blood Phoenix (The Firebrand Book 3)

  Viridian Gate Online: Vindication (The Alchemic Weaponeer Book 1)

  Viridian Gate Online: Absolution (The Alchemic Weaponeer Book 2)

  Wuxia

  Darkening Skies (Path of the Thunderbird Book 1)

  Stone Soul (Path of the Thunderbird Book 2)

  Hollow Core (School of Sword and Serpents Book 1)

  Eclipse Core (School of Sword and Serpents Book 2)

  Sages of the Underpass (Battle Artists Book 1)

  Urban Fantasy

  Strange Magic (Yancy Lazarus Episode One)

  Cold Hearted (Yancy Lazarus Episode Two)

  Flashback: Siren Song (Yancy Lazarus Episode 2.5)

  Wendigo Rising (Yancy Lazarus Episode Three)

  Flashback: The Morrigan (Yancy Lazarus Episode 3.5)

  Savage Prophet (Yancy Lazarus Episode Four)

  Brimstone Blues: A Yancy Lazarus Novel

  MudMan (A Lazarus World Novel)

  Two-Faced: Legend of the Treesinger (Book 1)

  Soul Game: Legend of the Treesinger (Book 2)

  Post-apocalyptic

  Armageddon Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 1)

  Machine-Gun Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 2)

 

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