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Larson McCade, a rogue adventurer, has come to Seltique, a planet culturally isolated from the rest of galactic civilization. He claims to be researching a pro-galaxy group, known as the Core, which was exterminated in an historic revolution. He makes several powerful friends along the way, including Valyn Dixon, to whom he is more attracted than he ought to be. But there is something else he wants, and he is willing to risk his life to get it. But on a planet like Seltique, he might get more than he is bargaining for.

There is a strange force among the Three Peoples of the Seven Worlds. Many believe that they are going crazy. Or that they have been visited by God. Or that it is a contact with a superior alien intelligence. And none who believe one way can accept the beliefs of the others, resulting in social disintegration and economic breakdown. The UCCSW has hired Satinas Paan, the best of the Free Lance Agents, to go visit another, reclusive people and ask for help. There is, however, a price.

The alien stranglehold on Earth has been broken, and victory is sweet until alien leader, Diana, uses her powers to escape. The alarm is raised, and the familiar beat of fear rises in the heart of the resistance. Diana must be stopped. Resistance member Donovan sets off in the alien Mother Ship in pursuit of the fleeing Diana, praying that he will be able to capture or destroy her before she can trigger another invasion of earth. During Donovan’s absence, the victory continues to unravel. The battle once won, must be fought again.

A new alien plot has been hatched — as vicious and inhuman as the Visitors themselves. In the Piedmont Muntain Region of North Carolin their top biologists, led by the coldly brutal Visitor Leon, are breeding crivits — a new life form of great power, appetite, and ferocity, which burrows in the sand and waits to pounce, destroy, and devour. The Visitor plan is to turn them loose in great numbers up and down the eastern beach coasts, where they can disrupt communications and kill thousands of people

Scientist Mark Casey, with the aid of some resistance-inspired students, has uncovered the scheme but cannot locate the secret breeding grounds. For that he needs the help of the locals — who distrust him and his fellow outsiders almost as much as the deadly visitors!

Psychologist Jack Page treats many who are struggling to deal with the reality of an alien invasion of Earth. But suddenly the Viet Nam veteran’s patients are losing their fear of the reptilian Visitors. Suddenly they are accepting, even welcoming. Suddenly resistance is fading. If Jack Page can’t find the cause and stop it, the last hope of Earth is doomed. But the insidious subversion is reaching out for everyone …

Kohltri … a deadly outlaw planet where every man, woman and child carries a gun at the hip … a refuge for outcasts, cutthroats and thieves, the hostile planet holds infinite mysteries — and endless dangers…

Young Rikard Braeth has traced his missing father to the strange planet Kohltri. And now — from the dark alleys of a vicious city of criminals, to the ancient ruins of a vanished culture — Rikard must follow in his father’s footsteps on a deadly quest for a vast fortune. He must face the unspeakable remains of a lost people. He must solve the riddle of the glittering, power-charged dragons that stalk the planet, destroying anyone in their path. He must face the terrifying truth of his father’s disappearance and the mysterious treasure guarded by misshapen life forms.

And if he is to survive, Rikard Braeth must learn to kill — with razor-sharp speed and accuracy…

Tathas … a race of pseudo-humanoids. Native to the deadly planet of Kohltri, their strange powers haave been put to hideous use throughout the intergalactic Federation

Rikard Braeth was unaware of the Tathas. He landed on abandoned Nowarth to seek treasure, but was arrested for trespassing. Now, he has been offered freedom if he will help find the unknown alien force that has mysteriously attacked and depopulated world upon world. Storming derelict, dangerous planets, the young adventurer will be placed in the path of the vile Tathas. He will have to fight indestructible monsters. He will have to discover the terrifying secret of the alien raiders. He will have to confront the grotesque spoils of their horrid conquests. And in so doing, he will unearth the greatest of all known treasures: the long-lost crown of the serpent.

But Rikard must battle psychic pirates as well as planetside warriors. And if he is to win, his mental powers must be as potent as his gun.

Vast, hidden ruins; an ancient alien museum; a photo older than history — clues that send adventurer Rikard Braeth on the quest of his life. Trailed by a murderous grave-robber, Rikard, snakeman Droagn, and the uncanny Grayshard battle civil war, academic cyberspace, savage worlds of psychic menace, and perilous private planets of the rich, seeking proof that a cyclopean race once changed the galaxy — only to die without a trace. Who were the cyclops? And what hellish power annihilated them?

To solve the 2,000,000-year-old mystery, Rikard must find and save the Lair of the Cyclops from a woman who would kill him and destroy the galaxy’s greatest treasure — just to feed her insane, insatiable greed…

Twentieth-century sorcerer Morgan Scott was pledged to fight the Servants of evil wherever he encountered them. He never expected to find them in the small town of Harborbeach, Michigan. But when he arrived there on a long-overdue visit to his brother Michael, Morgan found his brother had vanished, claimed by the Servants for some horrifying doom. Seeking to find and rescue Michael before it’s too late, Morgan and his familiar, the dragon cat Phoebus, begin their quest for a legendary relic of dark magic!

I have lived with cats for over fifty years.

I learned a lot during that time, about cats and about myself. Because living with cats isn’t the same as just having them around the house. It means that you pay attention to them, and give them the attention that they need, when they need it or when just want it. You interact with them when they want to, or when they let you. It means recognizing that no two cats are the same, that each is an individual and has its own idiosyncrasies. It means treating them with the respect they deserve.

My life would have been very different without cats. These reminiscences, of my first seven cats, will show you what I mean. Everything really happened, but it has been retold for the sake of story.

I wrote these stories over a period of fifty years. Many are somewhat experimental, and most have not been previously published. They are science fiction, or fantasy, or horror, or mixed, or something in between. They range from the Arizona desert to an intergalactic civilization, from the rebirth of daydreams to sadistic revenge. All have been revisited to ensure that they meet my current standards of storytelling. I hope you enjoy them.

Stroad’s Cross was oddly well preserved for a village that had been abandoned fifty years ago. The buildings showed no signs of mold or termites or vandalism, or even that the former residents had ever moved out.

In a way, some of them never had.

Nobody wants to die….

This is the Holt. It was our home while Freefoot was our chief. It was a quiet time, but even in quiet times things happen, about which stories are told, season after season. These stories eventually became part of the greater story of The Blood of Ten Chiefs. They tell of simple things, of life, and death, and growth, and regret, and ending. They tell about who we are, the elves in the World of Two Moons.

The breath is the life.

Blood remains after death, rots away with the body. But breath — breath is both a sign and a source of vitality. To draw off some of that vitality, to consume someone’s life, can be as simple as inhaling their breath.

That was how Mathew Dacorian’s upstairs neighbor had been killed, the latest in a series of victims who had apparently died from nothing more than a forced, full exhalation. Mathew wasn’t a detective, and he didn’t believe in the supernatural, but it seemed to be up to him to solve the mystery and stop the killer.

Even if he had to die to do it.

Little blue lights began floating around old Philip Proctor’s house four days after he was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The fifth day, there were intangible crystal baubles as well, hanging from the branches of the trees and shrubbery. Every day some weird new thing was added. Every day it extended further into the nearby yards. Every day it became more frightening.

Not everybody who lived nearby, or who passed through the neighborhood, was aware of the strangeness, and those who were didn’t talk much about it, afraid of what people might think. Some of Mr. Proctor’s neighbors were touched, by something trying to pull them from their bodies. Some of them died.

Mr Proctor’s unexpected death had left something under the house, something almost intelligent. It was just trying to do what it was supposed to do. But without Proctor, there was only a dead hand at the wheel, and that which dwelt below was getting stronger, spreading further, and going insane.

There was nothing the police could do. Investigate a floating blue spark? Arrest a smell of new-mown hay? Whatever was causing the weirdness would have to be stopped by those few neighbors who had the courage to enter the house.

When Anthony Gray, investigative reporter, sets out to discover why so many homeless people have been going missing, he doesn’t expect to be captured by aliens. Only his synesthesia prevents the aliens’ mind-wipe from turning him into a living brain-slave. His new masters, unaware of his preserved capability for independent thought, install him into ever-more powerful warships, engaged in a war between four very different races. The war has been going on for generations — nobody remembers how long  or who started it, or why.

Tony develops ever-increasing mastery of all sizes of battle-craft, from one-man scouts to super-dreadnoughts the size of a small city, and acquires brain implants which give him power his masters did not anticipate.

Conducting the war has impoverished the home worlds and colonies of all the races, and they are desperate to bring it to a conclusion. Will one race win and subjugate the others? Will earth, the source of the brain-slaves without which the war cannot be waged, be scorched from existence? Or will Tony Gray find another way out?

Our world is just one thread among uncounted others in the weave of the greater reality. Each of these threads is another world, some rather similar to ours, some bizarrely different. Each world has a rich culture, which the agent of a dark outside force is seeking to destroy.

Jeanette Delgado, small and young, struggles to make a success of the bookstore she runs with her husband, until Steve is killed in a freak accident. Though she has never been independent a day in her life, she is chosen, while still grieving for him, by powers she doesn’t understand, to go to one threatened world, then another, and another, each time to assume the role of the hero. 

Like her predecessors, her task is to try to prevent the agent of destruction from achieving its goal. In each world she is tested, and must discover the curage, the strength, and the leadership she never knew she had. In the end, she learns to accept her role, and decides to anticipate her enemy, by going, under her own power, to the nearest threatened world.

It all begins at the bonfire in her back yard, when she is dropped suddenly into the cavern of blue flames.

The five peoples of the world of winds, which always blow from where the sun sets to where the sun rises, are physically, psychologically, and culturally different from each other, more than even different species. 

The cultures of all the people are sustained by the Spiral, a matrix of connection, relation, concept, and meaning, within an extramundane layer of reality. The Main Quey maintains order and balance within the Spiral, and between it and the people. When he is kidnapped by Empa Tethicho, the Chancellor of Shotoban, the cultures of all five peoples are threatened with dissolution and descent into savagery and chaos. 

The Chancellor enforces a brutal rule of conformity, but there is an underground. Every attempt to rescue the Main Quey ends in failure. Property is confiscated, families are exiled, and those who made the attempt are executed. 

In desperation, a group of people, more than usually sensitive to the extramundane, is trying to call a demon from another layer of reality, an intelligence which can pass through walls and locked doors, hoping that it will find the Main Quey and bring him back. What they get is Jeanette Delgado.

Jeanette steps from a moving train into a multi-dimensional maze, which is a part of something greater. The miniature world at the center of the maze is, at the same time, the center of all things, even those beyond the greater reality. The dark outside force has sent a tempter to bring about its downfall. 

From there, Jeanette goes to a world of layers — the Sea of Grass; huge mesas of untouched forest; the Midlands of the people, whose culture is hundreds of thousands of years old; and the desert Uplands where demons dwell. An old enemy has come, and Jeanette, believed to be a demon herself, must keep him from enslaving the people. 

From there, Jeanette goes home, but an agent of the enemy has brought unnatural winter to her world, and comes itself to attack her in her home at night. She follows to a world similar to her own, where she must first deal with the unnatural winter, then find the agent, in a stolen tower house bigger on the inside than on the outside. 

She must prove herself again, and again, and Again. She must show not only her greater courage, strength, and leadership, but learn to control her rage, and to show compassion.

Jeanette has learned how to travel, under her own power, from one reality to another. She goes, even before a call, to worlds which the Arkenome is attempting to destroy, for no reason that she can see. Sometimes she prevents the destruction, sometimes she rescues only survivors, and sometimes she fails.

Her companions travel with her. Some of them die. She has learned super-human skills, which don’t always work. She has destroyed a powerful Arkenome, only to see him replaced by another, who is stronger, more dangerous, more powerful, and more ruthless. She has learned that Arkenomes, and those who want to be, are guided by a super-cosmic intelligence, which will always find another agent if one is lost. This is the Ecliptor, and she decides to go after it directly, to stop the creation of new enemies. 

She must somehow get the Arkenome to lead her to it. She and her companions do everything they can to drive him to seek his master’s help. She taunts him, evades him, disrupts his perverse pleasure places, turns his slave world against him, pursues him to target worlds and interrupts him before he gets started.

And then, at last, when it seems that she has succeeded, she learns that even the Ecliptor has a master of a higher order. Must she dominate the Ecliptor first? Or can she go directly to its master?

The time has come for Jeanette to confront the Enemy, but before she can reach him, she must defeat Diapollion the Ecliptor, the Enemy’s prime agent, and master of the Arkenomes who destroy cultures and whole worlds.

The Enemy is Kada Barros, an extra-cosmic intelligence. She learns how to go from all that is real to the place where Kada Barros dwells, outside the greater reality.  She confronts the  Enemy, he strikes, and she loses everything. 

Her spirit is saved at the last instant, by someone she had once rescued, and she is taken to the well of stars. Tondorre is brought to her, but all her other companions have been scattered to their own worlds. She must start all over again, with only Tondorre to help.

She saves one world, and another, and is challenged by a new Ecliptor, whom she had thought that she had overcome, and this time she destroys his power, and her way to the Enemy is clear. But the intelligences which have been watching over everything, have now given her a different task, which she could refuse — or accept.

Leslie Ann Drover is much more experienced in the world than Jeanette was, and when Jeanette gave her the black ring, she understood that she was to be Jeanette’s successor. She is younger than Jeanette, independent, self-supporting, and is learning leadership skills on her job. When she is called upon as the new hero, she proves herself. And again. And again.

The tasks, the adventures, become more complicated, the moral choices more difficult, the physical challenges harder, and the leadership more demanding. She knows she’s not crazy, she knows that these strange worlds and her body shapes are real. But she’s all alone, and it’s all getting to be too much.

Then, without being summoned, she goes from her apartment door to a world where there is no enemy to stop, to a not-quite medieval public house. There she finds Ikusa, one of Jeanette’s old companions, waiting for her. Together, they meet ever greater challenges until, at last, she has all five of the hero’s tokens.

But she must confront the Ecliptor personally. He was mortal, but is now almost a demigod. And then she must find and go to the Enemy himself, Kada Barros. She cannot destroy him, and would not if she could. But she has to stop him somehow. Maybe there’s another way….

They were here before we were — the Good People, the Fair Folk, the Bright Ones, the Fey, the Dalra. They were already well into decline by the time we discovered them, slowly losing their technology — “magic,” to us — and then having lost the thing that was supposed to bring it back. Today, they live in the corners of the world, and the lands they once held have returned to nature, never quite as rich as once they were. Yet what if we had never driven them away? What if we had learned to coexist with them instead? What if someone found a hint, a clue as to what might have been; a chance to rediscover something lost in a place forgotten long ago?

~~~

Amanda Valentine, on her first hunting trip with her father, discovers a shadowgate…

Brian Connover was a gifted traveler, who had gone among the worlds of the greater context farther and deeper than anyone else. He was struck down by someone who envied his power, and wanted to steal it, but they didn’t get it, and it took him ten years to die.

Brian’s son, David, has no gift at all, and knows nothing about traveling to other worlds. His father appeared to him after his burial, and asked for his help. His prison is somewhere among the worlds, and David must find it.

He will not be alone. Cesiili, a young gifted woman from another world, will guide him. Hawk, a huge mystic bird from somewhere else, will protect him. But only David can set his father free.

A few Khestari are traders, in their home cluster, and in that part of the galaxy where the markets are. Only those who have the education, training, and hands-on experience have a chance, and even then, only a few earn the license. 

Some of the Khestari mine the cold stars for strange molecules, which they use to create bizarre materials, which they trade, or use for building starships. Most Khestari provide everything else that is needed in a mining town, in their artificial city between the stars. 

None of the peoples with whom the Khestari trade are human, and some are so strange as to be almost incomprehensible. If traders are to succeed, they need an expert in extra-cultural relations, who can advise them when bargaining with these peoples.

Vaereon is a trader. His lifemate is his advisor. Together they are better than most, though there are, sometimes, problems which test them to their limits.