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Synopsis:
For one pair of swordfighters, their marriage is worth going to Hell and back.
Ty and Dani are a modern-day, swordfighting husband-and-wife duo who help with exorcisms until a demon kills Dani’s mother and all of their fellow exorcists. Now, they’re on a quest for revenge through the realms of Hell, and killing the demon is just the start of the journey. To keep the demon from reviving, Dani and Ty must escape Hell within seven days and cast the demon’s head and heart into an Eternal Flame. To get back to the mortal realm in time, they rely on their small terrier Wicket to lead them past the demon’s army and thousands of other horrors.
To Hell and Back takes readers on an epic journey perfect for those who believe love can overcome any challenge and that a devoted dog makes the perfect guide no matter where you need to go.
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Author Bio:
Bill Blume discovered his love for the written word while in high school and has been writing ever since. His latest novel, West of Apocalypse, is now available from Time Killer Publishing. His short stories have been published in many fantasy anthologies and various ezines.
Like the father figure in his “Gidion Keep, Vampire Hunter” novels, Bill works as a 911 dispatcher for Henrico County Police and has done so for more than two decades. He served as the 2013 chair for James River Writers, which produces one of the nation’s best annual conferences for educating and connecting writers.
He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in Broadcast Journalism in 1995. In the years after, he worked as a TV news producer, first in Columbus, Georgia, and then in Richmond, Virginia, which has become home for Bill & his family.
You can learn more about Bill at his website: www.billblume.net.
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EXCERPTS:
Excerpt 1 (From Chapter 3):
They didn’t drive far, parking on a cobblestone street next to the café, sitting on a street corner. The entire front wall of the café was made up of tall doors that were all turned open to take advantage of the pleasant spring weather. Ty sucked down his coffee. It tasted stronger than what he preferred, but as tired as he was, he considered that a good thing.
“I imagine you have a lot of questions.” Maria sat at one of the tables closest to the sidewalk with people dressed in business suits and hospital scrubs walking by. She crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair, draping her arm over the back of it.
“I’m told you work for the church?” He decided against gambling on whether it was the Catholic or Episcopal Church.
“Heard that, did you?” She cracked an amused grin, as if she’d been privy to his conversation with Barry. “That’s only partially true. We’re funded by the Church of England, but we don’t answer to them.”
Taking a chug of his coffee, Ty then asked, “And who is we?”
“A fair question, and I’ll get to that soon enough.” She paused for her own sip of coffee. When she continued, she stared out at the street as cars rumbled across the cobblestones. “I’d like to talk about you a bit first. I notice you’ve started the transition.”
“The what?”
“Oh, you’re trying to find a way to make a living off that sword arm of yours that doesn’t require a nine-to-five job typing on a keyboard or some other nonsense. You’re going the usual route: giving lessons to wannabes drunk on fantasies of medieval knights or Star Wars. You know. The usual stuff.” She looked at him with a smirk that assured him she already knew the answer to her next question. “You enjoying all that?”
He cleared his throat and sniffed. His sinuses were still killing him.
“I’m paying my bills.” He shrugged, trying to mimic her nonchalance by turning his focus out onto the street and the passersby. Didn’t keep him from seeing her amused reaction to his answer, that she knew he was full of shit.
Yeah, he’d taken to giving part-time lessons at a local fencing club that included saber fighting. Most of the job seemed more about punishing clients into the realization that they weren’t going to turn into Inigo Montoya overnight and that fighting with a sword required both finesse and brutality. Being good with a sword required a killer instinct. Forcing others with limited skills to realize they didn’t have that certain something was taking a toll on him.
“Look, Mr. Faison.” She leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table. “For some people that’s enough, and that’s fine.” The way she said “fine” left little doubt it was anything but that. “But someone like you…” She shook her head.
He tried to bluff, acting amused and disinterested, but his acting skills failed him again. “You think so?”
The way her expression hardened, that single eye narrowing on him, forced his full focus on her. “I think you’re the kind of person who’s only ever whole when he’s got a sword in his hand and a real fight in front of him.”
She leaned back in her chair again, with all the satisfaction of a wildcat dining on a fresh kill. The silence offered him a chance to respond, but she’d left him speechless. No one had ever peeled him down to his bones like this—not even his parents—not this fast or with such ease.
After giving him his chance to answer and seeing he wasn’t able to, Maria sipped her coffee and then continued. “You’re twenty-six. You used to finish in the top three at most competitions you entered but you haven’t in more than a year. It’s not that your skills or body are fading, and it’s not because you’re distracted by the side work that pays the bills. No, it’s because even the competitions are starting to bore you. Those fights aren’t real anymore, because all that’s at stake there is pride.”
“And what? You’re offering me a ‘real fight’? What is this? Some kind of underground sword fight club, where the loser dies, and the first rule is to not talk about it?”
She shook her head, grinning at his attempt at wit. “This is no game or club. Underground? Somewhat. But what you’ll be doing will make a real difference in people’s lives. I’m offering you a chance to reclaim that fire that ignited the moment you first touched a sword.
“I’m giving you a chance to find your heart.”
Excerpt 2 (From Chapter 15):
The swirling interior of the gate yanked Ty into its embrace. Three seconds passed. The first: the fiery panic of his body coming apart. The second: the truest nothing that nothing can be while still holding the barest minimum of self awareness, with an absence of anything to stimulate any of the five senses. The third: all of reality shoved back into place, but somewhere new.
The strangest part was that despite all that happened between entry and exit, Ty left the gate exactly as he entered. Reality’s invisible stagehands hit pause with him in mid-run, moved him somewhere else, and then pressed “play.”
Ty never understood how Wicket or any other dog agreed to enter these gates after taking their first one. Possibly dogs saw reality simple enough not to register the horror of it.
What he expected on the other side wasn’t what he got. After the heat of the Blood Realm, the cold mist of this new place sent a shiver through him.
They weren’t on any ground, though. They’d emerged onto the wooden deck of what could pass for some old 18th century pirate ship, near the elevated rear of it. The ship’s sails were all raised and flapping in a tattered mess above them. The ship didn’t rock, and it most certainly wasn’t floating in a body of water.
An endless assortment of derelict ships floated in the misty void around them. Thick yellow bridges connected all of the ships in the fashion of a spider web. The floating armada included some more modern vessels, including private yachts and battleships.
“We are definitely off the map.” Ty realized the three of them had stopped near the captain’s wheel.
Dani looked ready to say something smart, but then she grabbed at his arm and pulled him into a run as the lizards emerged from the Hell gate.
They sprinted for the front of the ship.
“We’re going to run out of ship real fast!” Dani said over her shoulder.
Wicket, for his part, didn’t require being told to flee from the lizards pursuing them. He went straight to the farthest point of the ship and barked for his humans to follow. Unintelligible voices called from below decks—inhuman voices.
They reached the far end of the ship. Dani pointed to a narrow bridge as long as a football field that protruded from the pirate ship and connected to a 35-foot-long speedboat.
“I’ll go first.” Dani stepped onto the bridge. It didn’t wobble, and while being a foot wide wasn’t too intimidating, the mist surrounding them left the uncomfortable impression that what awaited them, if they fell, wouldn’t be an ocean or land. Rumor suggested some parts of Hell were bottomless. Until this moment, Ty hadn’t given those rumors any credence. After all, unless someone fell and came back to tell the tale, then how did anyone know a hole was truly bottomless and not just really deep? Only, as he stepped onto the bridge behind Dani and Wicket, he felt that certainty in the very core of his soul that one step too far right or left would send him into endless space.
He wouldn’t describe the bridge as flat, not exactly. It resembled a six-sided spike driven into the two connecting ships. The rope-like material gave their boots more traction. Sadly, that helped the lizards, too.
“Are they still following?” Dani’s voice echoed to him.
He paused in his scrambling shuffle along the bridge to get a look back at the pirate ship. Vertigo hit him hard, drawing a curse out of him. He wasn’t normally scared of heights, but the way these ships were arranged—floating above, across, and below one another—wasn’t natural. Coupled with the sensation of traversing a bottomless void, the simple act of shifting in place turned into something far more dangerous while going across these ropes. He cursed as he turned to see the lizards leaping onto the rope after them.
“We’ve got about a thirty-yard head start, but they’re moving faster than us.”
“Of course they are.”
Wicket growled his own complaint. Hard to tell whether Wicket directed it at the lizards or the rope bridge.
They’d made it at least three-quarters of the distance from the pirate ship to the speedboat when Ty heard the skittering of the lizards’ feet getting close.
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