Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Odyssey, Issue 3, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2014.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Two women - and the workings of Time and Fate. In a time too long ago for most human memory, a god asked Mara what she most wanted. She got her wish: to protect the weak against the strong. For millennia, she has avenged that god, and her dead sisters, against anyone who uses the Rituals of Blood to become a god through mass murder. And there are few who can stand against her. A sudden shocking incident proves to Emma that the modern world is not what she thought it was, that there are demons and gods and elves and vampires. Her weapon is knowledge, and she pursues it wherever it leads her. The one thing she does not know is who she - and her ghostly lover, Caroline - are working for. RHAPSODY OF BLOOD is a four-part epic fantasy not quite like anything you've read before: a helter-skelter ride through history and legend, from Tenochitlan to Los Angeles, from Atlantis to London. It is a story of death, love and the end of worlds - and of dangerous, witty women.

Two women--and the workings of Time and Fate.

Mara, tasked since the dawn of history with destroying those who use the magic of killing and torture to become as gods. Emma, who with her ghost lover Caroline fights smaller evils on the streets of modern London and LA.

What is the connection between these two? Apart from the people they seem to know in common - the sorceress Morgana, the cockney spymistress Polly, the god Jehovah - they have the same enemies.

In the streets of Paris and London, the mountains of Afghanistan and a dusty car park in Iraq, these two dangerous witty women confront thugs, magic assassins, zombie gods and some of the worst villains in history, with allies that include Voltaire, the Duchess of Devonshire and a Yorkshire jihadi with serious demolition skills.

Reviewers called Rituals one of the most exciting fantasy debuts of 2012. Reflections is its worthy successor.

The worst days of their lives... Mara, immortal huntress of murderous gods, has told Aleister Crowley many stories. Now he persuades her to tell the stories she does not want to tell - of Josh and Judas, the charming clever boys she and her sister/lover Sof protected and taught in Alexandria, and of Hypatia, Sof's last incarnation before madness took her. Mara cannot save everyone and these are the tales of her worst failures... Emma is in danger. Lucifer has carried her beloved Caroline off to Hell and Jehovah wants Emma dead and his servant. She and her mysterious employer Josette journey to Hell to rescue Caroline, but what they have to deal with there is beyond Emma's ready wit and Josette's powers of intrigue... The third volume of Roz Kaveney's four-part novel of the fantastic RHAPSODY OF BLOOD, RESURRECTIONS is her darkest and most daring book yet.