Search Worlds Without End

After donning a cursed necklace for the cameras, a silent screen starlet and her entourage are terrorized by an ancient demon

It is 1923, and silent film reigns in Hollywood. Of all the starlets, none is more beloved than Chrysanda Flamande, a diva as brilliant as she is difficult to manage. Handling her falls to Norah, widow of Chrysanda's dead brother. She has always done her job well, but she was never equipped to deal with murder.

When a violent killing shocks Chrysanda's entourage, and other weird happenings swiftly follow, Norah begins to suspect that some strange power is stalking the star. In Chinatown she receives warning that a curse has been placed on the actress as vengeance for wearing a sacred amulet in one of her films--and this curse could mean death for all who surround her.

A fresh take on Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on the obsessive devotion of Renfield to his vampire master, embarking on a personal mission to hunt down Van Helsing and his companions that sets the stage for the ultimate confrontation between the living and the undead and takes him from Dracula's castle into the horrific darkness of his own mind.

A murderous force threatens a far-off magical world, and an ordinary Californian is drawn into the battle to save mankind.

As a student of medieval history, Gil Patterson is a woman familiar with dark stories. She knows well the Crusades, the Black Death, and the other horrors of the Middle Ages, but it is another kind of atrocity that has begun to haunt her dreams. She sees forces of evil assaulting a beleaguered kingdom, whose kind people are on the brink of annihilation, and awakes each morning in a cold sweat.

Gil dismisses the dreams until a wizard appears in her apartment. He has crossed into her dimension, passing through the fraying fabric of the universe, to ask her help. For mankind to survive he must protect an infant prince, whom he plans to hide in Gil's world. The student of history is about to get much closer to evil than she ever imagined.

Three thousand years before, the monstrous Dark had sprung from loathsome underground lairs to destroy most of humanity. Now they were again ravening and ruining in their blood-hunger. Only a few thousand people had managed to find refuge in the ancient fortress Keep of Renweth. There, even the magic of the wizard Ingold Inglorion could offer them little hope against the Dark. To defeat the savage horror, they must gain help from the Hidden City of Quo, to which all other wizards had been summoned. But Ingold could not pierce the walls of illusion that separated Quo from the world. With his student, Rudy Solis, the old wizard set out to cross 2,000 miles of dangerous desert to the City of Wizards. What he might find there he could not know - and dared not guess!

Outside the great stone Keep of Renweth, the night was the province of the Dark Ones - monstrous creatures that had swarmed out of their eldritch underground caverns to destroy humanity.

Inside, where the pitiful remnant of the once-great Realm of Darwath huddled, Chancellor Alwir and Bishop Govannin continued their bitter struggle for dominance. Against all advice, Alwir went ahead with plans to use Ingold, Rudy, and the other wizards in a hopeless, desperate invasion of the Nests of the Dark. The Bishop, obsessed with fanatical fury, sought to root out all magic by murdering the wizards. Both conspired together to seek the aid of Alketch, ancient enemy of the Realm.

In that hotbed of ambition, hatred, and fear, no one except Ingold would heed Gil's discovery of the truth that lay behind the rising of the Dark!

Five years after defeating the Dark Ones, the embattled inhabitants of the once-great Keep of Dare face a yet more deadly foe. An icy-cold force was spreading across the northlands, spawning strange creatures that killed everything in their grisly path . . .

Archmage Ingold Inglorion believed the source of this monstrous evil lay in the decadent lands to the south. With him traveled Gil Patterson, the scholar-warrior from Earth who had forsaken her own universe for love of the mage.  Determined to aid him in his quest, she was cursed to become the instrument of his death.

Ingold's apprentice Rudy Solis was left behind, the sole wizard standing between the Keep of Dare and the nightmare creatures besieging it. Rudy struggled tirelessly with wavering magic to ward off the virulent attacks of the ice mage's minions. But when someone attacked the widowed queen--the woman he loved--Rudy was forced to plumb the ultimate secret locked in the black crystal heart of the Keep of Dare . . . and so decide the fate of the world.

While chaos reigned in the Eastern Lands, the Keep of Dare stood as a bastion against war and bandits and the spawn of unnatural sorceries. Then twin blows rocked the citadel: the fearsome Alketch army mounted siege, even as young Prince Tir was snatched from the heart of the Keep. Behind the terror was the depraved, hook-handed general Vair na-Chandros. He had learned that the royal child possessed forbidden wisdom: a secret with which the bloodthirsty Vair intended to conquer the world.

One single man posed a threat to Vair's vaunting ambition: the legendary warrior known as the Icefalcon. Banished by his own people and scorned as a barbarian by others, only he could hope to free the boy from Vair's clutches. With his sister Cold Death--a sorcerer whose magic was as sharp as her tongue--the Icefalcon embarked on a dangerous mission of rescue and redemption.

Braving nightmare demons and the endless hordes of Vair's inhuman soldiers, he shadowed Vair and his small captive beyond the reaches of the known world. And when the boy led Vair to the forgotten Keep of the Shadow at the End of Time, the Icefalcon would face his greatest battle . . . for his prince, for his honor, and for all eternity.

Who's been killing the vampires of London, tearing open their coffins to let in lethal sunshine as they sleep--and then drinking their blood?

After a career spying for Queen Victoria, James Asher enjoyed a quiet retirement until he met the vampire Don Simon, an immortal Spaniard who taught him about the secret society of bloodsucking undead.

Now, one of the vampires, the Earl of Ernchester, has turned his back on Britain. When Asher spots him boarding a train for Paris in the company of an Austrian spy, he springs into action. If the immortals can forge an alliance with England's enemies, then the Empire is doomed. Asher tails the Earl to Paris and across the continent, plunging into the heart of a terrifying conspiracy of the undead - with the fate of the British Empire at stake.

The new 'James Asher' vampire novel from the best-selling author - It's 1911. War is coming, and according to one of the vampires of St. Petersburg, the Kaiser is trying to recruit vampires. James Asher, Oxford don and formerly on His Majesty's Secret Service, is forced to team up again with his vampire partner Don Simon Ysidro for a journey to the subarctic Russian capital. Are they on the trail of a rogue vampire with a plan to achieve the power to walk in daylight? Asher wonders. Or is Ysidro's real agenda to seek the woman he once loved?

James Asher finds himself once more in alliance with vampire Don Simon Ysidro, as their investigations takes them to far-off Peking . . . October, 1912. James Asher, his wife Lydia, and the old occultist and vampire-hunter Dr Solomon Karlebach have journeyed to the new-born Republic of China to investigate the rumour that the mindless Undead – the Others that even the vampires fear – have begun to multiply in the caverns of the hills west of Peking. Alongside his old vampire partner, Don Simon Ysidro, Asher embarks on a sinister hunt, while somewhere in the city’s cold gray labyrinth lurk the Peking vampires, known as the Magistrates of Hell – with an agenda of their own . . .

When James Asher and his wife Lydia's baby daughter Miranda is kidnapped by the Master Vampire of London, the stakes are high: blindly follow the Master Vampire's instructions, keep out of the way of the human networks that serves the vampires, destroy the interloper who seeks to seize control of the London Nest, and find the key to the Nest's tortuous inner workings: The Book of the Kindred of Darkness.

Even with the vampire Don Simon Ysidro on their side, there's no guarantee that anything - or anyone - is who or what they appear to be. Nor is there any certainty that they'll see their child again - or survive the experience themselves.

When James Asher is found unconscious in the cemetery of the Church of St. Clare Pieds-Nus with multiple puncture-wounds in his throat and arms, his wife, Lydia, knows of only one person to call: the vampire Don Simon Ysidro. Old friend and old adversary, he is the only one who can help Lydia protect her unconscious, fevered husband from the vampires of Paris.

Why James has been attacked - and why he was called to Paris in the first place - Lydia has no idea. But she knows that she must find out, and quickly. For with James wavering between life and death, and war descending on the world, their slim chance of saving themselves from the vampires grows slimmer with each passing day...

During the carnage of World War One, James Asher joins forces with the vampires of Europe to counter an even deadlier threat.

The vampires call them 'The Others'. Neither living nor dead, the revenants are mindless and unstoppable--and in the carnage of the First World War, governments already running short of men to throw into battle might be very interested in soldiers who don't ask questions and are hard to kill. Front-line volunteer nurse Lydia Asher is horrified to learn that someone has found a way to control revenants, and is creating them for this purpose.

Back in London, Lydia's husband, former spy James Asher, is even more appalled to learn that revenants are beginning to show up in England, on the loose. Since revenants devour vampires, the vampires of Europe--most of whom are at the Front, feeding completely unnoticed on the dying--join forces with the Ashers to find the source of the threat before the world is overwhelmed.

Vampire Don Simon Ysido has been captured and held aboard a ship heading to the US to act as a slave, and Dr Lydia Asher must stop it... at any cost.

March, 1917. The goal of every government involved in the Great War has been achieved: industrialist Spenser Cochran has drugged and enslaved a vampire, Don Simon Ysidro, to do his bidding, and is now on the way to the US aboard a luxury ship.

Horrified, Dr Lydia Asher secures her passage on the vessel to rescue her friend from Cochran's chemical thrall. Meanwhile, her husband makes a dangerous alliance with the vampires of Paris to send Lydia the information she needs about the drug.

As they cross the Atlantic evidence mounts that another vampire is hiding aboard the ship, indiscriminately murdering passengers. Lydia knows she must solve both cases before the ship docks, and that breaking Cochran's hold on Don Simon will not be enough... She must kill him.

The U.S.S. Enterprise is on a peaceful mission at Starbase 12 when a bizarre cosmic phenomenon causes a Klingon ship to suddenly vanish -- with Spock aboard for the ride.

Spock's last message from the Klingon ship is cryptic and frightening. The Klingons are traveling into the past, searching for the one man who holds the key to the future. If they can kill that man, the course of history will be changed -- and the Federation will be destroyed!

This novel is a tie-in with the TV show Here Come The Brides, starring Mark Lenard, who also played Sarek.

Elcidar Beta Three -- a tranquil, undisturbed planet strategically located between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Home to the Midgwins, a race of people who throughout all time have lived in peace with their planet, and themselves. But now, times are changing. Unwilling to embrace any form of technology, the Midgwins have exhausted their world's natural resources, and stand on the brink of global famine.

When Captain Kirk and the Enterprise arrive to aid the Midgwins, they find themselves caught up in that race's struggle for survival... a struggle whose climactic battle pits them against a creature of darkness and shadow -- an entity who roams the Enterprise corridors as if it owned them -- an enemy who will not hesitate to kill to achieve its ultimate goal...

The crew of the Nautilus, a battered Starship of mysterious origin, is beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise. The group claims they are freedom fighters from the future working to save the Federation from the Consilium -- a group of corrupt power-seekers.

But when the Nautilus crew members suddenly seize control of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and a Starship from the future arrives to arrest the renegades, Kirk must separate his true allies from those who wish to destroy the Federation.

In Children of the Jedi, Barbara Hambly introduces a new character: Callista, a brave Jedi warrior of long ago who gave her life to foil one of the Empire's darkest plans, a plot to destroy a stronghold that was sanctuary for the wives and children of the Jedi knights. Suddenly, the dreadnought is rearming itself, intent on destruction. Only Luke Skywalker can feel its evil presence as well as the mysterious influence of that powerful woman who should have died decades ago.

Nam Chorios is a barren backwater world--once a dreaded prison colony, now home to a fanatic religious cult. It is here that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a ruthless and charismatic warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Meanwhile, Luke lands on a mysterious planet in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover the Force is his own worst enemy. But worst of all, as Han, Chewie, and Lando leave Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens... a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything--both Empire and New Republic--on its path to domination.

A blend of sorcery, high adventure and romance, this first novel in a series of two takes the wizards across the void into our own world, into the arms of the Third Reich.

When the wizard Jaldis heard the cry from beyond the Void, telling of a world where magic was dead and begging for his aid, he and his apprentice, Rhion, went to help. Crossing the Void takes all of their strength, and when Rhion awakes on the other side, he learns that the task is beyond them. Jaldis is dead, and the portal home gone with him.

Now he is trapped in a place called Earth, in a nation beset from all sides by its enemies. The men who called him here need a wizard to save them, and though Rhion is but a novice, he will have to do. He may even find a way home, but only if he can find a way to serve this mysterious empire that they call the Third Reich.

Gifted with courage, strength, and the intelligence to know when to fight, Sun Wolf is the greatest mercenary in a land overrun by war. With his first lieutenant, Starhawk - a woman more deadly than any man - at his side, he has laid waste to countless cities, taking the best of their treasures for himself, and distributing the rest among his bloodthirsty crew.

Then a woman comes to him, an emissary from the town of Mandrigyn, a lush port city recently sacked by a powerful, mad wizard of unmatched abilities. She offers Sun Wolf untold riches for the use of his army, but the captain is not fool enough to wage war against a magician. He refuses her offer, but that is not the end of it. The women of Mandrigyn can be very persuasive.

Once, it was said, Wensha had been a city of witches, summoning and controlling demons for their evil magic. But in nearby Tandieras, Kaltha claimed to have found their lost book of spells to perform only white magic. When Sun Wolf arrived, he discovered increasing signs of evil magic and demon-controlling spells. And he realized, too late, that a new swarm of demons was trying to lure him to his death....

Sun Wolf knew he had the power of magic, but he needed a master wizard to teach him to fully use his skills. But there was no one who could do the job. When he was called upon to help old friends against the ancient wizard, he did - thus ensuring a curse that would be executed, unless Sun Wolf could harness his own powers and find a way out....

In a world where wizards are relegated to ghettos, it is no surprise to see one murdered in the street. But for Stonne Caris, a young warrior monk who sees the killing and gives chase to the culprit, there is nothing ordinary about seeing a murderer disappear into a black, inky portal. The Archmage sends him in search of Antryg Windrose - a half-mad mage who understands the nature of these passages between dimensions.

On the other side of the Void is Joanna, a programmer as mild as Caris is deadly. She has spent her life in cubicles, staring into computer terminals, as far from heroism as she can get. But when the power that is crossing between dimensions draws her through the Void, she finds herself battling to save a world she never even knew existed.

There was a time when Joanna Sheraton knew nothing of the Void. She was an ordinary computer programmer, toiling in a cubicle in air-conditioned Southern California comfort, unaware that sinister forces had penetrated her universe. But from across the interdimensional divide, an evil mage had put in motion a scheme for eternal life by transferring himself into a computer that feeds on Earth's life force. Called upon to help by the wizard Antryg, Joanna could do nothing more than delay. At the end of her first sojourn across the Void, Antryg was imprisoned and their task seemed hopeless.

Now she must depart from Earth once more, to rescue Antryg and save humanity. She is friendless, and the dark mage's forces hound her every step. But a good hacker is not easily deterred.

The Citadel of Wizards was under siege. Deep in the Vaults beneath the walled city, gates into inhuman realities were opening and closing without warning. Monsters emerged from other dimensions; and ancient, malign magics came to life under the influence of cosmic chaos.

Someone was tampering with the Void.

The Council of Wizards blamed Antryg Windrose, the rebel mage who had fled their justice to find haven in the City of Angels. Across dimensions, they reached out to bring him back... Antryg refused the wizards' summons. But when Joanna was kidnapped, Antryg followed the woman he loved back across the Void. Trapped in the Citadel between the vengeful mages who once had been his friends and the unspeakable horrors in the Vaults below, Antryg launched a desperate bid to rescue Joanna - while all about him, the very fabric of the universe unraveled...

Kyra was preparing for her final wizard test before the Council. But suddenly, something was twisting her magic, weaving sinister portents of doom into even the simplest of her spells. Then she knew for certain that her young sister Alix was soon to marry--and soon to die. And so she journeyed back to the family who had disowned her. To save her sister, Kyra would have to face down her father's rage, stand firm against the venomous rivalries of her family's enemies, and confront the Inquisition. Then she must defeat a still deadlier foe--if only she could find it!

When the Black Dragon seized the Deep of Ylferdun, young Gareth braved the far Winterlands to find John Aversin, Dragonsbane -- the only living man ever to slay a dragon. In return for the promise of the King to send help to the Winterlands, Aversin agreed to attempt the nearly impossible feat again.

With them, to guard them on the haunted trip south, went Jenny Waynest, a half-taught sorceress and mother of Aversin's sons.

But at the decadent Court, nothing was as expected. Rebellion threatened the land. Zyerne, a sorceress of seemingly unlimited power, held the King under an evil spell, and he refused to see them. Meantime, the dragon fed well on the knights who had challenged him.

In the end, Aversin, Jenny, and Gareth had to steal away at night to challenge Morkeleb, largest and wisest of dragons.

But that was only the beginning of the perils they must face.

Lord John Aversin--with the help of his mageborn wife, Jenny Waynest-- has fought and defeated two dragons, earning the title of Dragonsbane. But there are creatures more terrifying than dragons. Demonspawn from a dark dimension have learned to drink the magic--and the souls--of mages and dragons alike, turning their victims into empty vessels. And now they've stolen John and Jenny's mageborn son, twelve-year-old Ian.

In desperation, John seeks the help of the eldest and strongest dragon: Morkeleb the Black. But the demons have allies, too: a vast army poised to plunge the Realm into civil war. In the coming struggle, Morkeleb will sacrifice what he values most. Jenny will question everything she trusts and believes in. And John will embark on a perilous quest for the only things capable of defeating such powerful demons--even more powerful demons . . .

Once the most powerful mage in the land, Jenny Waynest is now a broken woman. After being possessed and corrupted by the demon Amayon, she lost everything she holds dear--even the trust of her husband. Yet Lord John Aversin has torments of his own: memories of the beautiful and cruel Aohila, demon queen of a rival hell, whom he'd tricked into providing the help he needed to free Jenny. Now, condemned to death for trafficking with demons, John cannot forgive himself for opening the door to a far greater evil--an evil that still haunts his dreams. And not only his dreams . . .

For a vengeful Aohila needs mortal aid in realms beyond her power, and who better to provide it than Lord John? Blackmailed into cooperating, John must fight his way through unimaginable horrors in quest of a prize that may doom the world he has left behind . . .

Condemned to die for consorting with demons, dragonslayer Lord John Aversin sits in a dank prison cell and calculates the odds of escape, while smelling the smoke of the executioners? pyres. In Winterlands, Jenny Waynest pays a heavy price for choosing to be human, mourning the loss of her husband, Lord John, and the dangers that engulf her family. But in a season of the Dragon Star, strange miracles are about to transpire.

As a pitched battle between the Hellspawn and the human rages, Jenny and John will be reunited in a city under siege. And there, they will have one last chance to understand all that has happened to them and why, who their true enemies and true allies are, and most of all, for what magical purpose each has been chosen.

A vast adventure and a powerful mystery teeming with demons and witches, gnomes and dragons, Dragonstar explores profound issues of faith, fate, and technology?while obscuring long held boundaries between good and evil, love and hate, what is human and what is fantastic. With this glorious finale to a breathtaking series, Barbara Hambly establishes herself as one of the most visionary and inventive storytellers in the field of fantasy fiction today.