Let’s Talk Promotions Presents

Of Claws and Fangs
by Faith Hunter

There’s a tour-wide giveaway open to US residents!

• 2 winners will receive a limited-edition leather Soulwood bracelet
• 1 winner will receive their choice of a $50 gift card from Amazon or Barnes & Noble

Enter Below!

New York Times bestselling author Faith Hunter presents a stunning collection of stories from the world of shape-shifting vampire hunter Jane Yellowrock and beyond.

Collected together for the first time, this volume contains shorter works featuring heroines Jane Yellowrock and Nell Ingram, as well as a host of other characters from the Jane Yellowrock and Soulwood series. Faith Hunter is “an expert at creating worlds filled with intriguing supernatural elements and exciting scenarios”* and her skills are on full display in this collection. From a vampire-filled Halloween evening in New Orleans to the searing tale of how a certain were-leopard first got his spots, this collection has something for everyone, and each story is sure to put the super in supernatural.

With eighteen stories in all, Of Claws and Fangs will enrich and entertain—it’s a must-have for Faith Hunter’s readers and all lovers of fantasy.

5 out of 5

I really enjoyed this collection of stories. They’re each fairly short – great for a quick reading break. This does tie in to the novel series – think of it as a bunch of bonus stories that add a little depth. If you’ve kept up with the series, then you may have read these before (when they were published separately in other formats), but it was nice to have them all compiled in once place. If you’re new to the series, and you’re worried about spoilers, then you might want to read all the currently released novels first, but overall this was an excellent collection.

Black Friday Shopping

A Soulwood story. It first appeared online as a gift to fans in 2017. It takes place around the time Nell joins PsyLED as a probie.

“Mama says Walmart is the devil’s storehouse,” I said, hiding my badge in my jacket lapel pocket and making sure my weapon was secure and out of sight in its Kydex holster.

“Nell, sugar. You never been in a Walmart?” Occam stopped and pulled me to a stop with him by the simple expedient of catching my jacket sleeve between thumb and forefinger.

“Course I been in a Walmart.” I eased away from his touch and he let go. Occam knew my history and was always careful when it came to trapping me. Neither of us liked cages of any kind, him being a wereleopard who’d spent twenty years in a cage, and me being an escapee from a polygamous church. “I just think about Mama anytime I go to a place she would disapprove of. And Mama would highly disapprove of me shopping at a Walmart on early Black Friday, after Thanksgiving dinner—what she would interpret as the devil’s holiday.”

“Well, let me lead you into sin and destruction”—he shot me a sidewise glance and a cat grin—“at Walmart.”

I knew he could smell my blush. Occam wanted to take me to dinner and a movie. A date. Like normal people did. But I wasn’t normal and neither was he. And I wasn’t sure how to date, what to do, or what to talk about, or how to act. I’d sorta put him off, which had made the occasional mischievous banter more pointed.

Determined not to be teased without a rebuttal, I said, “They got steak and pork and salmon and shrimp and chicken in there. You gonna go all furry and raid the refrigerated meats?”

Occam snorted and led the way. “I’ll try to restrain my cat, Nell, sugar.”

I made a hmmming sound and followed him into the chaos and insanity of a Thanksgiving evening at Walmart.

We had been sent by JoJo at HQ to take a long walk through Walmart while keeping an eye out for someone who might be casting curses at the shoppers or the store itself. The week before Thanksgiving, there had been half a dozen unusual accidents in the store, from a rack of children’s Santa-style pajamas collapsing and taking down four other racks, to a shelving unit full of Christmas trees falling on one shopper, to a row of three car batteries exploding in the automotive shop, to all the freezer compressors in the frozen foods section burning up at the same time. Other than a customer wearing tinsel, the fire department arriving to put out a small fire, and the mess of a lot of melted seafood and ice cream, there had been no major danger or human injury. But the customer who had worn tree lights after the Christmas tree shelving fell on her was a sensitive and claimed to smell magic, hence our presence in the store on late Thanksgiving, undercover, as shoppers.

Occam snagged a buggy and we melded into the crazy.

Two women were fighting over a sale item made of camo-material. Another woman yanked an item out of the hands of a disabled woman. Fortunately, someone “accidentally” tripped the shopper-thief and the item was returned. In the bedding section there was insane fighting over the last set of Marvel Comics superhero sheets. In the toy section, several shelves were empty already. In the food section the frozen turkey bin was empty and shoppers were yanking turkeys out of the hands of the poor clerk as he was restocking. And there was a near riot in the electronics section. Occam called it in to the local PD and we kept an eye open until the cops waded into the melee and arrested two women who were wrestling on the floor over an Apple tablet case that glowed in the dark.

We trundled through the store, eventually leaving the buggy in an aisle and just people-watching. An hour in, I felt a wash of magic, like sparklers cascading over my skin. I pointed. “That way. Fast.”

Occam took off at a jog while I walked slower, checking out the shoppers for anyone who looked like they might be casting mischievous spells on the customers, the store stock, and the store building. I spotted a little girl, standing off by herself. She was wearing boy’s clothing—too big for her, none too clean, and worn in tattered layers. I slowed, taking her in, knowing that something was wrong here.

There were dark circles beneath the child’s eyes. She hadn’t bathed or washed her hair in a while, her face smeared with that particular orange shade of Cheetos. Most telling, her ankles were bare and dirty above brand-new bunny slippers with the tags still on. And there was an aura of magic about her, like a soft blue haze.

To her left, a glass-topped case cracked and fell to the floor. Inside, an entire rack of jewelry slid to the floor on top of it, fake diamonds glittering. Shoppers raced in and grabbed up whatever was on the floor, one woman scooping glittery jewelry into her pocketbook, her hands like brooms. Security guards and the police from the electronics fight descended into the mess and arrested more people.

I watched the little girl as she watched the action. Occam looked back and caught the direction of my stare. He moseyed over, easy to do because he was wearing cowboy boots and jeans for this undercover op. “A kid? Naw,” he murmured.

“She’s the source of the magic. And I don’t see anyone watching for her. I think . . . I think she’s homeless. I think . . . she’s living here. In the store. Stealing food. Maybe she was abandoned? Or homeless and got lost? Thrown out by her parents because weird things were happening and they were afraid of her? Doing magic by accident maybe?”

To her right, an entire row of cosmetics hit the floor with a clatter. The little girl didn’t even turn that way.

“Who do we call?” Occam asked.

“Social Services for sure, but she’ll need a foster who can handle a witchling.”

“T. Laine,” he said, speaking of the unit’s resident witch. It was her day off, but she’d come for this. Occam pulled his cell to text JoJo at HQ. He also managed to wander around behind the wild child to cut off possible escape.

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Faith Hunter is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. She writes dark urban fantasy, paranormal urban thrillers, paranormal police procedurals, and science fiction.

Her long-running, bestselling, Skinwalker series features Jane Yellowrock, a hunter of rogue-vampires. The Soulwood series features Nell Nicholson Ingram in paranormal crime solving novels. Her Rogue Mage novels, a dark, post-apocalyptic fantasy series, features Thorn St. Croix, a stone mage in an alternate reality. She also writes a Scifi novella series: Junkyard Cats. 

Under the pen name Gwen Hunter, she has written action adventure, mysteries, thrillers, women’s fiction, a medical thriller series, and even historical religious fiction. As Gwen, she was part of the WH Smith Literary Award for Fresh Talent in the UK, and won a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award in 2008. Under all her pen names, she has over 40 books in print in 30 countries. Faith has won numerous awards and Curse on The Land won an Audie Award for 2017.

In real life, Faith once broke a stove by refusing to turn it on for so long that its parts froze and the unused stove had to be replaced. She collects orchids and animal skulls, rocks and fossils, loves to sit on the screened back porch in lightning storms, and is a workaholic with a passion for white-water kayaking, and RV travel. She prefers Class III whitewater rivers with no gorge to climb out of, and drinks a lot of tea. Some days she’s a lady. Some days she ain’t. 

For more, including a list of her books, see www.faithhunter.net , www.gwenhunter.com 
To keep up with her, like her fan page at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/official.faith.hunter 

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