Release Blitz + Giveaway: The Hunt (Psychic Underground #2) by Sarah Elkins

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Author Sarah Elkins and IndiGo Marketing are here celebrating the release of The Hunt (Psychic Underground #2)! Learn more today and enter in the $10 NineStar Press credit giveaway!

Title: The Hunt

Series: Psychic Underground, Book Two

Author: Sarah Elkins

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: December 30, 2019

Heat Level: 1 - No Sex

Pairing: No Romance

Length: 82100

Genre: Paranormal, LGBT, psychic ability, shifters, captivity, law enforcement/FBI, fantasy, medical personnel, shifters, paranormal

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Synopsis

The Facility is undergoing repairs after a chaotic failed escape attempt by several psychic test subjects some months ago. Neila and Henry’s mission is to locate potential psychics for the scientists at the Facility to study, but they have other ideas.

Neila can’t shake the idea of Nikola Tesla from her mind, and it’s getting worse as bizarre things start happening to herself and Henry. As they hunt for more about Neila’s possible past life, they aren’t sure if they will find answers or if they will become the hunted.

Things are not peaceful back at the Facility as troubling secrets come to light, and the Psychic Underground may never be the same.

Excerpt

The Hunt
Sarah Elkins © 2019
All Rights Reserved

The repair work on the Facility was slow going, but the director refused to forego using her office. The ceiling was still missing. New modern cameras, a phone, and internet were being installed: the works.

Director Lianne McClaine sat behind her desk with her elbows on several paper files while she read the results from her last checkup with her oncologist on her tablet. The cancer had vanished. Out of nowhere. Gone. Her doctor was sure there had to be some sort of error with her previous tests. Cancer didn’t just go away.

Not the type she had.

The newly installed landline phone rang on her desk.

“Director McClaine,” she said, leaving her answer vague. A director could be in charge of all sorts of things. No need to out their secret operation because of a wrong number.

“Director, you wanted to see us?” Agent Henry Anderson replied. She remembered him saving her life. The painful feeling of them being temporarily linked; her bullet wounds healing at his beckoning. He had hijacked her body with his shapeshifting ability, but it had saved her life. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Despite being grateful to be alive, she also felt violated. The director tried to put the latter feeling out of her mind.

“Yes. You and Blackbird report to my office.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The call ended.

The director glanced over the two paper files once more before she put them back in the bottom drawer of her desk. Agent Henry Anderson’s blood work and DNA tests had the same error the other shapeshifters at the Facility had. The results read as if he had just had a minor blood transfusion from multiple donors. There were traces from more than one blood type. The sort of errors that are normally attributed to contaminated samples. She should have noticed the pattern, even if the doctors hadn’t made the connection. They still hadn’t, but no denying it, he was a shapeshifter.

Henry’s results weren’t the only ones with the error. Besides the known shapeshifters, there were two others with the same anomaly: the pyrokinetic, Wallace, who had been killed by Shorty four and a half months before and “Blackbird” Neila Roddenberry, who had killed Shorty after he had almost succeeded in killing everyone in the Facility.

The whole incident had been a complete clusterfuck. Shorty, a telekinetic ex-con who, sick of being a prisoner and test subject in the Facility, rallied the rest of his test group of four men, Blue Team, to lead an escape attempt. The only reason anyone survived was because Henry had joined forces with several other test subjects.

Three members of Green Team, the shapeshifters, used their powers to help the perpetually disoriented group of telepaths and several doctors escape, bypassing the Facility’s biometric scans by copying Lianne’s own DNA. Green Team’s efforts weren’t what put an end to the assault though. Shorty had his eyes on another test subject, the only other one down on paper as an agent, Neila Roddenberry. The woman had more than one ability and the skill to use them.

After a vicious fight between members of Shorty’s Blue Team and the Facility’s surviving pyrokinetic, a nonbinary person named Lor, that wrecked the hallway leading to the Facility’s solitary holding cell, Henry managed to free Neila from the holding cell. Lianne wasn’t entirely clear on what happened afterward, but the two men Shorty sent to reach the Hole were soon very dead.

Not long after, Shorty and his remaining team member found the director, killed her guards, and almost killed Lianne just before he brutally broke Neila’s leg and dragged the small woman away by her hair.

Director McClaine was surprised she hadn’t been handed her ass on a platter by her superiors. They wanted an excuse to privatize the work the Facility was doing. The vultures circling the Facility had only grown in number since the incident. Defense contractors were interested in taking over where the clandestine government agency had continually failed. Private companies like White Rook and HUGO Defense had personnel trained to use the abilities most people assumed were utter bullshit, such as psychic powers like telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis, shapeshifting, and God knew what else. The federal government was behind the private sector and had been for years. All Director McClaine had left was one more strike, just one more mistake, and she’d disappear into another dark hole somewhere. And even God wouldn’t have a clue what would happen to everyone else at the Facility.

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Meet the Author

Sarah Elkins is a comic artist and writer who nearly had to give up art entirely due to a form of ossifying tennis elbow that forced her to be unable to use her dominate hand for nearly a year. She spent much of that time writing novels with her left hand as a means to deal with the pain and stress of possibly never drawing again. Thanks to a treatment regimen she is able to draw again albeit not as easily or quickly as she once did.

Sarah enjoys reading science fiction, horror, fantasy, weird stories, comics of every sort, as well as any biographical material about Nikola Tesla she can get her hands on (that doesn’t suggest he was from Venus.) She has worked in the comics industry since 2008 as a flatter (colorist assistant,) penciler, inker, and colorist. She contributed a comic to the massive anthology project Womanthology. Currently she (slowly) produces a webcomic called Magic Remains while writing as much as her body will allow.

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Release Blitz + Giveaway: The Facility (Psychic Underground #1) by Sarah Elkins

Celebrate the release of The Facility (Psychic Underground #1) with author Sarah Elkins and IndiGo Marketing! Learn more about the QUILTBAG sci-fi/paranormal suspense today! Enter in the giveaway to win a $10 NineStar Press credit!

Title:  The Facility

Series: Psychic Underground, Book One

Author: Sarah Elkins

Publisher:  NineStar Press

Release Date: March 5, 2018

Heat Level: 1 - No Sex

Pairing: No Romance

Length: 70000

Genre: Suspense Thriller Paranormal, LGBT, action, asexual, paranormal, science fiction, thriller

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Synopsis

Being psychic is just another aspect of life for Neila Roddenberry. So are dreams of a past life as Nikola Tesla. She's sure that last part is the result of reading the wrong mind at the wrong time without realizing it. Neither are things she talks about much. Her friends know she's psychic, but no one knows about the dreams. She's twenty-three, asexual, and unemployed with ambitions to become a freelance artist and writer.

On the way home from visiting friends, Neila gets caught up in a terrorist attack, then wakes up in an underground psychic testing facility. Raised by a doomsday-prepper father, Neila is unusually prepared for the possibility of being whisked away to a secret lab somewhere. When she is faced with the choice of working for the scientists studying psychics at the facility, she takes the job as both an agent and a test subject.

But not everyone in the facility wants to be there.

Excerpt

Psychic Underground
Sarah Elkins© 2018
All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1: Oh, Well Shit
Traffic from the shift change at Fort Hood was clogging up the perpetually construction-riddled highway that ran through the town of Killeen, Texas near the base. Neila sat in her Camaro, inching along behind a short army convoy on the highway not far from the military base. To distract herself from worry she had said or done the wrong thing at lunch with friends she let her attention hover around the military vehicles ahead of her to play a bit of a game of trying to identify what they were. One armored personnel carrier, three Humvees, and a water truck. There was a small red car with a primer-colored hood in front of the convoy. She pushed her Third Eye higher to see over the traffic jam. A wrecker was in the process of moving a car that had stalled in the one open lane. She snapped her attention back to her car when she smelled the sweet humid odor the radiator gave off when it was beginning to overheat.

“Crap, crap, crap, crap.” Neila hurried to turn on the heater and roll down the windows. She didn’t bother to reach over for the passenger side nob; instead, she used her telekinesis because it was faster.

It was a warm day, and the heater would make the interior of the car almost unbearable inside of ten minutes. The needle on the engine’s temperature gauge began to fall back down to read in the middle. She really didn’t want to take her hoodie off but would have to once the car got hotter.

Three motorcycles sped by on the narrow shoulder while Neila stared at the temperature gauge on the car. “Please cool off. We’ll be moving again soon. Great, shit, I’m talking to my car. Maybe I should cut the engine off?”

There was a loud noise, like a car wreck ahead of the traffic jam but louder. Neila thrust her Third Eye up to see what happened. Smoke rose from the remnants of the car that had been between the army convoy and the stalled car. The motorcycles that had passed were facing against traffic, and the riders were armed with assault rifles. She pushed her Third Eye closer to get a better look, AR-15s with M203 grenade launchers attached.

Thanks, Dad, for teaching me about high-powered weapons. Neila was thrust back to herself when the Humvee ahead backed over the front of her car. Without thinking, she slipped out the driver’s side window next to the concrete barrier before the military vehicle flattened the cab of her car. The other trucks in the convoy were scrambling to move, but the six-foot-high barriers on either side made escape all but impossible.

Neila was glad she wasn’t a big person as she raced forward, running down the thin gap between the convoy on her right and barrier to her left. She heard the familiar sound of shots from assault rifles and the loud unfamiliar sound of the slugs impacting with the armored personnel carrier ahead of the Humvees.

A series of loud bangs echoed down the road as if someone was breaking wood against metal, beating the side of the APC with mechanized baseball bats. She stopped next to the APC as she let her Third Eye trail up so she could see the motorcyclist who was firing at the window of the APC. Then she extended her “sphere of influence” toward him and wrenched the gun from his grip.

“What the fuck?” the man in the black motorcycle helmet shouted as his weapon abandoned him to tumble toward the hillside past the concrete barrier.

The driver’s side door to the APC opened. “Get in!”

Neila climbed up the side step of the truck and slipped in the door, which the driver shut behind her just as one of the motorcyclists began firing where she had just been. The driver and his passenger were the only other people in the APC.

“Please tell me you have backup coming,” Neila said quickly.

“Traffic’s backed up. They’re going to send in a helo, but the closest place to land is a mile up the road.”

“Do you have any guns?” she asked.

“No, just moving the trucks on a civi highway, no arms authorized this mission,” the driver replied. “Suppressive fire would save our asses—shit.”

“Oh, well, shit,” Neila echoed.

Neila wasn’t his boss, wasn’t even a soldier, but knew from spending time with her family who weren’t exactly “normal” that life-or-death situations required confidence and force. Her default was to take charge. Her family always joked that she sounded like a “little drill sergeant.” It had annoyed her, but she needed that experience now to survive.

That little drill sergeant found she couldn’t see outside the APC with her Third Eye. She went up to the scarred front window to get a better look at the cyclist who was firing at the truck.

More bullets slammed into the side of the vehicle. The windshield cracked a little more, and she ducked reflexively.

“I’m gonna try something. Don’t freak out,” she shouted to the two men in the truck as she tried extending her sphere of influence toward the biker who was still shooting. It was more difficult than normal, but she was able to wrench the gun away from her hands and slide it under the burning car ahead of them.

“You did that? How the fuck did you do that?” the soldier in the passenger seat of the APC barked. “What the fuck are you?”

The driver was on the radio. “We need that helo. Two hostiles engaging. Non-com casualties. Requesting permission to engage hostiles.”

“There’s three,” Neila corrected. “I saw three of them. One red helmet, two black helmets. Two men, one woman. AR-15s with grenade launchers attached.”

“Correction. Three hostiles engaging convoy,” the driver continued into the radio.

“You, girl. How the fuck did you do that?” the soldier in the passenger seat barked again. He wasn’t in follow-the-confident-person’s-orders mode like the driver had been.

“You mean you can’t?” Neila replied and looked back out the window. She assumed he couldn’t. Most people weren’t psychic. Playing dumb about it always seemed like the thing to do.

Neila managed to pull the brake lines off one of the bikes just as the female biker ran to it. The biker stared at the bike for a moment as it tipped over onto its side seemingly of its own accord. The woman in the red helmet looked up and locked eyes with Neila in the APC. Police lights twinkled over a mile down the highway. Neila couldn’t see where the other two bikers had gone due to the APC’s damaged windows.

“What the fuck, lady!”

Oh, now it was lady, such an upgrade. At least, it wasn’t girl anymore. She had been knighted.

“Requesting permission to engage hostiles. We are being assisted by a civilian,” the driver continued into the radio. So he had noticed her using her powers and wasn’t fazed by it. Maybe he was psychic or knew someone who was.

“Do not engage. Helo en route, coming in hot. Sit tight.”

Neila looked around at the angular interior of the APC. Rows of seats lined the sides of the truck. She couldn’t see any weapons inside. “How much does this weigh?”

“Six tons,” the soldier at the radio replied automatically.

Could she move six tons? She’d never tried because that was a lot of fucking weight.

“You need to drive forward, over the burning car.” She pointed ahead of them.

“Over the car?”

“Your buddies in the hummer in back already smashed my car. You can drive this beast over a fucking Kia. Get us out of here!”

The driver gunned the gas and plowed into the burning car, knocking Neila off her feet. She fell backward and hit her head hard on the metal floor of the APC.

Shouting. Muffled gunfire. The sound of a hail slamming into the side of a metal barn in a thunderstorm. The heavy thumping of a giant drum.

Darkness.

Purchase

NineStar Press | Amazon | Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

Meet the Author

Sarah Elkins is a 30 year old comic artist and writer who nearly had to give up art entirely due to a form of ossifying tennis elbow that forced her to be unable to use her dominate hand for nearly a year. She spent much of that time writing novels with her left hand as a means to deal with the pain and stress of possibly never drawing again. Thanks to a treatement regimen she is able to draw again albeit not as easily or quickly as she once did.

Sarah enjoys reading science fiction, horror, fantasy, weird stories, comics of every sort, as well as any biographical material about Nikola Tesla she can get her hands on (that doesn’t suggest he was from Venus.) She has worked in the comics industry since 2008 as a flatter (colorist assistant,) penciler, inker, and colorist. She contributed a comic to the massive anthology project Womanthology. Currently she (slowly) produces a webcomic called Magic Remains while writing as much as her body will allow.

Facebook | Twitter | Deviant Art

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