Showing results by narrator "Jesse Vilinsky" in All Categories

What makes love stick? Is it the irresistible spark when you lock eyes across a piazza in Rome? Is it feeling the earth move under your feet? (Wait—that was an actual earthquake.) In these six serendipitous short stories, bestselling authors turn improbable first encounters into hopelessly romantic happy ever afters.

Wyatt Westlock has one plan for the farmhouse she's just inherited -- to burn it to the ground. But during her final walkthrough of her childhood home, she makes a shocking discovery in the basement -- Peter, the boy she once considered her best friend, strung up in chains and left for dead. Unbeknownst to Wyatt, Peter has suffered hundreds of ritualistic deaths on her family's property. Semi-immortal, Peter never remains dead for long, but he can't really live, either. Not while he's bound to the farm, locked in a cycle of grisly deaths and painful rebirths.

Four years ago, Brynn quit Saint Ambrose School following the shocking murder of her favourite teacher. The case was never solved, but Brynn's sure that the three kids who found Mr. Larkin's body know more than they're telling. When Brynn gets the internship of a lifetime working on a popular true-crime show, she decides to investigate what really happened that day in the woods. But the further she dives into the past, the more secrets she uncovers.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Francie is a reluctant Maid of Honor, for several reasons. The first is that her friend Serena has terrible taste in men. Previous fiancés have included a storm-chaser, a shaman and a kamikaze base-jumper. This is the closest a wedding has come to happening, and it's to a UFO-chaser. The second is that, as a result, the wedding is being held in New Mexico. In Roswell. During the UFO festival.

Hazel Davis is drifting: newly unemployed, living in a city she hates, and significantly less successful than her infamous younger sister, Evie. Evie grew up online, having gone viral at age five in a daddy-daughter dance video. Now she’s a megapopular lifestyle influencer. But to Hazel, @evelyn is just Evie, her beloved little sister—and a kid who has been exploited for her entire childhood. So when Evie disappears—in the middle of a live stream, during a brand-sponsored trip to Los Angeles—Hazel knows something is terribly wrong.

1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ambitious husbands, with their own dubious impulses to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam veteran, reaches out to Tricia.

The future has amazing technology. Our alien allies have magic. Together, we are building a training system to teach the best of humanity to go to the stars. But the training is monumentally expensive. Stephanie Morgana is a genius, she just doesn't know it. The artificial intelligence that runs the virtual world is charged with testing Stephanie, a task it has never performed before. Will Stephanie pass the test and be moved to the advanced preparatory schools, or will the system miss her?

After living through a dumpster fire of a Valentine’s Day, Emilie Hornby escapes to her grandmother’s house for some comfort and a consolation pint of Ben & Jerry’s. She passes out on the couch, but when she wakes up, she’s back home in her own bed—and it’s Valentine’s Day all over again. And the next day? Another horrendous V-Day.

Quinn Maybrook and her father have moved to tiny, boring Kettle Springs, to find a fresh start. But what they don’t know is that ever since the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory shut down, Kettle Springs has cracked in half. On one side are the adults, who are desperate to make Kettle Springs great again, and on the other are the kids, who want to have fun, make prank videos, and get out of Kettle Springs as quick as they can.

It's the summer before her 16th birthday, and Sabrina Spellman knows her world is about to change. She's always studied magic and spells with her aunts, Hilda and Zelda. But she's also lived a normal mortal life - attending Baxter High, hanging out with her friends Susie and Roz, and going to the movies with her boyfriend, Harvey Kinkle.

After barely making it out of the Kettle Springs cornfields alive, Quinn’s first year away at college should be safe and easy. All she wants is to be normal again. But instead, Quinn finds that her past won’t leave her alone when she becomes the focus of online conspiracy theories that claim the Kettle Springs Massacre never happened. It’s a deranged but relentless fantasy, and there’s nothing Quinn can do to get people to hear the truth—not even on her own campus or in her own dorm room.

Lexi "Lynx" Sabado is no stranger to stressful situations. She can handle the fact that the CIA won't let her divorce her previously presumed dead husband. She can even figure out a way to legally marry ex-NAVY SEAL Striker Rheas, the love of her life. But when an old friend shows up at a very inopportune moment and asks Striker and Lexi for help, she wonders how much more she can take. The Pentagon is relying on her to stop a world-changing crisis.

Don't miss this exclusive original story straight from award-winning author E.C. Myers and RWBY's head writers, Kerry Shawcross and Miles Luna!

Lexi Sobado, code name Lynx, is the young, puzzling prodigy with a psychic gift working for Iniquus. Her job is to support American security and safety as she hunts through intelligence pieces in order to stop our enemies. This time, solving the puzzle means saving her own life. Rival group Omega has been contracted to bring her in dead or alive. Alive would mean rendition and interrogation.

Quinn has just survived yet another bloody run-in with the murderous clown Frendo, but somehow still she knows this won’t be the last. Tired of being hunted and seeing innocent people hurt, Quinn believes the only way to beat the horror is to take justice into her own hands—and stop the Frendo followers herself. Little does she know that this path will take her across cornfields and state lines, to where she will have to face the most dangerous and bloody menace yet: True believers.

1938. Dr. Ho Fengshan, consul general of China, is posted in Vienna with his American wife, Grace. Shy and ill at ease with the societal obligations of diplomats’ wives, Grace is an outsider in a city beginning to feel the sweep of the Nazi dragnet. When Grace forms a friendship with her Jewish tutor, Lola Schnitzler, Dr. Ho requests that Grace keep her distance. His instructions are to maintain amicable relations with the Third Reich, and he and Grace are already under their vigilant eye.

This "fresh, exciting, and brilliantly unpredictable" thriller (James Patterson) from a "great storyteller" (Michael Connelly) follows four unlikely vigilantes who pit themselves against the villain behind California’s coldest case when they decide to take justice into their own hands.

My Florida summer is not so hot. My mom and sister disappear, my dad is killed by a rogue wave, and then Hermes - yeah the god guy - shows up. He says a wave didn’t kill my dad - it was a monster from Greek myth. He invites me to attend Mount Olympus Academy where I’ll learn to be a killer and take my revenge.

When Andi Edwards discovers her husband Spencer isn’t where he’s supposed to be and isn’t answering her calls or texts, a flurry of scenarios races through her mind. Is he hurt? Is he cheating? Is he dead? The truth, she soon finds out, is so much worse than she could’ve imagined. As she struggles to make sense of her new and chilling reality, she must decide whether to stand by the man she loves and help protect him or walk away and let him pay for his sins.