Zero Hour: Order of the Dragon, #0

By Tina Glasneck

Dark magic comes with deadly consequences...The road to destruction is only one tempting spell away.

 

What happens when an untrained seer possesses the most powerful grimoire ever to exist?

 

Leslie's a romance author, who happens to be conjuring magic. She's researching sigils for her latest Highlander romance, but her intentions have powered something sinister.

 

With a target on her back, rogue vampires are after Leslie for the power she can unwittingly wield, and wolves from the Supernatural Order are there to stop them.

 

It's a fight for survival in Zero Hour by USA Today bestselling author Tina Glasneck.

 

Zero Hour is the prequel  to Once Bitten. Don't miss out on this thrilling Vampire Urban Fantasy from the Order of the Dragon series.

Readers who enjoy magic and mayhem with a heroine in her mid-thirties, as well as vampires and wolf shifters, will enjoy this thrilling and adventurous prequel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vie La Publishing House, LLC
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393251385

Tina Glasneck

TINA GLASNECK can't imagine a world without books. Her works have been classified in several genres, including mystery, suspense, fantasy and paranormal romance, and new adult.Yet for Tina, it is all about the characters and their journeys. An avid reader with a love of traveling, meeting new people and exploring her world, her interest in law, religion, history, fantasy, and dragons, made writing about it an “easy” choice. Give her a castle to enchant her, and tell her a funny story to make her snort with laughter, but please don’t serve her cake with red icing. Tina takes joy in beautiful architecture, lively cities and world travel. She enjoys creating make-believe worlds where she sometimes resides, and is often thinking about and tinkering on her next story. Sometimes she feels like a real life Cinderella, without the ashes or the fairy godmother; and, at other times, she is just a girl, looking for a chance to tell that next great story.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Leslie

Ihad the solution to my grief: resurrection.

Draped in black, and after taking what seemed like a plane, train, and automobile to upstate New York, my sister and I arrived for a sad goodbye.

There was no fun in funerals. We didn’t get together with Tennessee Whiskey, T-shirts with the family name airbrushed in bubble letters, or to play spades. There would be some red plastic picnic cups to hide all of the alcohol, though, as we sought a way to come to terms with death.

It seemed so final.

Seemed being the keyword.

There would be cigarette smoke wafting in the stagnate air, as some played old R&B music as a last goodbye to the man who used to be a cornerstone of the community.

Before his downfall into hedonism.

My gran forced me to go, although he’d been spiteful, mean as a hornet, and, sometimes, just no good. I often felt sorry for his wife—his real wife, and not all of the women he sought to wife-up without papers.

Luckily, my mother had escaped from him when she could and thrived. But I couldn’t say the same for the rest of those whom he touched. The family seemed cursed.

Like they’d sacrificed one pig too many.

Instead, in New York City, my side of the family had it made. His wealth, which had disappeared, many thought he’d hidden in the walls of the old family home that happened to come my way, probably through Gran’s intervention. The others might not have been my full family by blood, but Gran was. She was the only relative who still lived, too stubborn to pass on to the other side, and I was grateful for that.

At least they aren’t getting rid of his body at the landfill. My sister, Claudine, knew just what to say.

The family was still reeling from the sudden accident. The family’s patriarch had gotten up on Saturday morning to make a quick run and returned in a body bag.

They said accident, but the author in me thought murder. Lord knew there were enough people who wanted to kill him.

Tonight was the unsanctioned Requiem, instead of the Southern wake Dad had wished for, according to Southern tradition. After all, you could take a Southerner from the South, but you couldn’t replace it with the poppycock of the north. However, there was a compromise—a Catholic priest waited in the wings to lead the service in the funeral home’s chapel.

I swooshed into the chapel, my black leather coat fluttered behind me, a black-lace veil over my face behind which I hid, while my spiky heels stabbed the carpet. Claudine squeezed my hand and took a seat in the back, probably to ensure we weren’t going to be locked in.

She trusted this side of the family as much as I did.

Not one bit.

There was more regret in this room than what any of the floral arrangements might have otherwise said. Expensive sprays rested on the casket, while standing singular flower arrangements tried to convince those gathered that his family loved him.

He’d grown up in that South Carolina dirt, in a world where Hoodoo and Juju raced through the bloodlines.

That was a part of the oral tradition.

However, there was still something that needed to be done, to help him move on, or he’d be stuck on this side to wander, and he’d suffered enough.

Bypassing my weeping, gun-toting family on the first two rows, my heart thudded in my ears like a bass drum.

I clenched the holy oak stake in my hand hidden in my coat’s folds.

This act would cement my fate. It would cement what it meant to be the black sheep of a family who lacked all faith in the supernatural.

Was I ready?

My father’s wife’s scorn-filled gaze rested on me, and between her sobs and shaking shoulders, I wasn’t sure if she was going to force me to leave or have my brother shoot me.

I wouldn’t allow their lack of faith chain Dad to this world, to jail him to this plane where they’d abused him.

Death’s burden wasn’t anything