Cover Reveal & Excerpt: Ash & Stone (Monster Apocalypse 1) by Alexa Piper

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So excited to be able to share the Cover and an Excerpt from Ash & Stone, the first book in Alexa Piper's Monster Apocalypse series!   And mark the release date on your calendar because we'll be celebrating with a drop in party in the Facebook Group that evening!

Release Date: Sep 9, 2022

Horned and handsome Inkiri is not the monster Rory expected, but he is the one Rory gets.




Barnes & Noble: https://bit.ly/3p9bh2W


#paranormalromance #romancereaders #paranormalbook #LGBTQromance #mmromance #gayromance #monsterromance


Blurb:

Two years ago, the world ended with a wish, and it’s all Rory’s fault. Now, after he’s managed to survive all this time, it looks like karmic justice is finally coming for him. It looks like a monster is going to eat him, and Rory, while he is sorry for what he did, doesn’t want to die.

And he does not, because a stranger saves him from becoming monster food. The stranger features horns, blue skin, and too many swords. He is also really tall and muscular and handsome. In a monstrous way.

Rory might have jumped from the frying pan straight into the fire, because a big blue monster isn’t exactly Rory’s idea of a happily-ever-after. Not that he’s been thinking about that or about any sort of ravishing when the blue monster might still eat him or keep him as a pet.

But while Rory does not get eaten or ravished (sigh), the meeting with his monster mate shakes loose more revelations about what really happened two years ago than Rory is prepared to handle, especially since he was considering the comfortable life of a monster’s pet. He definitely wasn’t considering his monster’s murderous buddy, running so much, and going to another world, but sometimes, you just have to roll with the handsome blue monster the Apocalypse gives you.

~

EXCERPT:

Ash & Stone (Monster Apocalypse 1)
Alexa Piper
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2022 Alexa Piper

The Apocalypse was one hundred percent totally an accident, and I was sorry. So sorry. I contemplated for about the millionth time how very, very sorry I was as I huddled on the dusty stool in a changing room in the ladies’ section of the department store and, from behind a dusty, tattered curtain, peeked out at the very angry, very purple monster displaying its anger management issues fully on the female mannequin.

With my knees hurting from the awkward position of squatting on that stool, I could only hope that the monster liked eating women, and that guys were not on the menu, meaning I would be safe. Not that I was going to try moving or anything. I might have caused the Apocalypse and felt very sorry about it, but I was not going to just let some purple-assed monster eat me.

Only while my survival instincts were pretty good, they didn’t prevent me from getting muscle cramps, for instance, in my left calf. I managed to keep quiet when the cramp hit. I didn’t manage to just breathe through the pain and keep still, and instead, with all the gracefulness of a one-legged dodo, I overbalanced, which led to the stool falling over, me with it, and since I was holding onto the curtain across the opening of the changing room, that ripped from its rail and landed on top of me. The dust made me sneeze. I peeked out from under the curtain, and the purple monster looked at me down its long snout. It had two sets of eyes. Seriously, was that really necessary? What was there to see that prompted the need for four effing eyes?

The thing was a cross between a monkey and a jaguar, quadrupedal, no fur but leathery skin, and its mouth was more like a beak and studded with teeth like those in a shark’s jaws. The teeth were more worrisome than the eyes, if I was being honest. It considered me for two whole seconds before its body language told me that it liked guys just as much as female mannequins. The thing growled and took one step toward me, its taloned front limb tense, making ready to jump.

The blade that arced down came so fast, my brain didn’t recognize it for what it was, not until the purple monster’s head came off, oozing dark blue blood all over the not very clean floor. The disarticulated head rolled a few times, then came to a stop an arm’s length outside the changing room, practically in my lap. All four eyes fixed me in a dead look. They were black, like beetle eyes.

“Crap,” I said. “Crappity-crap.” The monster’s massive body collapsed, and more blood came out of it.

I tried to get to my feet, but the curtain had torn and tangled me like a polyester net. When the decapitator stepped out from between two clothes racks that advertised a fifty-percent-off sale for everything else, I froze.

The Apocalypse had done a lot of weird stuff. The really annoying weird stuff was that hungry monsters were now just here and roaming all over the place, which was Ireland, because that was where we’d gone for our summer vacay. Some of the monsters liked female mannequins and had blue blood that spurted sort of slowly after their heads got cut off. Others were tall and massively built -- not in a bad way, just carry-me-in-your-arms fit. And they had horns, curling back from their heads like ibex horns with all those textured ridges that looked kind of cool.

This guy was like that. He had ibex horns and slit-pupiled cat eyes, baby blue skin and hair the same color as the ink stain on the bottom right corner of my third-grade desk. It was braided under his horns, the braids running to the back of his head. He was also staring at me. Intently. His sword was still out, but as I was watching, he did that neat move I’d seen samurai do in movies when they wanted to get blood off their swords, and I heard the blood splattering to the ground right before he sheathed the blade at his side in one quick move. He didn’t tear his eyes away from me as he waved that very sharp sword around, which meant he was either a show-off or brutally competent. He wore comfortable-looking clothes, pants and a shirt tied with a belt, all black.

At least if he was using a sword and wearing clothes and walking on two legs, he was civilized. On the other hand, two years of living in the Apocalypse had taught me that you could be both civilized and human and be a monster, so what did I know.

Horned dude took another step toward me on silent feet, not quite human feet I noticed when he kicked the monster head away. But I couldn’t dwell on those feet, because they looked like massive cat paws, and in combination with the horns, it just made the dude really, really freaky. He squatted, and the way he moved looked disproportionately graceful for such a big, strong person. Once he was that close, he focused on me in an intense stare. His slitted pupils cleaved an iris of shining indigo.

And then, he looked me up and down and licked his effing lips.

I scrambled back against the wall of the changing room. “No, I’m not for eating. And I’d taste bad, so bad. Because of all the preservatives, hormones, and microplastics you eat as a human. You don’t want me.”

“I wasn’t thinking about eating you,” he said in the poshest of posh English I’d heard since landing here, which was odd, considering this was Ireland and he was a horned dude with a sword and some sick reflexes. “Did the beast scare you?”

“W-what?” I said. He was still looking at me, all over. All over.

~

About Alexa Piper:

Alexa Piper writes steamy romance that ranges from light to dark, from straight to queer. She’s also a coffee addict. Alexa loves writing stories that make her readers laugh and fall in love with the characters in them.

Follow Alexa on social media: linktr.ee/AlexaPiper
 

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