Excerpt of Ragnarok Tango by Michael Barnette
Book One of the Dark Tango Cycle
This book is no longer available. It will be rereleased through Shadowfire Press


This is a fantasy/horror erotic romance novel and contains graphic m/f, m/m, and menage content along with fantasy sexual situations and violence.

Guardaaz a demon of destruction has escaped from the Demon Realms into a Mortal Realm.

But nothing the people of the Mortal world have done has been able to stop Guardaaz. Jaella, leader of the Maidens of the Moon must try to summon Raene, Prince of the Coldlands, the demonic ancestor of their own bloodline. But summoning one demon to combat another one has a hefty price for Jaella and her kinsman Rayne. Their virginity, their lives and possibly even their very souls are at stake.

Prologue


A man stood on the parapet of a castle that shone like frost dusted opals. Slender minarets of crystal ice rose into the air far above the castle, curving upward in fragile twists that ended in sharply pointed tips no honest building material could have attained.

Across the land snow swirled down in an uncharacteristically gentle fall.

Normally a realm of sharp fanged rocky spires and icy wastes where the wind howled ceaselessly, driving before it crystals of snow that would slice flesh from bone, it was currently much altered. At his whim the entirety of the land had taken on the appearance of a winter garbed forest full of ancient trees.

At his whim it could just as easily become a storm tossed sea decked with icebergs the size of mountains, or change to a featureless plain of sheet ice.

It was his Realm, his Domain and he could do with it anything he pleased.

Anything except make it warm.

Or make it green.

Only a woman could accomplish that, and there were no women here.

The man leaned his folded arms on the wall of the parapet and stared out into his lonely domain.

He was tall. Almost seven feet. Broad shouldered with the physique of a pagan god. Hair white as frost fell to his shoulders, tumbling downward in fall that caught the light like crystal shards. Eyes the color of ice, a grey so pale they almost appeared colorless, stared out of a face at once starkly beautiful and unutterably inhuman.

He hadn’t always been as he now was.

Once, long ago he’d been as human as any man.

Back when the name he’d been called was Hrothrekr.

It had been his name when the Vikings had sailed their longboats into the seas and put terror of their raids into any country within their grasp.

But no one had called him that in centuries.

Not since he’d been taken by the Prince of the Coldlands, made a slave to every desire and whim an inhumanly cruel mind could conceive. And there had been an infinite number of pleasures and torments over the centuries. An infinite number of endured horrors and mind dazing ecstasies.

Like many slaves before him, and many after him, he had escaped the shackles of his master.

A master he had killed.

That death had set many of his master’s playthings free of their bindings.

He’d had to kill some of them rather than allow humanity to suffer under the lash of beings that should never have been called out of the Abyss.

Beings like his dead master.

A demon.

For his crime of killing the Prince he was cursed for all time.

All time.

Because his curse was immortality.

And when you can’t die, time ceases to have any meaning. The past, present and future become one and the same. Nothing and everything. Infinity dancing a tango with oblivion.

Today there was a disturbance in the Mortal Realm, the taste of pain and horror breaking across his consciousness the way storm tossed seas foamed shoreward.

Someone had let a demon of destruction loose and humans were dying by the tens of thousands in one of their myriad realities. Too many, too fast. A reality spiraling down toward the totality of Mother Night’s chill embrace, toward the finality of cessation.

He heard the voices of women raised in song.

A song to the being that had previously held the Coldlands, their song calling his dead master in a vain effort to summon the Prince to do their bidding.

Nothing could force him to answer their pleas. If he chose to ignore them, he could. He was not bound by their magic. But his own sense of morality, what precious little was left of it, wouldn’t let him ignore the suffering in their Realm.

"Hear us, Raene, Lord of Winter, Prince of the Coldlands! I, the child of your flesh, daughter of your blood, Guardian of the Gate summon you to our aid!"

Raene was dead, his power subsumed by the pale man on the castle battlements.

Sighing the man who wasn’t human decided to take a hand in events before the horns of Ragnarok were blown and another world went crashing down into the Eternal Dark.

It was, after all, his self appointed job.

Coming to Shadowfire Press in 2009.