The High Road

Enter a world of gangs, vigilantes, and magic that’s powerful enough to kill.

Mark has never been the survivor his friend Angie is, but when he rescues a mysterious belt from the flames, it’s a decision that changes his life for good. As the two tap into the secret of gravity-controlling magic, they realize the reason Angie’s family tried to destroy the belt. Flying comes at a cost, to their lives and their sanity.

Fighting back against a street gang with a vendetta, Mark begins to sense that death waits around every turn. Soon he and Angie come face-to-face with the true danger: hidden masters of other magical forces. The keepers of power want the secret of flying, and they’ll destroy anyone who gets in their way.

The High Road is the first book in a trilogy of street-level urban fantasy adventures. If you like heart-pounding suspense, comic-book energy, and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, then you’ll love this gritty, magical series.

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Sample

Mark rose upward, floating, like a dream. His feet moved of their own accord, reaching down for the ground, but found only empty space.

Upward, forward. The dark shapes of branches met him, scratched along him, as he fended them off with a forearm, hugging the satchel closer, his fingers tightening on the belt within—

Where will I stop?

With a shock of fear he grabbed for the branches, but his fingers only closed on twigs that rustled and snapped in his grip. The black sky yawned above. He tried to reach down after the trees as they dropped away below, but found he couldn’t quite lean back, couldn’t shift his balance when he hung weightless in the air.

I must be fifteen-some feet up—but it’s more each second, and they need me. In the next instant he bent his knees, tensing for the impact, and let the satchel go.

Except he didn’t fall, he kept rising. He could see the satchel beside him, floating upward on its own. “No no no—” He thrashed in space and stared helplessly around… and his breath caught at the sight.

The branches below were a sea of shadows ruffling in the breeze from his back, a breeze that ebbed away into stillness even as he noticed it. But the wind hadn’t faded, he could see that from the trembling wood still passing by below… because he was being carried within the current now, still rising and floating forward, angling to the right of how he faced. He gazed around in the gloom: beyond the faint trees and rolling hills of the park just below, the crystalline grid of the city lights began to spread before him; the streets’ night-thinned rumbles and honks filtered up to his ears with clearer tones than they ever had down at street level. Even the smells were different, cleaner, at this distance from the ground. He looked down again, to the scattered lamplight along the park’s walkways. Was that a couple walking along?

A rumble of far-off thunder snapped his mind back. He stretched out and snagged the satchel before it floated out of his reach, and hissed, “Zha-Daruath!” This time all the words triggered was a faint tingle.

—A wave of cold washed that tingle away as he stared at the ground, whole stories below him and still shrinking. What if saying those words really had brought him down, all at once?

Or, what if nothing stopped his rising? He looked at the city growing around him, trying not to glance back at the endless black storm bearing in, ready to swallow him up if he couldn’t get down. He might as well be naked in the sky.

This can’t be happening! How can Joe Dennard have something that makes you fly… and how could I grab it and get caught just on the night the Blades are hunting…