Search Worlds Without End

College student Nate Black is a top-notch computer hacker. But he's long since stopped the kind of hacking that could put him behind bars. Under the guise of his user i.d., Azrael, he has never been discovered. That is, until Nate gets an anonymous email, after which nothing will ever be the same. He's abducted to an alien world, where magic is the rule, the gods are all too real, and a twist of fate makes him the most valuable pawn in a terrifying game of power.

Unable to escape his recurring visions of a fantasy realm called Midland, psychologist Richard Brandon has begun doing research into past life regression by experimenting on himself. What he doesn't realize is that his tests are opening gateways between alternate worlds in which he leads quite different lives--and one thing that all the different Richards have in common is their dreams of this magical place.

Detective Dana Rohan has an excellent arrest and conviction rate. But even her partner doesn't know the real reason why.

All her life Dana has borne a Mark of unknown origin that she's kept secret. A Mark that allows her to walk into alternate pasts and futures. A Mark that allows her to go back and see any crime as it's being committed. But the life she's carefully built around this secret ability begins to crumble when she's assaulted by a ragged old man. He babbles an incoherent warning that "the Shadows are coming," right before he is killed by an armored monstrosity out of another century. The armored attacker vanishes, leaving the old man to die in Dana's arms, and she realizes that he bears the same Mark she does.

Soon Dana finds herself hunted by Shadows coming from out of Chaos. She must flee through a host of alternate worlds as she finds out the true meaning of the Mark on her skin, and why someone wants to kill her for it.

It's been nearly 200 years since the collapse of the Confederacy, the last government to claim humanity's colonies. So when signals come in revealing lost human colonies that could shift the power balance, the race is on between the Caliphate ships and a small team of scientists and mercenarys. But what awaits them all is a threat far beyond the scope of any human government.

Adam, an AI creation of an alien race, prepares to launch a conquest that has been centuries in the making, and if he succeeds he will rule over all humankind-over all sentient life-forms-as a God.

The last stand against the self-proclaimed God, Adam, has retreated to the anarchic planet Bakunin-a world besieged by civil war. Humanity's last hope lies with Nickolai Rajasthan, a Moreau who believes that the human race that created his kind is already damned beyond redemption.

It all started about a decade ago, when the Portal suddenly opened up over the stadium right in the middle of a game. Cleveland just hadn't been the same since, what with electronic devices pretty much useless--unless you were willing to spend a fortune in digital protection and redundancy equipment--and all the dragons, elves, gnomes, dwarves, gargoyles, etc. who'd come through the Portal to take up residence within the areas covered by the Portal's magical field.

For Kline Maxwell, City Hall reporter for the Cleveland Press, magic-based Cleveland had long since become the status quo. At least until a fellow reporter named Morgan came down with a case of eyeballs growing all over his body. The diagnosis: stay out of Portal territory and he'd be just fine. But that meant Maxwell and all the other reporters were going to have to take up the slack. And Maxwell hated the thought of doing "fuzzy gnome" stories. Still, he took his job seriously, and when he was assigned to cover a dragon's death by crash-landing into the Cuyahoga, he headed over to the accident site with only a modest number of curses. But what should have been a simple accident report soon led Maxwell in search of a much bigger story--one that would see him kidnapped by elves, framed for murder, holding secret meetings with dragons, and fleeing not only from the cops but from pretty much everyone....

Kline Maxwell was a serious political reporter, covering the City Hall beat for the Cleveland Press. He wasn't interested in working on "fuzzy gnome" stories, or any of the other unbelievable tales that should end up only in sensationalist rags. But twelve years ago a magical Portal had opened into Cleveland, a Portal that had ruined much of Cleveland's modern-day technology even as it released magical energy all over town. And suddenly there was a shift in the population as humans fled the burg while dwarves, elves, dragons, ogres, gnomes, mages, and every other denizen of the fantasy realm on the other side of the Portal began moving into town.

And whether he wanted to or not, Maxwell had found himself covering stories that sometimes took him far from his political stomping grounds and into way too much danger both magical and mundane. Now, just when he thought he was safe from all that, a mysterious phone call from a dwarf who wanted to give him information about the unexplained suicide of the former City Council President drew him into a case that had dark spells, destruction, and death written all over it...

Frank Blackthorne's most recent heist did not end optimally. The sacrificial virgin survived, but the whole incident left Frank, a respectable career thief, on the run from a kingdom full of evil cultists eager to replace their sacrifice.

So, when the Court Wizard of Lendowyn, Elhared the Unwise, comes to him intending to hire someone to save Lendowyn's princess from an evil dragon in return for riches, glory, and help with the bloodthirsty cultists problem, Frank is rightfully suspicious. Frank is also not in a position to refuse.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Frank's rescue fails--in an explosion of spectacularly misapplied magic. When the dust settles, all parties involved find themselves body-swapped. Frank is left stranded in the Princess Lucille's body, halfway across the kingdom. The understandably angry Princess Lucille finds herself inhabiting the body of the dragon. In order to set things right, they will have to team up and face down thugs, slavers, elvish bookies, knights in shining armor, an evil Queen, and the hordes of the Dark Lord Nâtalc.

All Frank Blackthorne wants is a little vacation from being the princess. The involuntary swap in gender has been bad enough, but being a figurehead for the Royal Court of Lendowyn is becoming downright oppressive. In a fit of drunken self-pity, Frank turns to using a cursed artifact, hoping to become a man again, if only temporarily.

The good news is he becomes a man again, a kingdom away from Lendowyn court.

The bad news is the man whose body he now occupies belongs to a notorious thief wanted by every kingdom in the known world. A man of ruthless ambition who has left unimaginable destruction in his wake. A man who Frank has inadvertently deposited in the middle of the Lendowyn court in the body of the princess.

Now he's stranded, his only allies a group of outcast teenage girls convinced that he's the legendary master thief Snake. He must get back to Lendowyn--avoiding the armies of thieves, mercenaries, and assassins after the bounty on his new head.

It has been a year since former thief Frank Blackthorne became Princess of Lendowyn and married a dragon. He's coming to terms with his new life, but during the royal anniversary banquet, an elven prince reads a scroll of evil magic and Frank's world is turned upside-down. Again.

The scroll's spell causes a murderous rampage in a palace full of noble dignitaries, so it's no surprise Frank's visitors are angry. The Elf-King Timoras threatens war but Frank can't do anything about it: because of the same bit of scroll magic, the ex-Dragon Lucille has taken over the princess's body, unaware that Frank is still there, locked in her skull. And worst of all, the fate of everyone may soon rest on the shoulders of the man responsible for the whole mess, someone who should be safely dead...