Dark Lightning

Curse & Quanta: The Enchanter's Theorem #2

by Angela N. Hunt

Sabine Parsons is no longer in the Cold. Taken back by the intelligence fraternity she left behind fourteen years before, she is once again code-named Oracle and in possession of a power that makes her an oracle in truth. Worse yet, her old controller, Edward Quintaine, is not even remotely dead. Confronted by her past, Sabine faces the memory and consequences of once being a ward of Special Projects, a DARPA project gone very strange and very wrong. Trying to escape the tightening grip of old affiliations, Sabine does what anyone would do. She goes home. But not all is as it seems when she gets there. For one, she’s not just come home to visit her parents. She’s on a mission: find the second of a set of three mystical golden tablets that might hold the key to stopping the end of the World. Find that and she can walk back into the cold; leave behind the past. Except the Waking Dream has her in its teeth, drawing her away from her father’s house and pulling her further north. She knows following the call without backup is probably the stupidest thing she can do, but too many questions remain unanswered: is it the tablet? How close is she really to finding it? Why does it just happen to be close to her father’s home? Sabine would think it all coincidence if not for one particularly glaring fact. Michael Parsons is a mathematician. A mathematician with ties to the Department of Defense and secrets of his own. And with every passing day, Sabine begins to wonder. Was her father not as unknowing of her time in SpecProj hands as she once thought? And why does her time in SpecProj have anything to do with the covert war still running back in San Francisco between Quintaine’s spies and the Lodge of the Midnight Sun? Too many secrets and too many questions and Sabine knows she is running out of time. In the end, there’s nowhere to run. She can face her past and remember the full extent of her gifts. Or… She can die. And no one’s secrets will be left to tell.

429 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Trite as it is to start this way, but I was born in Livermore, CA, five miles outside the fence of the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, where my father was a Physicist Technician under
Dr. Richard Feynman. Yeah. That Dr. Feynman.

I was an only child growing up, but I didn't stay that way. When I got older, I both discovered and aqcuired two sisters, but I'm still the youngest. Don't ask me how I managed that.

Physicist though he was, my father was also a photographer and a poet. I had to laugh at him when he wondered why I ended up as a creative and not as a physicist, when my earliest memories are of going through all the slides he took when he was in Korea.

I wrote my first story when I was 5 and it was about a telepathic horse and her girl.

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that I stole from my mother's desk drawer when I was 12. I bought my first Pentax K1000 when I was 14 and haven't looked back since.

At 15, I began painting.

I've picked up arts the way some people pick up bad habits, and for much the same reason: the deep satisfaction of them.

I haven't gone to school for any of it. They're just in me. I've learned technique from other professionals and other creatives, wherever I can find it, hell, off the graffitti I see in downtown LA.

Tell me your secrets.

Reviews

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sabine Parson's is a young woman with strange powers. She is caught berween various factors that want to either use her or destroy her. In the struggle between good and evil she stands against the destruction of the world. An interesting read. Read this one during my lunch breaks but otherwise hard to put down. Free advance reading copy.