Until Midnight  

90,000 word Mainstream/Time Travel Thriller                    

2007,2009 GH® nominee; 2006 1st place-Southern Heat Contest

Midnight is the enemy.

Ryan Beck is an agent assassin for The Assembly, a rogue government organization he's grown to despise.  His allegiance to their top-secret agenda marked his descent from patriot to criminal and cost him his wife and his honor.  He wants out but must complete one last mission to stay alive: obtain a serum from a ruthless scientist and use it as a bargaining chip for freedom.

Medical researcher Emma Parrish believe the time serum her brilliant but misunderstood father never completed is the holy grail of medicine.  The same men who hunted her father want the formula, along with an unforgettable stranger who seems to know the future as completely as the part of herself she shields from the world. 

A sniper's bullet reaches Beck's target first, shattering his mission into a reverse maze of deceit and time-altering events.  His only chance for escape is to find the moment the deadly chain of events began, somewhere at the crosshairs of loyalty and desire.

Excerpt:

Present Day

5:18 pm

Someone--hell, he didn't know who--once said the Phoenix wasn't a mythical creature at all.  Instead, a crow would sacrifice itself on a fire's dying embers and spread its wings while flames torched parasites in his black feathers.  A rebirth, out of reach.

Ryan Beck surveyed Evergreen Lake, his stance against the shoreline broad, defiant.  Above the distant cove, daylight's final rays hemorrhaged red and gold.  Night shadows stalked the white-barked aspen, stiff ghosts of their autumn glory.  He checked his watch.

Ten minutes.

To become Phoenix or die.  A rebirth, out of reach.

Beck sank his icy fingers into the heat pooled at his neck.  Ripe and swollen, the ink barely dry, he willed away the black mark of unity to an organization he'd grown to despise.  A strip of flesh in a devil's bet.  His last best chance at freedom.

From his pocket, he withdrew a photograph and studied it for the hundredth time that day.  His thumb brushed the subtle contours of the woman's face.

A crease slashed her syrup-brown eyes, distorted her perfectly symmetrical features.  The fold added a wicked element not present when her image first spilled from the brief--unintentional, but it turned her from the girl-next-door into something closer to a monster.

He searched for atrocities in her eyes.  Proof of the inhuman lengths she'd gone to test her scientific theories.  Every time he looked past the fold, something far more disturbing than the threat of failure ached within him.

None of his hits ever looked this innocent.