Title: Cosmo in Retrograde
Author: A. Flowers
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 09/09/2025
Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 98200
Genre: Fantasy, bisexual, gay, PNR-magic/magic users, investigators, mystery-police investigation, enemies/rivals to lovers, in the closet, disabilities, mental illness, politics, psychic ability, psychic medium, speech impediment/stutterer
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Description
Nothing has ever gone right for Cosmo Valencourt. After an automobile accident that left him permanently disabled, he lost most of his magical prowess and almost failed out of university. Left with only his talent for psychometry, which allows him to see the history of any object he touches, Cosmo has been working as an investigator at New Scotland Yard. A job that, in Cosmo’s opinion, is beneath him.
To make matters worse, Cosmo is tasked to investigate the threatening notes sent to his university rival, Blaise Howell. The notes, sent by a mysterious entity who calls himself the Third Eye, reveal a conspiracy to take down England’s Department for Marvels—starting with Blaise.
At first, every second with the disgustingly perfect Blaise Howell makes Cosmo’s skin crawl. But as the investigation continues, Cosmo finds himself falling for Blaise. Instead of the arrogant rich boy Cosmo remembers from university, he discovers the first person who truly understands him. There’s something sublime about Blaise that calms the chaos in Cosmo’s mind even as the investigation incites more chaos around him. From warding off magical attacks leveled against Blaise to interviewing prisoners at London’s most high-security prison, this investigation is Cosmo’s greatest challenge yet.
But Cosmo’s newfound love for Blaise is challenged when he discovers that Blaise is keeping a dark secret of his own. Between trying to save the Department for Marvels and attempting to keep Blaise’s heart beating, Cosmo is most definitely in over his head. In the end, he is left with a choice: save the Department for Marvels or keep Blaise Howell. There isn’t much chance of doing both.
But Cosmo plans to try. And if he fails, he will do so spectacularly.
Excerpt
Cosmo in Retrograde
A. Flowers © 2025
All Rights Reserved
The World, Judgement, and the Hanged Man. All inverted.
It’s 12:14 in the afternoon, and Cosmo Valencourt has exactly sixteen minutes left of his lunch break. He’ll eat five of those up walking back to New Scotland Yard, so he’s eager to hasten along this current impromptu appointment.
Something gripped him this morning, right between a cup of over-sweetened coffee and an endlessly dull meeting, some efficacious urge to visit with Aziza Birch for the umpteenth time—and Cosmo has never been one to ignore an urge. Especially not one so strong. He gets such impulses at least once a week, and he always follows them just in case they lead him somewhere extraordinary. They haven’t yet, but here’s hoping.
It’s a miracle Aziza agreed to do his reading today. Nine times out of ten, she refuses.
“This is your present,” she explains. As she pushes the stiff cards towards Cosmo, her ring-clad fingers clink musically, as do the coins adorning her headscarf. She always dresses for the occasion. Cosmo doesn’t understand why, seeing as all she does, day in and day out, is meet with slovenly half-desperates who barely even notice what she’s wearing. She’s nothing more than a mouthpiece to them. The Interpreter.
Cosmo tears his eyes from the shimmering coins glimmering in the pink lamplight and redirects his flighty mind to the cards. They’re imbued with magic, of course, and elaborate in design: dark purple, with lavender accents and gold-foil highlights. His fingertips tingle when he touches them. They’re mocking him; he can almost feel it. He hates it when Aziza uses this deck because the cards hate him. It’s a circular issue, hate building upon hate. But the cards have one up on him. They’re not mortal enemies with an inanimate object, after all—though Cosmo does, at times, feel as though he barely exists.
He hates fortune-telling. He never paid much attention in his augury classes. Pointless, those were. Divination is for hopeless fools, an empty, futile grasp at controlling fate, which is, by nature, capricious. Or, at the very least, it’s an attempt at understanding the un-understandable.
Cosmo is paying for his apathy now, however. He’s become one of Aziza’s half-desperates. Though he’s a little past the halfway mark at this point. The irony doesn’t escape him as he straightens his rumpled tweed blazer. “Yes, well, what do they mean?”
“They’re inverted, you see.” Aziza’s eyes, liquid black, seem to swallow him up. “You are incomplete, Cosmo. You—”
“Brilliant, that.” Cosmo sweeps the three cards into a pile and sets them aside. “Let’s move on to my future.” He doesn’t care about the present; he’s never learned to live in the now. Probably because his present has never been much of a gift. A curse, more like.
“No. Draw three for your past.” Aziza is firm. Clients come to her for the truth, and she would not be doing her job properly if she didn’t give it to them in full force.
Cosmo groans, unable and unwilling to conceal his impatience. In his eyes, there is no such thing as the past. He’s moved on from it. He’s bored with it. He’s gotten past it. Grudgingly, he picks another three cards and hands them to Aziza to appease her.
Aziza sets them down on the purple cloth covering the table. It’s always purple with her.
Death, the Chariot, and Justice. Only the last is inverted.
“No wonder,” Aziza mumbles, shaking her head at the cards. Maybe she feels it, too, the loathing they harbour towards her client. “There’s something terribly wrong with you, Cosmo.”
“There’s something terribly unprofessional about you, Aziza,” he shoots back. She’s wasting both of their time by telling him something he already knows. He stares at the Death card for a moment, taking in the rather dour image of a skeleton in billowing black robes, a gold-foil butterfly flittering about behind him. Yes: this is a grim waste of time.
Aziza glances up, once again consuming Cosmo in her disquieting gaze like a blanket smothering a baby. Her face has the magnetic pull of the planet Earth, and Cosmo is unable to look away.
“I read your tea leaves last month,” she admits. “At Mr Godfrey’s party.”
Cosmo sputters. The party was long and dull and absolutely a waste of time, but he didn’t expect it to be an invasion of his privacy. “Unprofessional, again. I don’t recall ever giving you permission to do that. And why would you read my tea leaves when you usually refuse to read my cards?”
He guards his tea leaves as he guards his life: with abandon. Still, no one has any right to be poking about in them.
Aziza ignores him. She always ignores him, treating him as if he doesn’t have anything particularly important to say. He usually doesn’t, but it would be nice for someone to take him seriously once in a while.
“Do you know what I saw?” she asks, leaning back in her chair. It creaks in protest; Cosmo is just waiting for the day when the ancient thing falls apart. It must be at least a hundred years old—Aziza never buys anything brand new. “Pain. Terror. And a great deal of chocolate-chip ice cream.”
Not only is Cosmo more than half-desperate, he’s also more than half-starved. “When abouts does this ice cream make an appearance?”
Her eyes narrow. “You’re not listening.”
“I heard you say ‘ice cream’ and promptly forgot the rest.” Rather than wait for Aziza to instruct him to draw another set of cards, Cosmo reaches for her deck and frees three more. He flips them over. They’re slippery in his hands. Treacherous.
The Moon, the Tower, and the Star. All upright.
“Bugger this!” In a sudden fit of anger, he slices his hand across the slick tablecloth, knocking them all to the floor. They flipper through the air with a rifling sound.
“Cosmo.” Aziza’s voice is that of practiced calm. She’s used to reactions like this; her readings are always honest. More often than not, they’re a little too honest. “Cosmo, this is the third time I’ve read your cards this month—”
“Each visit more of a bloody waste than the last,” he mumbles. The cards are, most definitely, mocking him. All but the nine he drew landed face down on the floor, and of those, the cards with little characters pictured on them leer at him, golden eyes wide and purple mouths twisted into mocking smiles.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Aziza’s sigh is a sound that Cosmo has become intimately familiar with. She has three types. First, the soft you-think-you’re-so-funny-don’t-you? nasal exhale. Second, the harsher, will-you-shut-up-already-my-mysticality-is-suffering? mouth exhale. And finally, the exasperated part-groan that she does now. Cosmo knows she despises his irreverence for the art of divination, but he can’t keep himself from coming back. It’s an itch he has to scratch, a stone he has to skip, a shoe he has to tie.
In other words, it’s a compulsion. He suffers from those chronically. And he’s never learned how to say no to himself.
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Meet the Author
A. Flowers loves all things fantasy, horror, and romance. She lives in a Vermont forest with a duo of mischievous cats. Her favorite place in the world is Kensington Gardens.
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