Ruined: A Guest Post by Kinley Baker

Shadow Shifting, Warriors and Healers

Ruined is a story set in the Realm of Shadows. In their kingdom, the Shadow Shifters use the shadows of their Ancestor gods to shift at lightning speeds. They can’t shift during broad daylight. Their power is not without limits. But I love the idea of being swept away by magic, literally.

The Shadow Shifters commune with the shadows, hang out and live in the darkness. In the darkness, motivations are muddled. Not everything is as it seems which makes sense because the world of the Shadow Shifters isn’t exactly what it seems on the surface. Every member of the Court has their own motivations and Vale, as the king, and Jessa, as the Senior Healer, constantly battle to do what’s best for their people against malicious characters and unlikely odds. Their love battles against the shadows: the shadows of their history, the shadows of individual pasts, and the shadows of ancient secrets.

In addition to shifting, the Shadow Shifters also have four spiritual gifts that travel through their bloodlines and originated from their Ancestors. After a Shadow Shifter dies, they add to the power source of their people by joining the ranks of their Ancestors. Although the gods don’t speak to them anymore, their power can be seen in other ways in the novel. The gifts blessed from their Ancestors are Warrior, Healer, Seer and Sensitive. A Warrior is born to fight with extra strength. A Healer is born with the ability to save lives. Seers can see into the future. Powerful Sensitives can be Truth Tellers, beings with the ability to tell if another living being is lying or being truthful.

I hope you’ll travel across the shadows of Ruined with me for a romantic, fantasy tale of Vale and Jessa’s strong bond of love that will be tested, but never broken. All in a realm where passions lead, evil lurks and shadows rule.

EXCERPT of RUINED

"You." Fury burned hot under Jessa's skin as she glared at Vale. "Who do you think you are, demanding I come live in this castle? You can't just order your guards to enter a woman's home and pack up her things."

"Well, I did." Vale came around the desk and propped one hip against it, more of a threatening than casual movement. "Someone tried to kill me. It makes sense that I have my Healer close by."

She released a pent-up breath. "Why couldn't you have explained that instead of mandating?" Silly. Her imagination had run away with her. The king needed his Healer. But the realization he didn't want her made her angrier.

"Because I didn't want to give you the option of saying no."

She most definitely would have said no.

"If you would have explained your reasoning, I would have complied. Your safety and health come first, even if I--"

"Eve if you what?"

"Loathe you." She bunched her fingers into two fists, seriously tempted to hit him. For all the nonexistent pain it would inflict upon him.

"Do you?" His tone deadened with calm. "Because I can't stop thinking about you."

"That's normal." She brushed off the claim. "I saved your life."

He moved in a blur. A true Shadow Shifter. One second he stood near his desk, the next he had her in his arms, one locked around her waist and one hand tangled in her hair. Their lips almost brushed.

"I can't stop thinking about you." His murmur played down her spine, leaving a tingling trail. His scent invaded her. His voice embraced her like bare skin against satin sheets.

Her heart beat fast, her pulse jumped.

She disliked him, but she didn't want him to let her go.

"Have you been thinking about me?" His soft tone feathered over her flesh.

"Only how much I dislike you." Lust pulsed in her belly.

He pulled her head back gently by her hair, so they looked straight into each other's eyes. Their bodies pressed tightly together. "Liar."

BLURB OF RUINED

Jessa is one healing away from death. Under the thrall of her gift, the Court's Senior Healer risks giving her life in exchange for her patient's.

Vale is a rebel ruler. When his brother is killed, he's given the throne and the decree from the Court to produce an heir or lose his family's hold on the land--and his deceiving advisors aren't afraid to use murder as a weapon if their directive to stay away from the Senior Healer goes unheeded.

But Vale burns to possess Jessa. The heat between them leaves a wake of smoke, and even the powerful forces above want to bind them in a union that lasts forever. Vale taking another would be a betrayal neither could survive.

Their enemies fear a child born of such a powerful Healer and Warrior, but the true threat lies in the bond forged in shadows and fused in fire.

Bio:

Kinley Baker read her first romance novel at the age of thirteen and immediately fell in love with the hero and the genre. She lives with her husband and her dog, Joker, in the Pacific Northwest. As a firm supporter of all supernatural lifestyles, she writes fantasy romance, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy. You can find Kinley at http://www.kinleybaker.com/.

Buy links:

Paperback

Ebook

Interview with Nancy Holzner

This week's interview guest, Nancy Holzner, is giving away one ebook. Make sure to read through the interview and excerpt to find out how to enter for a chance to win!

Tell us about you, do you have a routine for your writing?

I suffer from the curse of being a night owl who works best in the morning. That means I stay up late reading (often until 2:00 am) then stagger out of bed the next morning, fill a mug with coffee, and try to get some writing done. It's not a bad method, because I find I can make a lot of progress when my mind is in that half-awake state, before my conscious mind takes over fully. As long as I stay off the Internet, I do fine. I do sometimes enjoy reading the news online with my morning coffee, but that's a danger. When I let myself do that, I look up to find an hour or two have passed, and I have a hard time then turning to my writing.

Now on to the important bit, your book. Tell us about your characters.

My Deadtown series features Victory Vauhn, a shapeshifter who kills other people's personal demons for a living. Vicky lives in the Deadtown section of Boston. Three years ago, a plague turned two thousand Bostonians into zombies. The plague's quarantine zone became Deadtown, home (by law) to Boston's paranormal population. Deadtime's zombies aren't the shambling, brain-munching kind you see in horror films. They retain their personality and volition; it's just that they're super-strong, can't go out in sunlight, and go into a socially awkward feeding frenzy when they catch a whiff of fresh human blood. Vicky is training Tina, a teenage zombie, as an apprentice demon-fighter. Vicky has an on-again, off-again relationship with Alexander Kane, a werewolf activist lawyer who's trying to establish paranormal rights at the federal level. As a shapeshifter, Vicky can change three times per full-moon cycle, and she can shift into any sentient creature. Her race, the Cerddorion, is descended from the Welsh goddess Ceridwen. Even though Vicky's job focuses on personal demons, she often finds herself fighting the bigger, nastier kind--including the demons of her own past.

How did you come up with the title for your book?

The titles in my series have always been a collaboration between my editor and me. The working title for the first book in my series was Zombie Town, but since zombies are secondary characters in that book, the editor wanted a different title. Eventually we settled on Deadtown. Once that title was established, I wanted the titles of the other books in the series to resonate with it. So I look for compound nouns of two syllables that are between eight and 10 letter long: Deadtown, Hellforged, Bloodstone, and Darklands (2012). This gives the series' titles the same look and feel on the covers.

Is this your first book?

Bloodstone is the third book in my Deadtown series. My very first novel was a mystery (nonparanormal) titled Peace, Love and Murder that was published by a small press. That novel is available in hardcover and as a 99-cent ebook.

Do you have plans for more?

The fourth Deadtown book, Darklands, will be released next summer. I hope to continue the series for 2-3 more books after that, but those aren't yet under contract, so we'll see. I'm also writing some short stories set in Deadtown's world, as well as a sequel to the mystery, to publish as ebooks.

Which comes first, the character or the plot?

Plot is basically character in action, so the two are intertwined. I can't understand my characters until I see them going things and interacting with others. In a series, though, I get to know the character better with each book, so as the series progresses I probably focus more on plot. That's because I can trust my characters to be true to themsevles by that point.

Is there a certain author that influenced you in writing?

I used to be an English professor (medievalist), so I've had a liftetime of reading that's influenced my writing. That doesn't mean that I think my genre fiction is Literature with a capital L. It's just that I've been a reader my whole life and read a wide variety of books, and along the way I've been inspired to try to tell fun, entertaining stories, myself.

What's the best advice that you've been given when it comes to writing?

Write every day. It's so easy to lose touch with the world of your story if you don't.

What book are you reading at the moment?

Threshold by Caitlin R. Kierman. It's a Lovecraftian horror story set in Birmingham, Alabama. I read Kiermans' wonderfully creepy Gothic novel The Red Tree a while back and loved it, so I wanted to check out some of her other books.

What was the hardest scene for you to write?

I find scenes that have a lot of action very challenging. I enjoy writing dialogue, but my action scenes don't have much of that. I find it a challenge to balance description and action with pacing concerns. I probably go over (and over and over) the action scenes more than any others.

The anticipation is killing me! Let us read a little.

Here's an excerpt from Bloodstone. In it, Vicky goes to Creature Comforts, a monster bar in Boston's New Combat Zone, in hopes that is owner, Axel, can give refuge to an injured friend:

Any hope that Axel was having a slow night fled as soon as I opened the front door. Laughter and music blasted out. Creature Comforts was packed with women, dressed for a night of partying. The filled all the tables and spilled out of the booths. As I stepped inside, I was hit by the bar's characteristic perfume of beer, tobacco, and a slight whiff of human bloos--shot through tonight with a strong scent of musk. On tables at the back, two half-naked male dancers, humans, performed an athletic bump-and-grind routine.

Oh, great. I'd walked into a wereworld bachelorette party.

Massachusetts was one of a handful of states that recognized marriages between paranormals. Other states had passed laws restricting marriage to humans only. Although some norms in "Monsterchusetts" objected to paranormal marriage, no one seemed to mind the money it brought the state. It had become fashionable among werewolbes to have a norm-style wedding in addition to whatever ritual they performed at the full moon. In Boston, a whole industry had sprung up offering destination weddings to werewolves.

I scanned the crowd, but didn't see a face I recognized. I knew most of Deadtown's werewolves through Kane. These were definitely tourists.

"Hey!" One of the women stood up and pointed at me. She wore a tight, super-short, low-cut black dress and a crooked tiara sparkling with pink and white rhinestones. She flipped her glossy blond hair back over her shoulder, managing to make it look like an act of aggression. "This is a private party. The bar's closed."

Damn territorial werewolves. When the traveled in a pack, even out-of-towners acted like the owned the place.

I ignored her and walked toward the bar.

She was in front of me before I got halfway across the room. Her nostrils flared as she sized me up in a few sniffs. She bared her teeth--not a very impressive gesture in her human form--and growled. "I said it's a private party."

"Do I look like I'm here to crash your party?" I gestured at my ruined dress.

She didn't look at my outfit. She stared at the sword in my hand, the one I'd taken from the Old Ones.

Oh, that. Well, yeah, I could see how that might be interpreted as a threat.

I didn't have a sheath for it, so I stuck it under my arm, where I hoped it seemed less dangerous. I stepped to the left, intent on getting around her. "I need to talk to Axel."

She growled again and dropped into a fighting crouch. Jesus, the full moon was still three weeks away and she was going into feral overdrive.

"You want to challenge me? Fine." I dropped my purse on the floor and shifted the sword to my right hand, ready to use it. I wouldn't have minded two blades in a fight with a werewolf, but I wanted to teach her some manners, not kill her. Besides, it was bad form to rummage through your purse for a dagger at the start of a fight.


Where can readers connect with you?

My website and my blog are at http://www.nancyholzner.com/. I have both a personal Facebook page and an author page. I'm on Twitter, and I also participate in a group blog called Dark Central Station.

Where can readers purchase your book?

Bloodstone is available at bookstores, as well as online through Penguin, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

If you'd like to win an e-copy of Bloodstone, please leave a comment on this post in the following format: parayournormal(at)gamil(dot)com. If you'd like to learn more about Nancy, she'll be chatting with us via Blog Talk Radio this Wednesday at 3:30 PST. To set a reminder, click here

Winner Announcement

This week we're giving away a copy of "Chosen" by Denise Grover Swank. And the lucky winner is...

Vicki!

Congratulations! Denise will be in touch with you about your prize. Every one else, please check back tomorrow for our latest interview and chance to win a free read.

A Guest Post by C.S. Hand

For most of my recent life I have had one pithy epigram serve as the lodestar of my existence: read books and avoid sunlight.  Being a graduate student, this been quite propitious for my condition.  Like Shelley, who was also a student, I have spent a fair amount of time in decayed churches and old cemeteries trying to conjure ghosts and demons, because as I scholar, I could accomplish more with a few extra hands for writing.  Well, to my surprise, one night I was successful, and I would like to share with you a brief conversation I had with a spirit from the shady vale below.

***

 A little after midnight and under a full moon, I drew a pentagram in a local cemetery.  On each point I laid the underwear of a virgin, which is preternaturally difficult to find in a university.   I delivered my chant with such precision that I excelled even the ancient Greek orators in my delivery.  When my spell concluded, the moon had waned to a crescent, and sitting on a tombstone was a sinewy demon with swimmy eyes and hairless pink skin.

 “It worked!” I shouted.  “ I’ll have my peers and students calling me Doctor Faust from now on!  Spirit!  What is your name?”

“Yarlotep; or, He Who Comes.”

“Blast!  That’s not who I called for!”

“The hex requires the underwear of a virgin.  None of these garments belong to virgins.”

“That’s absurd!  I got them from the math and physics departments.”  Since I was short on time and had a paper due the next morning, rather than banishing him and starting over, I tried to utilize the opportunity with a few humble requests I had thought up for this occasion.

“I want extremely large muscles, to attract all the beautiful maidens!”

“I can do that, but it will most likely attract men.  The women will have to stand in line, and they might grow impatient and leave.”

“I want to marry the most beautiful woman in the world!”

“You are too late, for Helen is already dead, and she looks like any other faceless skeleton.  Besides, Timon and Diogenes never stop pillorying her, and I don’t want to incur their wrath by taking her away from them.”

“I want to be the happiest man in the world!”

“Well that’s a ridiculous request,” he said.  “You would first have to be the saddest man in the world in order to understand, and the saddest men always kill themselves.”

I thought for a moment before speaking.  “Well, I still haven’t defended my dissertation, so I might try that before I have to go through that kind of torture.”  I arched my eyebrow.  “Can you write my dissertation for me?”

“No, a stronger demon must do that, like your advisor.”

“I always knew he was evil,” I grumbled.  “What kind of demon are you anyways?”

“The worst kind: the kind that tells the Truth.”

“I thought those were called philosophers.”

He shrugged.

I resumed with my requests.  “I would like to make everyone read Hegel.”

“There’s not enough time for that.”

“I want to write a book of great literature!”

“Plato has already done this, as well as Nietzsche, Dante, Petrarch, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, and Kierkegaard, to name just a few.”  He shrugged.  “There are no more great works of literature to be written.”

“Very well, I would like to meet each one of them and talk with them for a little while.”

“Oh, they won’t do that, you’re not important.  You haven’t written a great book of literature.”

“I would like to possess all the knowledge in the world.”

“You’re a graduate student, and while your ego is big enough, your head is not.  I’m afraid it won’t fit.”

Being a clever lyricist, I decided to ask the same question in a more oblique fashion.  “Tell me where the next great philosopher will come from!”

“He’s already dead.  You will have find his manuscripts.”

“Well, can’t you find them?”

“No, you will have to summon another demon for that.”

“Well, what good are you?”

“I have listened to you in earnest, without the succor of a strong wine.  That is more than your students, colleagues, and bedfellows do.”

And with that, he faded away in a trail of thin smoke, leaving me alone in the cemetery.

 

Author bio:  C. S. Hand is a threadbare graduate student fond of British and German Romanticism and moonlit perambulations through soft European countrysides.  He recently translated a puckish, if dark, novella by Christian Winter, and is working on the subsequent full length novel while constantly battling tumid reading lists and jejune paper topics.

 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Splatterism-Recollections-Hellenistic-Asskicking-ebook/dp/B00528J7A4

 

Blog: http://www.finalxbreath.blogspot.com

Interview with Denise Grover Swank

This week's interview is with author Denise Grover Swank. She's giving away an ebook to one lucky winner, so after you read the interview be sure to leave a comment with your name and email!

What first got you into writing?

I started writing as a kid. I loved to read and coming up with my own stories was a natural extension of that. Of course, all of my stories were about me. They were my daydreams written on paper.

Now on to the important bit, your book. Can you tell us about it?

On a very basic level, Chosen is about a mother who will do anything to protect her son.  Emma has a five year old son who can see the future. For three years they’ve been on the run from men who keep finding them and wanting to take him. The book opens with them getting ready to run when Will shows up and offers to help. Jake insists that Emma trust him. But Will has been hired by a powerful group to bring Emma to them, not Jake. As they begin their two day trip from Texas to South Dakota, they encounter gunmen several times and Jake reveals that Will has set an ancient prophecy in motion. Because of Will everything is changing.

How did you come up with the title for your book?

The title for Chosen was easy. In fact, I had it before I even started the book – which is a total fluke for me. As I plotted the story I was playing around with themes in my head and it occurred to me that none of the three main characters were willing participants in the course of events. They were all chosen.

Is this your first book?

It’s my second published book and the second book I wrote.  I think it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. The characters were so different from who I am and the book was so much darker than the humorous family blog I used to write that it scared me. But I find that fear is often a good thing and pushes us to do extraordinary things that we might not have done otherwise.

Do you have plans for more?

Yes, Hunted, the second book of the Chosen series, will be out in November and then the third and final book, Sacrifice, will be out late next winter. I also have a young adult romance involving an alternate universe coming out in early December. And I released a humorous southern mystery with a paranormal element in July, Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes. I plan to write the next book in that series after  I complete Sacrifice. I hope to have that out by early next summer.

Which comes first the character or the plot?

It’s different each time. For Chosen it was the idea. What if there was a boy who could see the future and someone wanted him? And it built from there. What would his mother do to protect him? Who were the people after him? I originally saw the book as a story about the mother, Emma, and her son.  Will, the man who helps them but has ulterior motives of his own, wasn’t supposed to be a secondary character, but not be so front and center. He’s a very strong character and demanded more attention than I expected. I also realized that in first book, he had the strongest story.

Is there a certain author that influenced you in writing?

One? No, many. As a kid I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved early Stephen King. I loved LaVerle Spenser—total romance all the way there.  And Dean Koonz. But I love the writing of magical realism author Sarah Addison Allen. I’ll read it and study how she’s combined the words to make it read so lyrical. I love paranormal romance author Shannon K. Butcher’s world building. I’m very eclectic in my reading which probably shows in the various genres I write.

What book are you reading at the moment?

Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts. It's a YA apocolyptic that explores the breakdown of a society.

What is your favourite scene?

Wow. That's hard. Probably the cornfield scene when Will really looks at Emma and his whole attitude begins to change. It was a fun scene to write but also challenging because he's so alpha male and I had to make his transition believable.

Can we read it?

She turned to look at him, the loose strands of long brown hair dancing in the breeze around her face. She looked wild and ruthless. “Look, we can take care of ourselves.”

This turn of events had completely changed his plans. Of course, nothing about this job was what he expected. They never told him she had a kid and he’d complained bitterly when he found out. He didn’t do kids. He was explicit about that. But the group who hired him said they didn’t care about the kid. They wanted her and raised their offer. It was hard to refuse. Somewhere along the path of their self-destructive course he thought of a Plan B, which was much better than his original plan. Maybe things were turning his way. “Let me help you.”

She pulled up to a stop sign at the four-lane highway. “No, thanks, we’re good.”

“We can trust him,” a small voice in the back said.

She looked up sharply and spun around to look at the kid in the back.

Will turned, too. The boy looked like a cherub out of one of those Renaissance paintings he had studied back in his college art appreciation class. Short blond curls framed his face of pale skin with rosy cheeks. Big blue eyes with long dark eyelashes. Will thought the kid’s beauty was wasted on his gender.

“We can trust him,” the boy repeated.

She turned to look out the windshield and hung both of her arms over the steering wheel. “Are you sure?” she asked, staring straight ahead.

“Yes.”

She rested her chin on her hands and closed her eyes. He decided she must be trying to figure out how to deal with this change of events. Personally, Will thought it was going too far on the permissive parenting scale letting a preschooler make a decision like that, but hey, it worked in his favor. He sure wasn’t going to protest.

“Okay,” she finally said, sitting up. “I need to leave town. They know we’re here so we’ve got to leave as soon as we can.”

“Who exactly are they?” Will asked. As far as he knew, he was the only one on this job. He’d be pissed if they hired someone else as backup.

“You don’t need to know that,” she said, turning at the corner. “How do you plan on helping us?”

“I can help you leave town.”

“Why would you do that?” Her eyes narrowed as she looked behind for signs of the SUV.

Will had seen the damage. The SUV wasn’t going anywhere. Where the hell had she learned a move like that?

He gave her his rugged, bad boy smirk and shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress.”

“Do better than that,” she snorted.

He liked that she wasn’t easily snowed, even if it made his job more difficult.

“Let’s just say I’m hoping to get lucky, and maybe if I’m nice enough, I will.” He gave her a slow, lazy smile as he leaned against the door, crossing his arms.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t count on it.”

“Don’t crush a man’s hopes. Just wait and see. I might grow on you.”

Raising her eyebrows, she twisted her lips into a wry smile. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He laughed. God, this might actually be fun.


Where can readers connect with you?

I have a website—www.denisegroverswank.com I’m also on Twitter @DeniseMSwank – warning I Tweet a lot. I’m also on Facebook under my name.

Where can readers purchase your book?

It’s available in print and eBooks at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and autographed copies are available through my website.

If you'd like to win a copy of Chosen please leave a comment with your email address in the following format: parayournormal(at)gmail(dot)com. We will announce the winner this Sunday. Make sure to tune in to our radio show when we chat live with Denise this Wednesday at 3;30 Pacific Time. You can set a reminder for the show here.

Review: Cold in California

Five Fangs!

            Cold in California manages to create a unique take on a currently over-populated vampire genre.  The story is intriguing from the start, reads flawlessly and draws the reader directly into the world of Gabriel and the dead undead.  Far from a simple plot unfolds, however, the complexities add to the story rather than detract and distract from it.  The characters are well thought out and well developed, with an underlying complexity that shows depth and thought.

            A well-written, enjoyable story – I find myself looking forward to the next book in the series.

Reviewed by Jennifer Bacile
PYN Reviewer

Winner Announcement

This week we're giving away a copy of Lisa Kessler's ebook, Night Walker. And the lucky winner is...

Tanya!

Thank you so much for those of you who entered for a chance to win. Come back tomorrow to read our next interview and enter for another chance to win a free book!

From Blood & Brain A Guest Post by Miranda Doerfler

THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

JUNE 20^TH – 23:57 HOURS

 

            My name is Ari. I am recording this for posterity.

 

             June 21^st…the Summer Solstice…the longest day of the year.

            Some of The Faction claim to have seen the creatures, but it is a lie, for the beings cannot cross onto our plane until June 21st. We have seen drawings, however. Sketches and descriptions by scholars, left behind by the survivors of previous years. They say the beasts are shadows, all claws and teeth and glowing eyes. They move with ferocious speed. Their bodies allow them to bend, twist, stretch and transform in gruesome ways even the human mind can’t comprehend. According to The Prophecy, the creatures thrive on the Summer Solstice.            In preparation of the breaking dawn, The Faction has moved into The Bunker, a safe haven designed to protect us from the creatures. We have been sealed within this space for the entirety of the day. The Bunker is reinforced with steels and alloys that are ahead of our time; the greatest scientists came together to create this underground haven, but I fear that even the strongest, most advanced materials will not protect us from the creatures.

At dawn’s break, our plane’s energy aligns with that of another – what the scholars refer to as an “astral” plane – where various demons reside. When the planes coincide in existence at the day’s dawn, a portal is created between them, allowing the demons trapped in the astral plane to transport to our world. They are vicious creatures and will stop at nothing to kill us all.

 

            It is now…23:58.

 

            The leaders of The Faction vowed not to break the seal of The Bunker once it was closed. No one has entered or left, and panic is tangible amongst our legion as the break of dawn grows nearer. Aside from the caves and underground tunnels scattered throughout the area, The Bunker is the only place safe from the sunlight. We must avoid the light at all costs; if we become enveloped in light, we will quickly be devoured by the darkness. I do not trust The Bunker to remain sealed against the creatures, but I dare not speak my worries. The others need to remain calm if we wish to avoid a complete loss of all life.

 

            23:59.

 

            From my bed, I can see everyone I have ever known. Friends are trying to sleep, tossing and turning as their fears run amok in their minds. Mothers of children I grew up with are crying, hugging their husbands and praying for the day to come and go quietly. The older members of The Faction seem resigned to this existence in The Bunker. Perhaps their long lives leave them less afraid of what lies ahead. My brother is on his own bed, staring at the ceiling. He is wearing a strong face, but I know he is scared. We all are. My parents are assisting with the distribution of supplies and food, but I can see my mother crying as she hands an old man a blanket. She is more frightened than me, I think. I wish there was something I could do.

            …it is midnight.

 

JUNE 21^ST – 0001 HOURS

 

            The world is silent as the grave.

            I feel like a living corpse, waiting to be slaughtered.

            For a moment, The Faction is still. There is no sound. Everyone is holding their breath. The Earth seems to stop turning, and we hear nothing. Then, it happens.

            A horrible screeching rings out through the air, and although we’re underground, beneath metal and dirt, we can hear it perfectly. Everyone covers their ears. The screaming feels like needles stabbing at our brains, and people collapse to their knees in pain.

            Just as suddenly as it started, it stops. Some people are bleeding from their ears, and it looks as if a few of the elderly may have had heart attacks from the shock and sheer volume of the noise. But there’s no time to help anyone; I can hear scratching on the metal above us.

            The Faction is quiet, again, as the scratching grows more furious. The claws of the creatures scrape against the metal, making indentations that are clearly visible on our side of The Bunker. The sound is like nails on a chalkboard, and it’s too much for some of us to handle. People bury themselves under their blankets and mattresses. Some hide in alcoves or small tunnels. All I can do is watch from my bed, my body breaking into a cold sweat. I am afraid.

 

Miranda is a twenty year old TV nut. She has been writing since she was seven years old and writing is what she's wanted to do her entire life. Michael Crichton is her inspiration. For more information, check out her official website: http://docsaico.weebly.com