by Bill Hiatt
Tal can no longer rely on his friends. Worse, he can’t even rely on himself. Unaware that the girl he thinks he loves has cast a spell on him, Tal finds himself having more and more trouble containing Dark Me, the evil alter ego that now wrestles him daily for control of his body. That situation is bad enough to begin with, but when a misguided faerie spell gives Dark Me a body and makes him indistinguishable from Tal by any means, scientific or magical, all Hell breaks loose—literally!
“Angel Feather” is a short paraquel to Evil within Yourselves in the sense that its action ends shortly after that in Evil begins, but its plot is completely independent. Although it takes place in the Spell Weaver universe, it can easily be read by people unfamiliar with the other works in the series.
Hal doesn’t have any close friends at his high school and lies to his parents about his situation so they won’t worry. He wishes his life were different, but finding an anonymous note and a feather in his backpack wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. The anonymous note claims the feather is an angel feather, capable of working one miracle, but Hal hesitates. Is the feather someone’s idea of a joke, or is it the answer to Hal’s secret wishes? If the feather can really work a miracle, will it change Hal’s life for the better, or will it simply prove the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for”?
We Walk in Darkness, the fifth book in the series, is a novella that begins shortly after the ending of Evil within Yourselves and can actually be read independently from the rest of the series.
Lucas Santos has been worried for months that he is some kind of freak. He can move too fast, and he sometimes gets flashes of the near future. He does what a lot of teenagers would do under the circumstances: he keeps his special abilities secret, even from his family and his closest friends.
But secrets have a way of being revealed, and when a shadow takes on a life of its own and starts pursuing Lucas, he has the feeling he won’t be able to conceal his true nature much longer. Unexpectedly, the shadow’s sudden intervention uncovers a much larger secret that his family has been keeping, a secret that may save him from the shadows—but at the cost of destroying his current life completely.
If you like to read in other genres, you might enjoy my essay, “Sea of Dreams,” available in the anthology, Where Dreams and Visions Live. If you are a parent with a high-school-age son or daughter and have not always had success interacting with teachers, you might be interested in the booklet, “A Parent’s Guide to Parent-Teacher Communication.” If you are a teacher who has to write college recommendations, you might appreciate “A Teacher’s Survival Guide for Writing College Recommendations.”
About the Author
As soon as he learned to read, Bill Hiatt was hooked. Just as kids who are passionate sports fans often want to be athletes, kids who are passionate readers often want to be writers, and so it was with Bill. Though he dreamed of many career paths over the years, two remained while others came and went: teaching and writing. Fortunately for the world, there was no such thing as self-publishing when Bill was in college and writing horrendous love poetry. Luckily, he kept trying other genres, and he kept reading. He also graduated from UCLA with a degree in English and went on to pursue one of his two dreams by teaching English, mostly at the high school level, for thirty-six years.
Teaching was far more than a day job for Bill; it was his life. He had thought originally that he might be able to both teach and write, but the demands of teaching caused him to forget about writing—for a while. Then, one day Bill, trying to write an interesting grammar test, created one in narrative form, a short story about the students in that particular class. He got so wrapped up in it that he stayed up almost all night writing it. The students loved the test, demanded more like it, and scored better in grammar than any group Bill had ever taught. That experience made Bill realize that he hadn’t really abandoned being a writer; he had merely postponed it. He found time to publish a little at the end of his teaching career. Now that he is retired, all the stories accumulated somewhere in the back of his mind will finally be able to get out.
If you would like more information about Bill, this novel, or his other writing projects, you can visit http://billhiatt.com/, his author page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/writerbillhiatt/, and his Twitter page at https://twitter.com/BillHiatt2. In the first two locations, you can sign up for his mailing list, so that you can be the first to hear about giveaways, new releases, and other cool stuff.