She stood, smiling, by a lake at sunset. She giggled as she blew out candles on her birthday cake. She chatted animatedly with a friend as they walked through the mall. She shyly met his gaze across a crowded room. He remained at a distance as they grew up, never allowing himself to grow close to her. His life had no place for the fragile joy of innocence. Memories blossomed behind his eyes, each one a knife to his aching heart.
Their class stood clustered around a duck pond in third grade as their teacher demonstrated how to feed the birds. Alex amused himself by tripping people with darkness. A girl and boy lost their balance. He allowed the boy to slip into the murky water but caught the girl before she fell.
Alex watched with interest as a classmate pulled a gun on his former friend. A girl with curly hair the color of butterscotch rushed to stand between the two boys. His interest switched to ice-cold fear. She must not be hurt.
He glimpsed the curly-haired girl in front of a window display. She gazed longingly at a doll in a frilly pink dress. His lip curled in distaste, but something drew him inside the store. She was radiant when she found the gift in her locker the next morning.
Alex cupped her face as she cried. The purple bruise below her eye looked like an unfortunate encounter with a door. Alex knew better. He ran his thumb along her cheek and used darkness, for the first time in his life, to heal instead of hurt.
The sweet scent of spring lingered in the air as he walked her home at twilight. He pulled her to him at a street corner and gazed deep into her blue eyes. When their lips met, time stopped. He had kissed others before her, but no one else compared. Her silken hair smelled of summer; her soft lips tasted like honey. His heart sped up and adopted a new rhythm, beating in time with hers. He placed her hand against his chest, and her starry eyes widened in understanding. She belonged in his arms. She was his, and he was hers.
Alex was standing on her porch, trying to keep a straight face as she yelled at him. She was cute even when she was pissed.
He lay awake in the middle of the night with her soft, warm body nestled against his. Her head rested on his shoulder with her silken hair brushing his cheek. She smiled faintly as she dreamed. She had given him everything that night. She would always be safe with him; he would always keep her safe. When he pictured happiness, she was everything that came to mind.
Nathan was blundering his way through an Assassin’s Honor meeting. Alex was reclining in an overstuffed armchair and daydreaming about her. He was struck with blinding terror as suddenly and as certainly as if he were inches from death. The room swam in and out of focus. Agony clouded his mind. He clawed past his panic and hauled himself back to his surroundings. The shabby living room. The blistering summer day. Nothing was wrong, which meant everything was.
He charged from the room and fought to locate her through their bond. Their link was shockingly weak, a thread so fine it would snap at any moment. She was dying. A lump of terror formed in his throat. He used darkness to ghost to her, not caring who saw or what trouble it caused.
Alex appeared beside her family’s totaled car. The street was deserted apart from two smashed vehicles, a beet red station wagon and a Ford F-150. Both drivers were dead. His girl clung barely to life.
The station wagon was upside down in a ditch with the Ford smashed against its passenger side door. He ghosted her from the wreckage and scrambled to her side. Spikes of glass protruded from her chest. Her entire right side had been crushed. He clutched her hand and struggled to heal her, fighting the fear that his powers would fail. Darkness was a far better weapon than a cure. He was fighting a losing battle, but he would not, could not, stop fighting for her.
“Don’t die! Don’t you dare do this to me!” The words were ripped, raw and desperate, from his core. Crimson covered his hands. She was losing too much blood.
He called an ambulance and held her close, waiting for the shrieking of sirens and the rotund rattle of a big rig rescue. A breeze rustled gently through the trees, a peaceful sound that flooded him with panic. Where were they? Why weren’t they here? His love was bleeding out in front of him. His eyes burned. A painful pressure constricted his chest. How long had it been since he had called? Five minutes? Ten? He struggled to stem her blood flow, but her blood just kept coming. He choked on a sob that physically tore him apart. He could not save her. An angel could heal her, but he was powerless even to help. He had failed the only person he had ever dared to love.
Her face twisted in agony as she fought for a labored breath. He was hurting her more by keeping her alive. Alex cradled her against his chest and let her slip away. She briefly focused on his face. He held her starry gaze, trying to memorize the color of her eyes, the kindness in their depths.
“Love you, Alex,” she whispered. Her starry blue eyes closed forever. His heart stuttered as hers stopped. It had nothing to keep time with. She was gone.
Alex stood at the back of a crowded church, dressed in funeral black with emptiness in his heart. Everything inside him rebelled at standing on holy ground. But the girl he had loved had passed on to a better place, a place he could never reach. It was ironic that he believed in heaven, yet he would never be granted entrance to its hallowed halls. Darks had no place in heaven. His soul belonged in hell. The afterlife meant nothing but eternal separation from her, and the service at the church was his last chance to honor her.
He wandered the streets all night. He refused to sleep. He barely ate. Life had lost all meaning. He tormented himself by writing letters she would never read. He imagined he glimpsed her smile in a crowd of strangers’ faces. He reached for his phone, forgetting he had no one to call. He lay awake at night and longed for one more chance to hold her. Sometimes he grew angry and hated her for leaving him, but he had no one to blame except himself. She was gone because he had failed to keep her safe.
Time passed, but the agony never faded. The pain of losing her never dulled. Her memory remained as both his comfort and his curse. Her absence had left a gaping hole inside that would never, ever mend. He never wished to love again.
Alex came to on the cold floor of his cell. He brushed moisture from his eyes and put a hand to his throbbing head. A wave of misery lifted him and swept him away. He was doomed to relive the worst moments of his life until they thankfully drove him mad. His prison cell had become his personal hell on Earth. So, this was what they called the Blood Moon’s fury.
Afterword
ALEXANDER CARDELLE WAS discharged from the hospital after his violent encounter with Zack Donnellson. He awaits trial in Toronto where he is expected to receive a life sentence.
Nathan Johnson was transported to the hospital to have his gunshot wound treated. He was discharged the next morning and arrested for the kidnapping and torture of Amy Evans, Susan Evans, and Zack Donnellson. He, too, awaits trial in Toronto.
The doctors examined Peter Jenkins and were baffled to find nothing physically wrong with him apart from a minor concussion. They transferred him to police custody with disconcerted mutterings of a medical miracle. Peter’s case has been separated from Nathan Johnson’s and Alexander Cardelle’s. He is expected to receive leniency for his defense of Amy Evans and his cooperation with the police.
Ashton Jones died in his hospital bed late Saturday night. His estranged parents held a small funeral and quietly buried their son in the same cemetery as Peter’s mother and sister.
Byron Jenkins, Peter’s father, managed to disappear before the police tracked him down. He is wanted for several crimes, including illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, and now, attempted murder.
Officer Kimmy Wolf caught a flight back to Vancouver early Sunday morning. She plans to testify at Peter’s trial, but no one knows whether she will exonerate or condemn him.
The Queen of the Darks informed the Office of Supernatural Containment that Alex was to, in her words, “stay where he belonged.” She also had an angel reverse Peter’s injuries. The OSC believes she offered a lot more assistance than she reported
, suspecting she gave Amy easy access to her pistol and put Byron Jenkins to sleep while the girls escaped. The Dark dismissed these accusations with a flippant “you must be mad” and went back to Vancouver where she lives in a castle with seventeen pet dogs. Her subjects still consider her eccentric but grudgingly acknowledge her usefulness.
Susan Evans and Charles Banks were kept in the hospital until Sunday afternoon when they were both discharged with clean bills of health.
Amy Evans was discharged from Thunder Bay General six days after waking early Sunday morning. She is expected to make a full recovery. The tragic death of Katie Evans remains a secret shadow on her heart, but sharing her past with Zack mended a fracture in her soul.
Justin Evans checked his mother into rehab after Amy returned home. Erica Evans has promised to take it seriously this time and has vowed to stay single until she can stay clean. Zoe Banks played a central role in this decision and has offered to assist the Evans family in any way she can.
Bryan Davis, Jessie’s father and Amy’s landlord, drove his daughter all the way to Thunder Bay to visit Amy in the hospital. He happily informed Amy that an anonymous benefactor had paid their rent for an entire year. No one has the faintest idea how the donor knew of their financial woes.
Clarisse Donnellson and Justin Evans vacationed in Toronto for the holidays. Both were excused from writing final exams. They traveled back to Vancouver together in early January and have spent a suspicious amount of time together ever since.
Witnesses Chris Donnellson and Susan Evans have reported that Justin and Clarisse are not the only older siblings acting, in Susan’s words, “all lovey-dovey.” Zack and Amy have also spent a significant amount of time together, and as Susan says, “They act so disgustingly cute, it’s sickening!”
Chelsea Brookes was horrified to learn of her ex-boyfriend’s relationship with Amy Evans. But Jessie championed Amy and Zack, easing the impact of Chelsea’s hostility.
Amy, Zack, and Charles have grown close, but each keep secrets that threaten to destroy them all.
Author Note
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for reading our debut novel, Blood Moon’s Fury. This book was nine years in the making and co-written by two authors a country and a half apart. The first draft was shockingly terrible. We’re not talking bad. We’re not talking dreadful. We’re talking rip your hair out, chuck your laptop out a window, scream at the heavens awful.
Jenna Faris, a small-town girl from Canada with a worshipful adoration of Harry Potter, wrote the first draft of Blood Moon’s Fury when she was fifteen. She liked to blare music while jogging on the treadmill, and her music lit the spark of creativity. She began imagining a storyline and embellished upon it to pass the time. A month later, she had an entire novel in her head. The natural thing to do was write it down.
Fifteen-year-old Jenna was in writerly heaven. She had inspiration coming out her ears and words flying from her fingertips. What could be better? Basic knowledge of spelling, grammar, and sentence structure would have been nice. Teenaged Jenna finished writing her then 60,000-word novel in under two months. She went on her merry way and forgot all about its existence.
A year later, Jenna met Heidi Springstroh, an exuberant lover of fantasy novels from the great state of Florida. Heidi had a wild imagination which she expressed in the form of creative short stories, poetry, and songs. The teens became fast friends but did not begin writing together for another six years.
The girls were FaceTiming one blustery March evening when Heidi happened to mention Amazon’s Storyteller contest. She lamented the fact that she had a zillion great ideas and no motivation to write them down. For the first time in seven years, Jenna thought of that book she had scribbled with such feverish ease. But her computer had been taken out by a virus that had swallowed her novel whole. The girls bemoaned its fate for a while before remembering Jenna had sent Heidi a copy some three years prior. This did not spark instant hope as Heidi had gotten a new computer and no longer had a saved copy of the book. Still, she refused to give up. She scoured her email and managed to recover the nearly lost novel in an attachment. If it weren’t for her, the story you just read would still be living in oblivion.
Jenna had reservations about sharing her work with the world, but Heidi refused to listen to such nonsense. She was convinced her best friend had written a masterpiece. Jenna relented and agreed to Heidi’s plan to edit the book and enter it in the Storyteller contest.
The friends examined the horrifying mess of a story and nearly lost their nerve. The novel, lamely titled The Heroes at that time, featured the same characters and plotline as it does today. But the book had terrible dialogue and missing quotation marks, atrocious and arbitrary paragraph breaks, punctuation and spelling that would bring you to tears, and thousands of unnecessary rambling adjectives and sentences … like this one. It also lacked visual descriptions of any kind. Jenna and Heidi were both born blind, and describing people and their surroundings with detail, flair, and colorful imagery was an enormous struggle in the beginning. They studied color like a foreign art and gained perception of the visual world through nothing more than words.
Jenna and Heidi spent several months in early 2017 trying to get the disaster of a novel contest ready. Heidi did all of the early edits, proofreading and formatting that first draft into something resembling a book. Jenna read through every draft, eliminating excess words and rewriting entire chapters to achieve better flow. The girls stayed up all night the day before the contest was due to end. It was only as they familiarized themselves with Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing, that they realized they had overlooked something big. Winning depended upon their book being bought while the contest went on. As they were entering their novel on the contest’s very last day, they hadn’t a hope of winning. The aspiring authors shut their laptops with snaps of finality and retired to bed.
The next morning, they were at it again. They had an entire year to get their book ready for the contest, and they vowed to polish it to perfection, or as close to perfection as novels ever get. Heidi convinced Jenna to write fantasy into the previously realistic story, which sparked an idea for a sequel. They tossed out The Heroes as a title and tried out Take Control as an alternative. This idea seemed even worse than The Heroes, which sent them right back to square one. Hope came knocking in late July when Heidi dreamed up Eight Days of Hell. Jenna tried out Seven Days with Satan as a title for the sequel she was hard at work writing, and this snowballed into an eight-book series called “Countdown.”
The young authors threw out the countdown theme in favor of a series title with more fantasy/thriller vibes, “Curse of the Blood Moon.” Up until this point, their book had supernatural creatures interspersed throughout but no overarching fantasy storyline. Thus, the curse was born! In keeping with this theme, they renamed their novel Blood Moon’s Fury. They still had ideas for seven more books, though. What to do with them? Write seven more books of course!
Heidi happily set to work dreaming up titles, new characters, and cover designs for future books, while Jenna continued to write the sequel to Blood Moon’s Fury, Blood Moon’s Servant. Jenna spent the summer of 2017 writing and editing in her stifling studio apartment at the University of British Columbia while retaking advanced biochemistry.
It took a whopping two and a half more years before Blood Moon’s Fury was ready for publication. Jenna, juggling university, a part-time job, and a social life, edited the novel over and over and over every chance she got. She researched writing and editing tips until her mind ached and reread the book so many times she can quote large chunks by heart. Heidi, going through life transitions and working full-time, reformatted the novel from first person present tense to the more professional third person past tense. She proofread every finished draft and meticulously formatted the paperback and Kindle manuscripts to match Amazon’s requirements. She also corresponded with a brilliant cover designer to create an exciting and e
ngaging first image.
Jenna and Heidi dreamed of being published for years. Now they look up their book on Amazon and can hardly believe it exists in the world. Whether you are a published author, an aspiring novelist, or simply have an idea, we encourage you to follow your dreams and bring them to life. If we can do it, anyone can. Feel free to drop us a link to your Author Central or unpublished snippets of writing. We would be delighted to browse your work!
If you enjoyed our first novel, please support us and our writing by leaving a review. There is nothing we love more than hearing from our amazing readers. We read every single review and value your feedback above all else. It is for you we write, and you we want to hear from.
Follow our website www.leahkingsley.com for beyond the book insight into your favorite characters, exclusive deals, and direct conversation with us. Thank you for reading Blood Moon’s Fury from the bottom of both our hearts.
Blood Moon's Fury: A Young Adult Fantasy Thriller (Curse of the Blood Moon Book 1) Page 27