Today is the release day for Ascenders: SkyPunch by C.L. Gaber! I am so excited to share this fantastic YA paranormal. Check out the excerpt and C.L.’s giveaway, and be sure to grab your copy today!
In the Midst—a place for those who die young—there are no rules except one.
And Walker Callaghan, dead at seventeen, just broke it. She briefly revisited her earthly life . . . and the punishment is eternal. Longing for her rebel love interest, Daniel Reid, Walker finds an ally in Cass, whose attraction to her is as alive as he is. “Life is short,” he tells her. “I’m banking on eternity. With you.”
In the second book of the Ascenders Saga, a realm-jumping journey takes Walker and Daniel back to life again when they search for something buried in history. They team with students from several other schools in the middle realm including a place for teens born with oddities. It’s home to the Claires . . . beautiful, ruthless, and quite dead seventeen-year-old quads who each have a different clairvoyant gift.
Can Walker survive another adventure of an afterlife-time—or will she find herself on the downside of eternity?
(Buy Links coming soon!)
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Book One: Ascenders
Walker Callaghan has just arrived at the Academy after a tragic car accident. “Is this heaven or is this high school?” she asks.
She finds out her new life is a bit of both as she falls in love with tat-covered, bad boy Daniel Reid who is about to break the only sacred rule of this place. He’s looking for a portal to return back to the living realm.
He needs just one hour to retrieve his younger brother who strangely never arrived at The Academy. Bobby is an Earth Bound Spirit, stuck at a plane crash site that took both of their lives as their rich father piloted his private jet nose-first into a cornfield on Christmas Eve.
Walker loves Daniel and risks it all to go with him.
Have they learned enough to outsmart dangerous forces while transporting a young child with them? Can their love survive the fragmented evil parts of themselves that are now hunting them down as they try to find a way back to the middle?
At the Academy, you learn the lessons of an after-lifetime.
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Now, enjoy this exclusive excerpt!
She was waiting.
A tall, well-built woman with sparse black hair pulled back into a prim bun, her onyx eyes were close-set and her nostrils flared like they were two wide tunnels with direct access to brain matter.
A whisper of an old woman’s grayish-pink top lip rested on a nervously bitten and frequently chewed bottom one, and neither hinted at a smile. ”
“She was dressed in all black, but the freaky part was that Lizbeth, dean of women prisoners, didn’t wear the standard-issue ITT guard uniform of unflattering pants and a crisp, black, collared shirt.
She was clad in a flowing Victorian dress that reached the floor, her arms completely blanketed in yards of sooty-colored lace, and her throat obscured by a collar that reached upward to her chin. A white cameo pin rested on the neck of her turn-of-the-century fashion statement, and a small gold heart locket dangled against her chest. It was open to reveal two blurred black-and-white photos.
I couldn’t decide what to stare at harder, the small nameplate on her desk that read DEAN BORDEN or the two faces in that locket.
One was a middle-aged, wealthy-looking man. She knew where my eyes had settled. “My father, Andrew. Mur . . . der . . . ed,” she said in a voice so scratchy and old that it sounded as if she was on her last words. The other photo was a woman who couldn’t have been her mother because there was absolutely no family resemblance. Lizbeth was dark and brooding; the woman was in when the blade remained lodged. Her face contorted viciously as she ripped it out hard and then plunged it in even harder.
“My father, struck ten times. No, eleven times, so said I,” Lizbeth told me in her wispy, singsong voice as she moved closer. My eyes never leaving the glint of that ax blade, I could feel my heart begin to drum so hard in my chest that I thought it might rip open my flesh. I couldn’t move away because the office was a prison cell of sorts. There was absolutely nowhere to go.
Focus. Stay calm. Steel.
My eyes went wide when she found a new victim. Lizbeth began to slice her left hand with the freed ax blade and a strange calm returned to her face when her own blood began to freely rain down in small plops to the floor. She took delight playing with the thick liquid snaking through her fingers and smiled to reveal several holes in rotted, blackened teeth.
That stupid, childish song raced through my mind: “Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one….”
And now for the giveaway! To enter, fill out the Rafflectoper below!
About C.L. Gaber:
C.L. GABER is the author of ASCENDERS, the first book in Ascenders SAGA. She is also the co-author of “Jex Malone.” A lifelong entertainment journalist, she interviews A list film and TV stars for the New York Times wire and various other publications. C.L. lives in Nevada with her husband Ron, bonus daughter Sabrina and two unruly dogs. You can reach her at CLGaber@yahoo.com
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