Possession
By: Annie OldhamSong and Shadow #1
Young Adult Paranormal
Date Published: October 31, 2014
Blurb:
Constance Jerome wants nothing more than to make it through her senior year of high school without being noticed. But when her mother drops the world's biggest bombshell, flying under the radar just isn't in the cards. It turns out Constance is a necromancer—one of the few who can travel the realms of the dead.
Apparently it runs in the family. And now there's a threat coming: another necromancer with plans to disturb the living and the dead, and Constance and her mother are the only ones who can stop him. If only they knew who he was. Or what exactly he was up to. A quiet senior year isn't an option, and Constance must race to stop a high school apocalypse before the balance between the living and the dead is overturned.
Constance Jerome wants nothing more than to make it through her senior year of high school without being noticed. But when her mother drops the world's biggest bombshell, flying under the radar just isn't in the cards. It turns out Constance is a necromancer—one of the few who can travel the realms of the dead.
Apparently it runs in the family. And now there's a threat coming: another necromancer with plans to disturb the living and the dead, and Constance and her mother are the only ones who can stop him. If only they knew who he was. Or what exactly he was up to. A quiet senior year isn't an option, and Constance must race to stop a high school apocalypse before the balance between the living and the dead is overturned.
EXCERPT
Constance remembered what her mother said: it
was a mistake bringing life back. But wasn’t it a mistake to mess
around with death at all? How could anything good come from it? She
saw the way her mother had looked the past week. She was exhausted
and worn too thin. And who enforced the rules anyway?
And she needed to know.
She needed to know if what her mother was
saying was true—if Biscuit and the duckling were just those flukes
that sometimes happen because life is unpredictable, or if there was
something more to their existence. Constance needed proof, and if she
had done it once—and it wasn’t a fluke—then she should be able
to do it again.
Her spade struck the box, and she used her
fingers to edge around the lid and pry it off. She sat back on her
heels. Maggots were crawling over the bird’s feathers.
She reminded herself that she needed to know.
How did she even start? What had she done with
the duckling years ago? She forced herself to look at the tiny body
and the spindly legs, and tried to ignore the white worms destroying
the small form. She had felt so sad for that duckling, had wanted to
return it to its family. But what had she actually done? Her hands
hovered over the shoebox. She couldn’t bring herself to actually
touch it, but as her hand lingered, the shadows made a film around
the edges of her vision. She shook her head, trying to clear her
eyes, but they pressed in even more deeply. Did she have to sing?
Should she have brought one of the candles? Her mother had said
something about using both of them together. But she didn’t know
anything. All she knew was that she needed to know if this was who
she was supposed to be.
As she stared at the bird, the wind floated
over her arms and hands, and then the breeze kicked up, pulling her
hair out in tendrils. She imagined the bird as it must have been in
life: sandpipers scurried along the ground, their toothpick legs
moving so quickly they were a blur. As she stared at the bird in the
box, the shadows seemed to play tricks on her. Her vision blurred and
doubled and then tripled, the outlines of the ground hazy in all the
ways her vision had refracted. She shook her head, and when she did,
her eyesight was back to normal.
The wind ruffled through the bird’s mangled
feathers, and Constance was just about to put the lid back on the
box, ready to be done with this perverse experiment, when it happen.
The bird’s eye opened, and where there should
have been a glassy, ink-drop eye there was a maggot. And then the
bird blinked.
Constance’s hand flew to her mouth, the bile
rose in her throat, and she wheeled backward, falling back into the
grass. Her lungs wanted nothing more than to force her vocal chords
into a scream, but she swallowed it down. How would her mother like
this, if she saw it? Here Constance was bringing something back to
life—that is what happened, right?—when really the only thing she
had been taught so far was never
to do that.
Her chest heaved for a few moments, and then
she crawled on her hands and knees to the box. She had to make sure.
The bird’s head rested feebly on the
cardboard, and it could do nothing more than blink at her, maggots
inching their way across its decomposing flesh. And then her heart
plummeted. It was now alive when it was supposed to be dead. She had
done this; she had made this monstrosity. Tears pricked her eyes. It
had been easy—was it supposed to be this easy?—to just bring it
to life. Now she had to send it back, and that was going to be hard.
Her stomach heaved as she grabbed a heavy rock from the rock bed and
raised it over her head. As it came smashing down, the tears poured
down her cheeks, and she had so many thoughts racing through her head
that she couldn’t untangle them all until one finally threaded its
way to the forefront.
She would go along with her mother on this
necromancy thing, but she could never, ever tell her about tonight.
About the Author:
Annie adores writing and reading YA novels. She grew up with an insatiable desire to read and then came the insatiable desire to write. Annie has been blessed to have both of those in her life.
Away from her writing, Annie is the mother of the most adorable girls in the world, has the best husband in the world, and lives in the hottest place in the world (not really, but Phoenix sure feels like it). She loves to cook, sing, and play the piano.
Website: http://www.annieoldham.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/annieoldhambooks
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/annie_oldham
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