Hey awesome Wattpadder!
Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for and asking about: the sneak peek of my next book!
DESCRIPTION:
Echo Freyer is trying her hardest to be a normal eighteen year old girl. She goes to work, takes care of her younger sister, and lives a quiet life in New York.
But Echo is anything but normal. A born witch with a rare power, her kind have been hunted by the Shriekers for centuries. And try as she might, she can’t protect herself and her sister forever.
Echo thought she was safe. She thought she could hide from the Shriekers. She thought she could run from her power. She thought she could protect her heart from love.
But she will soon find out she was very, very wrong.
A YA Paranormal Romance story of sisterhood, magick, courage and true love, AWAKENED is coming to Wattpad starting Wednesday 15th April.
As I’m uploading each chapter as I write it, I won’t be uploading every day like I did with Before It Fades. My upload days will be Wednesday and Friday.
SNEAK PEEK: CHAPTER ONE
The icy wind fought against me as I trudged through the three-day-old snow on the sidewalk. At just above zero, it was the warmest it had been all winter, signaling the end of the season I so adored.
Despite the grey skies, freezing temperatures and everlasting snow storms, winter had a charm to it that I had grown to cherish since I moved to New York with my mother and sister six years earlier. Winter allowed time for solitude, for introspection and stillness.
It meant my sister, Wren, and I could spend all day in our apartment, watching movies and playing old video games without feeling like we were wasting the day.
It meant I could wrap myself in layer after layer of warm clothing, creating a much-needed barrier between me and the strangers I passed on the street. I felt hidden under all those layers, protected and invisible as I buried myself in my padded, soft jacket and faux-fur hood.
I stepped up to the entryway of the teeny-tiny bookshop I worked at, slipped my rusted key into the paint-chipped purple door and unlocked it, hoping to have another quiet, customer-free day.
New Chapter Books, as it had been named by its original owner in the early nineties, was a quaint little hole-in-the-wall, easily unnoticed by passers-by and frequented by neighborhood folk who I knew by name. I was the only employee, and it wasn’t unheard of to only have one or two customers a day, which was just how I liked it. The more time I had to dive into books and disappear into another world, the better.
The current owner didn’t make a dime from the store, but she grew up in the area and, after making a mint from opening a chain of coffee shops around the country, saved the store from closure and kept it open as a testament to her love of quirky old bookstores. Lucky for me, because the idea of finding another job and having to work with new people was enough to make me hyperventilate with anxiety. But there wasn’t much that didn’t spark anxiety in me, these days.
I had always been fairly introverted and quiet, but it wasn’t until my mother was taken that I genuinely started to fear the outside world. Panic attacks had become a common occurrence for me, just as my mother warned they would if I did not embrace my power.
She had always said that I was born with the gift to see into the hearts of others, that I could sense the vibrations of energy emanating from others like ripples in the ocean. She said that was why she named me Echo.
Her lifelong friend, a powerful seer named Sova, had told my mother of my gift when I was still in her womb. Sova had told her that one day I would come into my power, and if I was not prepared, it would overwhelm me.
I never really paid much attention to my mother’s words as a child – she was always trying to teach us spells or showing us the way of the Craft, trying to help us grow into the witches we were born to be. I guess we both thought she would be around to guide me when my power revealed itself. I certainly never thought her disappearance would be the trigger that awakened my gift.
When I first started sensing my mother, not long after they took her, and realized I was feeling her emotions as though they were my own, I thought it was a sign that I was meant to save her. That I could save her. But it quickly turned into unbearable torture.
I felt her fear, her sadness, her pain. I carried her with me everywhere, like a burden that I never wanted to lose, for fear of losing her, too. I felt her slowly fade away, day after day, as they drained her of her soul, of her life force.
Until one night, two years after she was taken, when I awoke with a fright and a shattered heart as I felt her die. I felt it as though it was my own death. I felt her last breath leave her lungs, her last drop of energy being forcefully evicted from her body. And then there was nothing.
I had been numb to my power, to my emotions, ever since.
Wren and I stopped hunting the Shriekers after that night. As good as it felt to save lives and slash those soul-sucking monsters, I knew it was too dangerous. I knew that, with my mother gone, it was my responsibility to protect Wren. To keep her safe. If that meant leading quiet, lonely lives staying hidden in our apartment, then so be it. I abandoned my so-called gift, and all the magick my mother had taught me, for a life of normalcy.
Since then, my anxiety had grown to the extent that I no longer felt safe anywhere, no matter how many times I double-checked the locks on our doors and windows – or how much I told Wren we were safe every time she woke up from another nightmare. At eleven years old, she was still young enough to believe me when I told her they could not find us, that we were safe.
But after what I had felt, I knew safety was nothing but an illusion, a story we told to make ourselves feel better. It was no more real than the fairytale my mother used to tell us every night, that I now recited to my sister to help her fall asleep.
I shrugged my jacket off and threw my gloves and scarf on the counter before taking a seat behind it and picking up my latest read: Girl, Interrupted. I flipped it open to where I’d left off, taking a moment to look at the photograph I had used as a bookmark since I was a little girl. It was a picture of my parents during their hand-fasting ceremony.
They looked so happy, so in love, standing under a towering oak tree with ribbon wrapped around their joined hands. My mother, always deviating from traditions, wore a tie-dyed dress and wildflowers in her hair. My father, just as rebellious as the woman he loved, was shirtless, with his long hair trailing down past his shoulders.
Looking at that photo, no-one would ever foretell just how tragically their love story would end. Both taken by the Shriekers, both drained of their souls, sustaining the very evil that was slowly killing them. My mother was never the same after they took my father, just as I had never been the same after they took her.
I put the photo aside and turned my attention to the worn book in my hands. The pages were faded and the corners wrinkled from the dozens of times I had read it before, but that was how I liked it. I liked seeing books with frayed edges, it showed that they had been loved, that they had fulfilled their purpose. I wished it was the same for people.
I felt frayed at the edges, but I knew it was not because I had been loved or had fulfilled my purpose. I was frayed because I had been hurt, because I had seen both my mother and father taken by the same creatures that I feared would one day come for my sister, and for me.
A crow landed on the windowsill of the store, startling me.
I glared at it as the memory of my mother’s voice ran through my mind: “A crow symbolizes change. It’s calling you to step into your true self, my love. Do not fear it.”
She had said those words to me the last time a crow had visited us, the day before she was taken.
“Shoo!” I said, standing up and going to the window, but it didn’t budge.
I waved my hands at it, trying to scare it away, but it just stared up at me, cawing at me through the glass.
I hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come.
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AWAKENED will continue on Wednesday 15th April. Follow me for updates, or join my email list at jenmariewilde.com to get an email from me when I start uploading.
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