Henry winced as he heard a very faint sound, so faint he could barely hear it but it could still hurt his ears. And then there was a voice.
“We… greet… you,” it said. It came from the device in the alien’s hand. Its voice, Henry realised suddenly, had to be too high-pitched for human ears. Given that the aliens lived underwater, that made a certain kind of sense. “We… must… talk.”
A question for my readers.
I do have a planned Book III, but I also have a planned book covering the events on Earth during The Nelson Touch. Which one would you like to see first?
SCHOOLED IN MAGIC
Preview
And now for something rather different… as fantasy and alternate history collide in Schooled In Magic.
Emily is a teenage girl pulled from our world into a world of magic and mystery by a necromancer who intends to sacrifice her to the dark gods. Rescued in the nick of time by an enigmatic sorcerer, she discovers that she possesses magical powers and must go to Whitehall School to learn how to master them. There, she learns the locals believe that she is a “Child of Destiny,” someone whose choices might save or damn their world… a title that earns her both friends and enemies. A stranger in a very strange land, she may never fit into her new world…
…and the necromancer is still hunting her. If Emily can’t stop him, he might bring about the end of days.
Chapter One
“It’s time to close, my dear.”
Emily Sanderson nodded reluctantly as the librarian stepped past her seat and headed to the handful of other occupied chairs. This late at night, only a handful of people remained in the library, either intent on reading or simply because they had nowhere else to go. The library was small and rarely more than half-full even at the best of times. Emily loved it because it was her refuge. She too had nowhere else to go.
She stood and gathered her books, returning them to the trolley for re-shelving. The librarian was a kindly old man — he’d certainly not asked any questions when the younger Emily had started to read well above her grade level — but he got grumpy when visitors tried to return books to the shelves themselves. Not that she could really blame him. Readers had a habit of returning the books to the wrong places, causing mistakes that tended to snowball until the entire shelf was out of order. And Emily hated to see poor Rupert grumpy. He was one of the few people she felt she could rely on.
Most teenage girls her age would never crack open a history book, unless they were looking for the answers to some test. Emily had fallen in love with history from a very early age, taking refuge in it from the trials and tribulations of her life. Reading about the lives of famous people — their struggles to change the world — made her feel her universe had a past, even if it didn’t have a future. Perhaps she would have made a good historian one day, if she’d known where to start working towards a history degree. But she already knew she would never find a proper life. She knew what happened to most graduates these days. They graduated from college, they celebrated, and then they couldn’t find a job.
Her stepfather had certainly made it clear to her, after an endless series of arguments about what she wanted to do with her life, that she would never do anything worthwhile with her life.
“You’ll never amount to anything,” he’d told Emily, one drunken night. “You won’t even be able to flip burgers at McDonald’s!”
Her mother should never have married again — but she’d been lonely after Emily’s father had vanished from their lives, so long ago that Emily barely remembered him. Emily’s stepfather — she refused to call him father — had never laid a finger on her, yet he hadn’t hesitated to tear down her confidence every chance he could, or to verbally rip her to shreds. He resented Emily and Emily had no idea why. She didn’t even know why he stayed with a woman he clearly didn’t love.
Emily caught sight of her own reflection in one of the windows and winced inwardly. She didn’t really recognize the girl looking back at her. Long brown hair framed a face too narrow to be classically pretty, with pale skin and dark eyes that looked somehow mournful against her skin. Her clothes were shapeless, hiding her figure; she rarely bothered with makeup, or indeed any other form of cosmetics, not when there was no point. They wouldn’t improve her life.
Nothing would.
And they might attract unwanted attention too.
The librarian waved to her as she took one last look at the bookshelves and headed for the counter. “No books today?”
“No, sorry,” Emily said. She had a library ticket — it said a great deal about her life that it was her most treasured possession — but she’d filled it over the week. There would be no more books until she returned some old ones. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The familiar sense of despondency and hopelessness fell back over her as she stepped out and walked down the street. There was no future for her, not even if she went to college; her life would become consumed by a boring job, or an unsatisfactory relationship. No, the very thought was laughable. She was neither pretty nor outgoing; indeed, she spent most of her life isolated from her peers. Even when there were groups that might have attracted her — she did occasionally take part in role-playing games — part of her never wanted to stay with them for very long. She wanted friendship and companionship and yet she knew she wouldn’t know what to do with them if she had either.
In fact, she’d been to a game earlier, before coming to the library. And she’d left early.
But now she didn’t want to go home. Her stepfather might be there, or he might be out drinking with his buddies, swapping lies about their days. The former was preferable to the latter, she knew; when he was out drinking, he tended to come home drunk, demanding service from Emily’s mother. And then he shouted at Emily, or threatened her.
Or looked at her. That was the worst of all.
She wished to go somewhere — anywhere — other than home. But there was nowhere else she could go.
Her stomach rumbled, unpleasantly. She would have to prepare a TV dinner for herself, or perhaps beans on toast. It was a given that her mother wouldn’t cook. She’d barely bothered to cook for her daughter since Emily had mastered the microwave. If she hadn’t been fed at school, Emily suspected that she would have starved to death by now.
As she trudged home, she realized something with a crystalline clarity that shocked her; she wanted out. She wanted out of her life, wanted out so badly that she would have left without a backward glance, if only someone made her an offer.
And then she shook herself into sense. No one had made her an offer and no one would. Her life was over. No matter what it looked like on the outside, she knew her life was over. She was sixteen years old and her life was over. And yet it felt as if it would never end.
A fatal disease would have been preferable, she thought, morbidly.
The wave of dizziness struck without warning. Emily screwed her eyes tightly shut as the world spun around her, wondering if she’d drunk something she shouldn’t have during the role-playing session with the nerds and geeks. She had thought that they were too shy to ever spike her drink, but perhaps one of them had brought in alcohol and she’d drunk it by mistake. The sound of giggling — faint, but unmistakable — echoed in the air as her senses swam. And then she fell… or at least it felt like falling, but from where and to what?