Rosenfay can sever your soul with her Song -
but
can she save Hell from an angel invasion?
Get Wicked Song, a YA paranormal story
with demons, angels, and gender fluid romance now at Amazon!
A
demon’s eye glitters in the harp’s reflection…
Sixteen year old
Rosenfay Marsh can steal your soul with her Song.
After helping her demon
father harvest the souls of her human schoolmates, Rosenfay is kidnapped by a
cruel angel. With her skin burning and peeling in Heaven, escape is impossible.
But if she doesn’t find her way to safety, the angel will torture her father’s location
from her. And all Hell will be in danger.
Wicked Song is a
paranormal novelette (12,000 words) with reluctant demons, brutish angels, and
a gender fluid romance.
Get it now for $0.99:
Get it now for $0.99:
RT MY TWEET & HELP OTHERS FIND WICKED SONG
Rosenfay can sever your soul with her Song - but can she save Hell from an angel invasion? https://t.co/tyuqP9LB32 pic.twitter.com/XPgwr3zW2n— Saruuh Kelsey (@saruuhkelsey) May 31, 2016
BEGIN READING NOW:
A demon’s eye glitters
in the harp’s reflection. At that narrowed glare, my nerves awaken. I wipe my
palms on my crisp trousers, heft the harp into my arms, and walk through heavy
purple curtains onto the stage as Mr. Vincent booms, “Next we have Rosenfay
Marsh on the harp.”
Every millisecond of
expectant silence from the audience sends a new prick of nervousness through
me.
“Don’t disappoint me,” the demon hisses.
“I won’t,” I promise and take my seat before the
crowd. I can’t disappoint him. If I
don’t do this, he’ll be demoted for his less-than-adequate number of souls
harvested this year. It’ll be my fault—it’s because of me he can’t leave hell—and
I know exactly how I’ll be punished if I refuse this. I can’t risk that.
The whole school is here, along with parents, aunts,
uncles, and the odd stray grandparent. Two hundred faces washed out by the
bright row of lights on the ceiling. I don’t allow my attention to linger on
them but it’s hard to block out their presence when the silence is periodically
interrupted by the rustle of a jacket, the creaking of hard plastic chairs, or
sighs of boredom. The whole school and more have crammed into this hall and all
of their eyes are on me.
My fingers pluck the strings. Already I hear
whispers, sense energy fluctuating. I begin to Sing. What emerges is a sibilant
sound, too unearthly for any end of term talent show. The Rapture begins, a
slow thrall that rises in pitch and spreads through everyone sat listening.
“Good,” my father’s reflection crows.
My English teacher rises from her chair first. Mrs.
Pale, a waif-like woman who’d rather suffer through a riotous lesson than raise
her voice to give someone a detention. Her mousy hair is piled on her head like
candyfloss. I try not to stare at the mass of it as she kneels before me, her
eyes shiny, her mouth a small O. Slow
at first, her soul rises from her body, falling from her lips in a thin wisp of
silver-red smoke. It drifts through the air toward the gleam of the harp and is
sucked into the gold, to my father.
Mrs. Pale drops to the floor and my heart sinks with
her. I’ll never be able to show my face in Leicester again. Never be the same
human again. My father has promised me another life somewhere else. His vow to
allow me to attend York School of Music is the only reason I’m here, harvesting
souls with my Song. If I weren’t, if I disobeyed him and performed a normal
song, it would have been my last act on Earth. My last act as a real, ordinary
human with a real, ordinary life.
I had no choice—I can’t go back to Hell. I can’t.
My fingers skip a string, a note, and a rumble of
disapproval comes from my father’s reaction.
I hurry to play quicker, to re-establish the Rapture
and the harvest before any of the students can shake off the thrall. Of anyone
in this room, the youngest would be the only ones able to free themselves;
they’re stronger, their faith in the unbelievable granting them a stronger
defence against us. Their parents have no such defences, not after years of
being told to accept reality, to grow up, to stop daydreaming. How can you
protect yourself from something you don’t believe exists?
Five parents fall before me next, two mothers and
three fathers, their heads bowed and faces gaunt. Their souls drift from them,
that silver-red smoke coiling around my hands before soaking into the harp and
down the devil’s pathways to Hell. How long before I’m dragged back with them?
For years I’ve been invisible in this school, by
choice, never drawing attention because someone seeing past the person I
pretend to be—human and harmless—means the life I love here on Earth will be
taken from me. I made a bargain with my father, convinced him there was no
point doing four years of school if I don’t complete it; that’s the only reason
I’m not already in Hell.
My breath falters but my notes stay steady this time,
my fingers automatically following the song to its end. By the time the harp
falls silent, my hands dropping to my sides, breath ragged, the whole hall is
silent and drained, bodies heaped on top of each other in a morbid path to the
stage, souls clamouring to reach the harp.
I stumble to my feet. Prying stiff fingers from the
harp that now lacks my father’s reflection, I pick a path around the husks of
people. My eyes land on Penelope Charles who sits next to me in English. Last
week she leant me her copy of Romeo and Juliet. Next to her is Angie McKerrow.
She was my best friend in year seven until she died her hair honey blonde and
caught the attention of the popular girls in our year, dropping out of
afterschool music and art club to hang around the park behind school.
These are girls I’ve known, and liked, girls who
were nice and human and … and I severed their souls from them. My eyes blur
with tears as I step over a dead parent, then a teacher, then student after
student after friend after familiar kid. I keep walking until I’ve fled the
blue and yellow halls and burst onto the steps out front, the autumn wind
biting my skin. I sink onto the steps and cover my head with my arms, making
myself into the smallest ball I can as I shudder and fall apart.
My hitching cries are the only sound interrupting
the night silence until, minutes later, Karel’s footsteps scrape up the path
from the car park and he sinks onto the stone at my side. His fingers sink into
the mess of my black curls, lifting my head un-gently. I don’t open my eyes but
I sense his disapproval at my display of emotion, and beneath it an expertly
concealed strain of worry.
“Did he—send you?” I ask between sobs. The thought
of my father is the only thing that can pierce the fog of disgust and pain and
shock at what I did. Until it was done, I wasn’t sure I could go through with
it. All I see behind my eyelids is that mound of bodies leading to the stage,
students and parents reaching for the harp, enthralled by the hypnosis in my
Song. I did that. I can’t fully
compute what happened yet. I should be thriving on this, sipping the death like
a human sips wine. There should be enough pleasure here for a Demon of
Satisfaction and Contentment like me, with all those people fallen under the
Rapture, but all I feel is misery.
“No,” Karel says, touching my cheek with a red claw.
I feel the tip prick my skin and know he didn’t mean to. “I felt your pain and
came of my own volition.”
That only makes me cry harder, makes the tight hurt
in my heart expand to cover my whole chest. Detached, dispassionate Karel came
to sit with me because he felt my pain, because a tiny shred of him has
softened toward me after years of being my protection. (Because I’m my father’s
heir and I was never strong or cold enough to be a true demon; because I’m
vulnerable and need a guard to watch over me because I feel and love and care,
because my mother was human.)
“It would be best if we left.” Karel gives me a flat
look. “Before the soulless are found.”
I nod. I know he’s right but I’m not ready to leave
this life. I don’t want to start over in a new city where nobody knows me. But
Karel won’t let me stay. People would ask questions—ask why I wasn’t dead
too—and that would only make things catastrophic. I’ll become a folk legend in
a few years’ time, a story whispered to spook children: did you hear about the
girl who killed a whole school with her song? There won’t be an investigation
into this, won’t be any evidence even if they do look into it. Karel will have
burned the cameras the minute he arrived. There’ll be no memory or explanation
of what I did tonight.
But I’ll
remember.
I’ll never be able to forget.
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