We are absolutely over the moon excited about the
Release Day Launch for Courtney Cole's GUARDIAN!!! GUARDIAN is a YA
Paranormal Romance, and a book close
to Courtney’s heart. Not only is this fabulous book back in a big
way, it's Courtney's birthday! To celebrate all of the awesome she is making a
few select titles only .99 TODAY ONLY! Grab them all
and thank us later.
Sometimes, things that go bump in the night are
real.
My name is Whitney Lane. I’m sixteen years old and at
first, I thought I was crazy.
I kept seeing shadows move along walls, and hearing whispers
around corners, but whenever I looked, there was never anything there.
Until one day, there was.
Our world isn’t what we think. There are things around
us, good things, bad things, scary things.
Things that we tell ourselves aren’t real, but they are.
They’re very real, and they’re terrifying.
I’ve been swept up now, in a battle of good and evil,
confused about love and what is supposed to be love, but isn’t. I don’t
know what to think anymore. I can’t trust my emotions and I don’t know
what is true.
There’s only one thing I know for sure.
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From the start you see Whitney dealing with a grief like no other: losing a beloved parent to a tragic accident. We see as she has to pick up the pieces in the aftermath as her mother has checked out on the family. No kid should have to be an adult at 16. It is not fair. But Whitney does it and makes sure her remaining family is taken care of. She was an excellent character in my eyes. I just hate that she had to go through what she went through. But thankfully she gets to be the teenager she is supposed to be when a fellow classmate shows some interest.
GUARDIAN was a wonderful read that, although started out somewhat slow in the beginning, really took off in the 2nd half. I was held captive by the plot from the middle straight on to the end. There were definitely turns I didn’t see coming, characters that had my jaw dropping with their actions, and an ending that was beyond amazing.
It has been some time since I read about Angels and Demons, so to step into this one was a nice change of scenery. But Cole did a wonderful job writing this one, as I do believe this was her debut book. Being YA it is definitely different than the NA books of hers that I am used to reading. But I was still entertained with it none the less. 4 Stars!
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Sometimes the things that go bump in the night are
real.
Happy birthday to me.
I close my eyes and burrow into my pillow as I try to sleep,
as I try to escape this life.
It’s a life I never thought I’d have, a life I most
certainly don’t want.
I’m still feeling sorry for myself as the blackness of sleep
finally overtakes me.
I don’t know what time it is when I shoot straight upward
like a rocket. Something had yanked me from the oblivion of sleep,
something loud and shrill scraping my window.
My room is completely dark and I glanceat my clock in
confusion.
3:00 a.m.
As my heart pounds hard against my ribcage, I quickly scan
every corner of the room.
In the last few hours, dark shadows had migrated onto my
pink walls, but they’re familiar, nothing out of the ordinary, although in the
night, they seem twisted and scary.
I remain motionless as I allow the sleep-induced fog to
clear from my brain.
As I sit, I feel common sense and logic slowly returning.
Of course nothing had touched my window because my bedroom
is on the second floor. Nothing can reach it. And there are no trees near
enough to brush against it. It was just a dream.
It was only a dream.
I chant it silently to myself like a mantra as I consciously
slow my breathing down, hoping that my racing pulse will soon follow. It was
only a dream.
But just as I’m calming down, I hear it again.
A high-pitched shrill shriek, reminiscent of fingernails on
a chalkboard, scraping down my window. I gasp and pull my feet up to my chest,
which is when I notice the temperature.
I notice because I can see my breath.
Timidly, I blow a puff out again, watching the way my breath
turns white in the air.
Holy crap. Oh my God.
What the hell?
The sound stops and stillness surrounds me once again, the
silence so loud that it echoes in my ear.
Nothing moves around me, the shadows are perfectly still as
they twist across my wall. They look like mangled fingers and arms and
legs, but they don’t move.
My legs are weak and shaking, but I know I have to
move. I have to move off my bed because it feels like something is
under it. Something terrifying.
With a leap, I bound across the room, my feet hitting the
floor several feet away from the edge of my bed.
The floor is ice cold, as though it had been covered in a
blanket of snow.
I’m trembling as I race to the far wall and check the
thermostat. Because that’s the only explanation. I must’ve bumped
it earlier, I must’ve turned the AC way down.
But the luminous numbers stare at me in contradiction.
74 degrees.
It must be broken. It has to be
broken.
My breath is coming in pants now, terrified, anxious pants.
My fear isn’t logical. I know there’s nothing
here. I’m the only one in this room.
Or am I?
The air seems to push at me from all around, something dark,
something heavy, something real. Something unseen.
My fingers shake, my legs tremble, and then all of a sudden,
they can no longer support my weight. I go down like a pile of bricks,
collapsing onto the floor. I lie still because I can’t move, because
something seems to sit on my chest, holding me down.
The shadows start to move, to slither across the walls, to
reach and pull and dance.
I struggle to focus, to see what it is.
But all I can see are the numbers on the thermostat suddenly
moving, rapidly counting down from 74 to 20.
Twenty degrees?
The air is frigid as I suck it in, as I try to pull the ice
crystals into my mouth so I can breathe.
All of a sudden, there’s a blackness in front of me.
It hovers over me, a shapeless mass, sucking in the cells of the air, the atoms
and the molecules. It’s darker than the blackness of my room, blacker
than the blackest black.
Something is here.
With me.
“Dad?” I whisper in a white puff. Because what else
could it be?
I reach out a finger to touch it, and then I can’t see
anything else, because the darkness of it surrounds me, bleeding into
everything else, even my vision. The shriek is back, screaming into
my ears, bleeding into my brain.
Then there’s nothing.
To celebrate the release of GUARDIAN
and Courtney's birthday the following books are on sale for .99,
today only!
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Courtney Cole is a novelist who would eat mythology for
breakfast if she could. She has a degree in Business, but has since discovered
that corporate America is not nearly as fun to live in as fictional worlds. She
loves chocolate and roller coasters and hates waiting and rude people.
Courtney lives in quiet suburbia, close to Lake
Michigan, with her real-life Prince Charming, her ornery kids (there is a small
chance that they get their orneriness from their mother) and a small domestic
zoo.
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