Love Triangle Entry #9

Title: Time Bound

Genre: YA Paranormal Fantasy

Word Count: 70,000

Query:

If sixteen-year-old Holly Takada had known spending the summer in Japan would drop her right into the middle of a real-life-game of Dungeons and Dragons, she might have packed differently.

Holly expects her annual visit to her grandmother to be just another summer of boredom and sushi - until she meets local boy Tamashi, whose threadbare clothes and strange accent hide a mysterious past.  When Tamashi saves Holly from thugs at the market where he works, she jumps at the chance to get closer to him, hoping to unearth his secrets, and maybe a kiss or two. But none of the crazy plotlines in her favorite video games prepare her for what she discovers.

Tamashi isn’t human.

He’s a Time Dragon - the last of an ancient breed of dragons created to watch over Japan. But after being betrayed by the woman he loved, he’s been trapped in the body of a seventeen-year-old human boy for the last five hundred years. Even worse, the wizard who captured him is close to unlocking Tamashi’s powers – and he intends to use them to rewrite time. If Tamashi and Holly can’t stop him from completing his terrible vision of the future, he will erase their very existence from history. Too bad real life doesn’t have a Reload button, because failing now means Game Over.

TIME BOUND is told in three points of view, that spans several centuries of Japanese history. I like to think of it as Hourglass meets Silver Phoenix.

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and have spent the last several years working as a Technical Writer and Marketing Specialist.

First 250:

There was nothing quite like the smell of fish to set the mood for a first date.

Holly stood at the edge of the farmer’s market and wrinkled her nose. Usually the scent of yuzu and fresh chestnuts spiced the air, but today was Wednesday. Fish day.

Not exactly the day she would have chosen to meet up with her crush, but evidently guys either didn’t mind the smell or didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing. She hitched up her ponytail and started to weave past tables covered with ice and slimy octopus. Fish mouths gaped at her, full of razor sharp teeth, but it was nothing compared to the looks some of the stooped old vendors shot her. They gawked as she passed, their quick judgment of her easy to read in their drawn brows and cold eyes.

Despite being half-Japanese, she was still an outsider. Though they were too polite to say anything, she knew what they were thinking. Hafu. Hapa. Half-breed. And now that she was back in Japan for another summer, she had to get used to the place all over again. It always felt so foreign, so alien to return, like stepping off a spinning merry-go-round and trying to stay upright. And the older she got, the longer she took to regain her balance.

“Buy a kimono!” one of the vendors shouted at her in Japanese. Holly shook her head and kept moving, skirting around tables full of oddly shaped vegetables.