Blind Speed Dating #53

Title: PARAWARS: Uprising

Genre: YA Paranormal

Word Count: 70,000

Query:

Seventeen-year-old Kendry thought she had life figured out. Sure, the Paranormal Uprising changed things. Yes, the Para-Human War could descend on her town at any moment. And okay, she might just have a crush on Axel, her gargoyle best friend. But she thought she had life handled.

She was wrong.

The town she thought safe from the war? Overrun. The mother she thought would always be there? Captured. The father she thought was dead? Very much alive. The paras she was told would protect her? They’re actually after her. 

And Axel, whose blacker-than-midnight eyes pierce her soul, and whose stony touch sets her on fire? Definitely wrong about him. But he might also be the only thing that’s right.

First 250:

It wasn’t the apocalypse anyone expected.

There were no nuclear bombs or failing economies, no plagues or bio-warfare. The Paranormal Uprising happened overnight, in silence. We woke to myth and legend, and a changed world. Until that day two years ago, most of us hadn’t known the paras were anything more than story or superstition, something told to amuse or frighten us.

But they did exist. And they were tired of hiding. Tired of being hunted by secret organizations that didn’t want anyone to know about them. Tired of being forced out of a world that belonged as much to them as to us. So the paras did the last thing anyone who knew them expected.

They showed the world they existed.

I went to bed thinking about my English exam and how much I was sure I’d bombed my drama audition. When I woke up, who got the lead roles in our school production of Beauty and the Beast didn’t matter. The world as we knew it, as I knew it, no longer existed. I found myself in a new world, one where nightmare and fantasy lived next door.

Axel later told me how it had been a huge shock for them, too. The Para Rule – don’t let the humans know – was done away with in a single stroke. Hide No More was now the mantra, chanted and shouted from rooftops and streets the world over. But most people I knew then didn’t care how the paras felt.