Bouncer Post #44

 Title: ONCE ETERNAL

Genre: YA paranormal/dystopian

Word Count: 93,000

Query:

Lexy Schroeder’s perfect future was crossed out and replaced with a truck taking her life at age seventeen, leaving her trapped in an afterlife that that seems almost perfect. But Eternity is no paradise, especially when Lucifer himself wants her soul erased—permanently. If it weren’t for the gorgeous and angelic caseworker, Mattakael, assigned to her, Eternity would be a bureaucratic nightmare of epic proportions. However, Mattakael has dark and dangerous secrets of his own.

Lexy always imagined death would be full of glowing angels, harps, and clouds. As the web of lies and secrets drags her deeper and deeper down to a place where Eternity’s shiny veneer begins to fade, Lexy is an unwilling catalyst for a war 20,000 years in the making. The perfect world of the afterlife is anything but, and Lexy’s existence – and the lives-after-death of billions – is on the line. To save her soul, she will have to become the heroine people think she is instead of a bratty, selfish bookworm - and fast.

ONCE ETERNAL is a 93,000 word young adult manuscript appealing to fans of Veronica Roth’s DIVERGENT and Laini Taylor’s DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE, mixing themes of paranormal, dystopian, and science fiction.

First 250:

When I woke in a dark office instead of my bedroom, I should have known something was very wrong.

“Alexandra Schroeder?”

“What?”

I jerked my head up and saw him sitting there, a guy not much older than my seventeen years, sitting at the center of the way too unfamiliar room. Golden skin, high cheekbones, and the weirdest pale purple eyes I’d ever seen in my life, the color of fresh lavender blossoms. His pouty lips parted just slightly as he focused. The way he spoke my name in his English accent was lilting and poetic. My dreams had a tendency to produce weird manifestations of guys from magazines or the covers of romance novels, but this wasn’t a café or some fairy tale dreamscape.

This wasn’t normal at all.

“I’m dreaming, right?” I asked him. I saw my palms pressed into the grimy chair. My back was stiff and pained, but from my waist down I was completely numb. “Where am I?”

He was focused on the computer screen in front of him. It was bulky, old, and covered in dust, the type of computer found in the days before internet was a common word. My mind was slowly becoming clearer, but all I couldn’t turn my attention away from him. His beauty. His dreamy eyes. So handsome…

Jeez, Lexy, snap out of it.

“Alexandra, what was your last waking memory?”

His voice startled me back to the present. I shook my head. “Waking memory? What are you talking about? I’m just dreaming. You’re not real.”