Surprise Agent Invasion #28

Title: SILENCE

Genre: Ya Paranormal

Word Count: 102,000

Query:

Sixteen-year-old Sage Krafte spends her time alone with her sketchbook listening to the stories of the departed souls she draws.



When she meets Aden, the new employee at the local art store, the phantoms in her head disappear. Drawn to him as a safe haven from the voices, she finds herself spending more of her time in the shop than in her own, broken home. But when she leaves him, the voices of the dead grow in numbers and are more and more incessant, pushing her to her limit. There’s something dark about the sweet and caring Aden and his ability, and the dead don’t like it.



After Sage is attacked by deavas – souls who feed off the pain of others – and starts to doubt her sanity, Aden offers her a chance to silence the voices permanently. The only price is her soul – an eternity of servitude to a dead and mysterious Lucian in exchange for extinguishing the ghosts. Now, Sage will have to choose between saving her sanity and losing Aden, or keeping him and slowly losing her grip on the meager life she has left.



Full of lies, hesitation, and the struggle to find oneself, SILENCE is intended to be the first in a trilogy. This is my first novel, and I have been a member of Thurber House’s Young Writer’s Studio in Columbus Ohio for four years.

 

First 250:

Ice trickled down her back as Sage stared at the graphite face on the table top. Pressing her lips together, she let her hand glide the pencil across the pale sketch’s cheek, adding the last of the shadows to the Victorian girl. The rhythmic tapping of pencils on table tops made her skin crawl, anxious nausea rolling over her in waves. The dead girl’s face flashed before her eyes, and she swallowed.

“All right, let’s hear what you have to say.”

Her head pulsed roughly and she watched as the girl’s face came to life before her eyes.

“It’s about time you’d gotten to finishing me,” the drawing snapped. The girl’s head pivoted in an array of thin lines and smudge marks so she could get a proper look at Sage.

She shifted in the uncomfortable library chair, the wooden back and seat seeming more painful than usual. The throbbing in her head diminished the longer the ghost was waiting on the page. With a deep breath, she whispered, “Maria Taylor?”

The drawing shifted, the girl’s jaw jutting out and her eyes slitting. “Yes.”

Sage nodded, ripping her eyes away from the piece and letting them move to one of the scattered notebooks on the table top. She moved her pencil, crafting the girl’s name at the top of the page.

“Date of death?” She shot a glance at the information desk a good distance from her table. Good. The librarians hadn’t heard the schizophrenic talking to dead people, yet.