Sharon Stevenson...Raised!

Hi everyone!
I'm so pleased to introduce something a little different today. Author Sharon Stevenson has a new paranormal and this one sounds thrilling and very fun. I have a feeling Raised: Part One might end up on everyone's TBR list after today!

Blurb:

 

In a world where magic crashed to earth in a rusty spaceship full of starving blood suckers, it’s not easy being a reanimated dead guy. Take Pete’s undead word for it…

Pete has been murdered by a mentally unhinged and suicidal one night stand. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s been reanimated for reasons unknown by… persons unknown. This makes him an Animate without an owner, the human equivalent of a stray dog.

Afraid of who his owner may be and what they have planned for his undead ass, Pete does the only thing he can; he goes on the run. The King’s Guard are Scotland’s primary recruiters for Animates so Pete knows he has to leave Edinburgh to escape a fate that terrifies him.

The portal to Las Vegas could be his only hope or his biggest mistake...

Can Pete escape enslavement when it’s what he’s been raised for?

Excerpt:

I was going to a hell of a lot of trouble to escape a fate that terrified me.  I realised that when I saw the queue for passport control.  The long winding line was chock-full of people going for a night out, or a mini-break.  It was strictly hand-luggage only.  You want to take a suitcase?  Go take a nine hour flight and go through several hours of security checks. 

It occurred to me that I might face harsher penalties for running than I would if I just faced up to things and went back to my flat to wait for the inevitable draft into the Guard. 

I just couldn’t do it.  See, I had a friend in first year.  Timmy Wallace.  He was a total shit.  I mean he’d spread nasty rumours for no other reason than he was bored.   He’d trip anyone he ever got the chance to, particularly if there was a nice muddy puddle on the ground.   He’d once snogged the face off a girl I said I liked and then told her she had cock-breath.  He was just that kind of guy.

So what happened should have been funny.  It really should have been.  Call it kharmic payback times a thousand.  We were in his kitchen one dreary rainy Saturday and he was talking about dipping his junk in a glass of cola his sister had left unattended on the table.  ‘No-one wants to see that’, I was protesting.  He ignored me as usual, standing up and unzipping his jeans.  And that was when it happened.

The back door swung open and banged against the wall.  I swear to god there was a crack of lightning at just that precise moment.  The thing that staggered forward was bruised and bloodied and huge.  It took me a few wild-eyed seconds to realise it was Timmy’s dad.  He groaned loudly.  The ripped up bloodied clothes were nothing, it was his face that shocked me immobile.  Half of it was hanging off, revealing bloody mulch and bone far more graphic than any horror movie I’d ever been forced to watch.  I screamed.  Timmy pissed on the floor, and then he fainted.

The King’s Guard weren’t long in following the zombie into the house.  I knew Timmy’s dad was dead.  I mean his head had been reshaped to something incapable of housing a brain.  There was a massive hole on top and I saw the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  And I’d thought catching sight of Timmy’s junk was going to be bad?  Maggot infested head-wound tops that any day.  Christ, I didn’t sleep for months.  The soldiers grabbed him as he lunged at Timmy.  They were efficient, I’ll give them that.  Some of the zombie-thing’s brains leaked out.  The one on the right scooped the mess up straight out of Timmy’s piss and stuffed it back in his dad’s head hole.  I threw up right on the table.  That drew a bit of attention. 

The two soldiers turned and stared at me.  Their eyes bored through me, blank and glassy in their blue-grey faces.  Their expressions were just as unreadable.  Terror gripped me.  I didn’t know what they might do.  I stopped breathing.  That’s when I realised I knew one of them, or I had done.  Mum’s old boyfriend, Frankie.  Hadn’t seen the guy in months and here he was staring right at me with blank eyes that remembered nothing of the countless days at the park and nights playing stupid board games.  Suddenly Mum’s silent tears over their break-up took on new meaning.  My head started to spin so I forced myself to suck in a breath.  My eyes refused to leave Frankie.  I willed him to show some spark of recognition but his expression never changed.

They both turned back to Timmy’s gargling dad and hefted him out the back door, no explanation uttered.  Weeks later, when Timmy was allowed back to school, he started calling me puke-breath and telling me his dad was asking for me, for my braaaiiiins!  I hadn’t even told people he’d pissed himself.  So not only was I still being haunted by the horrors of that night, I also got to feel like a total twat for being nice to the prick. 

I shiver at the very thought of that night.  Timmy’s dad got enlisted.  The User had raised him a little later than he strictly should have, so there were some wasting ‘issues’ that needed taken care off.  They called a Healer and that was that; one more dead guy drafted into the Guard.  I never did see Frankie again.  Not that I’d ever want to, now that I knew.

The line rumbled forward slowly.  I folded my arms.  Anything had to be better than that.  At least right now I still felt like myself, more or less.  If I was a little more limited in some ways and enhanced in others so be it, I was still me.  I still liked the same things.  I still just wanted to get through the day and come home to watch shit on TV and pull drunk girls in night clubs on the weekend.  Was that so much to ask?

Now free on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/347949

Also available at:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00EK0GUOQ

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK0GUOQ