Book Excerpt: Destiny of the Departed Promo
Jamie Poole must stop the murder of hundreds of innocent people: A crime that happened almost 1500 years before her birth. An impossible request, and yet she saw no alternative but to figure out how to do it.
She grew up hearing the Voices of the Dead. Their primal rant, she said, clashed somewhere between a Gregorian chant and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on high speed. They begged, pleaded, and demanded she intervene. She’d tried to ignore them, but they refused to stop. They’d haunted her head and left her questioning her sanity.
“All this might sound strange—Booby Hatch strange even—but trust me. It’s real. Very real. Welcome to my life.”
Despite when these people died, Jamie knew them. They were Eliyana’s people. Several years ago, and before the Voices came, a twelve year-old Jamie and her dad had unintentionally resurrected Eliyana the Druidess. Everything changed when you resurrect a Druidess. In her defense that had been an accident. Since then Eliyana had returned to her people, vowing as she departed back in time, to rescue them. She’d learned details, including time and date, of a volcano that would destroy their island home. Confidently, she believed she could evacuate them before their island exploded.
Despite this knowledge, she’d failed.
Somewhere in her teens, Jamie came to realize why Eliyana failed. The Voices added another layer to their plea. Someone had crossed back and thwarted their rescue. They held firmly to the fact they shouldn’t have died in the explosion. It seemed odd that the Dead could know how they should have died—as if there were parallel worlds where something went wrong in one.
That someone had rewritten Time.
Despite the time span between the crime and when Jamie lived, they expected her to fix things leaving her feeling more than overwhelmed. Knowing who this “someone” was? That was easy.
Tristan.
Who Tristan was became a conundrum she failed to discern. No more than she understood what he hoped to accomplish by harming these people. At first she assumed the name was merely part of a catchy curse her dad said when he was angry. This was not the case. Her dad held a dark secret close to his chest. “It’s all connected—Dad, Tristan, Eliyana and her people, even me. I just don’t know how,” she said.
Once Tristan had visited her. He’d spoken to her often, sometimes trying to impersonate one of the Voices within the ranting chorus. In his oily smooth voice, he promised ominously all paths led to him.
Jamie wondered, “What sort of monster changes Time? Will I be equally a monster if I try to fix Time? If I am to help the Dead, I must travel to when everything happened. Voices of the Dead begged for help. I can no longer ignore them.”
Last summer during a supernatural storm, Jamie received a sword that existed outside time. Lumen was bestowed upon her to aid the Dead and protect her world from the wrong things crossing from the Otherworld. It would enable her to travel in time.
To save Eliyana’s people, Jamie must risk everything.
No one is safe. Can Jamie reconcile with that as she tries not to rip the fabric of Time? The weight of responsibility becomes more than she can bear.
Jamie grows into her own as she learns to wield the otherworldly sword. She will make mistakes. The lessons will be critical but costly.
Is she prepared to live with that?
Destiny of the Departed is available internationally on Amazon, Kobo, and GooglePlay
