Title: Dream Casters: Light
Author: Adrienne Woods
Series: Dream Casters (Book 1)
Genre: YA Paranormal
Publisher: Fire Quill Publishing
Release Date: May 28 2015
Edition/Formats Available In: eBook
Blurb/Synopsis:
Mr. Sandman, send me a dream, ta da da da.....Seventeen year old Chasity Blake knows the Sandman is just a silly children's story parents tell their children to get them to sleep. At least she thought it was, until the day a mysterious, light golden sand appeared in her hands during a high school prank that went horribly wrong. A sand that has the power to send anyone it touches into a deep, sound sleep.
Fearing she had lost her mind, Chasity soon discovers the shocking truth of her heritage- she is a Dream Caster. Chasity was never supposed to be raised on the Domain, or what humans call Earth and she is forced to return to her true birth place, Revera – the world of Dreams.
However, in Revera there is no balance between good, the Light Casters, and darkness, the Shadow Casters, and Chasity is caught square in the middle. She soon learns that there is no place for anyone containing both the light and the darkness within them, and the shocking truth that if anyone in Revera ever discovered her shadow self, Chasity would be thrown into the Oblivion – the world of Nightmares.
Dreams are always more than they seem, and this time Chasity is going to discover just how different they can be.
Book Links
Excerpt
Crap, crap, crap,” were the only words that left my mouth as I took each painful step. Rollins knew just how to give ballet lessons that were straight from Nick’s pit. A stabbing pain ran up my calf and I had to stop as it went into a spasm. It should teach me to be late for class.
If it hadn’t been for Clare Bean, yip, her surname was Bean which led to plenty of teasing when she was little, I would’ve been on time. I would’ve had that extra ten minutes to stretch.
We had always been friends, Clare and I, since we were crawling around in diapers. Her house was a couple of houses down from mine and our moms were all too happy to bring us over for play dates. But since Ass and Abs had come into the picture, Taylor Winchester, Clare had gone all gaga and friendship didn’t seem to mean a thing to her anymore.
At first he hadn’t been too bad. He’d always had a thing for Clare but a month ago at his party, we were sort of trapped in the basement alone for a couple of minutes and he’d declared his ‘undying love and affection’ to me. Me, Chasity Blake, or just Chas as my friends call me, let me rephrase, my friends used to call me, as I’d rejected his affection, using finger quotes. Every girl my age knew what guys, especially the once that looked like Ty, meant when they declared their affection to you.
Clare was my best friend, what else was I supposed to do. I’d thought the idiot would feel like stinky feet and forget about it, but no, he thought that I should be taught a lesson, and told Clare that I’d made a move on him. She’d actually believed the dog.
Now for the past four weeks I’d had to endure their humiliation on a daily basis. First it was the posters on every locker with guys names crossed out. The entire baseball team from what it looked like, and the heading was Chasity Blake’s To Do List.
It was so lame, but coming from her, it hurt. It hurt a lot.
I thought everyone would forget about that in a week, but they didn’t and more rumors were added on.
Then came the exploding paint in my locker. I struggled to get the red paint out of my hair and had walked around with it for an entire week. My mom almost had a heart attack though, acted all strange and was ready to pack up and leave.
Today, they locked me in the girl’s bathroom. I crawled out the window, which wasn’t easy, and that was why I was late today.
Still, I tried to ignore it, even though it came from my best friend. Standing up to them would only cause more shit.
As I kept walking the fork in the road came nearer. One path led through the city. Five traffic lights with many twist and turns flashed though my head. The other road led past the lake. No traffic lights and it was a shorter route, but my mother disliked me taking those. Still today was the perfect day to make an exception.
I chose the lake and started to think about my crappy situation again and the regret of telling Mom not to pick me up from ballet had really started to bite me in the ass. Literally, it was like a tiny stabbing jolts of pain on my bum that ached with every step I took.
The next couple of years of school would probably suck if there wasn’t an end to Clare’s pranks soon and my father, sorry, step-father, Tim “the military man” Swanson, wasn’t going to move just because of the social life epidemic I was experiencing.
I never understood why Mom had married him. There wasn’t a time that I couldn’t remember Tim not being in our lives, but she was so different from him. She was a free spirit, loved to paint and for some reason she had a thing about dreams. She’s always asked me, since I was little, what I dreamt about the night before. It was creepy to people that didn’t know my mom but it didn’t bother me much.
Tim was easy to sum up. It was always YES SIR! and NO SIR! although he didn’t like the NO very much, and loved the HOW HIGH DO YOU WANT ME TO FREAK’N JUMP type of thing. Our relationship never used to be like that, but the older I got, the harder he became on me. Mom stood up for me a lot though, but I hated that they ended up fighting over stupid things I didn’t really want to do.
So lately my relationship with the only dad I knew was everything except the relationship a father and daughter should have.
Other family, I don’t have them. It was always just Tim and her.
As I was pondering my lack of family, something to the left caught my eye. It was parked right in front of the lake and my entire body felt as if someone had pulled a plug and let all the air out. It was Ty’s pick up, and I knew who else would be with him inside it.
When noises from Derek Benson came, I knew it wasn’t just the two of them, but the entire freak’nfootball team. They sometimes came here after practice and right now, I wished that I’d taken the other stupid road.
I watched as Clare’s figure jumped off his truck. She wasn’t as tall or as lean as me, thanks to the Asian blood that flowed through me, but she was not chubby either. She was medium built, not that there was anything wrong with it.
Here we go!
“Oh look, if it isn’t the baseball team’s slut,” Clare shouted loudly and everyone turned and laughed. If these were strangers that did this, it would’ve been different, but they weren’t; they used to be my friends. We used to laugh together, made jokes at the table and even pass notes around in class, even Nichole, she used to make up the rest of our little trio, had her nose in a teen magazine and pretended that nothing was about to happen.
I knew I should’ve just walked away, but today was different. I was tired, I ached from head to toe, I was in my freak’n tutu still, I’d just pulled my pants over my leotard and exchanged my ballet shoes for sneakers. I really didn’t have the time for her little charades of insecurity.
“The baseball team! Really? Now we know who has all the intellectual stem cells between the two of us,” I said and carried on walking.
“And who has all the grace and beauty,” Clare chirped.
“And also a shallow mind.” I couldn’t help myself. This is what happened when I started. It was like my mouth had its own passageway straight to my brain and I couldn’t do anything to switched it off.
“Oh, yeah, shallow minded. At least I know what loyalty means, bitch.”
I laughed again. “Loyalty. Can you even spell it, Clare?” Instant regret jumped through my core. Hurt rose briefly in Clare’s eyes but vanished just as fast. She was Dyslexic and I had been helping her with words ever since we were just tiny little things running around.
“I know how to spell slut, bitch, and skank.”
“Well, sorry to burst your bubble, sweetheart. I never did anything with Taylor, but wait, I tried to tell you that, and you still believed the son of a bitch.”
Bonus Excerpt
A mixture of cologne over powered me as the four guys stood really close to me. Their hands touching my arms and clothes.
Then I saw the grit in my hands again. It was soft, not like sand, and it had a light golden color to it.
At once the slow motion stopped and I threw a handful of the stuff, hitting Mark full in the face. He crouched and tried to get it out his eyes. I felt more sand in my hand and Jake was next. I didn’t know where it came from or how any of this was even possible, but right now that didn’t matter. As I threw a handful at each and every one of them, a refill was waiting patiently in my palm.
Derek was next and before I knew it, all the boys were coughing and crouching down. Then one by one they fell over, in a fetus position with eyes closed and soft snores coming from their lips.
Clare and Ty ran to the guys and crouched down. Ty felt for a heartbeat, but from the sound coming from their lips I knew they were still alive. I waited for men with cameras to jump out from behind the trees, yelling GOT YOU or something but it didn’t happened.
The fear on both Ty and Clare’s faces were real.
“What did you do?” Ty yelled.
“Nothing they didn’t deserve!” I yelled back hoping he would just back the hell off.
“You’re a freak!” Clare yelled, and stormed at me. More sand accumulated in my hand, but to me, she was still my best friend, one whose mind had been closed by the idiot that was busy running away.
I opened my palm and let the grit fall to the floor. A breeze picked it up and blew it softly into Clare’s face.
She stopped in her tracks, give a huge yawn and lay down on the ground.
Was she sleeping?
I looked at my hands. The grit was gone, there weren’t even traces of it inside my palm, nothing made sense.
“Just go,” Nichole said as she crouched down next to Clare to investigate.
I stood still as a statue trying to process what was happening to me.
“Chasity!” Nichole yelled again. “Go!”
I looked down at Nichole. My legs finally started to move into the direction of home, and grabbed my backpack that had fallen on the turf.
I looked down at Nichole. My legs finally started to move into the direction of home, and grabbed my backpack that had fallen on the turf.
I reached the city of Chicago fast and almost ran into a police office that was chatting to one of the waiters. Guilt over what I’d just done was evident on my face so I ran in another direction.
“Hey, you there, stop!” He yelled.
I didn’t listen and he chased me for a couple of blocks but he had probably had one too many donuts on a daily base and couldn’t keep up. I took so many turns down back alleys that when I finally stopped I had no idea where I was.
I breathed hard, trying to catch my breath and looked back at my hands. There was still no trace of the grit. It had just vanished. My heart beat fast again and cold sweat dripped from my temple as flashes of ogre-like bodies, almost the entire football team, falling down right after I threw the grit at them came to mind. Coach was not going to like this, and how was I going to explain any of it to anybody?
What the hell did I just do? I glanced at my hands one more time. What the hell was happening to me?
Author Information
Adrienne Woods was born and raised in South Africa, where she still lives with her husband and two beautiful little girls. She always knew she was going to be a writer, but it only started to really happen about four years ago. In her free time―if she gets any because moms don’t really have free time―she loves to spend it with friends, whether it’s a girl’s night out, or just watching a movie. She’s a very chilled person. Her writing career started with Firebolt, book one in the Dragonian series. There will be four books in total, including a further two to three books, which will be stories that take place within the Dragonian series. Her other series, Dream Casters, will be released mid-2015. She also writes in different genres, and her woman’s fiction, The Pregnancy Diaries, will be published under a pseudonym. And then, she has a paranormal series by the name of the Aswang series, which will consist of about ten novels. And if that wasn’t enough, there is another series, Guardians of Monsters, which will be released in 2016.
Thank You For Sharing Dream Casters: Light by Adrienne Woods :)
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