A Devil in Daylight
The Devil in Miss Drake’s Class, Book
Two
Marcus Damanda
Evernight Teen, 163 pages
Horror/romantic elements
16+ due to violence
and adult situations
Synopsis
“You
will account for what you did to Audrey.”
After three months in the suicide prevention wing of
St. George’s, Audrey Bales is finally coming home. Enrolled at a new school,
she plans to reinvent herself with a new look, new friends, and a second chance
to be just like everyone else. But the kids who drove her over the edge aren’t
through with her yet.
And one of her new friends has an agenda all his own.
“You,
and all the others.”
During the day, the halls of Battlefield High
will echo with their screams.
“It
will never stop.”
And at night, their screams will be silenced.
“Until
one of you ends it.”
Buy Now
Excerpt
Audrey watched the knife go in. Alex’s Swiss Army
knife, from Scouts.
That’s right, sis, Alex’s ghost
said. You’re doing it. Good girl.
Blood welled up from her wrist, at first in bubbles
and droplets, then in a line.
Ignore the pain. Block it out. Deny it, like it’s
not even there.
And it wasn’t. Weird. This was supposed to hurt.
Her reflection in the computer screen showed black
hair. And that, too, was weird. She hadn’t had black hair in months. Not since
her first days in the hospital.
Nor was she supposed to be
seeing him. She’d beaten him—banished him.
She had to saw to break the vein. A small, red jet
squirted over her keyboard.
On the screen, Val—her one-time best friend—was
reaching out to her. Audrey? Audrey, don’t be dumb. Come on.
Alex stopped talking, stopped coaching. From behind,
he held on to her shoulders and squeezed.
She still had the strength to use the knife again,
going down from the wrist. There was no pain, after all. She had the strength
for that and for one more thing.
She set down the knife in a puddle of her own blood,
then picked up her cell phone and took a picture, even as her wrist
squirted again.
She hooked the phone to a USB cable and to
the computer. She posted the picture, unhooked it, and let it drop. It
clattered off the side of the desk and onto the floor, but Audrey didn’t even
notice.
She tried to put her chin in her right hand. She
wanted to watch the responses. See what Val thought. See
what Maggie thought.
Maggie, who had started all of this. Maggie, who had
ruined Audrey’s life because she’d thought Audrey had been ogling her in the
locker room at school. Spoiled, rich little Maggie Lassiter, with the angel
earrings—it had been those Audrey had been staring at—and the
countless followers that Maggie called her friends. But it hadn’t been enough.
No, she had to steal Audrey’s friend, Valerie Mills.
Her only friend….
Putting her chin in her hand didn’t quite work out.
Her elbow slipped in the blood on her desk. She felt her face hit the hard
wooden corner of the desk on her way to the floor.
****
But instead of hitting the floor, Audrey sat up in
her own bed, awake and breathing hard and holding her left wrist with her right
hand.
She looked… scarred, but whole.
Her parents had purged her bedroom nearly to
emptiness, but her computer was still there, a shadow near the window.
Audrey kicked her legs over the side of the bed and
went to it, powered on, and thumbed the monitor. And, amazingly, she yawned,
even as her heart began to settle back toward its normal speed and rhythm.
She found her water bottle and Geodon, and checked
her clock as the computer slowly hummed to life. Yep, close enough. She took
her pill.
Taking a breath, she tried to access her Twitter
account.
Blocked.
Instagram, next.
Blocked.
Facebook.
Blocked.
She smiled, rather sleepily. Everything was still
normal. She’d just had to be sure.
Sunlight began to peek tentatively through her
window. Audrey set her chin in her right hand and waited for it.
Daylight could not come soon enough.
****
Alastair Hutchinson lay flat on his back on top of
his perfectly made bed, but he did not sleep. Had not slept.
Never slept.
He watched the sunrise.
We should be looking, said one of the voices that
lived inside of him. We’re wasting time.
“Why look?” he asked. “There’s an unsettled account
at the school we’ll be attending. I’ve found everything we need.”
Audrey is not an unsettled account, the voices
protested. She’s alive.
“I’m not talking about her,” Alastair said. “You
haven’t been paying attention. There’s another.” He laughed, softly. “Three
days from now, we’ll be sitting in her first period class.”
But not as Alastair Hutchinson, he thought. No.
As a name she’ll recognize.
The host stirred. We need to move the line,
said another voice. This isn’t helping.
“I’ve got that covered too,” said Alastair. “You
won’t have to wait long. Trust me.”
Meet Marcus Damanda
Marcus Damanda lives in Woodbridge, Virginia with
his cat, Shazam. At various times throughout his life, he played bass guitar
for the garage heavy metal band
Mother’s Day, wrote
for The Dale City Messenger, and published editorials in The Potomac News and The
Freelance Star. Currently, while not plotting his next foray into fictitious
suburban mayhem, he spoils his nieces and nephews and teaches middle school
English.
Find Marcus Damanda here
Website: http://www.marcusdamanda.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarcusDamanda
Giveaway
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Guest Spot for Devil in a Daylight
Topic One: Author Easter Eggs: When Fiction and the
Real World Collide
Any time I draft a story, as with any writer, a lot of
myself gets mixed up in the pages: places I’ve been, people I’ve known,
personal experiences. Much of it’s subconscious, and I realize it later. But I
do quite a bit of “egg-dropping” on purpose, too, as a tip of the hat to my
friends who loyally read my stories. When these things stick out like a
cigarette vending machine at a toy store, or don’t do anything to the tale
other than slow it down, they get edited out. Tricia Kristufek caught two of
them in the last round of edits … but I always manage to sneak a few through,
totally undetected.
My twelfth grade English teacher was Mrs. Drake. I
took the last name for Alastair, “Hutchinson,” from a teacher who helped me
change the bulb on my Smartboard at school—but we all call him “Hutch.” Both
THE FOREVER SHOW and THE DEVIL IN MISS DRAKE’S CLASS feature a front-office
secretary named “Jackie,” who, in real life, courageously holds down the front
lines at the school where I work.
Fairview is completely modeled after my hometown,
Woodbridge, Virginia. Anyone who lives there and reads my stuff will recognize
any number of places: the strip mall at Hunter Mills (Tackett’s Mill, in real
life), the county library (Chinn Library), the frozen over lake (our county reservoir)
…
But the most significant takeaway from my own
relatively quiet and pedestrian existence are the two high schools I’ve written
about: Fairview High and Battlefield Secondary School, both of which are
depicted as I remember Woodbridge Senior High School from when I graduated,
back in 1988. In those days, we had an “open-school” construct, meaning that
there were very few closed doors, and all the subject areas were allocated
their own “pods.” I remember walking past the science pod on my first day of
school, as a freshman, and hearing a chemistry teacher yell from beyond the
open door, “Put the cap back on! You’ll kill us all!”
I can still see the vast expanse of hallway—where
Audrey and Monica approach the volleyball banner in A DEVIL IN DAYLIGHT—leading
to open classrooms on either end. When we meet the ultimately skeevy Mr.
Downing in that same book, and a door closes, the silencing effect is
(hopefully) both unusual and claustrophobic. I deliberately made a big deal of
it. It fits with his character. If any teacher would have a door he could trap
kids behind, he’d be the one.
If I’m to be fully honest, the high school in THE
FOREVER SHOW, with its smoking court and roof access, is also Woodbridge Senior
High School, and Coach Macklin is Mr. Ross—and yes, he really did hang out on
that roof with binoculars to catch kids ditching class.
But A DEVIL IN DAYLIGHT, and the whole trilogy, has
more references and Easter Eggs than any book I’ve done before—because I
sneaked in a ton of material and ideas from my earlier books. Most notably, the
idea of a villain being able to become any insect he eats, at man size, is
something I first experimented with in a sci-fi story I wrote quiet a long time
ago called The Fractured Earth. Although that particular old book may be going
nowhere, the idea of being picked up and flown off in the clutches of a giant
wasp is just something I could not wholly abandon …
As for Audrey, the “Facebook Fifteen,” and most of the
kids who populate A DEVIL IN DAYLIGHT, they’re invented. They don’t live in my
real world, so far as I know, but I have allowed them to occupy it, rent-free, for
a while.
Thanks so much for hosting!
ReplyDelete