Hey, I’m back with the first chapter from Storm Spells!
(This is Ran, Sarn’s son in case you forgot. Find us in the Curse Breaker series and also in this week’s preview.)
Last week, I brought you the first chapter of Rogue Spells. This week, I bring you chapter 1 of sequel, Storm Spells.
In case you missed it, the reading order for the stories based on our newsletter adventures goes as follows:
Story Arc #1: TALES OF A CURSE BREAKER IN NY TRILOGY
- Catch the Scribe
- Book Battles
- Rogue Characters
Story Arc #2: CURSE BREAKER’S COMPANION SERIES
- Dragon Spells
- Rogue Spells
- Storm Spells ← You are here if you were wondering
- Void Spells
You can get all 7 books or just the 5 brand new books as plain ebooks and/or paperbacks or get the pretty special editions. But you’d better hurry since the campaign ends on Feb, 5 at 8:10 am EST.
(We forgot to change the time to midnight before we launched the project. At least this time, we launched the campaign before sending our newsletter out. Baby steps, right?)
We still have no news about Amazon, and our publisher account is still terminated. The Alliance of Independent Authors requested an account review 3 weeks ago, but we have not heard anything yet. So our fingers are still crossed!
And now, let’s go to that preview!
Storm Spells
by Melinda Kucsera
Chapter 1: Not My World
When I opened my eyes, Papa cradled me in his arms.
“Are you all right?” Papa raked me with anxious green eyes that didn’t glow. The last time that happened, he lost his magic.
I squirmed until I could hug him. “I’m okay. Are you okay? Your eyes aren’t glowing.”
“Yes, but my magic doesn’t like this place.” Papa held me tight.
I relaxed. His magic wasn’t gone, just hiding. “Where are we?” I leaned my head on his shoulder as a door opened, and my scribe walked in.
“We’re at my office, but it’s not my office.” Melinda banged on the big table in the windowed room.
“I don’t understand. How can it be your office but not be your office at the same time?” Sometimes adults didn’t make sense until I asked questions. So I made sure to always ask a lot of questions as often as I could.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” Papa leaned his head against the huge window until it rattled in its case. He rose from the metal sill that had strange vents on its top and glared at the window like it offended him.
“You want proof?” Melinda walked over to the glass cabinet on the other side of the room and switched something on. The white wall changed to show an image of a computer screen, and Melinda walked through the projection.
“Do you see that?” She pointed at the numbers in the bottom corner of the screen.
But they didn’t mean anything to us. We didn’t keep track of the years in Shayari, just the months and seasons. Nothing else mattered.
“It says March 2018. All the computers in this office say that too, but it’s not 2018. In my world, the year is 2021, and we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.” She ran her fingers through her hair and then trudged to the cabinet and switched off the offending computer projection.
“If this isn’t your world, then where are we?” That was a more important question, and probably the one we needed to answer first. So of course I asked it. Adults weren’t always logical.
“This isn’t my world. It’s another Melinda’s world.” Melinda leaned against the wall opposite the windows.
“How do we return to your world?” Papa set me down without asking. His arms probably needed a break.
“We need to go back to the library. That’s where everything went wrong.” I hurried to the other side of the room when the windows rattled again.
What was going on out there? The wind howled as it battered the building again, and the windows rattled so hard they threatened to break. That probably wasn’t a good thing, but we were inside, so I ignored what was happening outside for now since it couldn’t get inside.
“How do we get there?” Papa dropped onto one of the big comfy leather chairs surrounding the table.
“I don’t know.” Melinda tugged on the bottom of her blue sweater. Where was her jacket? She lived in it for six months out of the year.
“But you invented the library. You must know how to reach it. Think harder.” Papa rested his hands on the big table and then removed them as if it burned him. The table was made of some kind of unnatural material that imitated wood, and his magic probably didn’t like it. It had an opinion about everything.
“We’re in a version of my world, but I don’t have any power here. I’m just a project manager who writes fantasy novels in my spare time. It’s just a hobby. I want it to be more than that, but I’m not good at marketing, or writing to market, or doing the things that will sell enough books, so I can write full time.” Melinda hung her head.
“What if we go to our world? Could we reach the library from there?” An idea formed in the back of my mind. It was crazy, and it would be an adventure in this wild weather, but it might just work. Let’s face it. Maybe that was better than nothing right now.
Papa would hate my plan, but he didn’t like anything that put me in danger.
“Yes, but I’ll need Sovvan. Where is she?” Melinda turned, but no one else had materialized in this conference room except us.
“She’s with the Wandering Poet,” Papa said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it. Since he said it, it must be true because he couldn’t lie. So that was one point in my plan’s favor.
“Then we know what we need to do.” Papa rose and didn’t object to my plan.
“What do we need to do?” Melinda turned as footsteps approached the conference room.
“We need to go to your apartment and hope the portal to our world is still there.” I clasped my scribe’s hand. It sounded simple enough, but we didn’t know what lay between this office building and her apartment.
“That might be a problem.” Papa pointed at a gray shape just visible in the rain lashing the multi-lane roads surrounding this building.
Lightning struck the woman standing in the middle of the road. She was probably another Melinda since we kept running into copies of her from other worlds. The windows rattled, and thunder grumbled as our simple plan fell apart.
***
Next week, I’ll bring you the first chapter of the sequel, Void Spells! Things get even crazier.
Melinda Kucsera - USA Today Bestselling Author of Epic Fantasy Adventures 