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Monday, September 15, 2014

PROLOGUE to "War Angel II: Where Angels Fear to Tread"

Much love to everyone that has read the first book of my "War Angel" Trilogy. Here's a little something from "War Angel II: Where Angels Fear to Tread" to wet you appetite as I work hard to finish writing the final book. I plan to finish up the storyline with a bang!" Enjoy.

Prologue


S
trange, unfamiliar hands held her down. She tried to escape their grip with limbs that were suddenly limp and useless. The overwhelming sensation of suffocating made her gasp for air as she felt as if all of the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the room. It felt like death. She opened her mouth to scream for help but no sound escaped her lips. She was powerless to stop whatever was happening to her. Sleep paralysis was the medical term used to categorize her current condition but she would disagree vehemently. What she felt was not the effects of a common sleep disorder caused by lack of rest, anxiety or stress. What she felt was a sinister, malevolent entity that very much wanted to do her harm. She had laid down to take a nap and now she was trapped. Her legs began to move but not because she had regained control of her body. Someone, or something forced her thighs to spread apart against her will. Suddenly, a small hand slipped inside her and the terror she felt for her own safety was replaced by fear for her baby. Sharp, agonizing pain forced Jahaira to finally wake up screaming, frightened and alone in the darkness of her bedroom. It felt as if someone was twisting and wringing out her insides like a wet towel.
The pain did not subside when she finally opened her eyes and she realized that she was having contractions weeks earlier than she was supposed to. The child in the big, round tummy she had grown to love over the past eight and a half months caused her a kind of pain that she had never known as it fought to be born. She slipped her hands between her legs and found that her nightgown, her panties and even her bed sheets were soaked. Her water must have broken when she was asleep but it was too soon. The baby wasn’t due yet. The king-sized bed seemed longer than a football field as she struggled to move over to the end of it from all the way in the middle of the mattress. Just as she tried to hang her feet over the edge to slip her feet into her slippers, another wave of crippling pain shot through her abdomen maliciously like menstrual cramps from hell. Doubled over in agony, she tumbled from the bed and onto the hardwood floor. Fortunately for her child, she landed on her knees and not her belly. Frantically, her fingers clawed at the top of her nightstand as she searched for her cellphone, only to discover that it was missing. 
“Olive!” she screamed, desperate for her live-in nursemaid to come to her aid.
Four more times she called out for help but no one  answered. There were only the echoes of her own voice throughout the house. With spasms tightening her lower back into knots, she somehow managed to get to her feet and stagger out of the bedroom. Out in the hallway, she used the walls for support as she walked barefoot to the staircase, praying that Olive was downstairs on the couch, maybe sleeping too heavily to have heard her cries for help. At the top of the stairs, she gripped the bannister so hard that her knuckles turned white as another contraction ripped through her lower body. If it had hit her on her way down, she might have taken a nasty tumble that would have probably ended with her dead at the bottom of the steps from a broken neck. She grit her teeth and moaned until it passed, then hurried down as fast as she was able.
“Olive, where are you?” Jahaira called out again as she became even more alarmed when she saw that Olive wasn’t on the couch having her routine, late afternoon snooze. The television was on but no one was watching it.

Again, the pain returned with a vengeance, forcing her to double over and scream. She tried breathing like the doctors had taught her to keep from hyperventilating. Contractions so close together meant that the baby was coming soon and she was not ready. This was not how it was supposed to be and it was certainly not the way she and Lenox had planned it. Every step forward was an ordeal but she had to get to the telephone in the kitchen. A journey of just a few feet seemed more like a thousand miles but she eventually made it. She snatched the receiver from its base and clicked frantically like a madwoman when there was no dial tone. She would have screamed again if she hadn’t already been gritting her teeth in agony. Sweat trickled down her temples and beaded up on her forehead as she tried to figure out what to do next. If she didn’t get help soon, both she and the baby could die. The nearest neighbors weren’t very near at all and if the trek to her own kitchen had been so strenuous, there was no way that she would be able to make it that far on foot. Feeling faint and light-headed, Jahaira firmly planted both hands on the marble countertop next to the sink in order to steady herself. After she recovered from her brief dizzy spell, she raised her head and noticed something very disturbing through her kitchen window, at the edge of the tree-line just beyond the backyard, close enough to terrify her but far away enough to make her doubt her own eyes, she thought she spotted the pale faces of her twin aunts in the shadows. That’s impossible, she thought. She and Lenox had moved all the way out there to be safe. They had been careful and there was no way those two should have been able to find them. That’s when she heard a loud crash at her front door as something began to split the wood. She was about to scream when a hand reached around from behind her and covered her mouth.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from "War Angel II: Where Angels Fear to Tread."


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