Title:
Ascenders Saga
Author:
CL Gaber | @CLGaber
Ascenders: High
School for the Recently Departed (Ascenders #1)
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2mI4Him
Paperback: http://amzn.to/2mw8V02
Is this Hell or is this High School?
THE ASCENDERS Book Saga Takes You to the In-between Where Teens
Who Died Young Go On the Epic Adventure of an After-Lifetime
Walker Callaghan doesn't know what happened to her. One minute she
was living her teenage life in suburban Chicago...and the next minute, she was
in a strange place and in a brand new school with absolutely no homework, no
rules, and no consequences.
Walker Callaghan, 17, is dead.
She doesn't go to heaven or hell. She lands at The Academy, a
middle realm where teenagers have one thing in common: They were
the morning announcement at their high schools because they died young.
These high school kids are now caught in a strange “in-between”
zone where life hasn’t changed very much. In fact, this special teen
limbo looks a lot like life in a quaint Michigan town complete with jocks,
popular girls and cliques. "There are even cheerleaders in
death," Walker observes. It's not a coincidence that the
music teacher is a guy named Kurt who "used to have this band." The
drama teacher, Heath, is crush worthy because back in his life, he starred in
some superhero movie.
Principal King explains the rules -- there are none. Why? You
can't die twice.
There is no homework.
No tests.
No SATS.
You're just there to learn because the human brain isn't fully
formed until you're 24.
By the way, you can't get hurt physically, so race your Harley off
that hillside. But falling in love is the most dangerous thing you can do
...because no one knows how long you'll stay in this realm or what's next.
"Losing someone you love would be like dying twice,"
Walker says.
Walker Callaghan has just arrived at the Academy after a
tragic car accident. “Is this hell or is this high school?” she asks.
She finds out her new life is a bit of both as she falls in love
with tat-covered, bad boy Daniel Reid who is about to break the
only sacred rule of this place. He's looking for a portal to return
back to the living realm.
He needs just one hour to retrieve his younger brother who
strangely never arrived at The Academy. Bobby is an Earth Bound
Spirit, stuck at a plane crash site that took both of their
lives as their rich father piloted his private jet nose-first into a cornfield
on Christmas Eve.
Walker loves Daniel and risks it all to go with him.
Have they learned enough to outsmart dangerous forces while
transporting a young child with them? Can their love survive the fragmented
evil parts of themselves that are now hunting them down as they try to find a
way back to the middle?
At the Academy, you learn the lessons of an after-lifetime.
Ascenders: Skypunch (Book
Two)
Paperback: http://amzn.to/2mh68Hf
In the Midst—a place for those who die
young—there are no rules except one.
And Walker Callaghan, dead at seventeen, just broke it. She
briefly revisited her earthly life
and the punishment is
eternal. Longing for her rebel love interest, Daniel Reid, Walker
finds an ally in Cass, whose attraction to her is as alive as he is. “Life
is short,” he tells her. “I’m banking on eternity. With you.”
In the second book of the Ascenders Saga, a
realm-jumping journey takes Walker and Daniel back to life again when they
search for something buried in history. They team with students from
several other schools in the middle realm including a place for
teens born with oddities. It’s home to the Claires . . . beautiful,
ruthless, and quite dead seventeen-year-old quads who each have a
different clairvoyant gift.
Can Walker survive another adventure of
an afterlife-time—or will she find herself on the downside of eternity?
Ascenders
Text Copyright © 2017 CL Gaber
All Rights Reserved
Now that
it was absolutely dark, I felt like the world had faded to inky black. I
didn’t
have any idea where we were walking, but knew I had to get home before my
mother
became frantic and called the cops, which would be mortifying in a new town.
“So, how
long have your parents been gone?” I asked, sliding along and breathing
not-so-heavily,
while thinking that maybe his mother and father had a time-share in
Miami or
Palm Springs during this time of the year and had just snuck away for the
weekend or
even dumped the kids on him for a week.
“How long
have they been gone?” Daniel pondered out loud. His laugh was
beyond
sarcastic; it was vicious. “They’ve been gone years, months, and days. Who
cares
about
them? I certainly don’t.”
Of course,
he was kidding. Parents didn’t take vacations from their four children
for years.
It was called child abandonment and there were laws. Wait, maybe his parents
were
in jail for breaking the law. Embezzlers? Ponzi scheme? My
journalistic mind was
in
overdrive. “So, it’s just the four of you kids in the house? For years. Home
alone.” I
said with
a little laugh. “Obviously, that was a bad joke.”
“No joke.
It’s just us four—we’re a family. Intact. For the most part,” said the
David
Beckham look-a-like with the short dark hair and steel gray eyes, quickly
walking
ahead
again. He really didn’t want to get into it now.
Intact?
I thought. Now this was really getting
interesting. I knew he was the
exacting
type, and his choice of words was deliberate.
My next
question would have to wait.
In what
seemed like an instant, my back foot caught on a large fallen tree branch
and I fell
forward with all my body weight. Crashing hard onto my hands and knees, I
cried out,
but I wasn’t in any real pain. Before I could stand up, I slipped again until
my
stomach
slammed against the surface of the thickly iced-over pond. The cracking sound
was like
thunder. Then, in what felt like a sickening surge of broken glass and rushing
water, the
ground suddenly ceased to exist. I didn’t have time to scream as I dropped into
the dark,
lifeless, icy chill of wintery water.
I braced
for the first slap of bitter freeze, instantly calling up some stupid fact
from
science class at Kennedy High where we learned that Titanic survivors described
hitting
the freezing ocean water as thousands of tiny knives stabbing every inch of
their
bodies.
I expected
excruciating pain, but there was none. There was just numbness as I
entered
the earliest stages of being converted to ice.
Resistance
was only natural and I fought hard as my hands flailed through the
water
trying to keep my head above the murky freeze, but it was pointless. The water
was
hungry
that night and my thrashing almost made a game out of its impending conquest.
It
only took
a second or two of my desperate survival dance for the lake to swallow me
whole.
Daniel
must have heard the crack and he stopped in place. Slowly, he turned
around as
I struggled to pop up again, but by putting up a fight I only succeeded in
making it
worse. As my body was being carried under the heavy sheet of ice in an
involuntary
dance, I could see Daniel above, the soles of his black boots carefully
following
my route as he calmly watched me drown.
In a way,
it was fascinating to watch him ever so gradually shuffle along as my
hands
desperately reached from under my new icy roof for the bottom of his boots. The
only thing
that separated us was about five solid inches of deadly winter soup. By the
time he
found me in an even darker spot where the lake mingled with several dead,
embalmed
trees, all he could see from under the thick coating was my face looking up at
him,
frozen in horror. He saw my pouty mouth almost kissing the ice and frantically
trying to
say one word to him.
“Help!” I
mouthed.
I gulped
down murky green water, ingesting long tentacles of lifeless leaves and
thick
clumps of sludge-dirt, and it all slid easily into my lungs while he just
stood there.
He.
Stood. There.
Frantically,
I maneuvered away from the spot by the trees, which made it worse
because
now I was pinned under even thicker ice, my milky-white face pressed up
against
eight to ten inches of immovable crystals.
Casually,
Daniel walked to where I was wildly waving my arms underneath the
water.
When I looked up now, he was a hazy dark blur that made me suddenly dizzy.
That’s
when I shut my eyes to wait for the inevitable.
But I
didn’t black out. Long minutes passed, my eyes sprung open, and I
continued
to push upward again as the water became midnight black. For some reason I
was still
alive, but I still couldn’t free myself from this wintry prison.
My mind
raced. How much time had passed? How much time could pass before I
would
be brain-dead? How much time before I died?
Daniel
still stood above the ground and calmly watched me struggle. “To hell
with
this,” he finally said, loud enough for me to hear him under the ice. Was he
telling
me to stop
struggling and just accept that I lost?
After
another endless minute passed, he shook his head and, though apparently
talking to
himself, said even louder, “Okay, enough . . . but you need to know.”
Kicking through
a thinner spot of ice, he made a small hole and then pummeled it
into a
bigger passage with those clomping boots. Reaching down into the crack, he
offered me
a strong hand and a tat-covered, muscular arm. Somehow through the dark
water, I
saw human fingers moving and grabbed them like they were my only lifelines,
which is
exactly what they were to me.
All it
took was one big hoist and I was in his arms, pressed body-to-body up
against
him, soaking wet, freezing cold, and mad as hell.
With my
right hand, that had absolutely no feeling in it, I slapped him squarely
across the
jaw as hard as possible. When he didn’t budge much, I slapped him again,
which made
my hand tired, but it didn’t hurt. When I attempted to punch his face, he
grabbed my
hand in a firm way that signaled we weren’t going another nine rounds.
“Easy
there, tiger,” he said with a smirk that made those soft eyes twinkle. “I
guess
you’re a fan of the Rocky movies.”
“Why . . .
you bastard . . . why . . . you didn’t even try to save me,” I sputtered,
but I
wasn’t really coughing and certainly my brain was perfectly fine. For a split
second,
I counted
to five backward. Again, it was amazing that my mind was still functioning.
Maybe the
water was cold enough to save me. Is that how it worked?
“I saw
you. You were just standing there! Watching! Watching me die!” I
screamed,
shoving him again. This time, I took him by surprise and he landed butt-first
in
a pile of
snow.
Calmly, he
stood up, lurched forward, and grabbed both of my arms, holding me
against
his rock-hard chest until I stopped struggling and gave up the idea of trying
to
knock his
block off. He held me tightly like he was protecting me from some danger
worse than
what just happened. Tears formed in my eyes and I began to touch my arms
and then
tested my breathing, which was perfectly normal. He still refused to let go.
Big
white
puffs of my breath filled the dark sky and I watched them evaporate slowly like
little
clouds. Then I looked up.
“Why
aren’t I dead?” I said in an anguished voice.
Daniel
took a deep breath, carefully released me, and then answered slowly.
“Because,
baby, you can’t die twice,” he said.
C.L. Gaber is the author of the ASCENDERS SAGA including
"ASCENDERS: High School of the Recently Departed" (Book One) and a
ASCENDER: SKYPUNCH (Book Two). C.L. is also the co-author of JEX MALONE.
She is an entertainment journalist who interviews Hollywood's
A-listers for the New York Times wire and several other publications. Daniel
Day-Lewis and Bruce Springsteen are two of her favorites! C.L. lives in Nevada
with her husband Ron, daughter Sabrina and two unruly dogs.
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