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.
"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’n football 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.”
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.
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