THE TRUTH WILL SET THEM FREE
Brayelle Bates has always been a force of nature. Even as a child, Bray's wild and carefree spirit intimidated everyone around her. The only person who's ever truly understood her is her best friend, Elias Kline. Though every fiber of her being wants to stay with Elias forever, Bray can't bear the thought of him discovering her agonizing history. She's done everything she can to keep him at arm's length, including moving away. But their undying bond was too strong a pull to deny, and Bray couldn't survive without him. Now she's back home with Elias, and things have never felt more right-until one night changes everything.
Elias vowed never to be separated from Bray again. So when she decides to flee in a desperate attempt to escape her fate, Elias knows he must go with her. As the two try to make the most of their circumstance, taking up with a reckless group of new friends, Elias soon realizes there's a darkness driving Bray he can't ignore. Now in order to save her, he'll have to convince Bray to accept the consequences of their reality-even if it means losing her.
Brayelle Bates has always been a force of nature. Even as a child, Bray's wild and carefree spirit intimidated everyone around her. The only person who's ever truly understood her is her best friend, Elias Kline. Though every fiber of her being wants to stay with Elias forever, Bray can't bear the thought of him discovering her agonizing history. She's done everything she can to keep him at arm's length, including moving away. But their undying bond was too strong a pull to deny, and Bray couldn't survive without him. Now she's back home with Elias, and things have never felt more right-until one night changes everything.
Elias vowed never to be separated from Bray again. So when she decides to flee in a desperate attempt to escape her fate, Elias knows he must go with her. As the two try to make the most of their circumstance, taking up with a reckless group of new friends, Elias soon realizes there's a darkness driving Bray he can't ignore. Now in order to save her, he'll have to convince Bray to accept the consequences of their reality-even if it means losing her.
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J.A. Redmerski, New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling
author lives in North Little Rock, Arkansas with her three children,
two cats and a Maltese. She is a lover of television and books that push
boundaries and is
a huge fan of AMC's The Walking Dead.
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Top five authors that have inspired you.
2. Neil Gaiman
3. Cormack McCarthy
4. JK Rowling
5. Stephenie Meyer
SONG OF THE FIREFLIES
When I made my way back to the top, I found Bray wasn’t sitting
near the edge of the ridge where I had left her I moved farther out into the
clearing with our blankets draped over one shoulder.
“Bray?” I said, looking around.
I brushed it off for a second, thinking she was probably just
taking a piss behind a tree somewhere, and I set our blankets on the ground.
But then I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I walked quickly toward the edge and looked over. My heart started
to bang against my rib cage. I peered down as far as my sight could penetrate
the darkness, but took a step back upon realizing that if she had fallen there
was no way I’d be able to see from way up here.
She had to be somewhere around close by. She had to be.
“Bray?” I called out again. “Where the hell did you go?”
Still no answer.
Panic set in quickly. I stood there as still and as quiet as I
could for several long seconds in case she was coming through the woods, but I
heard nothing. I arranged both hands around my mouth and shouted, “BRAY!” and
my voice echoed through the wide-open space. But still nothing. I felt sick to
my stomach. She wouldn’t have left like that way out here. And if she did, I
would’ve seen her on the path coming down as I was making my way back up.
I ran toward the tree line, searching for any sign of her, for
another path she might have taken. I refused to believe that she had fallen off
the edge.
Just as I noticed another path through the woods that seemed to
head south and I started to go toward it, I heard footfalls in the leaves. I
didn’t wait to see if it was her, I ran blindly straight into the woods. A skinny
branch slapped me across the forehead on my way, but I didn’t stop.
Bray and I nearly crashed into each other.
“Shit, baby! Where the hell did you go? Scared
the hell
out of me!” I started to pull her into a hug, but something about her was off
and I stopped. She didn’t respond or even raise her head to look at me.
“Are you all right?”
I took her hands into mine. Hers were shaking. Her whole body was
shaking.
I cupped her face in my palms and raised her head so that she’d
look at me. She was crying, and something in her eyes…I couldn’t place it, but
it haunted me. I wondered if she even knew I was standing right in front of
her. Her hair was messy, with pieces of leaves stuck within a mass of strands.
Dirt was smeared across her left cheek. She looked like she’d been in a fight.
I touched her split lip, where a thin line of blood glistened near
the corner. “Bray, you’re scaring me. What happened to you?” I shook her gently
and then more aggressively when she still didn’t respond. “What happened? Talk
to me!”
Her lips trembled and more tears seeped from the corners of her
eyes. And then as if a floodgate had been opened, she started screaming through
her tears, “It was my fault! Elias! Oh my God!”
“What happened?” I roared, scared for her and for myself, my heart about to burst through my chest.
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“What happened?” I roared, scared for her and for myself, my heart about to burst through my chest.
Excerpt #2:
It would seem that it was too early
for Elias and me to stop being afraid and on edge about what happened. I admit
it. But really what we were doing was looking for any way out of that mind-set,
because if we didn’t, it would’ve killed us. We just wanted to live life. And,
well, it’s easy to forget about the significant things when you find other
things to cover it up. Partying quickly became our means of salvation, the way
out that we longed for. We learned fast how to replace misery and fear with
happiness and enjoyment, and with drugs and alcohol. We couldn’t afford much
ourselves, and the last thing we wanted to do was waste what little money we
did have on shit like that, but we got by with freebies usually. A joint passed
around a room. A group of partygoers already lit on alcohol, offering to buy
the table the next round. And occasionally guys would buy me drinks when they
thought I was alone.
Our first night hitting the bars
and nightclubs in Florida was the first domino to fall in a swirling maze of
hundreds of dominoes.
And every fucking one of them would
later prove to be a bigger mistake than the last.
“Hey, that’s our song!” I said over
the music bumping through the speakers inside the club.
I grabbed Elias by the wrist and
tugged. He slid down from the bar stool and hit the dance floor with me. He had
always been a hot dancer, and it helped that he had the body for it. But
usually, it took a few drinks for him to loosen up enough to dance in public.
He wasn’t afraid of it; he just never cared for it much.
Even that started to change with
our new lifestyle.
“Since when did this become our
song?” he shouted over the music. I danced my way around, putting my back to
him, raising my arms up and around both sides of his neck.
He ground his hips against me from
behind, his fingers splayed against my thighs.
“Since that time at Matt’s party,
remember?”
The beat picked up, and his
grinding hips moved with it flawlessly. I about fucking died. The boy could
dance.
I danced back around, facing him
again, moving my upper body in a lithe, swaying motion against his.
“Oh yeah, I remember that night,”
he said, leaning toward my ear. “But if I recall, after we danced to it in
front of everyone, you left with Dane Weatherby.”
“Dane was just a friend,” I
countered. And he was just a friend. “I was his shoulder to cry on that night.
Nothing more. But you and me, we had the whole room. We owned it!”
Elias grinned and fit my hips in
the palms of his hands, his long fingers spread like claws as he grinded
against me some more.
He was so getting laid tonight.
“I guess we did, huh?” he said with
a grin.
Suddenly Elias snatched me forward,
his arm around my waist, and pulled me out of the path of a tipsy couple
barreling through the crowd.
“Oh, sorry about that, man!” the
guy said.
He was as tall as a tree and had
short brown hair buzzed around the back. He grabbed hold of a strawberry-blonde
woman’s elbow to keep her from falling over. She laughed and fell into his arms
on purpose. Her huge boobs bulged into view from the force of his arm, which he
held across her chest.
“I think I’ve had too much,” she
said, raising her wine cooler out in front of her and then happily taking
another drink.
The guy apologized again. And
again. I wondered if he was just too drunk to remember he had already gotten
that much out of the way.
“It’s all right,” Elias said, still
holding me around the waist. “No harm done.”
We started to walk away from the
dance floor and back toward the bar, but we only got halfway before the couple
came up behind us.
“I’ve never seen you in here
before,” the guy said.
“You must come here a lot, then,” I
said, still being pulled along by my fingers. “To remember every face in a
place this populated.”
A small part of me was worried he’d
seen my face on a Most Wanted poster somewhere. But it was just the paranoia
kicking in.
“We’re here every weekend,” the
girl said.
She never stopped smiling. Neither
of them did. They wore permanent, drunken smiles.
We finally made it back to the bar.
Elias put his hands on my hips and lifted me onto the stool. He then sat on the
empty stool next to me.
“I’m Anthony,” the guy introduced
himself. “And this is Cristina.” He smelled of musk cologne.
I started to show them the same
courtesy, but Elias jumped in a second before. “I’m John and this is my
fiancée, Julia.”
Fiancée? That certainly got my
attention. So much so that I had already forgotten the fake name he gave me.
“You live around here?” Anthony
probed. He leaned against the bar next to an empty bar stool rather than sit.
Cristina, who I assumed was his girlfriend, continued to use him as her
makeshift crutch.
“No, we’re from—”
“—Indiana,” Elias jumped in.
I narrowed my eyes at him secretly
from the side.
He softened his baby-blues, as if
to say, Sorry, babe.
Instant forgiveness. He was in the
right, though, because I had been about to say Georgia, just as I had been a
second away from telling them our real names.
I didn’t know if I’d ever get used
to this covert lifestyle of lies and highways and shitty motel rooms. But Elias
was with me, and that made it all OK.
READ the first 8 chapters of SONG OF THE FIREFLIES on Redmerski's Facebook: https://www.
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