Category/Genre:
YA/Urban
Fantasy
Word
Count: 69,000
Pitch:
When a serial killer terrorizes St. Petersburg,
17-year-old Akira discovers strange links to a well-known Russian fairytale.
Now she must stop an immortal hell-bent on adding her soul to his collection
before he kills again.
Egg:
I would be a Faberge egg made of blood-red enamel. I don’t really
do sweets.
Excerpt:
When I was very small, my grandfather told me stories of Koschei
the Deathless.
He was trying to frighten me. They were the kinds of tales
villagers told children to keep them from wandering alone into the woods, the
Russian equivalent of Little Red Riding Hood. But just
as there was nothing scary about a wolf wearing a bonnet and bifocals, there
was nothing remotely frightening about my grandfather, so I paid little
attention to his stories.
“Solavushka,” he began (he had called me “little
nightingale” since I was an infant, when I kept everyone up all night with my
“singing”), “the thing you must know about Koschei the Deathless is that he
will not appear as a wicked old man with a long white beard, the way the
storybooks say. He will not take you to his castle to make you his wife.”
I nodded as I examined my grandfather’s long, wiry eyebrow
hairs, wondering why my grandmother didn’t trim them.
“Akira, are you listening?”
“Yes, Dedushka. I will make sure to stay away from
Koschei.”
“You are not listening, child,” my grandfather grumbled,
standing abruptly so I tumbled onto the floor. “How many times do I have to
tell you?” He shook his head as he stormed off into the kitchen for some of my
grandmother’s walnut oreshki.
“I met him when I was a young man,” he told me once, not long
before he died. “He had taken the form of a small girl, just a year or two
younger than you are now.”
“If he looked like a little girl, how did you know it was
Koschei?” I asked.
“Because I saw his teeth. Rows and rows, needle sharp, like a
shark. And he made a horrible noise, like an insect screaming. It was loud
enough to raise the dead.”
1 doz. nougat fill Choc. eggs
ReplyDeleteCocktail Bunny sneaks in and leaves 1 box of Caramel Eggs.
ReplyDelete3 boxes of caramel eggs
ReplyDelete