New Sight

On Amazon

After succumbing to the sudden and terrifying urge to rip people’s eyes out of their sockets, 16-year-old Lysandra Blake finds herself tied down in a psych ward, convinced she’s crazy. The doctors have no answers, and Lys is ready to give up when the mysterious Jeremiah Mason appears, telling Lys that she’s not insane—she’s addicted to a rare and deadly drug that she has no recollection of using. Mr. Mason offers to take her to his facility where he can treat her. Desperate yet suspicious, Lys agrees to go with Mr. Mason to his facility where she meets with a fellow addict, the tall and handsome Kamau. Together they discover that Mr. Mason may not have told them the truth about their condition—they’re thrown headfirst into a world of daunting powers that are not only unbelievable, they are dangerous.

Meet Lysandra Blake. Call her Lys, like bliss. 
(I sort of picture her looking like the lovely Emma Stone here)

At the beginning of New Sight, Lys finds herself strapped down in a psych ward with little to no hope in her life. Horrible things have happened to her—thus the psych ward—and she has no reason to carry on.

But she does.

Because giving up isn’t her style. She doesn’t flaunt it like a pair of 6” glittery red high heels, but she quietly sorts through her circumstances, grits her teeth and moves forward. Even if that means leaving her family and going off with a sketchy fellow named Jeremiah Mason who leaders her into even more trouble than she had originally stirred up.

Lys is like so many of the girls and women I know. She is awesome in her very own way.  A way that no one else can pull off. Lys can steer a motley crew of confused and traumatized teenagers she’s barely met out of danger and back on track.

Meet Kamau (he usually wears his shirt)

Kamau comes from Mozambique, and can squeeze water out of rocks, track foes through any terrain, eat bugs when the situation calls for it and has the table manners of a Jane Austin character. It doesn't take long for his eye to wander to Lys. In more way than one. Not to give too much away, but Kamau is very good at smelling rats.

Next is Brady

Brady is the youngest, as well as the geek of the bunch. Everything is a pop culture reference for him, but being from England, not everyone gets all of his jokes. Lys thinks he's adorable and likes to listen to his accent. Who wouldn't? Brady fancies himself a ladies man, but doesn't exactly have a soft touch.

Inez is our last crew member

It's kind of a rule that someone has to be grouchy, right? Well, Inez gets to be the angsty one. However, you can hardly blame her. She grew up poor, had to run away when she was young and now lives in a bit of Las Vegas that shouldn't even be inhabited. Lys is her polar opposite, and the two girls have their moments of, shall we say, animosity? Inez's little talent is talking boys into doing exactly what she wants, but not in the way you're thinking.

Note: I pulled these pictures off the web ages ago, so I don't have any credits for them. These are the faces (ish) that I wrote these characters with.

Here's a snippet from the novel. Creepy.

The memory filled Lys with shame, but it also reminded her why she'd agreed to go with Mr. Mason. She tried to ignore the rising feeling of panic and told herself that she had to do this.

     Mark continued to watch her. “You look nervous.”

     “Uh.” Lys didn’t know how to answer that. Nervous would mean that she would laugh a little too loudly at Mark’s jokes and say something stupid in reply. Considering right now she wanted to scream, cry and rip her wrists out of the handcuffs so she could jump out of a moving vehicle and escape into unknown woods Lys figured she was way past nervous.

     “Relax,” Mark said, “we’ve had meaner characters than you in here. We can handle it.” He exchanged a look with Ayden, and the other man nodded. “You’ll be feeling better in no time.”

     Whatever sedative they’d given her muted the Need, but her mind felt more alive than it had since she'd gone into the psych ward. Lys decided to try questions to distract herself.

     “Do you guys, uh, know what’s going to happen to me?”

     “We’ll let Mason explain that to you. He’s here at the hospital,” Ayden said in a soft voice.

     Hospital? Part of Lys still didn't believe in the supposed hospital lurking here in the backwoods of who knew where. She balled her hands into fists. Maybe her dad was right, maybe she should have held out for a different option.

     No. Mr. Mason believed her; he said he could help her. Lys would hold on to that until she knew otherwise. Her mind cradled the fragile hope, not wanting to let it fall and shatter into shards of nothing.

     “Here we go,” Mark said. He pointed out the front of the SUV.

     They came around a sharp corner, and Lys leaned forward, following Mark's gesture.

     Sure enough a hospital sat nestled in a clearing at the end of the road. Nothing big, just a two story, white building with a drop off spot. Three cars sat in the parking lot, not even filling it a quarter of the way. Mr. Mason stood outside the main doors.

     “What is this place?” Lys asked. A hospital in the middle of the woods? Secluded, small, off the beaten path. Creepy.

     “It used to be a privately run facility that treated people suffering from PTSD,” Ayden said, maneuvering the SUV toward the door. “Mostly for war veterans that couldn't get help anywhere else.”

     Old veterans? Lys' mind jumped to the guys she saw begging for money on street corners. Some of them had signs saying they were veterans. Their haunted expressions—their eyes that Lys knew had seen things that no person should have to see—made Lys shiver. Partly because she now wanted to see what they saw, and partly because she now felt like she’d just entered a horror movie. This sank below creepy. “So why do I have to detox here?”