By Yes, you read that right. Starting on 11/2/16 and going through 11/8/16, the Kindle edition of Forever is on sale for $0.99 (Amazon US) and £0.99 (Amazon UK). If you haven’t read it yet, now is your chance!
Just click here for US and click here for UK!
And to entice you along a little, how about an excerpt? From Chapter 12 of Forever:
With the setting of the sun they came, the boy and the Other, lifting my broken body from the stones of the ravine floor and beginning a long trek to some unknown place. The pain rushed back as if my body had suddenly remembered it. In absolute anguish I felt each jarring step up the trail. I concentrated on the pain of it, hoping it would give me just enough of something to make some sound they might hear. I couldn’t read the Other, he was distant, closed to me, but I could hear his soft voice as he spoke to the boy, instructed him to wash me and brush out my wild hair. I was being prepared for my burial. The thought terrified me, amplified by the remembered ordeals of a lifetime.
I needed to tell them that I was alive. I screamed inside, but no sound came. My heart beat so sluggishly even I was uncertain at times I lived. I lay upon some rock as the boy slowly bathed me in cool water from the spring near the place where I had fallen, my eyes open and staring into the night sky. The stars were bright and sparkling above us. Occasionally I could see a glimpse of one or the other. Each touch of their gentle ministrations brought back new reminders of the pain until it filled me and I could almost feel nothing at all. I thought of all the times I had wished for death, willed it to come, wanted it … and now, here, truly facing it perhaps for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to escape the icy grip of its greedy hands. “Careful boy, she’ll not thank you for greater injury,” the voice said as my leg slipped from the boy’s hands.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Amara,” that voice said, hovering just over me. He was very close. “I must hide you now, while I see to it that the Hunter and his friends are gone. You will recover, and I will return for you.”
Then, unexpectedly, I felt a warm flow of liquid on my lip, blood, slipping across my tongue, dripping into my throat. I could only taste the lingering flat taste of one who has been dead, but it heartened me that he would feed me before consigning me to my grave.
Once more I was lifted, and they wrapped me in a dark cloth, winding it around me, blocking out what little I could see. I was carried to the grave, which had already been dug, and lowered into it. Roughhewn timber scraped my raw skin. Each shovel full of dirt hit the close plank of wood above me, like lead as it struck. I was barely alive, scarcely breathing, and yet I could feel that little bit of air being robbed from me. My heart suddenly resumed its beating, roaring in my ears, the blood pounding through me so that I wondered if they couldn’t hear it. Then, quite suddenly, it was quiet. I heard no more.
For a long time, I had little or no awareness save for the beating of my heart and the furious anger of my broken body. I couldn’t count the days, months, years that passed. I was alternately on fire and frozen. I felt my limbs swell and contract and swell again. I felt the weight of the dirt pressed coldly against me. My conscious thought drifted from memory to memory. The absolute quiet overwhelmed me, and I prayed for some small sound. When the silence became too great, I would try to make some noise, but for a long time my voice still failed me. When at last it returned it was small, weak, and I would talk to myself aloud until it became little more than a whisper. I babbled incoherently.
In one moment of lucid thought I realized my eyelids had finally closed and I spent a great deal of time exploring that little wonder, opening and closing them as if they had never before moved. In another moment I felt the light kiss of air, small and nearly unnoticeable, across my cheek. At times I did nothing more than laugh hysterically at the unbelievable horror of my situation, unable to do more. My thought processes were slow and cumbersome, and more and more what true thoughts I had formed around the fiery hunger building within me. I had not fed in a very long time, and what I had taken from the Hunter had soured and burned inside me, contributing perhaps to the madness that held me. The little that the Other had offered was small comfort against the desire. The hunger went beyond the mere physical need at times, and there were moments when I felt sure I could claw my way up out of the ground if only a hot blooded creature would simply pass overhead.
Other times I lay quietly and accepted my fate, but never for long. I would sleep, long dreamless sleep where the blackness claimed me for its own. Eventually something, anything would touch my consciousness and bring me back to the fear, the pain, the desperation. At some point I discovered that the sides of my tomb were shored up with wood, and wood kept the cold earth from smothering me. Somewhere near my face a thin, hollow reed channeled outside air to my desperate lungs. I would weep for days on end, scream until my voice and thoughts abandoned me, whisper to myself deliriously.
More than once I caught myself talking to those I had known as if they were there beside me in my mountain grave. I heard them from time to time as well, the sounds of children laughing, the chanting of religious rites, Crenoral’s cold and unforgiving tones, Rebeka’s voice crying out for vengeance. I saw Jesse’s face repeatedly, as the Change came over him for the first time and he fully realized what he had become.
Sometimes the faces blurred and Adan was Jesse, Jesse was the Hunter, Rebeka became Adroushan, Adroushan became Damen until I was spinning trying to sort it out. I saw the gestures and expressions on Rebeka’s face that I found so enduring on Adroushan’s. I heard Crenoral’s words about Jesse, how he’d given him to me again, and I began to wonder if it might somehow be true. If Jesse was Adan returned to me, and the Hunter was Jesse come back for revenge, could Rebeka have been Adroushan come back? Were such things possible?
Through it all my body healed. Slowly, achingly, until the overwhelming pain was largely gone. I did not know how long I lay there, how many years passed by. It was many, many years however. This I did know. With the pain went much of the insanity, and in its place was left only the hunger. It burned like a thing alive and apart, until I felt that it alone would drive me from the remainder of my senses.
Natalie J Case 