The Fall 2015 YA Scavenger Hunt is ON!
Welcome to Fall 2015 YA Scavenger Hunt! My name is Amy Nichols and I’m your host this leg of the hunt.
A little about me:
– I’m the author of YA science fiction Duplexity novels, NOW THAT YOU’RE HERE and WHILE YOU WERE GONE, published by Knopf.
– When this post goes live, I’ll be in London!
– I have a ukulele named Gertie. She makes me happy.
– Benedict Cumberbatch likes my handbag.
Somewhere on this hunt, I’ve hidden a bonus scene from NOW THAT YOU’RE HERE from Warren’s POV and I can’t wait for you to read it! But before you go looking for it, you have to read on so you can check out the amazing author I’m hosting!
First, though, a little about the YA Scavenger Hunt:
On this hunt, you not only get access to exclusive content from each participating YA author, you also get a secret number. Add up the numbers, and enter it for a chance to win a major prize–one lucky winner will receive at least one signed book from each author on my team in the hunt! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online until noon PST on Sunday, October 4!
You can start right here or you can also go to the YA Scavenger Hunt homepage to find out all about the hunt. I am a part of the TEAM TEAL–but there seven other teams out there and if you do those hunts, too, you’ll have a chance to win seven different sets of signed books! If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page.
Check out all the amazing authors on Team Teal:
How to complete the hunt
Directions: Below, you’ll notice that I’ve listed my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on Team Teal, and then add them up. (Don’t worry, you can use a calculator!)
Entry Form: Once you’ve added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.
Rules: Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian’s permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by OCTOBER 4, at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.
And now…the fun part!
I am so excited to be hosting…
Ty Drago
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAbout Ty:
Ty Drago does his writing just across the river from Philadelphia, where the Undertakers novels take place. In addition to The Undertakers: Rise of the Corpses, The Undertakers: Queen of the Dead, The Undertakers: Secret of the Corpse Eater, and The Undertakers: Last Siege of Haven, he is the author of The Franklin Affair and Phobos, as well as short stories and articles that have appeared in numerous publications, including Writer’s Digest. He currently lives in southern New Jersey with his wife and best friend, the real Helene Drago née Boettcher. Find out more about Ty at Join the Undertakers.
The book Ty is showcasing on the Fall 2015 Hunt is…
THE UNDERTAKERS: LAST SIEGE OF HAVEN
About the book:
While away on an undercover mission, undertaker Will Ritter has made an unthinkable alliance . . . with a Corpse!
The zombie prince, Robert Dillin, is an alien invader who animates and possesses the bodies of the dead, but unlike the rest of his kind, Dillin isn’t evil. In fact, he wants to help. Ritter is willing to take all the help he can get because the Queen of the Dead has learned the location of Haven, the undertakers’ secret headquarters, and she is planning a massive and deadly assault. With the last day of the Corpse War finally upon them, Will and his friends find themselves in a desperate race to close the Rift between worlds and forever kill the Corpses. But can they do it before Haven is overrun?
And now…chapter one of THE UNDERTAKERS: LAST SIEGE OF HAVEN!
Chapter 1: BACK IN SCHOOL
The last day of the war started with two eleven-year-old girls clutching at me in terror, while a third girl stood protectively between us and a half-dozen of the walking dead, who closed in like lions around a wounded wildebeest.
Oh, and did I mention the Zombie Prince?
Um … maybe I’d better dial things back about ten minutes.
Let’s start with the snarling teacher.
“Mister Kessler,” the teacher snarled. “Why don’t you list for us three things that Walter Raleigh, or people in his employ, brought back to England from the New World?”
I don’t much like teachers. But I hate teachers who call you by your last name, especially when it isn’t your last name. And I really hate it when the teacher who’s calling you by a last name that isn’t yours is—well—dead.
Okay, that probably hasn’t happened to you. But, trust me, it stinks on ice.
My name’s Will Ritter. I’m an Undertaker. That means I spend my days battling Corpses, invaders from another planet, or dimension, or something. We’re not quite sure. These beings, who call themselves the Malum, are actually super-scary ten-legged monsters on their home world. But they arrive on ours with no bodies at all—just man-sized lumps of dark energy that wouldn’t last ten seconds in our atmosphere if they didn’t immediately possess and inhabit dead bodies. These they wear like suits of clothing until the cadavers literally fall apart around them. Then they abandon them and find another, and so on.
Thing is: most people can’t see them. To every adult on the planet—and most kids—Corpses look like regular folks: policemen, neighbors, bus drivers.
Teachers.
End of info dump. You’ll pick up the rest as we go along. For now, just get this: my history teacher, Ms. McKinney, was a Corpse. And if she wised up to the fact that I knew she was a Corpse, she’d kill me.
But at least that was a familiar kind of fear. This “getting called on” thing was something else entirely.
Before this gig, it’d been a while since I’d gone to school.
“Well, Mr. Kessler?”
That was my cover name: Ryan Kessler. The Hackers, the Undertakers’ computer crew, gave it to me when I first took this Schooler gig almost a month ago. Since then, I’d been Ryan, not Will. It had taken some getting used to, but eventually the lie had become second nature.
“Um … tobacco,” I said.
“Yes. That’s one.” She’d left the backboard, and was shuffling down the aisle toward me.
She smelled awful and, whenever she moved, flies as big as marbles flew in and out of holes in her neck and face. She was an early Type Three. That’s this one-to-five measuring system we use to describe how ripe a Corpse is getting. Threes are bloating, their tissues filling up with gases as they decompose. In the next week or so, unless she traded up to a fresher cadaver, Ms. Marcy McKinney—her name and history as fake as my own—would swell like an overripe melon, filling her budget pantsuit until her eyes nearly popped out of her head.
The kids around me, of course, saw none of it. They weren’t Seers. To them, Ms. McKinney was simply a short, skinny redhead in her fifties, alive and, to their eyes, completely normal.
We call it their Mask. It’s the face Corpses show to the world, and only Seers—a few, select kids like me—can recognize the stomach-emptying truth behind it. “Getting your Eyes,” we call it.
“Two more, Mr. Kessler,” she said, coming to stand by my desk. Her voice sounded thick, as if she were drowning. As if she could. The dead—no big surprise—are really hard to kill. Ms. McKinney’s voice box was just melting, that’s all.
I wracked my brain. I’d studied this last night, sort of. Well, you try to study by the light of a kerosene lamp while huddled in a tent in the woods outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania! True, it was June, with only one more day of school left and, yeah, that did mean it was warmer than, say, February. But it also meant that I shared the small tent with a fistful of mosquitoes.
And one big roommate—who snored.
“Potatoes,” I said.
“That’s two,” she said, glowering. “And the third?”
“I …” But the final answer wouldn’t come. A blank. Nothing. Whatever the third thing was the old British dude had snagged in the Americas, I couldn’t remember it.
Every school kid knows that, in such a situation, there’s only one kind of miracle to hope for.
And I got it.
The bell rang.
You could almost hear the room exhale. Suddenly, forty eighth graders were in motion—collecting books, pencils, and paper as they began spilling out through the hallway door.
Ms. McKinney eyed me dangerously. Then she straightened and shouted in her sticky voice, “Final test tomorrow! Everything we’ve studied all year will be on it! I don’t care if it’s the last day of school! It’s fifty percent of your grade, so be prepared!”
Groans.
Only a Corpse calls a test for the last day of school.
Pure evil.
I’d gotten up with the others, a little more slowly maybe, given my close call. I wasn’t the last one out the door, but I was close to it when the teacher suddenly said, “Stay a minute, Mr. Kessler.”
Crap.
I paused and turned, hoping I hadn’t heard her right. She waggled a purple, lifeless finger at me and pointed to the guest chair beside her desk.
My heart sinking, I took a seat.
She settled into her desk chair, her knees popping loudly. Tendons had just torn, I supposed.
“I’m worried about you,” she said, sounding almost kindly. She leaned forward, clasping her hands in front of her on the desktop. As she did, maggots squeezed out through cracks in the flesh of her wrists. They were tiny, like little squirming grains of rice. The sight of them would have grossed out almost anybody. But I’d seen bigger maggots than these.
Much bigger.
Another story.
“Why?” I asked.
“You seem tired today. In fact, you’ve seemed tired all week. How are you sleeping?”
“Okay, I guess.” I wasn’t about to tell her about the tent, its mosquitos, or my snoring roommate.
“Everything okay at home? You and your folks settling into your new house?”
“Sure.” There was, of course, no new house and no “folks.” My mom and sister were back at Haven, the Undertakers’ HQ, thirty miles away in Center City Philadelphia. I hadn’t seen either of them in a month, though we talked on the phone two or three times a week. Mom’s idea.
As far as Merriweather Intermediate School was concerned, however, I had a mom and a dad and we all lived in the suburban house we’d just bought, the details falsified with practiced ease by the Hackers.
“I know how hard it can be to come into a new school, especially at the end of the year,” Ms. McKinney told me gently. “And I want you to know: if there’s anything I can do to help, just say so.”
“Um … thanks.”
“Ryan?”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Don’t think so.”
“I’ve noticed how you look at me.”
I involuntarily swallowed. Nerves. She noticed.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She tilted her head. As she did, flakes of skin and wisps of dead hair sprinkled the shoulder of her suit. “You know what I mean.”
So, either she suspects I just got my Eyes … or she thinks I have a crush on her.
I hope it’s the Eyes thing.
I glanced over my shoulder at the open hallway door. Through it, I could see swarms of kids moving back and forth in that funny kind of reluctant haste that’s reserved for the five minute break between classes.
“Want to leave, Ryan?” Ms. McKinney asked and, though she tried to hide it, I caught the edge of menace in her voice.
Sure, I wanted to leave. But not quite how she meant. In truth, even if I’d escaped with the rest of the history class, I’d have hung around in the hallway, waiting until the last possible second to leave for my fifth period lunch. Watching.
Watching for Julie.
I had Ms. McKinney for fourth period eighth grade history. Julie had her for fifth period sixth grade history.
That was no accident.
Julie was the reason I’d come to Merriweather.
Watch Julie. Monitor Julie. Protect Julie.
My mission: Guard a little girl until the end of the school year. And do it without her knowledge.
That’s me. Will Ritter. Guardian Angel.
“I asked you a question, Mr. Kessler,” the teacher snarled. Her “You Can Come To Me With Your Problems” bit was apparently over. She’d sucked at it anyway.
“No, ma’am,” I said, keeping my eyes on the door.
Any second now.
Ms. McKinney said, “Look at me.”
I looked.
She was leaning way over the desk now, her dead face—putrid and bug invested—inches from my own. Then she hissed, “What do you See, Mr. Kessler?”
Yep. It’s the Eyes thing.
“I … um … see the next class coming in.”
And they were. Sixth graders had started slogging in from the hallway, backpacks over their shoulders, weary expressions on their faces—expressions that turned curious when they saw Ms. McKinney and myself.
The teacher sat back and smiled, showing me her hideous toothless maw. The other kids, I knew, saw only a friendly, welcoming grin. After all, they were her adored pupils, and Marcy McKinney was teacher of the year.
Corpses are, above all else, completely full of crap.
“Go to your next class, Ryan. We’ll talk again.”
I stood up with my own backpack, turned toward to doorway to leave —
— and froze.
Julie Boettcher, small and brunette, stood at the classroom’s threshold. Her thin, eleven-year-old body had gone statue still, her expressive brown eyes locked on Ms. McKinney. Her face, usually slightly darker in complexion than her sister’s, had gone pasty white—and, as I watched her, her bottom lip began to tremble.
She just got her Eyes!
Every Undertaker remembers all too well that moment when they started Seeing Corpses, got their first glimpse of the real world and the monsters who inhabit it. All the shock and horror and confusion of that initial moment shone like a beacon on this girl’s face.
I glanced back at Ms. McKinney, but the history teacher hadn’t noticed Julie yet. Her eyes—dead and seeming sightless—remained fixed on me.
Reactions are different for everyone. Some new Seers faint. Others run. Others curse or scream.
Julie did none of those things. She was a Boettcher. Like her big sister, Helene, fellow Undertaker and—let’s just get this out of the way now, okay?—my girlfriend, Julie had liquid steel running through her veins. On some level, she’d sensed the danger in revealing her newly discovered Seer talent. So, again as I watched, she steadied herself, took a deep breath, and stepped into the classroom.
Wow, I thought. Six graders are tougher than I remember.
But then two more girls, a blond and a redhead, walked through the door, took one look at Ms. McKinney, and started screaming.
Oooh, that was good! I could read that, like, 1,000,006 (that’s right, ONE MILLION AND SIX) more times! Did you enjoy it as much as I did? Let Ty know in the comments below.
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Filed under: Giveaways Tagged: Amy K. Nichols, Children's Books, giveaways, Ty Drago, YA books, YA Scavenger Hunt
