Sarah is heading for the corn circle. It’s a warm golden afternoon, the first after a grey start to October, and the sidewalk cafes and playgrounds are beginning to fill. She comes often to the park.
The last podcast of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
In the drive Jesse revved the motorbike, its trademark pop pop … pop pop ripping through the predawn silence. A light went on next door, and as the police came rushing out to their patrol car, Meg and Finn on their heels, a curtain twitched in the magistrate’s house across the road: breakfast fodder, a tasty alternative to granola; more chew.
The podcast of Chapter 41 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
‘Is that you, Jesse?’
Jesse whirled at Meg’s voice. He had drawn the curtains as soon as he’d come into his room and draped a blanket over the window for extra safety before switching on a light.
The podcast of Chapter 40 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
A few hours afterwards Jesse was seriously annoyed with himself for letting Sarah drag him to this party. ‘It’s not really a club,’ she’d said, ‘just an end-of-the-holidays sort of thing, all my mates will be there, Katy, everyone, you’ll get to meet a lot of people, please come.’ He knew she longed to go, and knew she wanted to take his mind off Nubi’s death, and Daisy’s, so he’d given in.
The podcast of Chapter 39 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
Finn cancelled his long-scheduled trip to New York over Jesse’s protests. ‘So I won’t sell as many books. Who cares? We won’t be going hungry, not with a doctor in the family.’
The podcast of Chapter 38 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
Jesse woke all at once, as though someone had tossed a bucket of cold water over the bed. For a moment he was unable to move, his first conscious thought of Sarah. He shifted his gaze from the elongated rhomboid of moonlight which fell across the floor through the half-drawn curtains and soon could make out Sarah’s shape, her deep-sleep breathing. His eyes searched every corner of the room.
The podcast of Chapter 37 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
At Siggy’s Jesse stopped just inside the doorway. The music surrounded him like a conversation of gossipy magpies, village women at the borehole drawing water for the day’s washing. Notes spilled from the tenor sax in a voluble chatter – an old woman’s toothless cackle, a high-pitched giggle, a knowing snicker, a whisper, a raucous joke, a hacking smoker’s cough, a complaint, a sob. He could hardly believe that only one instrument produced such a gush of voices, and though Daniel deserved his fate – well he did, didn’t he? – Jesse lingered, not keen to relate even a chlorinated version of the story. It was easy to think Mick would be far better off without his brother, but Jesse knew that families swam in cloudy waters; how well he knew it. Wading ashore together, his father had always insisted they stand knee-deep in the lake and wait patiently to scoop a drink till the silt they’d churned up settled, now settled too something in Jesse’s gut. Mick was a musician, very possibly a brilliant musician – not a judgement Jesse trusted himself to make with any real assurance – and though Mick’s pain would run rough and hard and swift, turbulent as any stormy river of sound, it would channel nevertheless into his music, feeding it, enriching it, and ultimately transforming it. And maybe, just maybe, with the sonorous and subterranean complexity of water, renew his belief in himself.
The podcast of Chapter 36 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
Why did you stop with Gavin’s hands? Think of what else the bastard deserves.
Jesse told his inner voice to shut up. Destroying Red hadn’t been quite the success he’d hoped. There was a kind of internal bleeding, a seepage that continued to affect his thoughts. And sometimes he wondered … Suppressing a sigh, he picked up his book and flipped back to the beginning of the chapter, which he’d apparently read without remembering a word. He was alone in the house, Sarah having gone to the airport to meet Katy, who was returning from the States for the start of term.
The podcast of Chapter 35 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
Jesse set the top spinning before him in the air, sent it out to a place of hypercomplex snow, and willed its instantaneous return. As the thin coating of ice melted against his skin, he would have been hard-pressed to describe the sensation in his fingertips. It felt like salty blue, a trill of silvers, sharp pungent aquamarine. There were congenitally blind people, he recalled reading somewhere, who could distinguish colour by touch alone; and those who painted astonishingly realistic, even exotic landscapes.
The podcast of Chapter 34 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
Sunday before dawn. It must have rained earlier – the air was damp and chill, with the raw green-tea smell of more to come. Sarah checked her alarm: five o’clock. No point tossing and turning any longer. She donned a fleecy jumper and tried reading; she tried listening to music; and finally, gazing out the open window, she tried listening for the first drops of rain but heard only the birds, the wind, the house, her fear … listening for footsteps.
The podcast of Chapter 33 of YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost
A single torrent download of the entire podcast series is also available at LegalTorrents.
