CLOAK OF ASHES, a brief excerpt

Now on Chapter 9 of 21 of CLOAK OF ASHES. Let’s have a short excerpt where Nadia meets a new character!

One of the fun things about writing Nadia’s character is how much history annoys her. Like, she’s personally offended that stuff that happened before she was born keeps coming back to haunt her.

Of course, if you’ve read CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE, CLOAK GAMES: SKY HAMMER, and CLOAK OF DRAGONS, you know she has good reasons to feel that way. 🙂

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He was talking about history, which should have bored me. I didn’t like history all that much and even had a grudge against it because stuff from the distant past kept coming back to bite me. Like, oh, Last Judge Mountain, or the Sky Hammer, or all that crap Catalyst Corporation left behind. That’s irrational, I know, but I’ve never claimed to be a paragon of mental stability. But the man in the bow tie somehow had the gift of making it interesting, and I had a brief vision of what it must have been like in northern Italy a thousand years ago with the spirit of the Renaissance taking hold.

Charisma. That was it. The teacher in the bow tie had serious charisma.

I realized that I had come to a stop, and the teacher glanced in my direction for a moment.

“Who’s that?” I murmured.

“Mr. Poole,” said Russell. “Thomas Poole. He teaches World History.”

“An impressive young man,” said Hakon.

“You know him?” I said.

“In passing,” said Hakon. “I met him at a few school functions – games and suchlike. One of Lydia’s brothers was on the football team.”

The extracurricular meeting was over, and the teenagers began loading books into their backpacks. Mr. Poole walked in our direction, looking right at me.

“What do you think of him?” I said.

“I really liked his class,” said Russell. “It’s the reason I like history so much.”

“Huh,” I said.

A wide smile went over Poole’s face as he looked at me, and immediately decided I didn’t like him. And not just because he was a history teacher.

-JM