Kelly Elexcia Musabandesu
The Bite
Part One · A young adult paranormal novel
One night can change a person's life forever. All it takes is one night for a girl named Vanessa Smith.
The book
The Bite: Part One
Vanessa Smith is sixteen, quiet, and used to being overlooked. Then she rides her bike home in the dark, takes a shortcut through the cemetery, and something happens on that road that she can neither explain nor undo.
Now every sense she has is sharper than it should be, a boy at school seems to understand exactly what she is going through, and whoever is responsible has not finished with her yet.
The Bite contains violence, bullying and blood. Recommended for readers aged fourteen and up.
Inside the story
Vanessa's journal
She writes down what she cannot say out loud. A few lines from the pages she keeps hidden.
Dear Diary, I don't know how to write this down.
I keep telling myself it was a nightmare. I keep telling myself I will wake up and it will be an ordinary Tuesday.
Something is different. I can hear things from the other end of the school. I don't know how to make it stop.
I can't tell Dad. I can't tell Chloe. I can't tell anyone, and that is the loneliest part of all of it.
He says he can help me. He says he has been looking for a long time. I don't know yet whether I believe him.
Whatever I am now, I have to get up tomorrow and go to school like nothing happened.
An excerpt of what follows
After that night
Her bike is bent, so she walks the rest of the way home. By the time she reaches her front door, everything about the world is louder, brighter and closer than it was that morning.
She has a father who worries and a little sister who misses nothing. She has a job at the mall, a play in rehearsal, and a life that is supposed to carry on exactly as it was.
The rest of the book is Vanessa working out who she is going to be now, and how much of it she can keep to herself.
The cast
Who you will meet
Five people and one secret between them.
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The girl it happens to
Vanessa Smith
Quiet, watchful, carrying a loss she never talks about. One ride home changes everything she thought she knew about herself.
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The one who already knows
Ashtyn
He turns up understanding far more about Vanessa than he should. Whether that makes him a friend is something she has to work out for herself.
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The name spoken carefully
Draven
People say his name quietly, when they say it at all. He has been around a great deal longer than he looks.
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The only warmth in the building
Miss Jones
The drama teacher who notices too much. She hands Vanessa a script and a reason to stay at school after the bell.
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Not revealed yet
Jade Sharpe
She is in the book. That is all Kelly is willing to say for now.
Settings
Inside The Bite
The halls
Lockers, fluorescent light, and one window at the far end with the moon sitting in it. Vanessa knows every inch of it and is known by almost nobody.
The cemetery and the woods
The shortcut she should never have taken. This is where the road home stops being safe.
Velvet Horns
The little store in the mall where she works part time. The most ordinary place in her life, which is exactly why it matters.
Home
Her father Andrew and her little sister Chloe. The two people she cannot lie to, and now has to.
Book trailer
Newsletter
Part Two is coming
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