Sometimes, in a world of darkness, it’s the secrets that keep you sane.
Welcome to one of the October 5th stops on the blog tour for Bloodlink by Raye T. Watson with Bewitching Book Tours (schedule linked.) Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, exclusive content, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.
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About the Book
Bloodlink
The Bloodlink Saga Book One
by Raye T. Watson
Published 2 August 2022
Knighted Phoenix Publishing
Genre: YA Paranormal Mystery
Page Count: 423
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Katelyn Phillips hates the Greatlee Wood, the small forest near her home in Effingham, England. She just wants to forget the uncomfortable feeling of being watched whenever she sees that line of trees and move on with her life like a normal person. But when she wakes up one night numb and dead, the forest becomes the least of her worries.
Now she’s lost all connection with the outside world as she fights for control of her mind and the lust for blood. But she’s not alone.
Aidan O’Conner, the superstitious Irish fellow with centuries of experience, is willing to help. Together, with his family and friends, they teach Kate what it means to be a vampire and how to manage her newfound powers, but there are some secrets they are not so willing to share. Like why the door at the end of the hallway is always locked? Or why the manor they live in was half burned down 20 years ago? And how does it all tie into the ghost tale of the Armuary Phantom?
Can Kate uncover the truth and protect her new surrogate family, or will these secrets and deceit cause her to lose trust in everything, including herself?
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Excerpt
Something is wrong. I’m finally waking up. I can almost feel my consciousness slip into focus, but I still feel like I am floating.
I pry my eyes open, and I can see I am lying in a bed, but I can’t remember how I got there or when I’d gone to bed. Had I been hallucinating? Is Ryan okay?
I put my hand to my head, or I think I did. I can’t feel it. I can hear movement, but I can’t feel anything. I frown, realizing the floating feeling hasn’t gone away. It isn’t really like floating; it isn’t as soothing. It’s just… nothing.
That scares me.
My eyes pop open, and I sit up, feeling like my heart should have shot to my throat. This isn’t my bed. This isn’t my room.
It is dark in this room, but I can see it fine. Moonlight filters in through the window to my left and helps define the room. I am in a four-poster bed in a renaissance style room. It’s as big as my living room. It is beautiful, but how did I get here?
I hear the rustle of the bed covers and look down. I can see my hands on the covers, but as I grip them, twist them, and throw them away from me, I still have no sense of their weight or texture. I rub my fingers and hands together, but nothing.
I can’t feel… anything!
Alarmed and panicked, I take in air through shallow and quick breaths as I kick away from the things I can’t touch. In the process, I fall backward over the side of the bed and hit the floor with a thud. I wish I could say that it hurt. But without the bang that resonated in the room as I hit the ground, I may not have known I’d fallen at all.
What is wrong with me? Tears of fear fill my eyes. Fear as intoxicating as poison burns inside me, and I begin to cry, too scared to think. I crab crawl quickly away from the bed, as if it was the thing that made me this way. I crunch against the far bedroom wall, which stops me from going any further. I turn and run my hands along the wall, but it’s the same as the bed. Without my sight, I wouldn’t even know it was there. Terror grips me, and I curl up in the corner and hug myself, but it doesn’t help. It’s as if my whole body is filled with novocaine. Before too long, I can hear footsteps outside the room I’m in. They sound like they’re coming toward me. They are going to find me. I don’t know if I want them to or not.
Spooktacular Feature
Blood Poem by a Murderous Vampire
Of all my character, Morsa is by far, the most villainous and violent. She is the main antagonist in my new novel, Bloodlink. I tried not to show a lot of her because her nature tends to lead some rather gory and graphic scenes, which I generally tend to avoid all together. But it does make her an interesting character to write. Not much is known about her past, but some of the other vampires suspect she was never human. She often speaks in a soft silky voice, trying to seduce others to follow after her, but as much as she seems to want followers, she will not hesitate to kill another vampire and drink their blood to make herself stronger. If she wrote a poem, I imagine it would be something like this:
Through boarded windows, moonlight peeps
In fractured light, the night life creeps
In the chamber of death, I make my home
Until I snatch it
If only it had known.
Silly thing, let us play
While the sunlight flees away.
There is such fun to be had.
Let me kill you
And make you sad.
Why should I let you live
When sweet blood you do give
Me? But oh, what tastes! Delicious! Divine!
When your blood
And life are mine.
You say I’ve lost my humanity.
You say I’ve lost my sanity.
But what is life lived on a lead?
To be kept in check
And to a sole master heed.
Weakness is found in foolish men
Who think they can bind me in this fox’s den.
But fools know not want power is
Or isn’t.
No man can make me his.
I’m a power beyond control
Beyond age, beyond all.
I do as I like and take what I see.
But if it’s a game you want,
Cat and mouse, you and me.
I’ll hide, and you find me.
Death will follow,
And all life will wilt and turn hollow.
I’m much better than that insolent whelp.
Someday, you’ll see, I’m trying to help.
But you’ll lock me away. Say that I’m dangerous.
No, Sir.
I’m just that spontaneous.
I just want to play with my bite and their blood.
Does that make me too hard to be loved?
Hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into the madden mind of my most wicked vampire. I loved being able to take this opportunity to guest blog today. Thank you so much, and happy hauntings!
About the Author
Raye T. Watson grew up in Northern California near the capital of Sacramento where she continues to live with her family. She is the only girl and second oldest of four children. She graduated Brigham Young University – Idaho with a bachelor’s degree and a minor in English. She enjoys learning and being a jack-of-all-trades.
As a kid, she actually did not like reading as a kid because her reading level was slight below average compared to other kids in her grade, but she loves most anything with a story: movies, TV shows, video games. But books were too boring to bother with. When she was 11 years old, her older brother tried to get her in a newer series about a young boy who learns he is a wizard and had to take an invisible train to go to wizarding school. She was not interested. But this book had a movie coming out, which he was very excited to see, so their parents took them to see the first Harry Potter movie. Watson was so enthralled with this magical world, she read books 1-4 before the second film was released in theaters. And thus, her love of reading was born.
Watson had always loved creating her own stories, whether it was creating new characters to fix the TV show plotlines during the commercials or playing games of make believe with her younger brother, but once she started reading, she began to write. None of her written stories ever got far, but she dreamed it all in her mind.
In early 2010, she got her first glimpse of what would become her debut novel, Bloodlink. She’d always loved vampires and the spooky thrills of Halloween, and having finished the Twilight Series and Dracula, she began to define her own kind of vampire.
In the summer of 2012, she met the lady who would become her best friend and fellow author, Charity Mae. Watson and Mae swamped stories during their first meeting and have encouraged each other’s writing ever since.
Watson continues to write to this day and enjoys drawing and painting in her free time. She created the cover art and title page art for her book and hope to publish more art and books in the years to come.
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I love the synopsis and excerpt, Bloodlink sounds like an awesome read for my teen-aged granddaughters and I. Thank you for sharing your bio and book details