Author Spotlight, Amber Forbes

Author Spotlight

Amber Forbes

"When Stars Die"

Commentary from Amber Forbes:

I can't really say where the idea for When Stars Die came from, as I started it eight years ago--who knows what was going through my fifteen-year-old mind then. All I know is that I really wanted to write about witches, explain why some people are witches and others aren't, and write a really, really dark story that could arguably border on horror. Oh, and I also wanted to write about convents too. But I started this story at fifteen and decided to shelve it in favor of working on its sequel. However, the sequel wasn't going the way I wanted it to, so I knew I needed to bring When Stars Die out again to make the sequel work. I brought it back out at twenty-one, finished it at twenty-two, and found a contract for it before I turned twenty-three. 

YA Paranormal Romance
Releasing October 2013
by
AEC Stellar Publishing
Blurb:

When Amelia discovers witch blood in her family, she joins a convent to cleanse the taint from her blood. But when she learns that redemption isn’t possible, she unites with the dangerously attractive priest, Oliver Cromwell, to fight for a place in Paradise.

Excerpt:

The sound is a dagger scraping crosshatches on a frosted windowpane, its echoes loud in this insensible room I’ve been locked in for the past few days. I want to remedy my fears over the sound, but I’m more terrified of the impending trials that will determine my readiness to be professed in the Order of Cathedral Reims. The trials are the reason I have been locked in here.

Colette sits beside me, lost in knitting a scarf she has been working on for a week—the amount of time we’ve been trapped in here with minimal food, water, and sanity. Her ability to shut out the world with a click of the needles is something I have always envied. For her, the world is nonexistent.

But not for me.

The sound strips my nerves raw, so I tighten my shawl and rise from the creaking mattress. My boot-clad feet meet the floor, and in spite of my stockings, cold still shoots through the soles, hibernating in my bones. Pulling in a deep breath of biting air, I tiptoe over to the door and press my eye to the keyhole that overlooks a bright hallway. The air freezes in my chest. I knew I heard those blasted shadows, the eerie, almost impossible sounds they make whenever their black cloaks trail along the cobbled floors of Cathedral Reims. Sometimes I wonder if they’re witches, people born of the Seven Deadly Sins and considered worse than murderers in the eyes of the law. Then I remember my little brother is nothing like them. They are mere shadows. Mere shadows.