Today Queen Anoshi stopped by and left an excerpt of her new novel, Her Shifters' Future. I hope you enjoy.
About the Book
Growing up in the country town of Beaufort, S.C. Tomia lived a lonely childhood. No one understood the gift that she possessed so she always longed for a meaningful relationship. After her Granny B passed she only had her father and two aunts to care for her and shelter the gift that she carried. Now the FBI wants to enlist her services to help them with a secret task force led by Director Dwayne Harris. When Tomia goes to the interview her life and Harris’ life changes forever. Harris is not your average FBI agent, don’t let his handsome exterior fool you. Now Tomia has to put her gifts to work in order to save the man that she has grown to love. What role will special agent Hughes play in all of this? Betrayal, Love and Jealousy will force the both of them to make decisions that will impact their futures forever. Peter the Native American keeper and Sadina the watcher has a secret as well but they can’t say any-thing until the time is right. Who knew that one touch could be the difference between life and death. Come with me as we tell this shifter’s tale and jump into the world of the supernatural.
Queen Anoshi is a native of Beaufort, S.C. She was born with the gift of making up stories on a whim. She started writing poetry as a young child which was her outlet in conquering different adversities in her life. It wasn’t until her service in the Army and her first deployment to Bosnia that she began writing short stories as a way to pass-time away. She felt her writings could take her to a different time and place and that she could become and do anything that her mind could conceive.
From that point, her love for fictional romance began to expound. She takes her personal experiences with love, heartbreak and finding that special person and uses them as a key element in her creative writings. She believes that nothing can be written without having parts of the writer in it.
She wants her readers to relate and connect to her personally as if they walked with her every day. She wants them all to become part of her, “Writer’s Soul”. Only then can they understand her passion for life and love. She writes romance, psychological suspense and paranormal. She also writes poems and short stories that related to the drama of finding and conquering that awesome love. She is ready to share her imagination in love and romance with all that is willing to ride with her.
Get ready for your imagination to go wild. Welcome to the world of ANOSHI!
Now the part you're waiting on the excerpt.
- Paperback: 164 pages
- Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 18, 2016)
- ISBN-10: 153476352X
- ISBN-13: 978-1534763524
Excerpt
Prologue
There is nothing worse than being able to see the death of everyone around you. With just the slightest of touch, Tomia could see years into someone’s future and that meant seeing both the good and the bad. She hated the feeling because she would get a rush of information within a few seconds of a touch. The shock often left her weak and feeling fragile. At 7 years of age, she had started to get the seer powers passed down to her from her grandmother, ‘Granny B’.
Her gift was unlike anyone else, and that’s why she was called neither a psychic nor clairvoyant; she was called a ‘Futurivoyant’. She was the second daughter of the youngest son, and that meant that she was granted the curse and blessing of ‘The Gift’. It simply became hard to be a child, because when she touched her friends, she was plagued with the revelation of what each one of their futures would be. On her eighth birthday, Tomia started shutting herself from the rest of the world only because her abilities had begun to come full strength and she was scared. Her family would often tell her that she had to learn to control her fear of the gift because it was not going anywhere. She just didn’t know how to do that?
Being a child with that kind of power was the hardest thing to contend with, as it really did hurt being the freak that everyone ran away from or picked on, making you the outsider. She found a source of income in her high school years and became popular amongst her peers. Unlike in elementary and middle school where she was feared, the high schoolers wanted her services. They wanted to know if a handsome quarterback would ask them to the homecoming dance; or what they would be like in the future. You know, things like if they would still be beautiful when they turned 40. When Tomia touched them, she found herself lying; especially when she knew that they would not even make it to their 20th birthday.
She lived on her family’s 10-acre land in a farmhouse that was provided by her grandmother, it was cared for by her father, Nathan and two Aunts, Geraldine and Hattie. Being on the quaint town of St. Helena Island, SC was great for her to blend in or out as she needed. With its rich history of magic, it was the best resting place unlike the town of Beaufort itself. She had now been residing in the Island of St. Helena for the past 10 years, after her permanent move across the bridge from Beaufort.
By the time she started college, she had made a name for herself in the community. She was banking close to $140,000 a year, simply by giving people their futures. She didn’t think that was too bad, for a single woman with no children; besides, it was non-taxable income. The best thing was, when she did tell them it gave people a chance to change their life, if their future was grim. Like, a drug user down the street from where she lived changed her drug habit. When she found out that she was going to die of an overdose on heroine in front of her 10-yearold daughter, she went straight to get help the next day, went through the necessary treatment and actually became a spokesperson for women drug users. That was just one of many things that she found herself doing, and she loved it because she was helping.
She was no longer the freak of nature, who walked around with long clothes and gloves that covered her flesh. People knew that any contact with her bare skin, could activate ‘The Gift’. People hovered over her when they needed answers. And boy, did she have them! Day after day and sometimes night after night, she would get calls for her assistance. Is my husband cheating? Will I win the lottery? Can you tell me if I would die of cancer? There were people coming from near and far to avail her services. She had to start taking appointments and limited the amount of reads she did a week. She literally had to start triaging each situation by priority because people were so demanding.
For almost a year, she saw people coming from as far as California. She was one of the few ladies left with the special gift. If she did not have a son who had a second daughter, then it was quite possible that there wouldn’t be anyone left in her blood line to pass the gift onto. It was not something that you could teach anyone, it had to be in the DNA; a gift that only the worthy could have. Her family had been urging her to find a suitable mate, in order that the legacy continued. Did they not know, what they were asking was easier said than done? Mostly, because she had not found anyone that she was interesting in and secondly, and the most important part was that she wanted to make sure the person would understand her. She didn’t want someone to just procreate with, she wanted someone who she could love.
Tomia now at the age of 29, still heard the taunts of the children that often woke her up in the middle of the night. Look at the freak. Everybody run, the freak is here. She remembered the voices of her peers, and she hated every one of them. She was just a child and was just as afraid as they were of who she was and what she could do.
One would think that growing up and finding success would have helped the memories and heartbreak go away. It didn't because she couldn’t let go of the hurt she felt. Even though some of the same people had visited her for her services later in their lives, she still held on to the way they treated her. Even so much that she found joy in telling them directly when something devastating would happen to them.
***
Opening her eyes, she laid staring at the ceiling before she got up and went to the medicine cabinet. Tomia looked at herself and the dark circles that had formed under her eyes, from the lack of sleep. She pulled the pill bottle out from the shelf and shook a tiny pill into the palm of her hand. For almost 10 years, she had been taking Ambien to sleep.
After all these years they were almost non-effective, but they did enough to sedate the thoughts that plagued her. Not only did she hear the evil laughter’s from her youth, she had now started to have nightmares of thousands of future events that she had performed over the years. There was more to just seeing because you still remembered. Long after the event has gone and passed, she had the inevitable task of remembering. That was the hard part, it’s like looking at a scary movie in the daytime and not getting scared, until it was time to go to bed at night.
She not only saw, but even heard everything from those moments. She often felt like she had schizophrenia when she heard the voice of her past talking in her ears. Tomia was taught by her grandma that putting cotton in her ears helped deafen the voices and sounds. Cotton had a type of mystical filter that helped to mute the noise from the ‘Future’s’ she had done’.
Its magic streamed from the years when her ancestors endured abuse during slavery and placed a spell of protection for their lives over the cotton. They would even chew on it, so that the slave masters could not harm them. That sounded crazy to her when she first heard about it until she found out that it really worked. How mystical nature was to her that cotton was more than something spun to wear in clothing. Things like that, made her appreciate it for more than what it was to most people.
Sometimes she wished she could do a reading on herself, but that was the limit to her gift. She could never see what was going to happen in her own life. The worst thing was even if she tried a psychic or clairvoyant, they just could not read her. She always felt it was a shame that someone who could tell everyone’s future, lived not knowing her own.
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You can reach Queen Anoshi via social media:
Website: www.queenanoshi.com
Queen Anoshi and Teresa Beasley, I want to thank you for asking me to participate in the blog tour. Queen, I'm wishing you much success on your writing care.
