Title: Forecast
Author: Elise Stephens
Genre: YA Urban Fantasy

http://www.amazon.com/Forecast-Elise-Stephens-ebook/dp/B00DZTZGEI/

Calvin isn’t a teenager, not really; instead, he’s spent his life trying to protect his mother and sister from his alcoholic father. Calvin keeps a knife close and sleeps with one eye open, even years after his father has left the family. A summer vacation spent at their late grandfather’s estate promises him and his sister the chance to leave their problems behind.

Instead of blissful freedom, they find the old house harbors secrets at every turn, like a mysterious stone door in the forest with rumored powers to give its entrants the gift of future-seeing. When Calvin faces the return of his seemingly-reformed father, he throws himself through the door to receive the gift of foresight. But the door offers more doubt than certainty, and the future he sees is riddled with disturbing confusion. With a revenge-obsessed lawyer hunting him down and a secret society out to control him, Calvin must figure out how to stop what he’s started before he loses what he holds most dear.

As he battles the legacies of his past and the shadows of his future, Calvin must accept help from unlikely sources, give trust he never thought possible, and learn that the greatest challenges lie not in the things to come, but in the present moment.

Buy Links
Amazon : amzn.to/1uYoAxK
Barnes & Noble: bit.ly/1wolB4h
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19192975-forecast

Author Bio

Elise Stephens received the Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction from the University of Washington in 2007. Forecast is her second novel. Her first novel Moonlight and Oranges was a quarter-finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Her short fiction has appeared in the Unusual Stories anthology, as well as in multiple journals.

She lives in Seattle with her husband where they both enjoy swing dancing, eating tiramisu, and taking in local live theater.

Links
http://www.elisestephens.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3413344.Elise_Stephens
https://twitter.com/elisestephens
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorEliseStephens

FORECAST EXCERPT

On the morning Joseph buried the key, he wrapped it in white silk and placed it in his winter coat. Night rain had glossed a thick sheen of ice over the earth, forest, and all the manor’s windows. Joseph melted the bathroom window seam with hot tap water and wriggled through it since creaking floorboards and mothers had signed a pact centuries ago. He had to shove his coat out the window ahead of him so he was small enough to fit. Once outside, he shivered violently in his boots and pajamas as he jammed his arms into his sleeves and blew breath down his collar to defrost his freezing heart.

The massive weight of the key pressed on him, heavy enough to split his pocket lining. He walked with a limp, one foot pounding the ice-crusted earth as he roamed the forest, seeking a hiding place to guard his strange and precious gift. The unfairness of his promise rang through the leafless wood, and Joseph imagined mournful wind-whispers that told him he shouldn’t surrender the one thing his father had given him, no matter what he’d vowed.

Frightened by the shadows of the trees, Joseph’s feet turned back toward the shelter of the tall house with the second story room where he’d met his father for the first and only time. His father had passed away in that same room two weeks before, eighteen days after Joseph had seen him.

Again the icy unfairness choked Joseph, but it couldn’t subdue the fire of his promise. A small sound, insistent but unobtrusive, tapped like a drum on Joseph’s soul, which was already stretched tight with longing.

His eyes roved the frozen lily pond, then turned up to the frigid sky. Christmas sparkle had faded with the passage of the old year. A few clouds in the pre-dawn firmament crumpled like discarded wrapping paper, and the woodpile reeked of mold. The house’s tears tumbled down two big drainpipes, the largest of which opened onto the ground in front of Joseph’s feet.

It was this ping – tap – thump that had woken him earlier. The drainpipe’s drip had summoned him here. Where else would frozen earth be soft enough for digging than under falling water? He knelt, ignoring the mud that seeped into his flannel pants, and dug earth chunks free with his fingers. He rinsed his palms in the falling trickle and withdrew the key.

Rest in peace, he thought. He imagined the tired, hopeless eyes of his father and their bewilderment when Joseph’s mother introduced Joseph and his sister to him with, “Percy, these are our twins.”

That day, Joseph’s father had given him this key and made him promise to hide it. Joseph had agreed with as much earnestness as his heart could command. He couldn’t deny this first and only request.

Suddenly it wasn’t just the rain pipe dripping, but his eyes were dripping, and then his nose ran. Joseph lowered the key carefully into its hole, the pale silk wrapping bright against the dark earth. He placed a large stone over the key, then stamped the sodden earth closed, gritting his teeth to hold a sob captive. He glanced once more at the second story window, then looked away.

He hung his head, wiped his nose, and prayed. He prayed for security and protection, for warnings and obstacles against the key’s discovery. He pressed a handprint into the earth, then stood, scrubbed his palm on his pajamas, and prepared to scramble again through the bathroom window.

Dark lashes and a round face observed him like his own reflection from the other side of the windowpane. He’d begged his twin not to follow him, but now that the deed was done, he couldn’t shut her out anymore.

Joseph touched the window, and a curl of ice fell to the ground as Hazel opened it for him. They crept back to their room with the twin beds, and he pulled his blanket over their feet as they huddled together on his bed.

Hazel hugged her knees. Her flannel nightgown had a pattern of moons and shooting stars, and the collar was wet where she’d chewed it.

“Did you do it?” she whispered.

“I buried it.”

“Is it safe?”

“The house is guarding it. It’s as safe as I can make it.”

That afternoon, as Joseph and Hazel drove away from the house, their mother tight-lipped at the wheel, he stared at the iron bars along the outer gate. Withered bouquets still clung to the fence, left by strangers who mourned the death of the great Percy Humboldt, his father.

Joseph squished his palm against the cold glass of the car window and watched items pass: the funeral flowers, the looming gate, the forest beyond, and finally, looking over his shoulder, the outline of Humboldt Manor with the key below in its earth until, at last, everything faded into the sheathing protection of distance.

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