Summary from Goodreads How can you fight your nightmares when they’re real? Melaina, half-human dream therapist, just wants her life to return to normal. Yes, her Oneiroi father is in prison and, yes, the place she worked burned down, but she has a cute boyfriend and a new house. She beat the bad guy. She’s earned a break. Right? Unfortunately for Melaina, people are still getting possessed by nightmare spirits; the police are investigating her past; and the bad guy’s brother, the Morpheus himself, is coming to town to demand answers. When a deranged ex-nurse checks himself out of hospital on the same day her cousin runs away from home, Melaina is dragged into a fight not just for her life but for her soul. Goodreads Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Australia Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | Kobo Excerpt one Usually when I stepped into someone’s dreams just after they’d fallen asleep, I didn’t arrive in an active dream so much as in a place of significance in their subconscious. The kind of place they’d have recurring dreams about. As a lucid dreamer, I didn’t have true recurring dreams—deliberately conjuring dreams of my favourite places didn’t count. But I was familiar with the concept. Jen had told me that, usually, those dreams she remembered contained elements of her family home. Brad often dreamed of his grandparents’ house, where he’d spent a lot of time as a child. That was why, when I appeared in a brightly lit department store, I raised my eyebrows. Huh. First job, maybe? I stood in an aisle full of bags of confectionary: liquorice sticks, mixed lollies, chocolate drops. But everything was slightly off. When I focused on a rustling purple and yellow packet, trying to make out the brand name, the logo slid away from my gaze as if it didn’t want to be nailed down. Price tags were illegible: smeared or written in gibberish characters. And when I looked between the packages I didn’t see a backboard filled with mounting holes but sheer, impenetrable darkness. The darkness gaped back at me. With goosebumps shivering along the length of my forearms, I took a moment to prepare myself, sparing a thought and a shred of energy to conjure a set of trusty motorcycle leathers. I didn’t have any such thing in the real world, but in dreams I’d found they served quite well as armour against the barbs on a blight’s tentacles. A clear-faced, round helmet made me feel like an idiot but protected my eyes. I didn’t know for certain that there was a blight here, but something was definitely not right. Even if it was just a creepy manifestation of Daniel’s subconscious—even if he was indeed going crazy—it paid to be careful. Ephemera could still have teeth. I crept towards the end of the aisle, leather squeaking faintly as I listened for the telltale bubbling hiss of a blight. Peering past a stand of round-bellied plastic animals stuffed with jellybeans, I saw a row of unattended registers to my left. To my right, clothes swayed in a breeze I couldn’t feel. In front of me was the store’s main entrance: the roller shutter was down, allowing only a vague impression of a darkened mall beyond. Deserted apartment stores were bloody creepy. Even ones with the lights on. Still, this didn’t look like a place a blight had trashed. Brad’s had shredded the surface of his dream, tearing holes in walls and coating everything with a mess that would do a slimy Ghostbusters spectre proud. This store was creepy, sure, but trashed? No. Like my thought made it happen, a corner of the store went dark as one fluorescent light, then another, went out with a pop and a tinkle of glass on tile. “What the…?” I whispered, looking up. That was when I spotted the blight. It hung upside down from the ceiling, somewhere above the menswear section, like a deranged bat a few feet wide and made of smog. Its tentacles were jammed deep into the rectangular ceiling tiles; the tiles themselves were slick with an oily coating of blight ichor that dripped downwards, spattering across a garish display of novelty ties that hurt my eyes. “Gross,” I said, my voice somewhat muffled behind the helmet’s faceplate. The blight turned, rotating slowly until its stained yellow eyes glared down at me. “Oneeiiiiroi,” the creature hissed. Excerpt two Leander studied me from the other side of the trolley. I could see the shadows of fatigue under his eyes, which shocked me. Leander never looked tired. Cocky and self-assured? Yes. But tired? No. Not even when Ikelos had bound him with barbed wire. Despite his relaxed manner, increasing the hold of Daniel’s memory over the dream and destroying so many blights was draining him. And he was too proud to admit it. I clenched my jaw and took a breath. I’d wanted to look for matches and maybe some reams of paper, but we didn’t have time. Another blight was about to hatch. “Alright.” I pulled several packets of nails down and tossed them onto the top of the trolley with a sick feeling. I’d seen enough news stories to know real-world lunatics packed their bombs with shards, to cause additional damage. “Can you get this up there, and then explode it?” I glanced at the nails. “From a d—” The floor erupted beneath us. Tentacles, each as thick as one of Leander’s well-muscled thighs, smashed through the floor. The blight hadn’t been as helpless as I’d assumed … and corruption hadn’t been the only thing it had been spreading. My cheek burned as a shard of floor tile sliced it, blood welling. The trolley tipped and I ignored the pain, lunging forward to steady it before its contents spilled into the sticky darkness below. Leander leaned over and gripped the frame, placing one hand on either side, his fingers brushing against mine as I let go. His grim gaze held mine for a moment, and then his wings pumped. Air washed over me as he lifted the overstuffed trolley into the air, towards the central body mass of the blight. For a second I felt relief as he carried the improvised bomb above the thrashing tentacles. Then one of those tentacles slid around my waist, barbs as long as my palm tearing through the scorched armour of my motorcycle leathers. I gasped and prised at them with bare hands, trying to wiggle free but succeeding only in cutting my palms. Above me, the muscles in Leander’s back worked as he strained to haul the trolley upwards, ignoring the now-free baby blight buzzing around him like an oversized mosquito. He was dragging the bomb up there with brute force. Pain caused my vision to blur, but not before I realised he was going to ignite the trolley’s contents while he was holding it. The damned fool Oneiroi had no idea what would happen. The tentacle dragged me towards the jagged hole in the floor. I didn’t look down, not wanting to see what awaited me. The wet smacking sound and the putrid smell were bad enough. Sweat beaded on my brow and I set my jaw against the pain, blinking to clear my vision, staring up at Leander. He drove the end of the trolley into the breeder blight’s wet mass, leaning against the handle to brace it there as he conjured a spark in one hand. The spark descended towards the makeshift bomb. I cried out, using the last of my energy to fling a shield, a wall of force, between Leander and the trolley. Fire and exploding chunks of meat raining down around me. My vision blackened, and I tumbled out of the dream. Author bio Cassandra Page is a mother, author, editor and geek. She lives in Canberra, Australia’s bush capital, with her son and two Cairn Terriers. She has a serious coffee addiction and a tattoo of a cat—despite being allergic to cats. When she’s not reading or writing, she engages in geekery, from Doctor Who to AD&D. Because who said you need to grow up? Author links Blog | Twitter | Facebook Instagram | Pinterest | Goodreads Interview with Cassandra Page, author of Lucid Dreaming
Can you tell us a little about your Lucid Dreaming series? The books tell the story of Melaina Armstrong, who is half human and half Oneiroi, or dream spirit. That had always been impossible, for rather obvious anatomical reasons; her birth caused a significant amount of consternation and raised a significant amount of interest—not all of it from benign quarters. After discovering and defeating the individual targeting her in the first book, poor Melaina just wants to get her life back to what passes for normal in her world. Of course, things are never that easy. Tell us a bit more about Melaina. Melaina appeared in my head one day, almost wholesale, as I was driving home after work. She came stomping out of my subconscious complete with steel-capped boots and a nose piercing. I loved her instantly, and put my fantasy novel plans aside to tell her story instead. She is a university drop-out, a dream therapist and a fierce friend and daughter. I’m going to miss her. Does that mean you’re not planning any more books in the series? Not at this stage; Melaina’s story was always intended to be a duology. I have four or five other stories percolating away in the back of my brain, each of them clamouring to be told next. But I might be tempted to revisit her again down the track. I’ll never say never! What is the favourite part of your writing process? Finishing the first draft? I suppose that’s a bit of a cheat answer, so if I can’t say that then it’d have to be editing. Having something to shape and hone is so much fun, and comes much more easily to me since I’m also an editor in my day job. My second-favourite part is writing the last few chapters of a book. I’ve drafted six novels now, and it’s always such a heady rush, seeing all the plot threads come together and the plot accelerate. Also, usually by that point I’m doing mean things to my characters, which is also fun (for me)! Are all your books set in Australia? All five of my urban fantasy novels are—although part of the third book in my young adult trilogy, Isla’s Inheritance, also has a handful of scenes set in London and Edinburgh. I’ve considered setting a book entirely overseas, but there are several reasons I haven’t. One is that I’ve only ever been on one overseas holiday (to Scotland and Spain), and I didn’t think I could fake it. Another is that I’m acutely aware that I write in Australian English. Readers would be onto me faster than I could say “hey, mate”. Besides, I love Australia and thought there wasn’t enough supernatural fiction set here, so I decided to put my money where my mouth is!
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