so you wanna read one of my original projects?

This isn't rushed--this is, it took a pandemic and my hours being cut drastically to push me to self-publish the book I've been meaning to self-publish. This isn't me giving up on being traditionally published--I've figured for a while that if this project was ever going to see the light of day it would be self-published, not because it's bad,  I enjoy it, but because it does seem more suited to self-publishing than anything else.

But, anyway, what is this thing? It's young adult, it's about these kids who go to hell accidentally, it's Aurora having a lot of fun shoving characters from a lot of different time periods into the same project. Here's the synopsis on Amazon:

It was Jake’s idea to explore the abandoned house a few miles off of the highway. Neither Sam nor Amanda could have predicted that it would send them to Hell. Fortunately, getting out of Hell is possible – and out of the 80 Divisions Hell is made of, the three of them have landed in Division 78. With the help of a medieval swordsman who wants nothing more than to keep out of school, the three of them just might make it. Standing in their way? A Southern gentleman who died at the end of the American Civil War, more demons than any of them can count, and the devil himself… all of whom have taken an unhealthy interest in Sam. And Sam, mute since birth and willing to do anything to not only survive, but thrive, might be willing to make a deal with the devil to get out of Hell alive and in better shape than he entered.

Here's links to paperback and kindle versions, though with books being de-prioritized by Amazon, I would maybe go for kindle if you want to read it faster, it's cheaper, anyway.

Posting the first chapter below the cut.

CHAPTER ONE

            The new kid had her poster.

            His name was Jake, he was from Bismarck, he never shut up, and he was holding the poster that she had (admittedly, taking a chance on it getting ruined) grabbed from the history room before heading out to the buses. She needed to finish it tonight, and now she had to talk to Jake Hyland to get it.

            It wasn’t like Jake was mean. He just didn’t shut up. He’d been at Lakewood for a couple of months, and already most of the high school had written him off as an annoyance. His only friends were Sam Jude, who was gorgeous, mute, and standing directly behind Jake, and Allan Carson, an eighth grader. Julian Rathe, a sixth grade kid who lived next door to Allan, could be seen hanging around them sometimes, too—either way, Jake had collected a reject, as cute as he was, and a couple of middle schoolers.

            “Hey, Amanda,” Jake said. “You busy tonight?”

            Oh, great. He was going to ask her out again. He’d asked her to the Halloween Dance and she’d had to fake family plans to get out of it.

            But she didn’t want to be a jerk. “No,” she said. “Can I have my poster back?”

            “Oh, uh, sure,” Jake said. He held it out, but held onto it and kept talking when she grabbed for it. “Do you want to come explore a creepy old house with Sam and me? It’s that one on 46. You know, the creepy abandoned one. Of course you know. You’ve lived here way longer than me. But, um, Sam was talking, well, not talking, but he told me about it, because he’s way into creepy stuff, and it sounds cool, and if you want to come it would be super cool if you could like, answer so I can stop making a douche out of myself.”

            “Um,” Amanda said, and then her bus pulled away. Jake still hadn’t let go of her poster, and she resigned herself to either an afternoon with Jake’s voice bouncing around in her ears or walking home (and, though it was November, it was North Dakota, and it was cold), so she sighed. “How are we getting there?”

            Jake pointed to Sam, who pulled out his wallet and extracted a driver’s license. He showed it off with no indication that he cared at all about what was going on. He just held it between two-fingers and met her eyes, completely straight-faced. Then he put it back in his wallet, flipping it shut with the finality of a coffin closing. “Sam’s one of those assholes who got his license six months after getting his permit at fourteen. Country kids, man.”

            Amanda, who was also ‘one of those assholes’ that had gotten her license six months after getting her permit at fourteen, didn’t say anything. Jake grimaced, a little, and Amanda took pity on him.

            Even though he was still holding onto her poster.

            “If you take me home afterward,” she said. “I’ll come explore this stupid abandoned house with you.”

            Jake cheered and held up a fist for Sam; Sam briefly touched his fist to Jake’s, and then Jake offered it to Amanda. Amanda, feeling supremely awkward, gave him the fistbump, and then unceremoniously yanked her poster out of his other hand. Jake didn’t even notice she’d taken her poster back, he just tugged his backwards snapback tighter onto his head and grinned.

            Amanda supposed that Jake wasn’t ugly. It was just hard to look good next to Sam Jude, who was bona fide pretty. He was tall and lean, whereas Jake was short-ish and scrawny—kind of like an eleven-year-old. Sam had dark hair that fell in waves over his forehead and around his ears, and Jake’s hair was dishwater blond and spiked out. Sam’s eyes were big and dark brown, Jake’s were nondescript blue. And while both of them were very, very white, Sam’s skin was smooth and even. Jake was covered in freckles.

            Also, maybe it was just because she was annoyed with Jake, but the fact that Sam physically couldn’t speak was very appealing to Amanda right now. Though it wasn’t a date of any kind, even though she knew Jake liked her and Sam didn’t give a shit about any of the girls at Lakewood. It was just a creepy excursion to an abandoned house with two boys, one of whom she barely knew, the other whom she’d gone to kindergarten with. It wasn’t anything big.

            God, but Jake was talking again.

            “—and so, like, Sam’s car is super tiny, we’ll fit, I think—“ Sam started walking across the parking lot and Amanda followed, Jake blabbing a couple of steps behind them at all times. “—like, seriously, the thing’s so tiny it doesn’t even have back doors, but like, it runs, I guess. It was his Dad’s old car, and by ‘old car’ was probably his Dad’s car in the nineties. It’s kind of a piece of shit.”

            Sam shot him the bird, and Jake shot it right back with a grin. “You know I love you and your shit car, Sam,” he said. Sam responded by stopping beside a tiny red Ford and pointing to the backseat, and then to Jake. “Aw, shit, Sam, you’re gonna make me sit in the back? On all your stupid emo CDs?”

            Sam frowned, and then glanced at Amanda.

            “Point. Yeah, it would be a dick move to make her sit back there. Sorry. Didn’t mean to like, pretend you weren’t there, but it’s really hard to have a multi-person conversation when Sam’s involved. You’re difficult, Sam.”

            Sam opened the car door, folded the driver’s seat forward, and pointed to the backseat. Jake tumbled through with a kind of awkward effortlessness, and then, before Sam could slam the seat back on him, put one hand to the back of it and turned to Amanda. “I can take your bag and stuff. There’s not even any room in the front, and it’ll be a lot more comfortable with your shit out of the way.”

            “Okay,” Amanda said. This was… weird. Besides the obvious weirdness of the situation, the fact that she didn’t really know either of them all that well, they had that kind of bro-y friendship that she didn’t understand in the slightest. But she handed Jake her backpack, and her poster, anyway. It was better than having to walk home.

            And Sam looked really, really good—sure, he dressed like a regular teenage boy, T-shirts and jeans and all that, but his clothes fit him and didn’t have any mud stains or tears. And he wore Converse instead of dirty cowboy or muck boots. So she went around to the other side, tugged at the door until it popped open, and got in. The seatbelt stuck for a second, and she satisfied herself with the fact that, while the car was definitely not clean, the front was not the disaster zone the back looked to be.

            “Sam, music,” Jake said. Sam dropped into the driver’s seat and glanced back. Jake held up Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree and Linkin Park’s Meteora. Sam bit down hard on his lower lip, and then grabbed Meteora. “Ooh, a super emo day. Not just one of those fake emo days. Hey, was Sam an emo in eighth grade? He looks like a former emo. He has too many My Chemical Romance CDs for him to not have been at least a little emo. Seriously, dude wears Converse, and sometimes black jeans, and that’s pretty emo.”

            “Um,” Amanda said. “He didn’t, like, ever have a fringe or wear eyeliner or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

            “Damn it,” Jake said. “I was like, hoping for full MySpace emo glory.”

            Sam rolled his eyes and started his car. It did start, like Jake had promised, though it rattled with a sort of alarming tenacity for a couple of seconds before it settled down. Sam popped in the CD, and the car was filled with industrial noise Linkin Park. Amanda didn’t know any Linkin Park besides “In the End”, but it didn’t really surprise her that Sam liked them.

            They pulled out of the school’s parking lot and headed for the highway. Lakewood was a small town—not supremely tiny, not by North Dakota standards, but still small. The town itself had a population of about twelve hundred, a combination middle-and-high school and a small elementary school, a bar, a gas station, a post office, a McDonald’s, and two churches, a Lutheran and a Catholic. There had used to be a family-owned movie theater, but it had closed down in 2007, so it stood empty, the plastic lettered sign still advertising Spider-Man 3.

            Sam’s driving wasn’t as good as Amanda had expected it would be. He did go the speed limit, roughly, but it was like he saw stop signs about half a second after he should’ve, and he stopped jerkily and frequently. Jake, unbuckled and holding onto the ‘oh-shit’ handle in the backseat, leaned forward to shake Amanda’s shoulder.

            “Should’ve warned you he sucks,” Jake said. “I think he only got his license because the lady at the DMV’s scared of his dad. His dad’s pretty scary. He’s—dude, you’re gonna miss the turn!”

            Sam cranked the wheel to the left so hard and so fast that Amanda felt her stomach jump into her throat. She clutched at her seatbelt, her heart pounding so hard she was pretty sure it was going to crack a rib or pop a lung or something, and Jake let out a breathless laugh as the car spun onto gravel. It careened toward the ditch for a couple of seconds, a couple of terrible goddam seconds, and then Sam got control of the car again and they were going straight.

            “Goddam, Sam,” Jake said. “God. Damn.”

            Sam shrugged. He looked calm, but like he was forcing himself calm. He was ashy-pale and his arms were tense, but he looked like he was forcing his hands to stay soft on the wheel. Like he was forcing himself to not freak out.

            Amanda tried to force herself to not freak out, but it was harder. It made her think of her brother. He’d died in 2008 in a drunk driving accident—freshman in college, runs away from a party, gets in a car with a bunch of other drunk freshman, driver doesn’t look at an intersection, half of the kids die, Alex among them. She was normally okay in cars, as long as the driver didn’t drive stupid.

            Sam seemed to be one of those guys that drove stupid, and it was not great for her resting heart rate.

            She was tempted to ask him to take her home, but she could see the house now. The trees that surrounded it at least, and the peak of the roof with the dinky little formerly-red chimney sticking straight out the top. Jake, who had lapsed into silence after they’d nearly gone into the ditch, decided that it was time to start talking again.

            “So, I figured this would be a good bonding activity for me and my boy Sam here,” Jake said. “Seeing as all we really do is play video games and watch creepy movies on his impressively large flat-screen, and Sam really likes creepy shit, and especially old creepy shit, like I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t gotten anything lower than an A+ on any history assignment this year, and he has found creepy shit in things I did not know one could find creepy shit, and I like feeling like I know what’s going on, and that’s why we’re coming to check out this creepy house.

            “In case you were wondering.”

            “Okay,” Amanda said. She hadn’t really been wondering. She mostly just figured that teenage boys did stupid things, and sometimes those stupid things included creepy houses. Sam parked the car, stared at the steering wheel for a few seconds, and then sighed and turned the key. “How long do you think this is going to take? I have to be home for dinner at six.”

            “Uh,” Jake said. He cleared his throat. “It’s like, three-forty-five now, right?”

            Sam held up four fingers.

            “Four. Okay. Yeah, that should be fine. Dude, it shouldn’t take longer than like forty-five minutes. I dunno how much is going to be in here, honestly. I mean, it’s cool, but like. How much could seriously be in there, right?”

            Sam spread his hands, and Jake laughed.

            “Okay. Okay, yeah.”  

            Amanda had no clue what was going on, so she got out of the car.

            It was windier than it had been, or maybe the buildings in Lakewood had blocked some of it, but it was coming from the south and so the windblock did nothing. Amanda shivered and tucked her hands into the sleeves of her coat. In the next few moments, Jake and Sam were out too, Sam pulling his trench coat tighter around his body and Jake unceremoniously losing his hat to the wind.

            “Aw, shit!” He went chasing after it, but stopped trying when it blew over the highway. “Shit, man. You can’t find Fighting Sioux stuff very easy anymore, not since the name change.”

            Sam pulled out his phone, tapped something out, and then Jake’s phone buzzed.

            “Yeah, Sam, I do actually like the Fighting Sioux, because I have to, because before he got arrested Ben went to UND, and that’s where I want to go, too, because Grand Forks is sick as hell, dude.”

            His phone buzzed again.

            “People do say sick as hell, and I am not living in 2004.”

            Amanda, feeling increasingly like she should have chosen to brave the wind and the cold and just walked home, coughed to maybe get someone to pay some sort of attention to her. She felt weird about Sam texting what he wanted to say to Jake; not because she thought that he was talking about her, because Jake’s comments pointed to that definitely not being the case, but it made her feel like a definite outsider. And that felt weird, partially because she was normally a generally accepted part of the population, and because she was with Jake, who talked too much, and Sam, who couldn’t talk at all, and they were supposed to be the outsiders.

            “Oh, hey, Sam’s being a dick, sorry,” Jake said. “Uh, he was just asking me if I actually liked the Fighting Sioux, and then he told me that nobody says sick as hell and that I’m living in 2004 which would, honestly, probably be like, way cooler than 2011, because like, the music and shit. I mean, there was the whole Bush presidency, which my dad hates so I just hate because my dad hated him, but it would’ve been cool to be like, cognizant during that time. Hey, Sam, did I use that word right?”

            Sam gave him a thumbs up, and Jake grinned.

            “Okay, cool, let’s do what we came here to do.”      

            With that, Jake ran to the house. Legit ran—he ran awkwardly, like he had just stepped out of an eighties movie, and Jake’s eighties movie stereotype was definitely the dorky kid who got beat up all the time. He bounced onto the porch (Amanda waited for it to crack and crumble underneath him, but it held) and pushed on the door.

            It opened. It wasn’t even hard.

            The fact that it opened without any resistance whatsoever made Amanda shiver. She supposed she was probably shivering anyway, with the wind and the cold and all, but it was a different kind of shiver. It was a kind of, holy shit this is how horror movies start kind of shiver. But if Jake and Sam felt it, they didn’t give it away. Sure, Jake looked a little nervous as he looked back to the two of them and grinned, but he always looked a little nervous. And Sam didn’t look any different from before.

            Not at all.

            In fact, Sam pushed past Jake to be the first in and disappeared around a corner.

            “Huh,” Jake said. “Yeah, he’s just going for it. C’mon, we probably shouldn’t like, split up. That’s how members of the Scooby Doo gang get captured and, to be honest, I’m probably Shaggy, and without Scooby, he would’ve been dead like a million times, so I’m gonna like—shut up, I’m going to shut up. Point is, we should follow him.”

            “Yeah,” Amanda said. She resisted the urge to rub her temples. Jake gave her a headache.

            But she followed him deeper into the house, anyway.

            Somehow, she’d lost him.

            Jake had run into the house immediately after Sam, taking that same turn, and Amanda had followed after only a couple of minutes of wishing that she was anywhere but there. She should have at least been able to hear Jake whether he found Sam or not—if he found him, because he would definitely be talking to him, and if not, because he would definitely be talking to her.

            But she took the turn and was faced with a stripped room. She figured that it had once been a kitchen. It was too big to have been a bathroom and she could see the remains of plumbing. On the other end of the kitchen, directly across from her, was a screen door. Directly to her right was a doorway that yawned into blackness, and she didn’t have to think to figure out which door that Jake and Sam had decided to take.

            Her critical thinking was rewarded when she heard a yell, and she shook her head. She didn’t have to go down there. Sam had probably spooked Jake and they’d come bursting up in a few seconds like breathless puppies. She kept her eyes on the doorway, her unease growing with every second that they didn’t show up, and then she leaned on the wall and the plaster screamed and from the hole, Jake screamed.

            “Amanda-get-down-here-please-holy-shit!”

            She really didn’t want to. Not only was it creepy in general, but she had the sudden image of the stairs breaking underneath her.

Or worse, the stairs not being there at all.

But Jake was still screaming. Wordless, just shrieks.

It didn’t make her want to go down there any more than the first screams had, but her phone was in her bag, in the car, and Sam might have locked the car so going out there to get that was probably a stupid idea that wouldn’t get anything done, so when Jake screamed again she crossed to the basement staircase and put out one foot to test for the stairs.

They were there. At least there was that.

She stuck to the edges of the stairs, away from the middle, but tried not to lean too hard on the railings. She remembered the scene in one of the Goosebumps books she’d read as a kid where a kid leaned hard on a railing and fell. It hadn’t been the main plot of the book; that had been something to do with an evil camera, but it was flashing through her mind anyway.

The basement swallowed light. Though sunlight made its way into the house upstairs through cracks between the boards on the windows, and just through cracks in the house itself, none of the light made it onto the basement stairs. Within a few steps she was swallowed up, completely consumed by the basement stairs. There had probably been more Goosebumps books where kids had died in basements, but she could only think of that one scene in that one book, and that was probably a good thing, but it kept running around in her head.

Jake had stopped screaming, but she could hear his breathing. It was shaky. Shaky and rough and raw. “Jake?” she tried. “I’m on the stairs. Do—do you have your phone on you, can you show me where you are?”

“Dropped it,” was the reply. “I was—I had the flashlight on, but like, uh, it fell onto it, so you probably can’t see it, um, I, um, I did a stupid thing.”

“Huh?” Amanda said. She kept sliding her feet down the staircase, waiting for the final crash that would send her to a broken leg or a broken arm or just a slow death of starvation in this basement, never mind that Jake’s phone was somewhere on the floor.

The stairs stopped and Amanda, expecting another step, nearly fell. She caught herself on the railing and it creaked and she flinched away. “What did you do?”

“So, there’s this, um, box on the wall,” Jake said.

“What—?”

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “What. That’s like, super fricking weird, or cool, or something, you know. So there’s this hole in the box, and I um, I looked in with my flashlight first, and I thought I saw something at the end, like a picture or something, so I reached my arm in, and now—this is like some Saw shit, Amanda, and when I pull it feels like I’m going to lose all the skin on my arm and possibly my entire hand.”

He let out a laugh, or a cough, that sounded a lot like a sob.

“It hurts.”

“I’ll try and find your phone,” Amanda said. Her heart was pounding in her throat, but she felt steady. She felt like she could figure it out. A crises was okay, a crises was better than wandering around, no clue what was going on or why it was happening. A crises was better than uncertainty. “Is it by you?”

“Yeah, it just like, slammed into the ground,” Jake said. “Probably cracked up and stuff.”

“Keep talking.” Amanda had already started walking toward him.

“Ha, not gonna be a problem,” Jake said. He kept blabbing and Amanda kept making her way toward him, walking slow because she didn’t know what else was in this room, if it included a box that sounded like it could be from the Saw movies. “You know last year, when I was a freshman, people like, hated me because I never shut up? Like, that was their primary reason. I’m pretty sure. It was great. I mean, not really, that was sarcasm, but like—can I stop now, because if you say no I might actually talk about how much I got beat up and that’s not something you should tell a girl you like, probably.”

He sounded like he was right beside her. Right beside her. She reached out and her fingertips brushed against a hoodie and then he grabbed her arm and it took all she had not to jump, or cringe away, because she knew it was Jake. “Yeah, please be quiet,” she said.

Jake let out a breathless laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Amanda crouched, Jake’s hand moved up her arm so that she could still crouch down and he could still have some human contact. She felt around on the floor, finding Jake’s Vans and dirt and then, a rectangle that was definitely his phone. She picked it up and then there was light. Jake let out an audible sigh.

“Cool, step one complete. Step two is to help me not be in this situation anymore.”

            “Take your phone,” Amanda said as she stood. She pressed the phone into the back of his free hand, and he let go of her arm to grab it. “Okay. What’s this about a box?”

            “Oh boy,” Jake said. “Oh boy, are you going to have fun with this.”

            The flashlight illuminated his face for a few seconds, and he didn’t look good—he looked pale and dirty and stressed—and then the light flashed over to a big metal box in the wall. One of Jake’s arms was inside up to the elbow. His hoodie sleeve had torn, and what was left had fallen down enough that she could see blood streaking his bare skin.

            “Question,” Amanda said. “Why did you put your arm in the mysterious box in the abandoned house?”

            “I’m fifteen? I’m dumb? I dunno, Amanda, just get me out!”

            Amanda swallowed and got much closer to Jake Hyland than she’d ever wanted to be; she moved between him and the box, which basically meant that he was spooning her standing up, and she, praying to whatever god was feeling bad for her at the moment, put her hands into the box.

            There were definitely blades. She had her fingertips on the flats of them—the sharp points were laid flat against Jake’s arm. It was like a Saw trap—she was even pretty sure she knew which movie this one was from—because they were laid against Jake’s arm in a way that told her they would definitely dig in if he tried to get his arm out. And from how sticky the blades already were (apart from the fact that he’d told her and was obviously in pain) she knew that he’d definitely already tried to get his arm out.

            “I’m going to try something,” she said. “It might hurt. Try to pull your arm out when I tell you to.”

            “Okay,” Jake said. “It might be a good time to tell you that when I try to do that, it hurts me.”

            “I know,” Amanda said. “I have a plan.”

            She pushed on the blades, and they bowed away from Jake’s arm.

            “Pull.”

            Jake pulled, his arm coming out over Amanda’s shoulder (she caught a glimpse of the gore in the flashlight beam and winced, a little), and once his hand was clear, she pulled her hands out. The blades snapped shut after her, and then they were faced with a box whose hole was guarded by a legitimate ring of blades.

            “Okay, I know I already asked this,” Amanda started.

            “I know, Amanda. I know. I’m dumb. Please don’t ask me why I stuck my arm in the obvious trap box again.”

            Amanda couldn’t help but laugh, a little, and then turned to face him. He illuminated his face long enough to give her a strained grin, and then turned the flashlight to his arm. The gore was not better the second time around; his arm had been braceleted by deep-looking angular cuts.

            “You’re gonna need stitches,” Amanda said.

            “Yeah,” Jake said. He let out another one of those breathless, nervous laughs. “Let’s, um, let’s find Sam so that we can leave. This was a stupid idea, and now I’m bleeding, which is, honestly, how most of my stupid ideas turn out.”

            Jake swept the flashlight beam around the basement then, and it looked like a normal basement, apart from the torture-box on the wall.

            And the hole on the other side, with Sam Jude’s phone lying in front of it.