Showing results by author "Rachel Conlin-McLeod" in All Categories

Avery is a sixteen-year-old sophomore finding her way in a new school and new environment in Ledyard Meadow, Wyoming from far flung East River, Connecticut. She's shy and soft spoken but from within the shadows where she hides herself and her secret, her sketching and creativity bring color to her life. When she decides to watch the Ledyard Meadow High gymnastics team at practice for new subjects to sketch, she discovers Chloe. Chloe is a confident, poised, energetic gymnast on the high school gymnastics team. Behind the appearance of perfection though, is a sixteen-year-old girl dealing ...

Astrid Marie Dawson doesn't have it easy. Her mother is an addict, her father is abusive to her and her seven-year-old brother, Eric. Foster homes come and go and most of them have hurt more than healed. After a night of escape at a house party that turns wild and violent, Astrid is arrested and charged with assault, among other crimes, and is sentenced to juvenile detention. While in detention, she is forced to look inward at the two wolves that seem to influence who she is and what she does. There is the black, feral, unpredictable Angry Wolf, fed by anger, and the compassionate, ...

Emi Sato has always felt like a feral, stray cat that no one has wanted. She slips through the cracks but then, she lives in a cracked and broken world under the rules of a broken Department of Child and Family Services. Whether she is Deaf or not, she feels ignored, betrayed, unwanted, and definitely misunderstood. She has been left to believe that nothing matters anymore in her life. No one cares about her so why should she care about anyone or anything? Along comes Kira Pagano and Jess Carbonneau, two girls of East River High School's gymnastics team with a plan to help this feral cat ...

Fourteen-year-old Robyne McIntyre has slipped through too many cracks and run from crisis after crisis and too many foster homes to count, seeking refuge from abuse and neglect from wherever she is bounced. After running into the world of Overwatch, a very popular video game, Robyne sees an escape from juvenile detention and a new group home full of new challenges and new adjustments. Katie Pagano is a twenty-three-year-old college graduate dealing with the stresses and pressure to be everything her over-bearing and over-protective mother plans for her. Out on her own, Katie is a freelance ...

The latest installment in the Dragon's Tear Chronicle and the second in the Tales of East River series of books. Just when things seem right in the world, a new sort of storm begins to brew in the town of East River, Connecticut. Old enemies of the past creep back into the present and recruit some new blood to their ranks. For Amy Cavanaugh and Robyne Sheridan, the ties that once bound them, might be choking them to death. Dreams that were once wonderful and enriching, are becoming nightmares. Has the Living Darkness returned for revenge? What must Amy and Robyne do now to be rid of the ...

After a violent fire and home invasion on a cold winter's night in 1834, Mayfair, London and three years in St. Rita's Asylum for Girls, Noriko Tanaka-Gillette seeks an answer to her parents' disappearances or murders. Coming to her rescue from the continent, is her internationally known detective auntie, Elizabeth Gillette. Through London's East End and along England's earliest established rail line to Boxmoor, Noriko follows where her detective aunt leads as she takes up her case and looks to solve a crime layered with secrets, deceptions, and the workings of a gang of smugglers led by a ...

Yukiko Yashida was just an ordinary Japanese American ten-year-old living on a strawberry field on Bainbridge Island, Washington. She lived a simple life of school, chores, gardening, and friendships. She was a girl in search of her own place in the world and her own special story to share. Then, in a blink of an eye, Pearl Harbor is attacked and the Land of the Rising Sun emerges and looms large in her life. Not quite Japanese, not as American as she believes, Yukiko and her family are taken from their homes and relocated to the internment camps where now it's the desert sun that never ...

Everything is new for Naomi. She is in a new state and new school. She is in a new gymnastics program and club. She is also experiencing a new fear and new kind of pain that seems to paralyze her from being her best in the gym. Nightmares, waking up in cold sweats, a racing heart, chest pains.... There is something wrong going on inside her, but she can't figure it out. She can't see where this pain is coming from, but it hurts more than anything she has ever experienced before. As she tries to push through this pain and tries to appease her parents and focus on her gymnastics, some clues ...

The trilogy comes to a climactic end as vampire bloodlines and armies converge in a desperate battle for power and dominion, with Amy Cavanaugh, Robyne Sheridan, and Colette Paul-Michelle in the midst of the chaos with their allies and friends. With everything at stake, the Dragon's Tear becomes all the more precious and even more sought after. In the fogs of war and in the darkness of violence, bloodlust, and greed, the search for the Light of Redemption becomes all the more vital. In a soul-searching journey now coming to a close, Amy and Robyne must search inside themselves to see if ...

East River, Connecticut seems like an isolated, rural paradise in the wooded hills of Litchfield County, but underneath its many facades and surfaces, something dark and evil lurks among the shadows. This unknown threat gradually creeps and inserts itself into the peaceful like a parasite. What are its motives? It seems to feed on the weak and grow strong on the hidden evils in human nature. Something seems to be drawing out the sadistic, diabolical, and violent in some of the town's residents and it is up to some unlikely heroes from among East River's kids, to bring some light to these ...

An abusive, murderous father. A mother gone. Paige Tucker, a self-guarded girl, is placed with the Raymond family in a foster home feeling overwhelmed with fear and anger. Navigating a life forever changed will be hard, but one night she hears the howling of wolves, and finds her life suddenly full where she expected only emptiness. New friends, new purpose, and the promise of new adventure. With the help of new friends, Paige discovers that she holds inside herself the spirit of her mother, and her mother's many secrets. Her heart beats differently. Hers is the heart of a wolf. A past ...

In the absence of Edalis Meric, their friend, brother, companion, and Stormcaster, the Six Fellows are just pieces, shards, and shattered fragments of who they are. Though finally free of her slave collar and the Witches of Aether, a battered, broken and tormented Rebecca is barely the brave and courageous Bard-Minstrel she once was. Lost without Edalis, haunted by voices and nightmares, she feels herself slipping away or getting torn apart. The Druid, Wowen, sees premonitions of converging forces coming to a head that could change the lives of Edalis, Rebecca, Nidalee D'Avoneese, and the ...

Pain, trauma, and abuse seem to be all thirteen-year-old Allison McClanahan knows. Shame, humiliation, and fear was her life before her ambitious case worker, Ms. Rebecca Aisling, took her case and took her under her protective wings. Rescued from an abusive, drug-addled father and the loss of her mother, Allison finds herself placed in foster care. Everything is a whirlwind of confusion. She doesn’t know who she is or where her place is in this world anymore. She yearns for answers and a night without bad dreams and nightmares. Marjan Mehri, an outsider to some but a young woman of hope ...

After the passing of her grandmother at the age of nine, Gwendolyn's life in the house of charity and orphanage in Winterfell has been one of chores and boredom for the most part--that is until she starts to sneak off to learn swordplay from Sir Jared and his young recruits in the fairground. Wishing to be a squire herself, Gwendolyn seeks ways to prove herself and show everyone around her that though she is Deaf, she is not to be underestimated. When stories of her grandmother's past and legacy come to light with the inheritance and return of a magic lantern, Gwendolyn's opportunity to ...

Taken into the world of the great immortal artists, painters, musicians, and composers, Diana Tremont must learn to adapt to the existence of a vampire if she is to be worthy of her eternal gift. As one of the Orchid, she must become a guardian and custodian of the beautiful, creative, and those touched by the Muse with the Divine Spark. AislingTuck, is just a wanderer, loner, and high school wallflower trying to navigate a life of constant change and upheaval. When she meets Diana Tremont, she can no longer hide or shy away. She finds herself thrust into the center of a centuries' old ...

In the year 2195, post-war Saigon is a city of ghosts, demons, skeletons, and vampires. From the remnants of the old International Zone, Sara takes herself through the war weary streets at night, under monsoon rains, to work her night shift at the Moonlight Cinema, a two-hundred-forty-year-old relic of French occupation. More than just a cashier and attendant, she is one of the last custodians of a house of ghosts standing guard against the demons of prejudice, racism, and old xenophobia, and the skeletons of recent war and violence. Wrestling with her own inner demons, ghosts, skeletons, ...

Mari Parenteau was eight years old when she was inserted into the astronaut training program with an international crew of scientists, specialists in the fields of astrophysics, botany, and engineering. Six years later, she wakes from her stasis coma sleep aboard the international space station, Oberon One, now in orbit between Ganymede and Callisto, on a long-term expedition to explore and investigate Jupiter and its four Galilean moons of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Six years lost and gone... a childhood abruptly shortened against her will. She wakes in the shadow of a stormy ...

Corrin is an indentured servant of House D'Avoneese with a bit of a wild and stormy streak. She loves her mischief as much as she desires her freedom. Unfortunately for her, Lord and Lady D'Avoneese have run out of patience with her jokes, pranks, and wild shenanigans. An unexpected abandonment leads to an incredible encounter with a bubbly, sometimes fluff-headed cleric named Calla, a crafty old tinker of a shaman named Brann, and a rather handsome but troubled elf named Lethuel who seems determined to hunt and kill a dragon. This dragon reveals herself to be just as stormy and chaotic as ...

A Changeling shapeshifter, Ophren, reluctant to even be an "almost" Druid, is given the opportunity to finally escape the life she dreads. Summoned by elder Elves of Silvestri, Ophren must find and rescue a Sun Elf child born of a rare and sacred bloodline of Silvestri and help restore her to a throne destined for her and her alone. Krenn, the Sun Elf in question, begins her adventure with very few memories but a life of seafaring and chores and modest contentment ahead of her. Purchased as an orphaned slave from the city of Arrabel when she was only a very young child, Krenn's life has ...

Two Past Twilight is a macabre pairing of two novellas. In "Ghost Story", a wandering vampire named David unknowingly finds himself returning to a place of his past; but what appears to be an abandoned village town named Sanctuary, becomes a place of more than just faded memories. What he finds among the dilapidated old places and empty fields stirs up a story of tragedy. The victims who once called Sanctuary home emerge with stories to tell that he must hear. Apparently, David was not Sanctuary's only survivor. In "Wish", a young girl named Alyssa unknowingly encounters a wandering, unseen...