Night Terror (Night Chill # 2) by Jeff Gunhus
Publication Date:
Genre: Horror, Supernatural Thriller
Ten years after her abduction and near-sacrifice to the Source, Sarah Tremont struggles to be a normal teenager. As much as she’s tried to suppress the power inside of her, it’s grown dangerously strong and has drawn the attention of those who want to possess her power for themselves.
The nightmare that she thought was long over starts again as powerful forces descend upon Prescott City to seek her out. With her parents and Joseph Lonetree’s help, Sarah must stand up to an evil much more powerful than the one she faced in the caves a decade earlier. But in the end, she discovers the greatest danger might come from the power living inside of her.
Mama D’s Character
Mama D hated Halloween. All of the regular folk, the ones who crossed themselves when the wind howled through trees on a dark night, or turned on all the lights in the house because of a single creaking floorboard, pretended for a night that they enjoyed the macabre. Only they didn’t enjoy it. They mocked it, hoping in their primal brains that such mocking would immunize them from the very real world of terror that lurked in the unlit places ready to reach out, touch them on their bare skin and make them unclean.
Mama D scanned the revelers in the street with her eyes closed. The information she wanted wasn’t the kind reflected light could give her. It was the kind she could feel only using the acute senses she’d been born with, the senses that had enabled her to hunt and to feed for the last century. She breathed in deep as she sensed a pesh with a little bit of the gift inside pass her by. It wasn’t enough though. She thought she could find better so she waited. And she watched.
She knew there were others like her around the country, taking advantage of this night where inhibitions were lowered, where protective parents let their children run wild on a sugar-high up and down streets. Nowadays parents had become increasingly paranoid and usually made feeding more of a challenge. That and law enforcement was better than even so Mama D and her kind had to be smart. The last thing she wanted was to end up in jail or, more likely, under some scientist’s knife once they realized what she really was.
Mama D shut out those dark thoughts and looked back over the crowd in the street. She sensed a powerful young pesh walking toward her and she felt her hunger rise in her chest. The crush of the crowd would make things easy for her. As she opened her eyes and spotted the young trick-or-treater walking her way she though that maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe Halloween was going to be fun this year after all.
Jeff Gunhus is the author of both adult thrillers and the Middle Grade/YA series, The Templar Chronicles. The first book, Jack Templar Monster Hunter, was written in an effort to get his reluctant reader eleven-year old son excited about reading. It worked and a new series was born. His book Reaching Your Reluctant Reader has helped hundreds of parents create avid readers. As a father of five, he and his wife lead an active lifestyle simply trying to keep up with their kids. In rare moments of quiet, he can be found in the back of the City Dock Cafe in Annapolis working on his next novel.
His latest book is the thriller/horror novel, Night Terror. Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
Author Links
- Visit Jeff Gunhus’ website.
- Connect with Jeff on Facebook and Twitter.
- More books by Jeff Gunhus.
- Contact Jeff
The woman didn’t look evil, but there was no better word to describe her. Charlie Winters would wonder later how he could have missed sensing her earlier than he did. It was equivalent to normal people walking halfway through a field only to look down and find themselves thigh-deep in a pile of rotting animal carcasses, the stench hitting them like a wave. After retching their stomach contents, they would question both their senses and their sanity. How could they have missed such a smell? How could they have not felt their feet sinking into the liquefied soft tissue?
Charlie’s senses were better than a normal person’s. Way better.
It had started when he was only a baby, a fact he knew because he still remembered every second of this life since the moment of his birth. It was a long time before he understood that such a memory was not a normal thing. Other people, normal humans, could not remember the first feeding at their mother’s breast. The hot pain of circumcision. The first glimpse of sunlight as they left the hospital. So many firsts, memories as clear to Charlie as what he’d had for breakfast that day.
Inside those memories, the echoes and shadows of his other unusual senses lingered. The ability to sense emotion. To pick up on intention. Sometimes these abilities strengthened what he observed in the physical world. His grandparents’ cooing excitement over him matched an internal warmth that felt the same as sunshine. His father’s thoughtful stares mirrored Charlie’s sense that his dad would do anything to protect him, to provide for him. Even if there was an undercurrent of trepidation that vibrated like a single out-of-tune string on a guitar, the other intentions drowned it out and gave Charlie a sense of comfort. This was very different from his mother, whose kind smiles and soft features once masked a nearly constant desire to kill him.
Her thoughts alternated between putting a pillow over his head or dropping him down the basement stairs. In darker moments, when his father was gone overnight for a business trip, she would consider carving up her child with a knife. Even going as far as pulling a cleaver from the block and slowly running her sweaty palm down the length of the blade. She never did this in front of him, but that was part of his gift. He could see through her eyes. Feel her emotions. Know her dark intentions. And understand that the threat of violence was very, very real.
But as much as she fantasized about it, his mother didn’t kill him. In fact, she never so much as laid a finger on him in anger. Slowly, over time, the dark thoughts faded, and the light inside his mother came to match her soft eyes and the beautiful mouth that sang to him and called him sunshine. A normal person might never have been able to forget the darkness and might never have trusted the woman who once considered taking a ball-peen hammer to his forehead, but he wasn’t normal people. He was special. And it was that specialness that showed him the truth in her absolute love for him once the veils of shadows had fallen away from her like someone passing through heavy curtains.
Much later, Charlie read about a condition called post-partum depression and understood where the dark had come from. It hadn’t been his fault. Or hers. It was the depression that spawned the evil thoughts. And he liked to think it was her love for him that pushed them back enough to keep him safe.
Even after she recovered, he could sense when she felt pangs of guilt about those days. They were like electric bolts jolting through her. When those moments happened, and they could happen at any time, he would come up and hug her, kiss her on the cheek and tell her how much he loved her. At first, she cried harder when he did it, and he sensed her guilt grow even stronger. Later, she puzzled over how he timed the affection to her thoughts. Over time, the puzzling turned to suspicion, even fear that somehow he knew. After that, like with all of his special gifts, he learned it was best to hide.
But he hadn’t hidden his powers well enough.
If he had, then the woman who called herself Mama D would never have come looking for him.
Purchase from Amazon: Night Terror (Night Chill Book 2)
Read the first book in the series:
Night Chill (# 1)
Jack Tremont moves his family to the quiet mountains of Western Maryland hoping to leave behind a troubled past and restart his life. Instead, he finds himself caught up in a nightmare when his daughter Sarah is targeted by Nate Huckley, a mysterious and horrifying stranger driven by a dark power that will stop at nothing to possess Sarah. When Sarah goes missing, suspicion falls on Jack and he must uncover the secrets of the small mountain town of Prescott City and face the evil secret hidden there. As he digs further, he learns the conspiracy reaches more deeply than he could have imagined. Finally, he will have to face the question, What is a father willing to do to save his child? The answer? Anything. Anything at all.
Sun Mountain Reviews 