Title: Game of Secrets
Author: Kim Foster
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Publication Date: July 3, 2018Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Synopsis: Felicity Cole sells flowers in the streets of Victorian London to feed herself and her young brother. But she has a close-guarded secret—her brother is a Tainted, born with special abilities that society fears and a shadowy organization called the Hunstsmen scours the country to eliminate. When Felicity becomes the target of one of these individuals, she discovers something horrible: she’s Tainted, too.
Rescued by a mysterious gentleman on the eve of execution, she's whisked away to a school funded by Queen Victoria, established to train selected Tainted into assassins in service of the crown.
Struggling to harness her incredible strength, speed, and agility, and despised by her classmates, all she wants is to use her new position to find a cure so she can be normal and reunited with her brother.
But with the Golden Jubilee fast approaching and the discovery that there’s a traitor in their midst, she has no choice but to embrace the one thing she’s been fighting all along.
About the Author: Kim Foster is the author of the Agency of Burglary & Theft series for adults and GAME OF SECRETS, her YA debut. She has a typical background for someone who writes thrillers about thieves and spies and criminals: she has a degree in medicine and is a practicing family doctor. (Don’t worry, it doesn’t make much sense to her friends and family, either.) She's addicted to yoga, loves to travel, and has a clinical weakness for dark chocolate with sea salt. She lives with her husband and their two young sons in Victoria, British Columbia.Excerpt:
Movement around me slows. The mist from the horses’ nostrils hangs suspended in the air. Carriage wheels on cobbles and the bells from St. Paul’s Cathedral sound stifled—dampened and low.
I see everything at once. Time bends, curving around me.
Locals and customers cower in the market, screams frozen on their faces. They crouch behind carts. A surge goes to my muscles and somehow I know—I just know—I can do impossible things. I am not thinking. I am pure rage. A deep burning takes hold of my bones.
I reach Kit’s murderer in a heartbeat. Impossibly fast. Before he can fire his pistol again, I punch forward, catching him square in the throat. His eyes pop wide. I chop the hand that holds the gun and it skitters away on the ground. He staggers. I punch him again, smashing his nose, and blood spurts everywhere. I kick at his knees, sending him to the ground. I don’t know what I’m doing, or how I’m doing it, only that it’s coming from somewhere deep inside.
Everything around me is slow, like it’s moving through water. Sliding like molasses. But I am a spark. Fire. Lightning.
I hear the report of a gun—a dull, low rumble, not the sharp crack it should be—and I have time to spin. The bullet tears from the footman’s weapon in a plume of smoke. But I don’t feel the sharp agony of the shot. Instead, I see the bullet as it comes toward me. It moves through the air trailing a spiraling smoke wisp behind it like a comet. I slide out of the way, ducking easily underneath it.
With a slow, deep thud it slams harmlessly into a vegetable cart behind me, smashing into the cabbages and sending a fountain of dusty hay into the air.
And now the footman is mine.
I see everything at once. Time bends, curving around me.
Locals and customers cower in the market, screams frozen on their faces. They crouch behind carts. A surge goes to my muscles and somehow I know—I just know—I can do impossible things. I am not thinking. I am pure rage. A deep burning takes hold of my bones.
I reach Kit’s murderer in a heartbeat. Impossibly fast. Before he can fire his pistol again, I punch forward, catching him square in the throat. His eyes pop wide. I chop the hand that holds the gun and it skitters away on the ground. He staggers. I punch him again, smashing his nose, and blood spurts everywhere. I kick at his knees, sending him to the ground. I don’t know what I’m doing, or how I’m doing it, only that it’s coming from somewhere deep inside.
Everything around me is slow, like it’s moving through water. Sliding like molasses. But I am a spark. Fire. Lightning.
I hear the report of a gun—a dull, low rumble, not the sharp crack it should be—and I have time to spin. The bullet tears from the footman’s weapon in a plume of smoke. But I don’t feel the sharp agony of the shot. Instead, I see the bullet as it comes toward me. It moves through the air trailing a spiraling smoke wisp behind it like a comet. I slide out of the way, ducking easily underneath it.
With a slow, deep thud it slams harmlessly into a vegetable cart behind me, smashing into the cabbages and sending a fountain of dusty hay into the air.
And now the footman is mine.
Giveaway:
- Open internationally, Ends July 5th
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