Mundie Moms

Friday, October 10, 2014

EXQUISITE CAPTIVE by Heather Demetrios, Blog Tour: Excerpt & Giveaway


Hello & welcome to today's EXQUISITE CAPTIVE blog tour
Today's stop is a 2 parter. The first is a giveaway & excerpt. The 2nd is my glowing review of Heather's debut book.



By: Heather Demetrios
Published by: Harper Teen (Balzer+Bray
Released on: October 7th, 2014
Series: Dark Caravan Cycle #1
Purchase it from: Amazon | B&N
Add it to Goodreads

Forced to obey her master.
Compelled to help her enemy.
Determined to free herself. 

Nalia is a jinni of tremendous ancient power, the only survivor of a coup that killed nearly everyone she loved. Stuffed into a bottle and sold by a slave trader, she’s now in hiding on the dark caravan, the lucrative jinni slave trade between Arjinna and Earth, where jinn are forced to grant wishes and obey their human masters’ every command. She’d give almost anything to be free of the golden shackles that bind her to Malek, her handsome, cruel master, and his lavish Hollywood lifestyle.

Enter Raif, the enigmatic leader of Arjinna’s revolution and Nalia’s sworn enemy. He promises to free Nalia from her master so that she can return to her ravaged homeland and free her imprisoned brother—all for an unbearably high price. Nalia’s not sure she can trust him, but Raif’s her only hope of escape. With her enemies on the hunt, Earth has become more perilous than ever for Nalia. There’s just one catch: for Raif’s unbinding magic to work, Nalia must gain possession of her bottle…and convince the dangerously persuasive Malek that she truly loves him. Battling a dark past and harboring a terrible secret, Nalia soon realizes her freedom may come at a price too terrible to pay: but how far is she willing to go for it?

Inspired by Arabian Nights, EXQUISITE CAPTIVE brings to life a deliciously seductive world where a wish can be a curse and shadows are sometimes safer than the light.


Read An Excerpt

Excerpt #1: This is from the prologue. Fun fact: when I first got the idea for this book, it was a middle-grade character who was in the bottle and she was pretty sure her little brother had put her in there, as a trick. As you will see, the book has evolved quite a bit since then!

He’d buried her alive.
The surrounding darkness was a black, writhing worm—hungry. It twisted around her body, tightening its grip. What little air remained reeked of iron; it would be a slow death. She could already feel the poisonous metal bleeding into her skin, infecting her blood. Nalia inhaled anyway: a trickle slipped past her parched lips, then dripped down her throat and slowly seeped into her crushed lungs. Not enough.
The bottle was a vault.
She’d been drifting in and out of sleep, floating on a foggy sea that seemed to have no beginning, no end. Time here was an elastic thing, bending and shifting at will.
For so long now, she’d been living in prisons within prisons within prisons, like a nesting doll. Earth; Malek’s compound; the bottle. If he let her out, she’d still be a slave. Just one with a little more room to breathe. She’d never forgive Malek for the ripping, tearing, choking sensation of being stuffed into a bottle the size of her pinkie. It had been designed to punish, nothing more.
Officially, she was in the bottle because she’d run away again. Unofficially, she’d kicked her master’s ass. How many times had she tried to escape? He always knew when she left, as if some sixth sense had nudged him, then whispered her name in his ear. Her sentences in the bottle followed a predictable pattern: Nalia ran away. Her master summoned her back. She spit in his face. Called forth the wind to wreak havoc in his perfectly organized study or willed a storm to rain upon his priceless treasures. He put her in the bottle. After a time—long or short, depending on his mood or what he needed from her—he let her out. The pattern would resume again as her master tried to tame the wild colt within her.
This time was different. This time, Nalia had wanted him to hurt a little too.
She’d expected Malek’s usual raving—he hated when his jinni wasn’t right where he wanted her to be—but what he did instead was far worse. He’d looked at her, standing there in the doorway of his study, then returned to his reading, waving her away as though Nalia were nothing more than a dog. Before she knew what her hands were doing, Nalia had thrown Malek through a wall. The look on his face. The way the plaster had crumbled all around him, like powdery snow. Of course, her revenge had had its price: whatever pain she inflicted on her master ricocheted back to her. Punch her master, she punched herself, that kind of thing. Her defiance had been worth the sudden pain jolting up her spine and the two ribs that cracked as soon as her master hit the wall. It was almost worth the punishment of this endless suffocation. Almost.
“Hell, Nalia, you’re seventeen,” Malek had said, just before he put her in the bottle. “When I was your age, I was running a multinational corporation, not pulling childish disappearing acts.”
He had been sitting at his desk, near the window that overlooked the rose garden, sipping his absinthe with that faraway look in his eye—like he was examining the fabric of the universe, peeking through holes the gods had forgotten to sew up. Malek didn’t appear much older than she was, yet he’d been living far longer. Whether it was due to a wish from another jinni or a human mage’s skillful ministrations, Nalia didn’t know—Malek’s enduring youth was just another one of his secrets.
“This running around the planet as soon as I have my back turned and your little violent outbursts . . .” His voice had trailed off. Then, “I can’t allow it to continue.”
Nalia shouldn’t have tried to run. How silly, to think she could go where Malek wouldn’t find her. She was his property, bought and paid for long ago, just another jinni on the dark caravan, the slave trade that had claimed thousands of jinn before her. Ghan Aisouri, Shaitan, Ifrit, Djan, Marid: the caravan wasn’t picky—it would take jinn from any of the five castes. Nalia’s last hours as a free jinni were filled with flames and death, the palace overrun with Ifrit vermin and their poisonous dark magic. Civil war. A coup. Revolution. The whole realm in shambles, its powerful Ghan Aisouri protectors slain in one night of carnage. Locked out of that world, Nalia could do nothing but remember. And hope.


 About The Author
When she's not traipsing around the world or spending time in imaginary places, Heather Demetrios lives with her husband in New York City. Originally from Los Angeles, she now calls the East Coast home. Heather is a recipient of the PEN New England Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award for her debut novel, Something Real, which Publisher's Weekly calls “[An] addictive yet thoughtful debut” about reality TV stardom. She is the author of the upcoming EXQUISITE CAPTIVE, a smoldering fantasy about jinn in Los Angeles and what Kirkus called in its starred review "an intoxicating, richly realized realm of magic, politics, spirituality and history" (#1 in the DARK CARAVAN CYCLE). She is also the author of the upcoming I’ll Meet You There (Winter 2015). I’ll Meet You There is a love story about a young combat veteran and a girl trapped in their small town, both struggling to escape the war at home. Heather is the founder of Live Your What, an organization dedicated to fostering passion in people of all ages and creating writing opportunities for youth of limited economic means. She is proud to have an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can always find her on Twitter (@HDemetrios), ogling the military dogs she wants to adopt (but can’t because her NYC apartment is way too small). Find out more about Heather and her other books at www.heatherdemetrios.comand www.darkcaravancycle.com 


Giveaway
23 Winners will get a signed finished copy of Exquisite Captive by Heather Demetrios
Must be 13+ To Enter | Ships to US only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good Luck!

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