Curse of the Cobalt Moon

Lou Hernandez

Description

In The Curse of the Cobalt Moon, teenage hemophiliac, Joshua Puig discovers that he is a half-vampire. He has his life turned upside down when he is confronted with the existence of two types of half-vampires--a non-aggressive group, and another, infused with a much more combative and deadly blood stock. Joshua reluctantly accepts that he belongs to the group with the 'passive' supernatural strains. A cycle of seven blue moons completes the transformation for Joshua and all like him. Now, aged 16, a foster child living in Miami during the late 1960s, he is rapidly nearing this life changing event. Leading up to the "cobalt moon reckoning" Joshua, his fellow half-vampire, Milagros, and friends are thrust into their own life and death battle against the vengeance-seeking vampire vixen, Alegra Prez.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645369639
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Curse of the Cobalt Moon
Lou Hernández
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-02-28
The Curse of the Cobalt Moon About the Author Dedication Copyright Information Other Books by the Author Principal Characters Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Glossary: Foreign Language Pronunciations and Translations Sentences/Expressions/ Phrases
About the Author

The author
Lou Hernández is the author of several baseball histories and biographies. He was born­­­ in Cuba and lives in South Florida. This is his first novel.
Dedication
For Olivia. May all of your sunrises be bright and all of your sunsets rosy through all the days of your life.
Copyright Information
Copyright © Lou Hernández (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Hernández, Lou
The Curse of the Cobalt Moon
ISBN 9781641823203 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781641823210 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781641823227 (Kindle)
ISBN 9781645369639 (ePub)
The main category of the book: Fiction / Fantasy / General
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
[e-mail]
[phone]
Other Books by the Author
Manager of the Giants: The Tactics, Temper and True Record of John McGraw (2018)
The 1933 New York Giants: Bill Terry’s Unexpected World Champions (2017)
Chronology of Latin Americans in Baseball, 1871–2015 (2016)
Baseball’s Great Hispanic Pitchers: Seventeen Aces from the Major, Negro and Latin American Leagues (2015)
Memories of Winter Ball: Interviews with Players in the Latin American Winter Leagues (2013)
The Rise of the Latin American Baseball Leagues, 1947–1961: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela (2011)
Principal Characters
Joshua Puig [pronounced PWEEG]—high school student with hemophilia and a half-vampire
Milagros Ricardo—high school student with a heavy crush on Joshua. Docile half-vampire
Jerry Porter—Joshua’s best friend
Dawn Landis—high school student and Joshua’s unrequited love interest
Raúl Pérez—Joshua’s high school rival and Dawn Landis’s boyfriend. Hostile half-vampire
Cira Pérez—Raúl’s sister and Hostile half-vampire
Alegría Pérez—Raúl and Cira’s vampire mother
Margot Navarro—Alegría’s mother
Manolín Suárez—Milagros’s cousin
Rosa Montes—Milagros’s mother
Juan Montes—Milagros’s stepfather
Rafaela ‘Felita’ Sánchez—Joshua’s aunt
Carmen Puig Sánchez—Joshua’s mother
Prologue
Cira Pérez silently pushed open the swing door to the kitchen and peeked inside. The two other women of the house, her mother and grandmother, were facing the sink.
“Come in, mija ,” she heard her mother say without turning around.
Was it my perfume? Cira wondered as she tried to determine the source of her mother’s apparent psychic powers. But the curiosity quickly faded as she eyed the two most influential women in her life working in tandem, finishing up the dishes. The task appeared nearly done. Her grandmother, with her yellow Playtex gloves half way up her arms, always washed.
Standing near the round breakfast table, Cira now understood why she, along with her brother, had been summoned. She waited until her mother handed the last of the plates to her grandmother, who placed it—with a clink—on top of others in a neat pile. Hurriedly, she moved forward. “Mom, please make Raúl wash, and I’ll dry. He’s a sophomore. I’m barely fourteen.”
Her mother dropped the drying rag on the counter. A half-smile came over her face as she shot a glance at her Playtex glove-wearing mother. “I didn’t call you here to assign you new chores,” she said with a gentle stroke of her daughter’s head.
“Oh. You didn’t?” Cira cheerily replied. “But you said right after dinner you had an important announcement involving me and Raúl.”
“Where is your brother?”
“I don’t know. Probably combing his hair with that greasy kid stuff.”
Wiping her hands in the apron around her waist, Cira’s mother moved toward the kitchen door. Ready to push through, she abruptly stopped. “Come in, darling,” she said.
The door swung open and in stepped Raúl like the leading man in a play making his grand entrance. Cira barely had time to digest her mother’s clairvoyant act again because the full-of-himself Raúl started in with her. “Whatever I put in my hair is better than that smelly sticky stuff you spray all over yours.” Raúl’s chest then deflated and he swiveled toward his mother. “Wait,” he said, pointing toward the door, “how did you…? I didn’t make a sound.”
“At least my hair spray doesn’t leave my hands all oily,” said Cira, satisfying a need to get the last jousting word in with her sibling.
“Sit down,” ordered their mother. “You too, Cira.”
Cira obeyed. It wasn’t too often that her mother addressed her by her christened name. She became a little worried, but not enough to resist matching ugly faces with Raúl as he sat. In the process, she pushed away the opened wall calendar that was on the table to give her hands more room.
As she pulled off her apron, Cira noticed the hemline of her mother’s sleeveless lime dress was now higher than the apron’s length. That did not used to be the case. “I thought it best to have this talk with the two of you together,” her mother said, the tips of her fingers coming together in an almost reverent way.
“Mom, we had our talk,” Cira said.
“Don’t get antsy, either of you. This isn’t about sex.”
As Raúl relaxed in his chair, their mother breathed deeply and said: “I am a vampire. A blood-sucking, life-draining vampire. I rest in seclusion during the day and kill indiscriminately at night. But not every night. Just twice…maybe three times a week. I could feed more often if I wanted, but overindulging leads me to put on excess water weight.”
Cira and Raúl stared back with blank faces, with Cira finally speaking. “Is this your weird way of saying you want to go trick or treating with us on Halloween?”
“I’m a vampire,” the woman continued as she slipped into a chair, “but your father was not. He was human. But the good news is that both of you will become vampires like me. My main objective, as a single mother, was to raise you both with love and affection so that you became well-adjusted, young adults. And when the time came, to point you on the path to becoming heartless, killing machines.”
Cira exchanged a bewildered goggle with Raúl. “I think I have some homework to do,” she said, slowly easing away from the table.
“Yeah, me too,” said Raúl, extricating himself more brusquely.
“Sit back down, the two of you,” demanded their mother. She flipped around the calendar on the table to make it easier for the pair to read.
The calendar remained open to the current month, August, and Cira found nothing odd about it, except that the familiar calendar usually hung on the wall.
“See that darkened circle,” said the mother, “and that darkened circle under today’s date?” The woman pointed to two similar symbols imprinted under two different days of the month, four weeks apart. “Two full moons this month. That’s a rarity. That’s the sixth time it has happened since the two of you were born. The next time will be thirty-two months from now, in May 1968.”
“Is this some queer astronomy kick you’re on?” posed Cira.
When his mother did not answer right away, Raúl said, “Yeah, you’re not going to start telling us our future by reading the stars?”
“That’s ‘astrology’,” said Cira in a condescending tone. “I said ‘astronomy’.”
“Are you making fun of my smarts?”
“I would if you had any.”
“Basta,” their mother yelled. “Enough.” She then called out: “Momó!”
It was only when her grandmother was summoned, using the family’s pet name for her, did Cira realize that she had left the room. Cira always resented the fact that her brother was responsible for the endearing term that everyone used with their grandmother. She was told that little Raúl, just learning to talk, came up with the derivative after hearing others address her by her given name of Margot. Struggling with pronunciation, little Raúl turned his attempts at ‘Margot’ into ‘Momó’, which affectionately stuck.
“When you guys were younger,” her mother asked, interrupting Cira’s grudging thoughts, “didn’t you ever wonder why it was Momó that always took you on outings to the beach and pools and local tourist attractions? Who drove you to Little League practice? And you, mija , to your afternoon voice and music lessons?”
Cira responded, “Your sunlight affliction, Mom. You told us you could be permanently blinded if you were exposed.”
Her mother smiled affectionately. “You’re both wonderful,” she said lovingly. “You’ve grown so accustomed to living in an insulated house by day that the closed-in environment has become totally normal for you.”
Momó then came back into the kitchen along with another person—a young woman who surprised Cira and Raúl as much by her appearance as her presence. The stranger’s hair and clothes were disheveled and her face was bruised on one si