Looking at Luca, who’s just saved my life, I can’t respond. No explanation I might offer will satisfy after all of the extraordinary things he’s just witnessed. —Ankh
AnCaela Murphy's body is a ticking bomb that only her mom can defuse. The problem: her mother is missing and presumed taken by the Skinless, bogeymen from Ankh’s home world who have been hunting her and her mother for two years--ever since they fled that world and certain death.
With help from Luca, a boy whose touch confuses and who refuses to back down, Ankh races against time to find her mother before the bomb inside of her detonates, taking her life. Tracking the Skinless across the country, the pair search for her mother and uncover the horrifying truth behind the generations-old war.
L. M. Davis loves great storytelling. She needs nothing more than a good book and a comfy chair to be happy. She was born in the south, raised in the north, and has several English degrees under her belt. She currently lives in Atlanta and is contemplating getting a cat. It will probably be black. The first two books of her Shifters Novel series, Interlopers and Posers, are available now.
Ankh is, quite honestly, one of the hardest characters I have ever written. There is something about her voice and the way that she sees the world--how everything is so new and how there is so much that she tries so hard to understand--that feels very raw to me. She has to be so strong, but she is so vulnerable and fragile at the same time.
Added it to that, the language she uses is so restrained. It has to be because of how new even English is for her. She's not like Luca, with all sorts of language tricks at her disposal. So I had to try to convey all of this emotion through a very limited vocabulary.
Book Excerpt
Skinless: A Novel in III Parts
He disappears among the trees and I feel
strange, even though it’s what I asked him to do. The feel of
his skin lingers. Memories of what it reveals echo. We
touch, so rarely, skin to skin, for this very reason. To
touch him is an invasion. I’m overwhelmed by a jumble of
thoughts and sensations that I still can’t place. To touch
him is to know things that he has not said. Things that he
may not want me know. Things that I don’t understand.
I do it on purpose: send him away. He goes
but my request makes him unhappy. It troubles me too.
More and more I want to keep him by my side. The feeling is
as old as my memories on this world. I know now, more than
ever with everything that’s happening, how dangerous that would
be.
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