A gripping speculative thriller perfect for fans of Lauren Oliver and Ginny Myers Sain, about one girl with the power to see death before it happens—and the terrible consequences she faces when saving someone goes wrong.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Darkness Rises by Stacy Stokes, which releases on April 9th 2024.
Someone wants revenge…
Whitney knows what death looks like. Since she was seven, she’s seen it hover over strangers’ heads in dark, rippling clouds. Sometimes she can save people from the darkness. Sometimes she can’t. But she’s never questioned if she should try. Until the unthinkable happens—and a person she saves becomes the perpetrator of a horrific school shooting.
Now Whitney will do anything to escape the memory of last year’s tragedy and the guilt that gnaws at her for her role in it. Even if that means quitting dance—the thing she loves most—and hiding her ability from her family and friends. But most importantly, no one can know what really happened last year.
Then Whitney finds an ominous message in her locker and realizes someone knows her secret. As the threats pile up, one thing becomes clear—someone wants payback for what she did. And if she’s going to survive the year, she must track down whoever is after her before it’s too late.
I was seven the first time I saw the darkness.
My numb fingers wriggled inside my mother’s hand as we bumped along the rush hour–packed sidewalk, weaving in and out of bodies with the frustration that only a last-minute cancellation from the nanny could bring. I kept looking skyward at the glistening giants that made up the Dallas skyline. I imagined them coming to life and reaching with metal fingers to pluck me from the crowd.
“Whitney, please,” my mother begged after I smacked into another pedestrian. “You can stare at the buildings from my office.” She squeezed my hand, making her intention clear: walk faster.
That’s when the man lumbered into view. He was taller than nearly everyone on the sidewalk, with a thick tuft of brown hair that only added to his height. A phone was pressed to his ear while he screamed words my mother would never let me say out loud.
“Sorry’s not good enough!” he shouted, his cheeks flaming red to match his neck. I gaped, first at the enormous butterfly of sweat soaking through his dress shirt, then at the matching tuft of shadowy blackness taking shape above his head.
“Look, Mommy.”
“Don’t point, Whitney. It’s rude.” She smacked my hand down. Had I not been so enthralled in the growing fingers of smoke swirling around the man’s head I might have thought to cry out, but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t understand why no one else gaped at the shifting, stretching cloud.
Then I remembered something my Gams had told me only a few weeks before.
“Someday you may see a dark cloud hovering over a stranger’s head. It’s important that you tell me as soon as it happens. Tell no one else.”
She had refused to answer my questions but told me that I would know it when I saw it, if I saw it. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone but her.
Now I gaped at the cloud, a giddy sense of excitement swirling in my tummy. This must have been what she was talking about.
The man was yelling louder, swears flying out of his mouth like spit. He was so busy yelling that he didn’t notice the light had changed. He didn’t realize that everyone else had stopped on the sidewalk to let the traffic through.
For one brief second I had the craziest thought—that I could stop it. That I had the ability to help the man. But then the cloud above his head swelled. His foot lifted off the curb and onto the crosswalk. A car barreled around the corner.
The car smacked into him. His body rolled onto the windshield and landed on the crosswalk in a heap, thudding to the ground like a felled tree.
People shouted. Horns blared. Phones fumbled out of pockets.
The blackness crept up the length of his body until it encased him. He was a blacked-out smudge on the ground.
My mother clamped an arm around me and dragged me away from the gathering crowd, but not before I saw the cloud start to recede from the man’s body, licking back down his sides the way it had come.
The man was dead. I knew it the way I knew the buildings were tall and the sky was blue. Why else would Gams have warned me?
Mom knelt down so she was eye level to me. She smiled, but her eyes didn’t crinkle at the corners the way they usually did.
“Don’t worry about him, sweetheart. He’s going to be just fine. All those nice people will help him.”
“Don’t lie, Mommy,” I said, using the same tone I might use to ask for a glass of juice or a second helping of mac and cheese. “He’s dead. The rain cloud killed him.”
“The—rain cloud?” she asked, voice hesitant.
I nodded, assuming she’d seen it. Assuming everyone had grandmothers who whispered warnings about black clouds.
“What rain cloud are you talking about, sweetheart?”
“The one that was floating above his head. It gobbled him up.”
“Honey, there wasn’t a . . . rain cloud.” She stumbled over the last two words . “The man’s just in shock. He probably fainted, that’s all.”
“No, he didn’t. He’s dead.”
She flinched, her smile wobbling as something passed across her face. Gams’s warning flashed inside my head: tell no one else, do you understand?
“We should get going.” Mom studied my face for a beat longer, brows pushed together, then she grabbed my hand.
We began to walk again, but I didn’t feel like staring at the buildings anymore. Something in my stomach squirmed. Mom kept glancing down at me, her expression dark and unfamiliar. She touched my forehead like I might have a fever.
It took several months and many more rain-cloud sightings before I finally understood why Gams had been so adamant that I tell no one, or why Mom had looked at me that way—like there was something wrong with me. Fear became an easy thing to spot once I knew what to look for.
Even now, all these years later.
Excerpted from THE DARKNESS RISES by Stacy Stokes. Copyright © 2024 by Stacy Stokes. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.
