‘PEARL BY PEARL‘
book 2 of two – A TIME-TRAVEL FANTASY about reincarnation, love, lost identities, and missing paintings.
The fairy-tale of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ retold in a world of state-of-the-art technology… about a savant orphan who thrives in a society that shuns her by imagining her mother is the ‘Mona Lisa’ and her father is ‘Dr. Who.’
‘PEARL BY PEARL’ concludes of the story which begins in ‘THE INDIGO PEARL‘
DELPHI SHARPE has lived under the thumb of institutions for twenty-seven years. Ever since her traumatic childhood when was misdiagnosed as an autistic savant, it has been easier to retreat into her fantasy life than fight a world where she is too intelligent to be understood. Even the paintings she speaks to tell her so.
A burst of white light flashes once at the end of a tunnel. Delphi shields her eyes until it fades to a gentle drizzle of platinum rain. It is the single-most powerful image to confirm the close of mortality. She has died. Perhaps her telepathic ability to read paintings through touch has died too.
In her brief life of twenty-seven years, Delphi has retreated into a fantasy world. Now, after her death, she is forced to transmit her experiences to her next incarnation in the form of pictures.
The shriek of a peacock splits her soul in two, and for a brief moment nothing matters. Two women wait where one had stood but Delphi’s duplicate quickly fades to mist.
A transparent white peacock sashays through the curtain and brushes past Delphi, its lacy tail widening a gap that showcases a vista of snow-covered hills and a bleached sky.
A figure shuffles in the far distance – a snowman on the horizon white as a blank page. He waves a scarf madly and blows kisses. “Run towards me,” he shouts, before climbing onto the peacock’s back.
Rider and bird comet across the sky, soon lost in a swirl of thick white flakes that fall in soft drifts. Their leaving billows the curtains in slow motion and the panels swing together with the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass.
Delphi blows on her hands to warm them but her breath crystalizes and falls at her feet like a sift of sugar. She calls out, and the word hello forms an icicle in the air. It shatters when she touches it. “Cecco!” she screams. “Ti amo!”
Silence erases all her fears until half-a-century later, Delphi awakens, reincarnated as the ‘other woman’ – Cherry White, a bionically-enhanced time-traveler struggling with memories of her former life, the artificial duplicate of Delphi’s unlived dreams.
To fulfill their dual destiny, Delphi and Cherry must reconcile their split personalities and comb time to recover lost renaissance paintings, uncover a bizarre secret thousands of years in the past, and reunite with the ghostly lover they now share.
Cherry evokes Delphi’s memories to exact revenge on the descendants of those who betrayed her. But Delphi, devastated by a shameful secret, is reluctant to face another defeat. She craves Cecco and forgiveness and moving on… and Paris.
‘THE INDIGO PEARL‘ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL‘ will be AVAILABLE to purchase in PRINT-ON-DEMAND and E-BOOK FORMATS on AMAZON
*on or before DECEMBER 1 – 2015