Ogitchida Kwe's Book Blog : Broken City and Broken Truce by D.D. Chant Blog Tour!

Genre/Age Group- 16+

By- D.D. Chant

A girl with no future

A man with no past

A little lost boy

And those who seek to find him....

....Welcome to Deeta's world.

Deeta Richards has never seen the outside world. Before she was born a banking crisis brought civilization to an end and now no one leaves the safety of the compounds unless they need to, but Deeta still dreams of seeing more than the building she was born in.

Tom is in the guard, this group are the only people that the tribal elders allow to leave the compound and Tom knows only too well that Deeta could never survive the harshness that exists outside. Then tragedy strikes and Deeta and her Sister Jan find themselves captured by a hostile tribe. Why does Tom know so much about these people? And why do they know so much about him? As this mystery draws to a climax, they discover that their friend Tom is not quite what he seems...

I’m not sure how it happens, but the next thing I’m aware of is the faintly groggy feeling you get when you’ve been woken from sleep quickly. A glance at the clock tells me that forty minutes have gone by, yet the room is still silent, with no noise to rouse me from what had obviously been a deep sleep. I stand up and meet my own eyes in the mirror above the fire place. I’m staring at myself in a dazed kind of way, when I realise that mine is not the only figure reflected in its polished surface.

I suppose it must have been the second time he walked through this room and the first time he didn’t notice me curled up in the depths of the large arm chair. He seems quite as shocked as I am to find he’s not alone.

A full second elapses before I utter a strangled scream and leg it through the door and into the passage way. The first thing I come across is another camouflaged figure and my panic ratchets up a notch. I think of the children, who in about fifteen minute’s time, will joyfully be free of the shackles of their lessons.

The two soldiers are behind me, so only way to go is up the stairs. The knowledge that I am leading the intruders towards the children, rings in my head. With the sound of pursuit hideously loud in the stairwell, coherent thought is proving difficult. I’m half way up the forth flight when I hear Dec’s jubilant voice proclaiming himself the winner of some unseen race.

“Dec, run!” My voice cracks and my throat, already sore, tightens.

Dec’s voice exclaiming above my head is cut short as he sees my pursuers. I hear the door onto the stairwell open and close above me and a moment later something hit the floor behind me with a dull thud. A cheer reverberates around the walls.

Dec, bless him, hadn’t run away when I told him to, instead he’d brought a large book from the school room above and hurled it at one of my attackers. As that soldier was at this very moment out cold on the steps, I guess his aim must have been pretty accurate.

The last of the men is felled by some sort of encyclopaedia, this time lobbed by Roydon. I reach the landing they are standing on, completely out of breath. Roydon and Dec seize a hand each and drag me after Ricky who is holding Tarri in his arms and has Carris’s hand tucked in his.

From the direction in which they are going, I think their destination is Ralph’s house. But we keep running into the strangers that have breached the building and our efforts bring us almost full circle. We come to a standstill in one of the rooms with a connecting door and pause breathlessly.

“Who are they?” whispers Roydon.

“I don’t know, but they have some pretty neat kit,” answers Ricky. He relinquishes Tarri into Carris’s arms and places an ear to the door. “Ssh — someone’s coming!”

Ricky steps back a little from the door and we all wait expectantly. Sure enough it begins to open, Ricky waits until it is almost half way before he kicks it shut with all his might. We turn and run though the connecting door in to the room on the other side and out on to the corridor beyond. We are tantalisingly close to Ralph’s house.

How it happens I hardly know, but as Dec passes the open door of the school room, he is dragged kicking and screaming through the door by unseen hands. I scream and pull as hard as I can on the handle, but it won’t move. I realise they must have locked it behind them. Ralph’s door is just a little further on and I grab Ricky’s arm.

“Ricky, take the children to Ralph and stay there.”

“But…”

I don’t know what he had been going to say, but he stops abruptly and nods.

As I turn and run down the hallway I hear them banging on the Clark’s door.

There is no sign of Dec when I enter the school room, but from the knocked over chairs it is obvious that there has been some struggling. I run through the next two rooms desperately and hear, in the distance, Dec’s voice raised in protest. I burst into the corridor to find him struggling madly with one of the camouflaged soldiers. Picking up a stool from the room I have just come through, I use it to hit the man around the head. He sinks to the floor moaning and I taking Dec’s hand. We run down the passage, around the corner and up the steps, slap bang into more of the soldiers.

Instinctively I push Dec behind me, below their visors I see derision in the soldier’s faces and when they step forwards, they pull us apart easily. Trying to tear away from the vice like grip on my arm, I pull my knee up into the soldier’s stomach. His smirk changes quickly to a snarl of pain and my struggles become more desperate. I manage to free an arm long enough to punch him in the face. I must admit to a feeling of gratification as blood begins to trickle from his nose.

There is blinding pain as his fist connects with my face, slapping it sharply sideways and causing me to lurch backwards. I fall to the floor and it’s only Dec screaming my name that brings me groggily to my feet. I am rewarded by a merciless grip on my arm, forcing it behind me and well up my back as the soldier drives me heavily into the wall. I slip to the floor weakly, again hearing Dec’s voice calling to me. The sound grows gradually fainter, until my eyes close and I hear nothing.

**Broken City is FREE right now! **

Broken City # 2

Genre/Age Group- 16+

By- D.D. Chant

Life isn't turning out the way that Deeta thought it would. With the Lewises defeated and peace between the tribes, she had believed that the dark times were a thing of the past.

But troubles between the tribes continue, and the Andak council have selected Tom as their ambassador and spokesman to the other tribes.

Deeta knows that there is still much resentment against the Andak, and that Tom is in danger every time he leaves the safety of Andak City.

Struggling with her own complicated feelings against the tribe that she is now a part of, Deeta tries to ignore the changing attitudes growing within her.

But when Tom is betrayed and they are thrown into great danger, Deeta finds that reality can't be ignored forever…

It’s a girl, probably still in her teens, with short red hair and impossibly big blue eyes.

“Can you stand?”

The question is curt, little more than a formality as she drags me to my feet.

“We need to stop the bleeding!”

The girl shakes her head at Jan.

“We need to run like hell, unless you want to be caught?” The girl returns, passing her arm around my waist and pulling my arm over her shoulder.

“But he’s blocking our exit.” I gasp faintly.

The girl flashes me a grin.

“Birds don’t need to walk, they can fly.”

She pulls me toward the door in the wall and for one horrifying moment I really believe she’s going to push me out. Instead she leans out and reaches for something just outside my line of vision. It’s a stout piece of rope, joined to the tree somewhere above her. She looks from one to the other of us, assessing our physical abilities.

“I guess you’d better go first.” She gestures toward Jan.

“Go where?”

The girl points through the door and we see that, about fifteen feet away in another tree, there is a young lad of about twelve, crouched on a tiny platform on one of the branches.

“You want her to swing through the trees like Tarzan and Jane?” I squeak. “She’s pregnant!”

“And here I thought she’d stuffed a cushion up her jumper,” returned the girl.

“You can’t expect her to do it!”

Jan starts to laugh, slightly hysterical amusement in her voice.

“This from you, Deet? I climbed up that rope ladder on your say so, I think I can manage swinging through the trees.”

The girl grins at Jan in approval.

“Good, Kestrel will catch you.”

Without realising quite how it happens, Jan is manoeuvred toward the door and clings on for dear life as the girl launches her across the space between the two trees. A slight sound

behind me alerts me to the fact that the wounded soldier, has somehow managed to pull himself up the rope ladder and into the tree house. The girl notices as well and pushes me into the corner, before turning on the soldier purposefully. As she faces him I see her lithe form take on a different attitude, she seems to slink forward, moving with the grace of a feline.

“Whatever you do; keep out of the way of the door,” whispers the girl over her shoulder.

I nod weakly, trying to ignore how my leg throbs and my vision blurs. I reach down clutching my thigh; blood soaks my jeans stickily, making the material drag against my wound.

She steps carefully out of the light coming through the door, her movements fluid. I shiver, she’s so small, hardly reaching my shoulder, how will she defend herself against a Lewis soldier, even a wounded one. I remember suddenly the look of wild elation in the soldier’s eyes as his knife had plunged in my leg.

My stomach rolls unpleasantly as I wonder what he will do to our rescuer.

The soldier sways, slightly unsteady in the middle of the room, one hand pressed against his shoulder. He hasn’t removed the shard of metal; it sticks out between his bloody fingers making an already gory image even more gruesome.

The girl pulls out another of the shard-like blades from her boot and holds it in a light, sure grip. She stands firmly between me and the soldier, just out of his reach. He lurches forward out of the shadows of the tree house and into the light cast by the door. A moment later an arrow slams into his body and I scream.

He stares down at the wooden shaft buried in his chest in astonishment, before slowly pitching backwards. My knees threaten to give way as the girl turns to me, calm and collected and passes her arm around my waist. She signals to the boy; he’s moved from the small platform and sits perched on another branch. I realise that he moved to get a better shot.

He nods at her gesture and pulls the bow over his shoulder, swiftly moving through the tree limbs, half climbing, half swinging, until he reaches the platform again. Jan crouches in one corner, eyes closed and arms wrapped around a branch. Kestrel grabs the rope held tethered to the wooden platform and swings it back in our direction.

The girl catches it one handed and pulls it close.

“Can you hold on?”

I nod jerkily, grasping the rope with both hands.

“On three then.”

She counts the numbers off slowly and then gives me a hefty push. I squeeze my eyes shut as the air whisks past me, clinging to the rope desperately. A few seconds later waiting arms catch me and I open my eyes. The boy, Kestrel, is supporting me with one hand and sending the rope swinging back to the girl still standing in the tree house.

“Hurry up, Wren, the soldiers have started to climb our tree.”

I look down, alarmed to find that Kestrel is right; the soldier that I pushed down the ladder has recovered and is now making surprisingly quick time up the tree that, until now, I had viewed as a safe haven.

Wren sails across the space between the trees and lands lightly on the small platform that is now getting very overcrowded.

“I’ll take the wounded one, Kes, you take the other and go first. Don’t wait for us, just get out of here as fast as you can.” She nods to Jan. “Follow him, he’ll get you to safety.”

Kestrel shins up the tree quickly, turning to help Jan over the rougher stretches. Whenever the gap between the branches is a little too wide there is a foothold nailed onto the tree, bridging the distance.

Wren pushes me to go next, casting a hasty look down at the soldier and finding him horribly close. Reaching to her boot she pulls another blade free and I hear a sharp cry of pain as she throws it at the soldier below us, signalling the accuracy of her aim.

Climbing up through the tree is hard and very painful, but fear pushes me onward despite the throbbing of my leg. Wren stays close to me, helping me over the more difficult areas.

Finally we reach another platform and I sag sweating against the nearest branch. Jan is nowhere in sight so I suppose Kestrel has taken Wren at her word and left us on our own. Relief floods through me at the thought that Jan and Rhubarb will be safe.

Hi everyone!

My name is Dee Dee, I'm twenty seven and I live in a beautiful part of Devon, England, with my family.

That introduction made me feel a little bit like I was on Blind Date!!!

As our house is in the countryside we have some unusual neighbours including chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, a cat (that adopted us when we moved in!!!) and some koi. I also have a very long suffering younger sister, Jingle, who is a brilliant guitar player. She keeps me supplied with coffee and brownies, generally making sure that the Chant household doesn't grind to a halt.

I really hope you enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoy writing them.

I love reading and have a kindle, I enjoy almost every genre; if there is adventure and romance I'll be there with coffee and a brownie! I also like to cook and wear impractical high heels! You may also have noticed that I have a horrible addiction to exclamation marks!!!