Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book tour for
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Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.
So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.
A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.
Cleo licked her lips, enjoying
the pungent taste of sea salt. The spume flicked her parched skin, peppering it
with tiny droplets. Her eyes were filled with a red glow as the sun shone
through the closed lids. The warmth was just the right side of heat, thawing
out her stiff muscles. Her soaked clothes were slowly drying into a crusty
armor.
The bench creaked as somebody
heavy sat on the other end. Cleo reluctantly unglued her mascara-caked lashes.
The man was indeed big and heavy,
so much so that the promenade bench seemed to tilt toward him, lifting Cleo
into the air like a child on a seesaw. He sat with his eyes closed, his broad
face turned toward the sun. And there was a large spider on his left arm.
She gulped and scooted away,
almost falling off the bench. The man did not move. The spider, as big as
Cleo’s fist, did not move either, but its angled legs, haloed with shiny hairs,
twitched slightly, showing it was no bizarre decoration or a toy. Its golden
head, sunken into its globular body, was peppered with multiple dot-eyes, each
swiveling independently of the rest as they focused on Cleo.
She slid off the bench and stood
up, her joints creaking and her damp jeans chafing her inner thighs. She rubbed
her eyes, disregarding the fact that she was embedding the smears of
yesterday’s makeup deeper into her tired skin. She blinked, then looked back.
The spider lazily spread out its legs across the man’s tattooed arm. Each leg
ended in a small, hooked claw, and its swollen abdomen pulsed with amber
highlights.
Okay, so she had been drunk.
Okay, so she might have hooked up with a Dutch tourist, which was a mistake –
if it had happened. But one thing she was absolutely sure of was that she had
not taken any drugs. Her sister’s fate was the best guarantee of clean living.
So, she had a pint or two occasionally. So, on this Greek vacation she had
overdone the combination of retsina, Moscofilero white wine, and the shockingly
sweet liqueur called mastika. But it was a vacation, for Christ’s sake! Wasn’t
she entitled to let her hair down a bit? She ran her hand over the stubble on
her head which had dried into a collection of scratchy spikes.
She edged away from the bench,
refusing to look back at the big man with his eight-legged pet and walked to
the parapet separating the promenade from the beach below. The sugary-white
sand glistened in the blinding sunlight that stabbed into Cleo’s bruised brain.
The indigo wavelets licked at the beach margin scattered with shells. The beach
was surprisingly empty: no tourists on tatty towels; no coolers, umbrellas, or
kids. And no signs of their impromptu party that started last night when Cleo,
Mick, Iris, and a couple of Dutch boys whose names she could not remember had
spread their blankets in the balmy Mediterranean night on the shore of Syros.
Had they simply abandoned her and
walked back to the hotel? But why? Try as she might, Cleo could not remember
anything out of the ordinary except the retsina whose piney taste seemed to
take up permanent residence in her parched mouth. And why was she soaked? It
felt like sometime in the night she had walked into the Aegean fully clothed.
Skinny-dipping was one thing, but swimming in your jeans in the midnight sea?
And yet, a vague memory, like a disintegrating dream, nibbled at the edges of
her mind with images of inky waves, bathwater-warm, embracing her as she swam
toward…what?
Cleo squinted into the glare,
expecting to see the tawny silhouettes of the smaller Cycladic islands
surrounding Syros, but the blue immensity appeared to be empty. Not quite true
– there was some vague vertical protrusion on the horizon, shimmering in the
sunlight, but the hangover headache suddenly bore into Cleo’s temples with such
brutal intensity that she gasped and folded down onto the pavement. She kept
her eyes shut for a moment and then swiveled away from the sea, subconsciously
noting that her dark glasses were apparently gone together with her backpack.
At least her credit cards were back at the hotel – if she could make it.
Without dark glasses, the flaming July sun in Greece would burn out her blue
British eyes and shrivel her damp British brain. Was it what was happening to
her? Was she hallucinating giant spiders as a result of a sunstroke?
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