Title:
Weeping Angels
Author: Cristy
Rey
Genre: Romantic
Women’s Fiction
Four years ago, Frankie Rios walked
away from her best friend and big sister, Iris. To Frankie, Iris died the day
that she last rejected Frankie’s attempts at getting Iris alcohol and drug
treatment. Rather than accept grief for her beloved sister’s loss, Frankie
turned to her music. A renowned cellist, Frankie has managed to ignore the pain
and suffering of losing the person she loved most in this world. With Iris out
of her mind and out of her life, Frankie was able to move on…or so she thought.
Until Iris really died.
Topher went to war in 2001 only to
return two years later damaged and broken. Unable to reconcile the war vet with
the boy he used to be, Topher gave up on
life. When Iris Rios, his long-lost childhood best friend, dies from liver
failure at thirty-two years-old, Topher is forced to confront his past. He must decide whether he deserves to heal.
He must decide whether he will take that first step and then take another until
he can recover what he lost: himself.
Weeping
Angels is a story of grief carried and grief ignored. It’s about learning
to love and moving on. Mourning someone once is hard enough, but mourning
someone twice is unimaginably harder.
Author Bio
Cristy Rey is the author of the urban fantasy, Incarnate Series. She also
writes unconventional, romantic women’s fiction. She’d say she writes
the books Jane Austen would have written if Jane had been a riot grrrl. Cristy lives in Miami,
FL where she spends most of her days in a library and most of her nights
surrounded by cats.
Find Cristy Rey Online
Get Cristy Rey’s Books
Links
Book
Excerpts
Excerpt 1 – The Funeral
A woman hurls
herself into the parking lot without even checking to see if a car is coming.
Long blonde hair flies like a cape and she moves as though propelled by a
rocket. Black, slinky heels flick off her feet, smacking into the asphalt with
every rapid step. The scarf wrapped around her neck, despite this god-forsaken
humidity, flaps over her shoulder. Any other day, I might have tried to stop
her. If not, I might have fallen to the ground and covered my head with my
hands, brought back to Afghanistan by some misapprehending synapse fire. But
not tonight. Tonight, I merely stand by and watch her go.
She stops
abruptly at the edge of the parking lot and just stands there. Her back to us,
she drops her arms to her sides and her shoulders slump. I’m not sure what I’m
looking at, but whatever it is unfurls as I watch. A woman like that doesn’t
need to be crying at the end of the parking lot alone, and we’re watching like
a couple of jackals who are just man enough to smoke outside a funeral, but not
man enough to rescue her from herself. I’m not sure what it is about her, but I
can’t stop staring, so I don’t even try.
I suck on my
cigarette, taking the longest pull I can to give myself time to keep from
engaging in conversation, when the woman slams her palms to her thighs. If she
were any closer or if there was any less traffic on the highway, we might have
heard the smacking sound echoing in the air. Even without sound, I feel it. A
sonic wave crashes into my chest. My heart stops beating for a second in its
wake.
Through a stream
of white smoke, I jut my chin to the woman.
”Who’s
that?” I ask Jose.
“That’s
Frances.” He’s curt, and the sharpness when he says her name makes it sound
like an offense. “I thought you knew her,” he adds, raising an eyebrow
skeptically.
There’s a
silence between us as we keep our eyes trained on Frankie. For the life of me,
I would have never known it was her had he not just told me. I wonder now why
no one makes his or her way toward her. If there’s a husband or a boyfriend
standing about inside, someone needs to tell him that she’s out there alone, grieving.
“Frankie loved
Iris. She’s probably taking this hard.”
As soon as the
last word has fallen from my lips, Jose chuckles humorlessly and again my eyebrows
furrow. I can feel the anger lining my forehead. Jose brings the cigarette to
his lips and smoke pours from his nostrils as he inhales and exhales
simultaneously like a fuming dragon. He shakes his head as his gaze wanders
back to Frankie.
“Frankie loved
Iris, that’s true, but Frankie also disappeared and refused to come when Iris
got sick.”
“I don’t believe
you.”
Shock slaps
across Jose’s face when I declare him a liar. There is absolutely no way I can
know if what Jose said is true or not.
An ephemeral
summer breeze catches her hair. When it passes, she combs her fingers through
her hair and twists it into a knot that she promptly releases. Even though
she’s far away, I make out the shaking of her shoulders, as if she might burst.
I’ve never felt
as intimate with Frankie as I do right now. Sharing in her private, raw space
is wrong. I want is to throw a curtain between her and the rest of the world. I
want to put my body between Frankie and all the smokers, spread my arms, puff
my chest, and yell out, “There’s nothing to see here! Move along!” like some cop directing rubberneckers
forward in traffic.
I take my first
step off the curb so that I can go to her and do I don’t know what, when she turns around and hugs herself so
tightly you’d think it was freezing, when it’s actually a humid ninety degrees
Fahrenheit. Her head tilts forward and her blonde bangs sway, falling over her
eyes.
She starts
walking, slumped and dejected, in my direction. If a car whizzed by her, she
might look up, but given by the way she ejected herself from the building, I’m
not fully convinced she doesn’t have a death wish. So I do the only thing I can
think of, I finish taking that first step and then take another.
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