On March 31, The Man with Two Pasts, the fourth and final book in my Timeloopers series, hits shelves! For those of you who don't know about my Timeloopers books, this is a young adult time travel series. You can find more out about it here. For those of you who are familiar with this series, book four is going to be the craziest one yet. So, without further ado, I thought I'd share the first teaser with you:
The Man with Two Pasts, Teaser #1
On Tuesday, a package lay on Iris’s front porch when she got
home.
A ripped, scuffed, dented Manila envelope, addressed to her.
From?
She turned it over. No return address.
But a dozen stamps. Thing looked like it had traveled halfway
around the world.
Curious, she carried it inside to her room and ripped it
open, then dumped out a wad of bubblewrap on her bed. A little black object
skittered under her pillow.
A thumb drive.
And a folded piece of paper.
Rolling the thumb drive between her fingers, she unfolded
the paper.
Scrawled in the center were three words that sent goosebumps
down her arms.
From the
future
What the hell?
Skin suddenly tingly with anticipation, she yanked open her MacBook Pro and
jammed the thumb drive into a USB port. Please
don’t be a virus.
The drive contained a single file. A video.
A video from the future.
Heart hammering in her throat, she tapped open the video,
which filled the screen.
Taken from a cell phone.
Two faces stared up at her from what looked like sand—a
beach, maybe?—their skin flickering under firelight. A girl and a boy, just the
lower part of his jaw visible. The girl had long golden hair, and Iris
recognized her first to a wave of pins and needles.
Herself.
“I’m serious, turn it off,”
she said, covering her chest and nuzzling into the boy’s shirtless shoulder to
shield her face, “I don’t want you posting me on all your sketchy porn sites.”
Her own voice sounded wrong. All wrong. Sleepy and soft and
girly. Not cold and terse like her own voice. Wrong.
As far she could tell, she wore only a bikini. The image cut
off below her navel.
Wrong.
Her and a boy, lying shirtless on a beach, way too much skin
contact. Alarm bells screamed in her brain. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But then the guy tilted the phone up, and his face came into
view.
“Dude, I got to make money somehow. Say something funny,
Iris.”
“No,” she grumbled into his chest.
“That’s not that funny,” he said.
Iris forgot how to breathe. She could only stare, a dull
ache setting in deep in her abdomen.
“I have an idea. How about you say something nice?” Iris on the screen propped
herself up on his pecs and looked into his eyes. “For once.”
“Only if you take off your top.”
She whacked him.
“Hey, quit abusing me, I’m kidding.”
Cory.
It was Cory.
“Cory, say something nice,” she ordered. “Or I’m dumping
sand in your eye.” Her hand flashed offscreen and came back in a fist, white
grains spilling through her fingers onto his chest.
The video wobbled as he covered his eyes. “Wow, you do not know how to bargain. You ever heard
of the carrot and stick approach? It’s not just
the stick, Iris.”
“Fine, crybaby.” She flung the sand away, prowled up his
tanned torso, and scooped up her hair as she kissed him. “Now…tell me what you
like about me.”
Watching them, Iris felt a pang in her chest.
“Good job, you do
learn.” Cory looked smug. “Okay, you’re smart.”
“That’s a nonanswer.”
“You’re pretty.”
“Another horrible answer.”
She had a video of herself kissing Cory. In the future…did
they get together?
“You look good in a bikini.”
“And…zero for three. My boyfriend’s officially still a
shallow prick.”
My boyfriend?
“And you’re real,” he said. “You’re three-dimensional,
you’re in color, you go after what you want and you don’t follow anybody, you
own who you are, you’re tough, you’re cocky, and part of you is wicked just
like me. That’s why I like you.”
At first, she said nothing. Firelight danced across her
cheekbones, cast her eyes in shadow.
Then she murmured, “Now it’s my turn…to say something nice.”
Lying on her bed, Iris couldn’t take her eyes off the video,
utterly transfixed by these alternate versions of them. How was this possible?
Where had this come from? When did
this come from?
The Iris on the screen kissed Cory again, and whispered, “I
love you.”
For Iris in the present, the confession made her heart
squeeze even tighter, painfully tight. She couldn’t catch her breath.
For a long, long time, Cory stared into Iris’s eyes, his
expression suddenly stone cold serious. She stared back, not flinching, and her
throat moved up and down almost imperceptibly.
“Cory and Iris, signing off,” he said.
The screen went dark.
The video was over.
Iris raised her hand to her mouth, and only then realized
she was trembling.
The note…the note said from
the future…
But it couldn’t be from the future.
Cory died in the past.
***
If you enjoyed that, you can add The Man with Two Pasts on Goodreads right here!
Happy reading,
Dan
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