Death Hand Blog Tour: Halloween Guest Post with S.M Reine

As apart of her blog tour we have S.M Reine on the blog today doing an awesome scary guest post. She is the author of 'Six Moon Summer's' and her new novel is 'Death's Hand'. Please welcome S.M Reine.

Thanks for having me, Book Passion for Life! 
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My new book, “Death’s Hand,” takes place in Nevada, where I’ve lived for almost twenty years. We’ve got hundreds of ghost towns withering away in the desert where life boomed and busted with veins of gold. It’s a real cowboy place, wild and dark, and there are tons of abandoned mines beneath the cities.
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I used to live in one of Nevada’s older towns in a house that remembered the jangling of spurs. Our neighborhood had hitching posts. And my house was haunted.
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It started with footsteps.
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You could trace them from the entryway through the laundry room and into the kitchen, where they would pause, as though someone was checking a pot of stew on our stove. They happened almost every night, and then they started walking during the day, too.
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It got worse from there. I would sometimes catch glimpses of movement behind my reflection in mirrors. I would lay in bed at night and feel someone grab the side of the mattress and shake it. The whole bed trembled. Books occasionally fell off our shelves without being touched, too.
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And it wasn’t just me. My sisters felt stalked, too. One night, the ghost even yelled at my oldest sister, shouting “No!” loud and clear when she tried to do something in the laundry room. She didn’t do laundry for weeks after that (and unfortunately, the stink didn’t exorcise our house).
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I don’t know what made the ghost so angry. Did he hate having clean, dry clothes? Or did he just hate having us in his house? Either way, I was done. Period.
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“We have to move,” I told my mom the next day. “The ghost doesn’t want us here.”
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I was a silly child, and my mom was totally used to weirdness from me. So this didn’t even make her blink. “That’s nice,” she said without looking up from her book.
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“No, seriously, Mom. The ghost yelled at us! It wants us to leave!”
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“Sure. We’ll just break our rental agreement, pay the landlord a huge fee, and then spend hundreds of dollars moving.”
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“What if it kills us? It’s been trying to shake me out of bed!”
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Finally, she rolled her eyes and shut her book. “Then tell it to leave you alone, Sara. Stop being such a weenie.” (She’ll deny it, but those are her words exactly. I swear.)
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So one night, I rallied all my courage and stood in the dark living room. The house was empty, but I wasn’t alone. I heard the footsteps-- entryway, laundry room, kitchen. A flash out of the corner of my eye. A creaking noise. My heart squeezed tight in my chest. I could barely breathe.
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“I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered into the silence. “Leave me alone.”
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Creak. It sounded like it was right behind me.
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I didn’t dare turn around. I shut my eyes. “Leave me alone!” I yelled, and it echoed in our huge living room.
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Maybe the ghosts took pity on me. Or maybe being brave enough to stand in the middle of my haunted house alone made it easier to deal with the rest, too. Either way, it got better after that. I didn’t feel the bed shaking anymore. The footsteps grew sporadic.
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And then one day, I was sitting on the couch, and a little statue fell off the shelf. Like my mom, I didn’t even look up from my reading. “Stop it,” I snapped. “I need to finish this book.”
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That was the last time anything happened to me.
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My family doesn’t live in the haunted house anymore. The landlord was foreclosed upon and they had to move to a newer part of town. Another family has bought it since, and I visited the other day just to see what it looks like now. They’ve completely torn it apart and are building it new even though it was a beautiful house.
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Maybe the ghost didn’t like having them there, either. But if I was them, I wouldn’t be so sure tearing down the house would get rid of the other people who live there.
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S.M.Reine.
Date of Birth: March 14th, 1988
Bio: SM Reine is a writer and graphic designer obsessed with werewolves, the occult, and collecting swords. Her YA fantasy books, "Six Moon Summer" and "All Hallows's Moon," have been praised as fresh, fast-paced and captivating. Sara spins tales of dark fantasy to escape the drudgery of the desert, where she lives with her husband and the Helpful Baby.
Her Books: Six Moon Summer (April, 2011) The 19 Dragons (July, 2011) All Hallows' Moon (September, 2011) Death's Hand (October, 2011) 
Follow S.M Reine on: Blog - Facebook - Twitter 
Buy Death's Hand: Amazon UK -  Amazon US - Barnes & Noble - Smashwords
Buy the Paperback - Death's Hand Paperback