Pitch Madness: S-14 BLACK HEART, RED RUBY

Title: Black Heart, Red Ruby
Genre: YA gothic romance
Word Count: 74,000


17-year-old Ava Nolan’s life as an amateur relic hunter is filled with backstabbing—not to mention literal stabbing—when her quest for an occult ruby pits her against her graverobber uncle and her ambitious boyfriend.

The boy I caught lurking outside my bedroom window deserved a good beating, but Cam never knew when to quit. My brother’s head, as our dad used to tell Cam’s probation officer, was filled with missiles instead of brains—and it only took a tiny spark to launch WWIII. As his sister and keeper, only I knew how to work the controls.

Diving into the fray, I rammed Cam from the side and broke his stranglehold on the stranger. The creeper collapsed to the ground, choking and wheezing in the weeds. He was a scrawny guy about my age, seventeen, maybe nineteen at the most. Propped against the side of the barn, he looked as pathetic as a tattered scarecrow. Somehow he’d seemed scarier standing in my backyard, a dark prince cloaked in fog and shadow.

His name, we learned after Cam put him in a headlock, was Ben Wolcott.