Angelfire (1st book)

Angelfire is the first novel in the Angelfire trilogy written by Courtney Allison Moulton. It is her debut novel.

Blurb
First there are nightmares.

Every night Ellie is haunted by terrifying dreams of monstrous creatures that are hunting her, killing her.

Then come the memories.

When Ellie meets Will, she feels on the verge of remembering something just beyond her grasp. His attention is intense and romantic, and Ellie feels like her soul has known him for centuries. On her seventeenth birthday, on a dark street at midnight, Will awakens Ellie's power, and she knows that she can fight the creatures that stalk her in the grim darkness. Only Will holds the key to Ellie's memories, whole lifetimes of them, and when she looks at him, she can no longer pretend anything was just a dream.

Now she must hunt.

Ellie has power that no one can match, and her role is to hunt and kill the reapers that prey on human souls. But in order to survive the dangerous and ancient battle of the angels and the Fallen, she must also hunt for the secrets of her past lives and truths that may be too frightening to remember.

Plot
Mr Frank Meyer, Ellie’s economics teacher called her for a quick discussion about her failing grades (due to constant, vivid nightmares) when the school day ended. He gave her a strange small speech, saying ‘Life is going to test you in ways it never has before.’ She felt ‘a certain fondness deep in her heart’ when she saw a strange boy lounging against a tree, and only tore her gaze away when she realised he was watching her back. During the night, she found out that Mr Meyer was ‘murdered’ and ‘severely mutilated.’

Ellie had another vivid nightmare during her morning nap, of being killed by a ‘reaper’. The strange boy appeared to her again while she was out with her friends. He looked hurt when Ellie didn’t remember him past having seen him the day before. He introduced himself with a distinctly familiar phrase - ‘Just call me Will.’

Ellie saw Will again on a restless nighttime stroll - on the night of her 17th birthday. When a growling monster appeared out of nowhere, Will awakened a different part of Ellie. She summoned to swords and killed a ‘reaper’ almost effortlessly - like she’d done that everyday.

When she woke up the next morning in her bed, she passed the events of the night before as a nightmare - because she had nightmares of killing (and being killed) by ‘reapers’ wasn’t uncommon for her. When Will went to her school during the day to discuss the events of the night before, she thought him out of his mind. He told her that she was ‘the Preliator’ and that she was her ‘Guardian.’ To Ellie's shock, Will knew all about her nightmares. He gave her a relic-like pendant and strange instructions to ‘remember.’ Despite logic saying he was out of his mind, she slipped into another daydream of a fight with a ‘reaper.’

When she went back to school to retrieve her forgotten homework papers that night, another reaper attacked her. She tried to put it down to caffeine as she refused to believe the insanity of what Will told her about earlier in the day. When Will woke her power again the way he’d done the night before, she summoned her swords and killed the reaper. She had no choice but to listen to Will after that fight. Will told her that he was over six hundred years old and that she herself predated in ancient Rome. That every time she died, she was reincarnated in the same human form. She remembered that she was the one who put Will’s tattoo on. Will also told her about the functions of her Khopesh swords. She reflected that  'there could be no denying that my life would never be normal again.' 

The next night, Ellie began training in an abandoned warehouse that Will found. Will took her to meet Nathaniel and Lauren in the library the next day. Nathaniel was immortal like Will while Lauren was a psychic - a human who could see the reapers. To Ellie’s shock, Mr Meyer was too a psychic. He’d died hunting a reaper - and that she’d known him in her previous incarnation.

IN PROGRESS