Are You Hooked? Young Adult #13

TITLE: LIONCLAD - The Coins of Cruelty
GENRE: YA Urban Fantasy

Corey Roote’s an idiot. The ugly earring he found on the Isle of Man won't come off. It also turns into an enchanted, pushy lion helmet that gives him heightened strength and senses. Corey hopes it’ll help him and a sea-wielding local face a killer who gambles with human souls.

A wave was coming to devour the Isle of Man.
Eoin Wade waited on the Tower of Refuge ramparts. The stout, neatly bricked fortress glowed red and green under artificial spotlights. It sat on a patch of stone and sand four hundred yards from the shoreline of Douglas, the Isle of Man’s capital city. On the horizon, the jagged outline of the English coast peeked through the mist.
At Eoin’s back stood a line of three-storey Victorian guesthouses. Vacancy signs creaked on their hinges. Pigeons shuddered under flake-painted eaves. The pre-dawn sky was salmon flesh in colour. There was still time until silver-haired shoppers and leather-clad motorcyclists filled the promenade behind him. Provided that the ocean didn’t fill it first.
Black hair trailed from Eoin’s oilskin hood. Salty air rushed through his trimmed beard, making the skin underneath itch. Heavy metal screeched from the earbuds hanging from his shirt collar. To think there was once a time, a long, yawning river of time, when he couldn’t stuff his head with Motorhead or Thin Lizzy. Was it from so distant an age, when letting music leak from little sponges into your ears would’ve been considered witchcraft? Of course, much had changed since Eoin’s longship first caressed these sands. Too much.
The most pointless thoughts stirred in Eoin’s head when he was afraid. It was one of many reasons he never felt like the right man for this...role he’d been given. His father would’ve agreed, no doubt.