Tags:
Romance,
Fantasy,
Paranormal,
Magic,
vampire romance,
vampire,
supernatural,
Young Adult,
teen,
Occult,
breathless
several scattered places now. She kept her gaze fixed on the largest of the growing piles of dirt. There! She was certain she saw something push up above the surface. She squinted, trying to see more clearly, and gasped. This most certainly was not a gopher, nor any other burrowing animal. Reaching up out of the earth was the unmistakable shape of a human hand!
More hands pushed up from the ground, a half-dozen now. Soon, entire arms appeared…and then heads. Heads that were part flesh and part bone. A few were wrapped in rotting cloth; one wore what could only be the remains of an old-fashioned tri-cornered hat.
Leesa watched, frozen to her spot atop the wall, as six corpses climbed out of their graves. They moved awkwardly, clumsily, but moved nonetheless. They looked at each other and walked in circles, almost as if they were waiting for direction. They didn’t seem to notice her.
Suddenly, all six collapsed to the ground, like marionettes whose strings had been cut.
Leesa awoke again, the image of the corpses falling to the ground clear and sharp in her mind. Her room was lighter now, with the first gray light of dawn spilling in through the windows. She could hear muted sounds from elsewhere in her dorm—music playing softly, a door closing—as some early risers prepared to start their day. Outside, a truck beeped annoyingly as it backed up to unload its cargo somewhere nearby.
She seemed to be dreaming more and more frequently of late, but she could not remember one staying with her so clearly after she woke up. While the rotting, reanimated bodies were not a pleasant image, the dream had not really been frightening, and she much preferred it to what she had experienced earlier that night, waking up with her heart racing and not being able to recall why.
9. VIDEO CONFIRMATION
L eesa sat hunched over her desk, slogging through her physics book, struggling to understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Her room had grown dark while she was studying, but her desk lamp provided a small island of light. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was playing in the background. Leesa loved the young British singer’s voice, so powerful and full of raw emotion. It was hard to believe she wasn’t even twenty-five years old yet. Leesa let her mind drift for a moment, escaping into the lyrics. She particularly liked the part about a fire starting in her heart. That was definitely a good description of how Rave made her feel—in more ways than one!
As the song wound down, she turned back to her physics book. “Uncertainty” was a fitting word for her right now, she thought. Not only was she uncertain about this whole Heisenberg Principle, but she was uncertain about so many other things going on in her life as well. Just when things were finally becoming normal with her mom and her brother, all this other stuff kept cropping up. Rave losing control of his fire, the strange phone call, her difficulty sleeping and her weird dream—all that was way more than any one person should have to deal with.
There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about those things, though, so she forced her mind back to physics. Final exams were only two weeks away. They were something under her control, at least. She just had to concentrate.
Suddenly, something gripped her tightly by the shoulders. She almost jumped out of her skin as adrenaline shot through her system. She whipped her head around to see Cali grinning down at her.
“ Sorry,” Cali said. “Your door was open and I just couldn’t resist. You were totally lost in that book. I didn’t know physics was so enthralling.”
“ You almost gave me a heart attack,” Leesa said, her heart still racing.
Cali plopped down on the edge of Leesa’s bed. She was wearing ripped jeans with tiny red sequins outlining the front pockets and a dark brown T-shirt with a gold tic-tac-toe game etched on the front. Instead of O’s, the designer had used shiny gold
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