Read Online Lightbringer by K.D. McEntire - Free Book Online Page B

date you. Lots of guys totally do.”
    “Right, whatever.” Wendy rolled her eyes, but felt the flush work up her neck. “Everyone wants to date the class freak. Sure they do.”
    “Oh please. Shut up. I'm making a point here.”
    “Oh yeah? And that point is?”
    “The point is that you don't have to date, Wendy. This is the real world, right? There doesn't need to be some intense connection. You don't need to be wearing some guy's jacket or whatever to, you know, blow off steam, have a little fun. Especially not with me.” He reached out, captured her fingers again, and squeezed her hand. “I am more than willing to consider less…permanent…options. For now.”
    “Blowing off something,” she muttered under her breath as she sat back.
    “I heard that, you perv. Secondly, maybe Chel's got a point. You're really wound up. I mean, okay, I'll admit, if you went for one of those losers I'd be jealous as hell, but…but it doesn't have to be me, I know that.”
    Wendy slouched in the seat, turned her face away. “Oh yeah? If not you, then who?”
    “Please. You've got that whole bad-girl gothette vibe going for you, and some people—not me of course, because I myself am a goth god—but there are some dudes who find that vibe, likewise you, sexy as hell. They'd stick around even if shit got a little weird. Who doesn't like a little mystery?”
    “Reaping. The. Dead. Eddie.”
    “So? They don't have to know about it.”
    “Right, like I'm supposed to Bruce Wayne my way through a relationship? I see a soul, maybe my mom's, and then I'm supposed to be all, ‘Excuse me, honey, I just remembered that my house is on fire. Gotta go!’” Wendy snorted. “Not bloody likely.”
    “Do you have to go send every soul you see into the Light?” He slapped the wheel, exasperated. “I mean, can't you just let a couple of them slide?”
    “I do let them go. I told you, I don't reap unless I have to now,” Wendy snapped. “It's not like I'm in this for the glory, Eddie, and I don't want them noticing me any more than…any more than they want me noticing them, but sometimes…sometimes there's no choice. Some of them,” she shuddered, “some of the ghosts aren't right. Some of them scare me.”
    Though she'd tried to explain before, Wendy knew she'd never have the words for the horrors Eddie couldn't see. He'd been in the operating room after the accident; he hadn't been there when she'd spotted her first Walker.
    The ambulance came shortly after Piotr left her, shivering and lonely, hunched in the back of the police car. The paramedics looked her over and escorted her into the back, driving quietly to El Camino Hospital, where they left her in the ER to await medical attention. Her mother was an EMT so most of the ER nurses knew Wendy on sight. After she'd been declared bruised but intact, the nurses sat her in a corner bed and pulled the curtain, giving her privacy while she waited for her mother.
    It was spooky sitting there, shrouded behind the green fabric. Wendy hopped down and opened the curtain a large crack before crawling back onto the table. Bored, she began watching ghosts wander by. Piotr had promised that the ability to see ghosts would fade but so far it hadn't. The shock of the accident had peeled back some protective layer in Wendy's mind, leaving her exposed to a different level of the world—a darker, colder place.
    It didn't take Wendy long to figure out that only a small fraction of the ghosts seemed to realize that they were dead; they drifted from nurse to nurse, touching elbows and asking plaintive questions like “Where am I?” or “What happened?” They shuffled amid the staff, repeating their queries over and over again until Wendy thought she'd be driven mad by the soft, insistent questions. The rest just drifted, ignoring the living and the dead alike, lost in their own tragedies and oblivious to the world around them.
    After awhile, she began keeping tally, wetting her finger and