Read Online SwitchBack: A Paranormal Werewolf Romance (Knightsbridge Canyon Series Book 1) by David VanDyke, Drew VanDyke - Free Book Online

are so ungrateful.” She was right, but I was mad, and when I had my mad on, my stupid mouth got the best of me.
    “Fine. I’m an ungrateful bitch. You hate me. This town hates me and now, probably Will hates me too!” I wailed and I broke down and began to cry.
    My sister stared at me like I’d grown another head. I never cried. I was the tomboy. I was the scrapper. I was…I was, I was a big ol’ mess.
    My sister sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at me with concern. J.R. and Elle both poked their heads into the room and she waved them away.
    “So…do you want to talk about it?”
    “Do I look like I want to talk about it?” I sobbed.
    Amber patted my foot through the down comforter. She was not making this easy on me.
    “I’ll tell you about it later,” I promised. “Right now, I’d just like to sleep a little.”
    Amber looked at me with kindness and brushed my hair from off my face. Then, she kissed my forehead like Mom used to do and I about lost it. That is, until she said, “Tomorrow, we’ll go get mani-pedis. Just the two of us.”
    As if that would make it all better. I laughed between sobs as she shut the door.
    I was such a schizoid.
    “Ashlee Marie Scott!” Mom’s voice came out of the woodwork and her disembodied head floated into the room.
    Oh, dear mother of God
,
I thought. Now I’d done it. It wasn’t enough to be humiliated and have a nervous breakdown in front of my identical twin, but now Mother had to get involved and I knew that she wasn’t going to be put off so easily.
    “Stop that sniveling at once,” my dead mother said as she halfway materialized into the room.
    I say halfway, because the lower half of her body seemed to be having trouble catching up to the rest and was banging its shins against the door. She whistled and her stocking feet finally found their home. “There. That’s better. Now what’s this all about, young lady?” she intoned and sat down into the bed.
    I would have said “on the bed” but it seemed like holding a visual pattern of molecules against the solidity of the real world was a process she hadn’t fully mastered.
    I opened my mouth, but before I spoke, she plucked the thought from my mind.
    “So, Will’s in love with you.”
    I growled, “I really hate it when you do that.”
    Mom ignored my outburst. “So, why does that bother you?” she asked.
    I knew she was referring to Will, but I deliberately called up a brick wall in my head and said, “Because my thoughts should be my own and I’d like to think that there’s such a thing as respecting my privacy.” If I wouldn’t let her read my diary when she was alive, I was sure as hell not going to give her the opportunity to read my mind after she was dead.
    “Talk to me, Ashlee,” she said. “You know I’m not very good at this.”
    “Yeah, well that makes two of us.”
    “So, why does Will loving you bother you so?” she badgered me.
    I sighed and threw the covers over my head. “Because I don’t even know how I feel! How can he say he still loves me after how many years has it been now?”
    “I don’t know how to answer that, Ash. Time doesn’t work the same for me as it does for you.”
    “What does that mean?” I asked, suddenly curious. I was always trying to trick Mother into telling me what’s on the other side, but she usually saw through my subterfuges.
    “Hmm. How can I say it?” Her eyes closed and her head got denser, and the rest of her tea-length gown went diaphanous as if all her energy was centered in her noggin as she thought long and hard about what she could or would say.
    “I know.” She opened her eyes and the color washed out of her cranium and she got all ghostly again. “See. Time is a continuum, a mental construct created for physical bodies. As I no longer have the same type of physical body that you do and am not bound by time, I see you as a complete entity. You are all ages at once to me. Maybe Will sees you the same way. You’re