Haunted Read Free

combination to my locker. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I really couldn’t. What was Paul doing here? What was Paul doing here enrolling in my school, making my world—from which I’d thought I’d rid him forever—a real-life nightmare?
    I didn’t want to know. Whatever his motives for coming back, I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get away from him, get to class, anywhere, anywhere at all…
    …so long as it was away from him.
    “Well,” I said, slamming my locker door closed. I hardly knew what I was doing. I had reached in and blindly grabbed the first books my fingers touched. “Gotta go. Homeroom calls.”
    He looked down at the books in my arms, the ones I was holding almost as a shield, as if they would protect me from whatever it was—and I was sure there was something—he had in store for me. For us.
    “You won’t find them in there,” Paul said with a cryptic nod at the textbooks bulging from my arms.
    I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t want to know. All I knew was that I wanted out of there, and I wanted out of there fast. CeeCee still stood beside me, looking bewilderedly from my face to Paul’s. Any second, I knew, she was going to begin to ask questions, questions I didn’t dare answer…because she wouldn’t believe me if I tried.
    Still, even though I didn’t want to, I heard myself asking, as if the words were being torn involuntarily from my lips, “I won’t find what in here?”
    “The answers you’re looking for.” Paul’s blue-eyed gaze was intense. “Why you, of all people, were chosen. And what, exactly, you are.”
    This time, I didn’t have to ask what he meant. I knew. I knew as surely as if he’d said the words out loud. He was talking about the gift we shared, he and I, the one over which he seemed to have so much better control—and of which he seemed to have such superior knowledge—than I did.
    While CeeCee stood there, staring at the two of us as if we were speaking a foreign language, Paul went on smoothly, “When you’re ready to hear the truth about what you are, you’ll know where to find me. Because I’ll be right here.”
    And then he walked away, seemingly unaware of all the feminine sighs he drew from my classmates as he moved with pantherlike grace down the breezeway.
    Her violet eyes still wide behind her glasses, CeeCee looked up at me wonderingly.
    “What,” she wanted to know, “was that guy talking about? And who on earth is Jesse ?”

chapter

two
     
     

    I couldn’t tell her, of course. I couldn’t tell anyone about Jesse, because, frankly, who’d have believed it? I knew only one person—one living person, anyway—who knew the whole truth about people like Paul and me, and that was only because he was one of us. As I sat in front of his mahogany desk a little while later, I couldn’t help letting out a groan.
    “How could this have happened?” I asked.
    Father Dominic, principal of the Junipero Serra Mission Academy, sat behind his enormous desk, looking patient. It was an expression that became the good father, who, rumor had it, grew better looking with every passing year. At nearly sixty-five, he was a white-haired, spectacled Adonis.
    He was also very contrite.
    “Susannah, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy with preparations for the new school year—not to mention the Father Serra festival this coming weekend—I never glanced at the admission rosters.” He shook his neatly trimmed white head. “I am so, so sorry.”
    I grimaced. He was sorry. He was sorry? What about me ? He wasn’t the one who had to be in the same classes with Paul Slater. Two classes, as a matter of fact: homeroom and U.S. history. Two whole hours a day I was going to have to sit there and look at the guy who’d tried to off my boyfriend and leave me for dead. And that wasn’t even counting morning assembly and lunch. That was another hour, right there!
    “Although I don’t honestly know what I could have