A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) Read Online Free PDF

fingers along the cheek and the curve of her jaw. Kara
swallowed hard, staring into his eyes, and for several long seconds she was
speechless, despite a thousand unsaid things that blossomed in her heart.
    He kissed her again, not nearly
as gentle as before, and they only stopped to breathe.
    With a quick knock on the open
door, Ren stepped into the room. "Hachiro, can I borrow —" he
began, halting abruptly when he saw them and covering his eyes. "Ahhh, I'm
blind."
    Kara and Hachiro both laughed.
    "What do you need?"
Hachiro asked.
    Ren shook his head, long
bronze-dyed hair falling across his eyes. "Nothing. Go back to what you
were doing. I'll come back later."
    Before either of them could
argue or ask him to say, he darted off down the hall. Kara hugged Hachiro
again, but as she did she found herself looking around the room, realizing that
something was out of place. Or, rather, not at all out of place. Hachiro's
suitcase had already been stowed away, whatever clothes he had brought home
already integrated back into his school wardrobe. Even his books for the new
term were organized on his desk.
    A little tremor of
disappointment went through her as she stepped back from him.
    "You've been home for
hours."
    Hachiro's happiness fell away
like a mask and she saw again the sadness that weighed on him. He seemed
exhausted by it.
    "Since last night,
actually," he confessed.
    Her heart sank. Part of her mind
immediately started making excuses for him, mostly to make herself feel better,
but the hurt was too much.
    "What? You didn't . . . why
didn't you tell me? Or come see me?"
    "I meant to," he said.
"I came back on the train. I wanted to surprise you, but something
happened on the train and I've been trying to make sense of it, trying to
figure out if I really saw what I think I saw."
    Kara felt a chill dance along
her spine. "What do you think you saw?"
    Hachiro looked away from her,
out at the darkness beyond his window. When he looked back, his face had gone
pale.
    "Jiro's ghost."
    Her breath caught in her throat. Jiro's ghost. Oh, my God.
    "Are you sure?"
    "I'm not sure of anything,"
he said. "Once I would have said it was impossible, but —"
    "But 'impossible' doesn't
mean much anymore," Kara finished for him.
    "What do you think it
means?" Hachiro asked. "Do you think it's just . . . I don't know,
symptoms of the curse? That we've brushed up against so much of the
supernatural that we're more aware of it now? Or do you think it's something
else, that something else has come to try to finish what Kyuketsuki and the
Hannya started?"
    Kara shook her head. "I don't
know. But we've got to keep our eyes open. We have to be on guard."
    "I'm always on guard these
days."
    He took her hand, then, and she
stepped into his embrace, relishing his warmth and strength and how safe she
felt in his arms. But she knew it was an illusion.
    As long as the curse remained in
place, they were never really safe.
     

Chapter Three
     
    By Saturday morning, Kara's
schoolwork was already suffering. She sat in the back of 2-C while her homeroom
teacher, the gray-eyed Mr. Sato, droned on about the drop-off in attentiveness —
and thus test scores — that many students showed during winter term. She
knew she ought to be paying attention, since he might as well have been talking
specifically about her, but his voice was such a monotone that it lulled her
into a stupor.
    For the past few days, she had
been able to think of nothing but Jiro's ghost, and what it might mean. She
felt uneasy most of the time, an awful paranoia creeping up on her in quiet
moments. Hachiro had been unnerved at first, but with every hour that passed he
seemed less and less sure of what he had really seen, and now he acted almost
embarrassed by his ghost sighting. Kara had not witnessed it herself, so there
was no way she could know for certain what he had seen, but she had a hard time
thinking the apparition had been nothing but Hachiro's imagination, and he
couldn't