Alive (The Veiled World Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

gorgeous smile. Carl had been one of my brother’s best mates. Sam had been completely cut up when he’d died last winter. The whole school had mourned him, just like they’d mourned my brother only two months later.
    More pictures came.
    Of Jacob’s dad leaning out of his work Ute window, just as muscular and good-looking as his son. Then of Reuben’s famous footballer dad who’d died of brain cancer, hairless and thin, but smiling weakly in a hospital bed surrounded by his family.
    When Noah’s cousin, Laura, an only child of her parents, who’d died in a car accident when she was only ten, showed, I started to sweat and my stomach began churning. I knew what was coming. Knew whose face I’d see next.
    I shut my eyes but opened them again just as a picture of Sam came into focus. He was smiling, his hair perfectly mussed. It was his famous bed hair that used to take him roughly forty-five minutes each morning before school. We missed the bus regularly because of that hair and I used to give him heaps over it.
    “Why is she smiling like that?”
    Wait. What?
    “Because she’s a fucking freak!”
    I looked up and saw that everyone was staring at me. Reece stood leaning over the back of my seat, his eyes like slits. When I brought my hands to my face I felt the wetness of my own tears. I’d been crying and smiling at the same time.
    “What the hell is going on?” Reece shouted to nobody in particular.
    The screen turned black, then white again, and one by one, single black letters appeared to eventually form seven words.
     
    What if you could bring them back?
     
    “What is this shit?” Reece shouted at my screen.
    Noah, his face white, shook his head. For once he was at a loss for words.
    Reuben stood up, his furious dark eyes trained on the cockpit, but the plane trembled and shook and he fell back into his seat.
    “Must be turbulence,” shouted Kyle, his eyes wide and unsure, when the lights for the seatbelt came on.
    Claire’s and Bella’s cries filled the cabin. I wanted to reach out to Claire. It must have been hard for her to see the picture of her little sister after all these years, but six months’ worth of Claire ignoring me or smirking at me kept me in my seat.
    “I don’t mean the fucking turbulence!” shouted Reece. “I mean this ‘ What if you could bring them back?’ crap . ” He looked at us all, even me, his green eyes wide. “How did he get photos of all these people? Of our people? What’s he trying to do?”
    “He’s trying to freak us out!” shouted Kyle, who was now sitting up straight, his back against his upright seat. “He’s a freak,” he added, buckling his seatbelt with trembling fingers. “He likes doing stuff like this. I mean, he wears a friggen Buzz suit!”
    Reuben got up again but landed on his arse when the plane shook even more violently than before.
    Bella screamed and Claire buried her face beneath the blanket. When the plane shuddered again Claire raised her head and looked at me, her large dark eyes filled with terror. “Do something, Amber, do something, please ! I’m so scared . ”
    I nodded and sucked in a deep breath, my eyes on the cockpit door. Suddenly all the bitchiness Claire had doled out to me since my brother died faded away. All I could remember was how hard she’d cried when her little sister had died, and how she’d slept with her baby sister’s teething ring beneath her pillow each night for years following her death.
    I stood up, ignoring the flashing seatbelt warning.
    Using Noah’s armrest, I propelled myself forward. When I gripped the back of Jacob’s chair, I threw a quick glance at him and was surprised to find him sitting with his head back, eyes closed, the veins in his neck and arms bulging while he gripped the arms of his seat. His seatbelt was unbuckled.
    From out of nowhere Reuben fell against me, our heads cracking together. The impact knocked me to the ground, across Jacob’s feet. I raised myself to my knees