Catalyst (Forevermore, Book Two) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the litter box, then crawled into bed. Willow eventually eased out of her hiding place and joined me on the mattress after noisily crunching on her food. It was nice having her warm fluffy body beside me again. My mom came into the room two hours later, trying to be quiet and not wake me, but she failed when she knocked over the water dish and yelped.
    “ M-mom?” I said quietly, sitting upright and blinking into the darkness.
    She flipped on the light switch and looked apologetically in my direction. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered. “Let me clean this up and you can go back to sleep.”
    With a groggy nod, I fell back against my pillow and drew my covers up over my head. The sound of my mom opening the bathroom door to get a towel, wiping up the mess, and refilling the water dish kept me awake for the next five minutes. Once silence had settled in the room again, I managed to fall back asleep. My dreams were filled with dark shadows that whispered in screeching voices in languages that I couldn’t understand. Bright red eyes sparked into existence, illuminating the faces of each shadowy figure and one clearly said my name.
    I sat up in a startled jolt, my heart pounding in my chest. Daylight streamed through the windows and Willow was nowhere to be seen. I heard scraping coming from the bathroom and assumed that ’s where the cat had gone off to. Mom was curled up on her bed, facing the wall. With a strangled gasp of surprise, I saw that the framed picture was no longer hanging up and instead was lying face down on her nightstand. Quietly, I stepped down from my bed, went over to the nightstand and picked it up. There were crumpled up tissues beside it, and I imagined my mom sitting up in the darkness last night, crying relentlessly ... if only she knew the truth.
    Temptation overwhelmed me then. It would have been so easy to wake her up and tell her that Salem was alive and that we could save him, just her and me. Hannah wouldn ’t have to know. Then again, what could we possibly do? A mortal and an untrained witch against hordes of vampires was suicide. I frowned, placed the frame back on the nightstand, and stepped away from her bed. It hurt knowing that my aunt was right and that keeping this information from my mom was the best for now. She could go to Romania, she could go to whatever fortress Cassius and Silas lived in, and she could demand to see her husband, but in the end they would only wind up killing her or holding her prisoner with him.
    When Willow came padding silently from the bathroom, I collected some clean clothes from my dresser and went to take a shower. I’d hoped the warm water would help clear my thoughts, but if anything, it only caused my mind to wander more and intensify them. The red-eyed creatures from my dream appeared more than once when I shut my eyes to rinse out the shampoo, and I wondered if there was more behind it than just a dream as Hannah seemed to have hinted at.

Chapter Four
     
    I found my way to Noah ’s room, where I’d hoped to find Mathias since he wasn’t in his own and the boys were practically brothers. The door was cracked open enough that I could hear the two of them discussing the night I had been attacked by James and the rest of the Nefastus group. I cringed at the memory and knocked on the door. Mathias looked temporarily surprised, and then grinned at my presence. He jumped down from Noah’s bed, and shut the door quietly behind me once I was inside. I scanned the vicinity, having never been in this room before. It was cluttered, to say the least. If Eila had thought Jason was a slob, she needed to see this room. Clothing was strewn all over the floor and hanging off of the back of a computer chair, there was an overflowing garbage can in the kitchen area, and the sink was stacked with unwashed dishes. On the walls surrounding Noah’s bed were movie posters and pictures of scantily clad women. I shook my head and glowered at him.
    “