First Grave on the Right Read Online Free PDF Page B

would explain a lot.
    I’d never been afraid of the unknown, like other people. Things like the dark or monsters or the bogeyman. I suppose if I had been, I wouldn’t have made a proper grim reaper. But something or someone was stalking me. I’d tried for weeks to convince myself that I was imagining it. But I’ve seen only one thing in my life move that fast. And it was the only thing on Earth, or the hereafter, that terrified me.
    I’d never quite worked out the reasoning behind my unnatural fear, because the being had never hurt me. Truth be known, it had saved my life on several occasions. When I was almost kidnapped as a child by a paroled sex offender, it saved me. When Owen Vaughn tried to run me down with his dad’s Suburban in high school, it saved me. When I was being stalked in college and eventually attacked, it saved me. At the time, I hadn’t taken the stalking thing that seriously until it showed up. Only then did I realize, almost too late, that my life had been in danger.
    So, you’d think I’d be more grateful. But it wasn’t just that it had saved my life. It was the way it had saved my life. The ability to sever a man’s spinal cord in half without leaving any visible evidence as to what happened was a tad disconcerting.
    And in high school, when other teens were trying desperately to figure out who they were, where they fit in the world, it told me what I was. It whispered the role I would play in life into my ear as I was applying lip gloss in the girls’ bathroom, words I never heard, words that lay thick in the air, waiting for me to breathe them in, to accept who I was, what I would become. As girls fluttered around me for glimpses in the mirror, I could see only him, standing over me, a huge cloaked figure bearing down on me like a suffocating vacuum.
    I’d stood there for a solid fifteen minutes after the other girls left, after he left, barely breathing, unable to move until Mrs. Worthy busted me for skipping and sent me to the office.
    He was basically dark and creepy and just sort of showed up in my life every so often to impart some juicy tidbit of afterlife wisdom—and scare the bejesus out of me—only to leave me quaking in the wake of his visit. At least I was a bright and shiny grim reaper. He was dark and dangerous, and death seemed to waft off him like smoke off dry ice. When I was a child, I decided to name him something ordinary, something nonthreatening, but Fluffy just didn’t fit. Eventually, he was christened the Big Bad.
    “Ms. Davidson,” Elizabeth said, sitting beside me.
    I blinked and glanced around. “Did you just see someone?”
    She scanned the area as well. “I don’t think so.”
    “A blur? Kind of dark and … blurry?”
    “Um, nope.”
    “Oh, okay, sorry. What’s up?”
    “I can’t have my nieces and nephew wake up to my body. I’m right under their windows.”
    I’d thought of that, too. “You’re right,” I said. “Maybe we should break the news to your sister.”
    She nodded sadly. I called Garrett over, and we agreed for me and the cop to ring the doorbell and give Elizabeth’s sister the news. Maybe Elizabeth could help me with what to say. Her presence might make the whole thing easier on us all. At least I’d thought so.
    An hour later, I was in my uncle’s SUV, breathing into a paper bag.
    “You should have waited for me,” he said really helpfully.
    Never again. Obviously there were siblings out there who actually liked each other. Who knew? The woman had an emotional breakdown in my arms. What seemed to upset her most was the fact that Elizabeth had been outside her house all night and she hadn’t known. I might should’ve left that part out. The woman grabbed my shoulders, her fingernails digging into my skin, her morning hair, a cross between disco and crack addict, shaking in denial; then she crumpled to the floor and sobbed. Most definitely an emotional breakdown.
    The bad part came when I crumpled to the floor and