Shadow Hills Read Online Free PDF Page B

a finger to my chin in mock contemplation. “I’m going to have to say … almost anything, excluding water torture and mimes.”
    Graham laughed, reaching in front of me to open the door to the dorm. There was a bright light coming from the first room on the right.
    “Looks like Angela is waiting up for you.” He knocked on the open door.
    “Hey, Ms. Moore.” Graham gestured to me. “This is Persephone. The new student from L.A.”
    “Good. I was beginning to wonder if you had made it in.” Ms.Moore—who didn’t look anything like I’d expected a house mistress to look—stood up from her desk, where she had obviously been reading. She was young and fresh faced, her brown hair cut in a slightly layered bob.
    “I’m not sure how this works.” I fidgeted with the strap of my purse. There had never been anyone checking up on me in Los Angeles. I knew it was going to be very different here.
    “That’s okay.” Ms. Moore smiled. “No one knows how the residency process works when they first get here. It’s pretty simple: Sunday through Thursday, you need to be in your dorm by eight, and lights have to be out by ten thirty. Friday and Saturday check-in is at eleven, lights out by eleven thirty.”
    She picked up the clipboard that was hanging on her wall, just inside the doorway. “You sign your name here, record the time you arrived and your room number. I oversee nightly check-in and grant day or overnight excuses.” Ms. Moore shrugged her shoulders. “And that’s pretty much it.”
    She was apparently not aware that this was the longest list of rules I’d ever been given. My parents were never strict, and after Athena, they’d stopped caring altogether.
    I took the clipboard she extended to me and wrote down my information before digging around in my purse for my keys. Finally, I found them and headed for my door at the end of the hall, with Graham a few steps behind me.
    “Good night, Graham.” Ms. Moore gave him a pointed look that stopped him in his tracks. “No boys in the dorm after eight, remember?”
    “Right.” Graham looked at me questioningly. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
    “Yeah.” I nodded. He grinned and left the way we had come in.
    A noise pulled me out of my half-asleep haze what seemed like only a few minutes later. But a glance at my alarm clock told me it was 3:33 a.m. Had one of my dreams awakened me? I felt like I needed something. A drink? A snack? There was that vending machine in the common room. Tightness crept into my chest as I got out of bed. The tile beneath my feet felt cold, almost wet. I reached down and touched the floor; it was damp. Peering around my door, I stared into the dark hallway. The white tile looked black in the low light. This wasn’t, in and of itself, terribly disturbing, but the reflective, rippling appearance of the floor was.
    “What the hell?” I muttered. Taking a tentative step out of my room, I discovered the floor in the hall was covered in several inches of liquid. It was coming from underneath the bathroom door.
Had Ms. Moore left the water running?
    Her door was closed, and there was no light escaping from the cracks around it. I took a deep breath. What was I afraid of, an overflowing bathtub? I was trying to be calm, but the closer I got to the bathroom, the higher the water climbed. And the higher the water climbed, the more anxious I felt. The water was now over my ankles. I ignored the jittery panic building inside me and pulled swiftly on the handle. The door swung open, and an avalanche of water hit me hard in the chest. I wasfloating now, drowning. The water was thick and murky; my eyes stung as I opened them. I was blinking rapidly, trying to bring my blurry vision into focus, when out of the corner of my eye I saw her.
    My sister. Lifeless and limp, sinking down to the bottom of the ocean. Her tiny delicate hand was wrapped around a huge ornate gold skeleton key. Its heaviness seemed to be dragging her down faster and