Shadowshift Read Online Free PDF

the wall of skee ball machines. Not knowing the ticket-to-point ratio here, she doesn’t figure two dollars will easily win three hundred tickets. She can get more money from Kevin; that’d be easy, but it wouldn’t be right. The two dollars from her pocket is money she saved, and she has to do this on her own. More than that, she wants to do it the right way.
    The first game garners a score of 290—better than average—with one of her balls landing in the coveted 100 hole. But her momentary excitement fades when the machine only spits fourteen tickets into her waiting hands. The next six attempts don’t fare much better—some worse—leaving her with one token and eighty-one tickets. Barely enough for a pencil-top eraser.
    So much for the right way, she thinks.
    Electronic dings and blips ring out. Parents with exasperated tones herd wild children. Laughter erupts from every corner of the arcade. But that’s all lost on Hannah. In her mind, she’s elsewhere—a dark void. The only thing present with her, the skee ball machine. She stares through wood and plastic, into the belly of the ticket mechanism, a network of wires and switches.
    One ticket for every twenty points isn’t fair, she thinks, then she sends the machine a message: One for one.
    Click—screep—click…
    And she closes her eyes. For a moment, she feels weightless, as if detached from her body, but the sensation quickly fades.
    When she opens her eyes, she’s back in the arcade, the one remaining token in her palm. She drops the coin in the slot and grabs her first ball, confident she can win. Sure, all nine balls might drop in 10, giving her the worst possible score of 90. But she’s better than that.
    The first ball lands in 100, and she feels herself locked in a zone. Her luck holds out, and by game’s end, she’s looks up at a score of 450, her personal best.
    Then the tickets start coming, and her smile fades. She crouches, wrapping her body around the dispenser like a shield, winding the long, seemingly endless strand into loops as tickets click, one at a time, from their slot.
    She’s sure someone’s watching.
    Her eyes dart.
    No one’s paying attention, it appears, and yet she senses scrutiny at her back. She turns, and no one on the opposite side of the arcade looks in her direction, but that doesn’t erase the nagging fear she’s being watched, or that she’ll soon be discovered doing wrong.
    Her body quakes.
    She’s never used her power with so many around. What made me risk it? she asks herself. No logical answer is forthcoming.
    After what seems like an entire afternoon, she moves to a short bench next to a Coke machine and counts off three hundred tickets, forcing herself not to look up, afraid that her nervous demeanor will only draw misgiving. She pushes the tickets she needs into her pocket and stands as a red-haired boy, no more than five or six, stumbles past. He looks like the kid from an old TV show her mom used to watch often, except the boy in the show always seemed happy. Opie, she remembers. That was his name. But this Opie looks depressed.
    “Hey, kid,” she says.
    The boy stops and looks up, but he doesn’t make eye contact with her. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he has a hard life. She feels sorry for the kid.
    “Thought you might like these.” She hands him her spare tickets.
    “Thanks,” he mutters. After taking Hannah’s offering, he scampers away, disappearing into the crowded den of electronic mayhem.
    Her nerves calm, and her hands stop trembling. She glances around to make sure no one is casting suspicious eyes in her direction. The coast seems clear. Then she returns to the counter to claim her prize.
    “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Pimpleboy says.
    “Actually, it was pretty freaking hard. Just give me my prize.”
    “Okay, here you go, drama queen.” The boy flings the bag of rings onto the counter. “Enjoy.”
    Hannah doesn’t take the bag right away. She just stands there, staring