The Evil Within Read Online Free PDF Page B

with great songs, which we listened to through his car speakers, then tore up the freeway laughing and singing.
    The seaside town of San Covino was the last outpost of civilization before we began the slow climb into the mountains on a one-lane road. It would take about two hours to travel from San Covino to Marlwood. As we prepared for launch, it was almost eight o’clock, and I had to physically check in with Ms. Krige, my housemother, by ten. As we drove down Main Street in search of gas, shadows stretched across the mirrored store-fronts, making the town seemed deserted . . . dead. We stopped at a Chevron station, and I called my parents, reminding them that I probably wouldn’t be able to reach them again until I got to the landline in my dorm. We had terrible cell phone coverage at Marlwood.
    Then we were back in the car in the Chevron lot when Troy got a text message on his wafer-thin phone, so new you couldn’t get it in the States yet, and his face fell. He was quiet for a moment, and then instead of pulling out of the station, he took my hand.
    “I need to tell you something,” he said.
    As soon as he said that, my heart dropped and the whole day of fun—the views, the salt spray, tossing tangerine peels at each other in the car . . . it all fell away like background noise, like a carousel winding down until the music warps, slows, and stops. Let’s face it. There’s never anything good coming when someone says, “I need to tell you something.”
    Troy hesitated, tossing his thick dark hair out of his blue eyes. “I don’t want to seem like a player . . . ” Then he trailed off, and loosened his grip on my fingers.
    A sickening dread rushed through me. I waited.
    He gave his head a little shake. “I told you I would break up with Mandy. But she came to the hospital and . . . ”
    I wasn’t stupid. I could fill in the blanks: he hadn’t done it. As I worked to keep the pain out of my expression, I was suddenly very grateful for my year as a Jane-bitch—because she had taught us never to show weakness in front of boys. Never to confirm that we liked or wanted them. They had to work to deserve us .
    “She didn’t used to be so . . . so bad,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. Just . . . it’s so weird. She’s so bad .” And I wondered if he knew . About the hauntings. “She was . . . ”
    He sighed hard and tsked his teeth, as if it was too baffling for him. “It’s her brother. Miles is crazy. He’s ruined their whole family.”
    Before I could say anything, he looked up at me. “She was crying when she came to see me. She said she was afraid.”
    “Of what?” I asked.
    “My guess is Miles. But she wouldn’t say. She told me I wouldn’t understand.”
    Of all the things that Mandy might fear, her brother Miles did not seem to be one of them. Word all over campus was that she and her brother had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. Together. And that was why she got sent to Marlwood—late, although not as late as me. She had been going to boarding school in London, but Marlwood was much closer to San Francisco, where the Winters lived, and her parents could keep better tabs on her. I half-believed the gossip; she talked about Miles all the time.
    “She was terrified ,” he continued, and I listened hard. Could it be that Mandy and I both wanted to be free of the ghosts that were haunting us?
    “I know what you’re thinking,” he went on. “That she’s playing me .”
    You didn’t really want Riley , Jane had told me after she stole him, or you would have done anything to get him back. I knew she was wrong. Guys weren’t possessions to be fought over. And I wasn’t going to fight over Troy. If he liked girls with issues . . .
    . . . Then I am the girl for him. Haha.
    Just as with Heather, I had no idea how to respond. He kept gazing at me, then down at his hands, then back at me, and I knew he was expecting something. I just didn’t know what. How did rich girls deal