In Bethany Neal's "Friends 'Til the End," death isn't the end for Emily Winstead, not even close. She died with a wrong to make right, and she's been given a second chance to set things straight. The only problem: her memories are hazy, she doesn't know who to trust or even why she's back, but she does know something about how she died broke the course of fate and it's her ghostly mission to mend it.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
In Bethany Neal's "Friends 'Til the End," death isn't the end for Emily Winstead, not even close. She died with a wrong to make right, and she's been given a second chance to set things straight. The only problem: her memories are hazy, she doesn't know who to trust or even why she's back, but she does know something about how she died broke the course of fate and it's her ghostly mission to mend it.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Overview
In Bethany Neal's "Friends 'Til the End," death isn't the end for Emily Winstead, not even close. She died with a wrong to make right, and she's been given a second chance to set things straight. The only problem: her memories are hazy, she doesn't know who to trust or even why she's back, but she does know something about how she died broke the course of fate and it's her ghostly mission to mend it.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466868052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2014 |
| Series: | Tor.Com Original Series |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 32 |
| File size: | 660 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Friends 'Til the End
By Bethany Neal, Ashley Mackenzie
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2014 Bethany NealAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6805-2
CHAPTER 1
"Prick your finger, blood beads red. Forever and always, friends 'til we're dead."
I winced as the pin pierced my left pinkie finger. My instinct was to bring the wound to my mouth and suck away the pain, but I knew my friends were counting on me. I was the last to go and the three of them had been waiting with bloody digits for me to complete the ritual.
Tonight we were to become blood siblings, inseparable friends 'til the end.
Melanie raised her freshly manicured hand, a single deep crimson line tracing its way down her index finger, and continued. "Let our blood run as one."
"Très morbid, don't you think, Mel?" Lilly asked with her usual sarcastic amusement.
"This whole thing is morbid," Reed said under his breath. I reached out my right hand to squeeze his. We exchanged a private eye roll then focused back on the small silver platter that Melanie had swiped from her mom's prized collection, a relic of the days before Mr. Hill lost his cushy VP job. It held four friendship bracelets that each of us had helped braid into intricate patterns earlier in the day.
We'd been listening to music, sprawled out in various positions on the dock in front of Lilly's family cottage, bored out of our skulls, as per the norm that summer after our senior year, when she pulled out her stash of embroidery floss. She insisted we make something to remember each other by since high school was finally over. Everyone was getting nostalgic, but as sad as the idea of being separated was, it was overshadowed by our impending freedom. We'd be liberated from the mindless trudge of small-town life and all the mistakes we'd made in the space between the years.
I glimpsed at Reed. He'd gained two new freckles on the tip of his nose while lying out today. When we were little I used to tease him with daily freckle inspections. Lately, I'd been keeping my count private.
He noticed me staring and pinched my arm with a crooked grin. He was practically vibrating with anticipation for his future. Lilly and Melanie were just as excited. I suddenly felt nauseous. I let go of Reed's hand and covered my mouth as I swallowed back the sickness burning my throat.
"Are you okay?" he whispered as he tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear.
"It must be the smell of the blood." I made an exaggerated frown then stepped forward to join Melanie. I could feel his eyes on me as the moonlight cooled my bare upper back. The thin fabric of my tank top clung to the moisture of my summer-soaked body. I was definitely coming down with something, but I couldn't bring myself to dwell. The idea of Reed sneaking clandestine glances in my direction made my pulse race.
"This isn't morbid," I said loud enough for everyone to hear. "It's how we'll remember each other."
"After this," Melanie added, "come hell or high water, we'll never be apart."
I smiled at the wild expression that lightened her dark complexion even though I wasn't into this Ouija board brand of mischief as much as she was — none of us were, but her excitement was, as always, contagious.
"Let our blood run as one," I repeated.
Lilly followed suit, her broad hand raised with her red middle finger extended. She giggled to herself about that.
Reed lifted his hand, too, but he didn't say the words. The blood from his pinprick hugged the knuckle of his third finger the way a ring might.
Melanie nudged him, and he stepped forward so the four of us could link thumbs over the platter. Together we made a single hand formed by individual fingers, deliberately scarred so they could heal as one.
As we touched fingertips, Reed recited the words. "Let our blood run as one."
We separated, rubbed our mixed blood into our own bracelets, and tied them back onto our wrists. Then as a group we said, "Blood bonds us as friends in an oath made eternal."
"In other words," Lilly interjected, "B-F-F. Blood friends forever." She gathered our hands together and lifted them skyward.
When I looked up, all I could see was the blood on our hands.
* * *
The pavement beneath my cheek feels cool and slightly moist. The prolonged thaw of spring has penetrated every inch of Crescent Valley, even the trees and the stones. Usually this kind of humid chill doesn't arrive until May, but the weather, like most things this past year, has arrived without warning.
I try to lift my head, but every muscle in my body protests with a violent, almost audible ache that makes me wish I was back in the dream I just had. Was that a dream? It felt closer to a memory than the haphazard storylines I'm used to dreaming.
I open my mouth to call for help, but my voice is swallowed by the pain and the heat and the light. Where is that light coming from? I manage to crane my neck enough to see two headlights illuminating a path in the winding road.
Oh no, the road. I'm in the road!
I struggle to move out of the way before I'm run over, but something is obstructing my feet. As I stagger toward the gravel shoulder, I look around myself, trying to see what it is. Instead I see what I know is impossible: me. Another me. Lying in the middle of the deserted country road, cheek smashed against the asphalt.
I rub my eyes, blink, comb my fingers through my long, stringy hair — all the things I do in the morning to wake myself up — but the freakish dreamscape surrounding me doesn't blur.
Instead, the lines of the road sharpen. Beside me I notice the remnants of a freshly roadkilled squirrel. Across the expanse of pavement, I see a lonely mile marker denoted with a white 127 and a limp pine branch waiting for a heavy rain to snap it from its trunk. I hear small animals rustling on all sides. The riotous assault on my senses comes to an abrupt halt when a crackle of lightning strikes somewhere in the distance.
My senses feel strangely heightened, but what I don't pick up on is the only thing I should sense. How did I get here?
I remember coming home to spend our first collegiate spring break with my friends "like old times" — that was what Melanie had said — but the rest of the day and the night is blank.
My look-alike who's on the ground is so pale it's as if she's been carved out of creamy blue marble. Her long brown hair is draped haphazardly over her face. I kneel beside her and reach out a tentative hand to move the strands, but the air inexplicably thickens the closer I get. When I thrust my hand forward, it's pushed back, as if an invisible rubber sheet has been stretched taut around her body.
I press my hand to my cheek, brushing off nonexistent bits of gravel, staring at my morbid doppelgänger and wondering where she came from. She can't be me.
Then why is she wearing an identical pair of blue shorts?
An answer stirs in the recesses of my mind. Before I can take hold of it, a sudden burst of light appears from around the nearest bend in the road, blinding me.
I tick a frantic look between the girl and the approaching headlights, then wave my arms, yelling, "Stop, stop! Please!"
The car slows and switches on its high beams before pulling over. As soon as the driver's door opens, I begin explaining. "Please, I need your help. I don't know how I got here, but there's a girl in the road that — well, I think she's hurt pretty badly and she looks like ..." I stop talking when I see the driver's familiar face. "Melanie!" I run to her, arms spread wide, relief coursing through me. "Mel, I was so scared. I thought I might be —"
I fling my arms around her narrow shoulders and a sudden, arresting shockwave of pain spreads through every inch of my being. My friend walks through me as if I'm made of nothing more than vapor. I thrust myself out of her path, hoping for relief, but my confusion deepens when my hands, my legs, my everything dissolve into glittering translucent dust.
I hysterically grasp at the floating wisps until they settle back into the form of my body. They reassemble like the pieces in a malleable puzzle. I twist my arms back and forth, marveling at what I just witnessed. In the glow of the car's headlights, my new skin shimmers like the fine film of a dragonfly's wings.
I have to be dreaming. This is too impossible to be real. Wake up, I yell at myself.
Melanie falls to her knees beside the girl and starts murmuring, "Oh no, no." She tucks her chin into her shoulder, wiping tears, then stares up at the stars. "Oh, Em, you can't be gone. You can't."
"I'm not gone," I say desperately. "I'm here." I reach out to touch her arm, but my hand slides straight through. As I wait for the pain and dust to settle, I realize: she isn't talking to me. She's talking to that girl.
Melanie bends her neck to listen for breathing from my unconscious look-alike. As she gingerly moves the girl's hair, I wonder why she didn't get blocked by whatever invisible barrier kept me away. Melanie exhales a heavy sigh and sits back on her heels.
"Is she okay?" I ask, suddenly feeling optimistic when I notice there isn't any blood on the road. I can't bring myself to look at the girl's face.
Melanie gets to her feet and runs to the nearest driveway, about five yards past the mile marker. I stay with the girl, feeling eerily connected to her.
I look back at the mile marker: 127. That means we're one mile south of the turnoff to Lilly's family cottage. Melanie must have been on her way home from our spring break barbeque. But why would she leave in the middle of the night? Was she looking for me?
Melanie's voice breaks my train of thought. "I think she was hit by a car," she's telling the man who's following her. He doesn't see me either. Her voice is shaky and thick with tears. "An attempted hit and run, maybe."
The idea ignites a deep fiery anger in my stomach. I can feel the heat of it licking down my arms and legs like flames.
"Attempted?" the man asks Melanie. "What gave you that idea?"
Melanie points to the dark side of the road. The man lifts his flashlight, illuminating a black car sitting at an angle, half in the woods, half out, with its front end smashed like an accordion into a tree.
The man nods, and then covers his mouth when he sees the girl in the road. Through his fingers he says, "Did you see it happen?" Melanie shakes her head. The man assures her, "The police are on their way with an ambulance. Why don't you wait inside?"
Melanie refuses to abandon the girl. After the man leaves to check on the driver of the black car, I move to stand in front of Melanie, careful not to get too close. That girl lies between us. "Mel," I start slowly, "what is going on? Why can't anybody hear or see me? Why was I out here alone at night?"
Melanie reaches under the girl's torso and lays her limp arm flat across her waist. Melanie's fingers graze the purple and yellow friendship bracelet on the girl's pale wrist. I clutch the bracelet tied around my own wrist; the same faint brown-red smear is engrained in the fibers. Melanie yanks on her similar red and orange bracelet, trying to rip it off, but the knot is too tight. She bites her lip, refusing to cry.
When the paramedics arrive, they divide their efforts between that other me in the road and the driver of the crashed car. I feel bad about not checking on the driver, but I can't pull my eyes away from the girl's body. It's depressing how little time it takes the paramedics to check her pulse at the wrist, then at the neck, and ultimately give up. They don't even bother attempting to resuscitate her. They lift up her hair and examine a cut on the side of her head that I didn't realize was there.
I move my own hair, searching for a matching cut, but all I feel is smooth scalp. For a whisper of a moment, that comforts me, gives me hope that I'm not her ghost or some otherworldly thing. Until I notice the speckle of yellow paint on the toe of the dead girl's sandal. I have the exact stain on the shoe I'm wearing, from when I helped my little brother paint his bedroom. We even have the same chips out of our coral nail polish. And the same bracelet.
I finally meet her vacant gray eyes. She is me and I am her. There's no use denying that anymore.
One of the paramedics tells the other that the girl is "unresponsive" and something inside my head clicks into place.
No breath. No pulse. No blood.
I'm dead.
"The four of us went for a drive along the river around one a.m.," Melanie is explaining to a female police officer, "but we didn't see this wreck on our way back." She's sitting on the bumper of a squad car with her elbows propped on her knobby knees. Tears have dried in chalky lines down her brown cheeks.
"Is that how the Jeep there got so dirty?" The officer points out the fresh layer of mud caked on Melanie's white Jeep.
"We drove through the trails too ... for old times' sake," Melanie responds mechanically.
It dislodges a piece of my memory, but I'm not sure how it fits into the big picture of what happened here on the road.
"We were spending the night at our friend's cottage," Melanie continues, "but I couldn't sleep so I got up to see if Emily was awake and I couldn't find her. That's when I decided to go out looking."
"Any reason you can think of why she'd walk off on her own at night?"
Melanie's chocolate eyes flicker with an unidentifiable emotion. "She was kind of picking fights with everyone toward the end of the night. Especially with our other friend Reed."
"I was?" I voice my confusion.
"Was he one of the friends you two drove the trails with?" the officer asks. Melanie nods. "What were the fights about?"
Melanie clears her throat. "Mostly just that we'd all grown apart since we left for college, I guess, but Reed and Emily have a history. He wanted to be more than friends — she didn't. It's a routine for them — or was." A new round of silent tears wets her face.
Reed. My heart aches for him. He's lost his first love, and so have I, in more ways than I ever knew possible. I care deeply for him, but when we're together he has a tendency to hold me so close that the rest of the world begins to pass us by. After high school I was thirsty to experience everything the world had to offer, and that meant loosening Reed's hold on me.
But now I feel abandoned on a deserted island with no one to rescue me. Maybe that's why I'm still here, to make things right with Reed. But how can I accomplish that if nobody can see me?
"She goes on long walks to clear her head when she's upset." Melanie swallows, blotting at tears with the sleeve of her loose-knit ivory sweater. "She used to, anyway."
Another officer walks up. "Excuse me, Officer Egan. Is there a number for the girl's parents that we can call to notify them?" He looks at Melanie when he asks.
"I know the number by heart," Melanie mutters. Officer Egan offers her a small notebook and pen from her breast pocket. Melanie's hand shakes as she writes down my home phone number.
The female officer tears off the sheet and passes it to her colleague then continues questioning. "You said you used Mr. Kelly's house phone to call 9-1-1 a short time after you found your friend in the road. Why not use your cell phone to call right away?"
"I misplaced my phone," Melanie answers, like it's a reflex.
"You left it in your beach bag," I tell her, surprising myself that I remember such an inconsequential detail about the day when nothing she's saying triggers any other sort of memory. "Why can't I remember how I died?" Nobody answers me. None of them can hear me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Friends 'Til the End by Bethany Neal, Ashley Mackenzie. Copyright © 2014 Bethany Neal. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Beging Reading,
Preview: My Last Kiss,