Prom Nights From Hell Page 0,41

up my old friends and vent about being dead-as entertaining as that might be.

Barnabas hesitated. "No, but I might try to persuade you to tell him yourself."

That I could deal with, and I took a slow breath. "He said that his ending my pathetic life was his ticket into a higher court. He came back to prove he had... culled me."

I waited for a reaction, but there was none. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and I lifted my head to meet his eyes. Barnabas was looking at me as if trying to figure out what it meant. Clearly not having an answer, he slowly said, "I think you should keep this to yourself for a while. He probably didn't mean anything by it. Forget it. Spend your time learning how to fit in."

"Yeah," I said with a sarcastic bark of laughter. "A new school is tons of fun."

"I meant fit in with the living."

"Oh." Okay. I was going to have to learn how to fit in, not at a new school, but with the living. Swell. Remembering the disastrous dinner with my dad, I bit my lip. "Uh, Barnabas, am I supposed to eat?"

"Sure. If you want to. I don't. Not much, anyway," he said, sounding almost wistful. "But if you're like me, you'll never be hungry."

I tucked my short hair behind my ear. "How about sleep?"

At that, he smiled. "You can try. I can't manage it unless I am bored out of my mind."

I picked a bit of tar off the shingles and flicked it at the chimney again. "How come I don't have to eat?" I asked.

Barnabas turned to face me. "That stone of yours is giving off energy, and you're taking it in. Basking in it. Watch out for psychics. They'll think you're possessed."

"Mmmm," I murmured, wondering if I could get any useful information about what was really going on from a church, but they were wrong about grim reapers, so maybe they didn't know as much as they thought.

I sighed, sitting in the dark on my roof with a white reaper-my guardian angel. Nice going, Madison, I thought, wondering if my life-or death, rather-could get any more screwed up. I slowly fingered the stone that kept me somewhat alive, wondering what I was supposed to do now. Go to school. Do my homework. Be with my dad. Try to make sense of who I was and what I was supposed to do. Nothing much had changed, really, apart from the no-eating-no-sleeping thing. So I had something worse than a black reaper gunning for me. I also had a guardian angel. And life, apparently, goes on, even if you aren't a participating part of it anymore.

Barnabas surprised me when he suddenly stood, and I leaned to look up at his height measured against the stars. "Let's go," he said, extending his hand. "I don't have anything to do tonight, and I'm bored. You're not a screamer, are you?"

My first thought was screamer? And then, go where? But what came out of my mouth was a lame, "I can't. I've been grounded. I can't set a foot outside the house apart from school until I pay for that costume." But I smiled, taking his hand and letting him help me rise. If Ron could make my dad forget I had died, I'd be willing to bet Barnabas could cover for me sneaking out a couple of hours.

"Yeah, well, I can't do anything about you being grounded," he said, "but where we're going, you won't be setting a foot anywhere."

"Huh?" I stammered, then stiffened when he moved behind me, taller because of the roof's pitch. "Hey!" I yelped when his arm went around me. But my protest vanished in shock at the gray shadow suddenly curving around us. It was real, smelling like my mom's feather pillow, and I gasped when his grip tightened and my feet left the roof in a downward drop of gravity.

"Holy crap!" I exclaimed as the world spread out beneath us, silver and black in the moonlight. "You have wings?"

Barnabas laughed, and with my stomach dropping in a tingling surge, we went higher.

Maybe... maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.

Kiss and Tell Chapter One

Kiss and Tell

Michele Jaffe

Chapter One

"Sorry this wasn't more of a storybook ending," the man with his hands around her throat said, smiling, holding her eyes with his own as he choked her.

"If you're going to kill me, can't you just get on with it? This is kind