Arise Read Online Free Page A

face fell in recognition: he knew from my expression that I wouldn’t be joining him at school today.
    He sighed and placed one hand on top of the roof of his truck. “Again, Amelia? Really?”
    “I have to, Joshua. You know I have to.”
    “No, I don’t,” he said, frowning heavily. “Besides, it’s freezing today.”
    I shrugged. “So? It’s not like I can feel it.”
    This time I heard a note of defeat in Joshua’s sigh. “Fine. But just be careful out there, okay? Don’t get too close to it.”
    I smiled, but not very widely. “I never do.”
    Pulling his door fully open, Joshua just shook his head. He didn’t even try to mask his disappointment as he slipped into the cab of the truck.
    Just before he slammed the door and started the engine, I called out, “See you back here this afternoon.”
    Through the frost on the windshield, I caught one last glimpse of his face—still wearing that disappointed expression—before he backed the truck down the driveway and disappeared onto the main road.
    Late that afternoon I stamped my feet on the ice-encrusted grass and rubbed my fists along my bare arms a few times. Then I made a little cave of my hands and placed them in front of my mouth so that I could puff air into them as if I could warm them with my breath. As if I even needed to warm them in the first place. Still, the gestures made me feel more normal. And normal was a feeling I desperately needed right now.
    In front of me the river moved more quickly than usual, its waters swelled and muddied by all the sleet last night. The river, however, wasn’t the ugliest part of this scene. That honor went to the remains of High Bridge, only a few hundred feet downriver from me.
    The ruined bridge stretched across the muddy water as bleak and stripped as the forest surrounding it. From here I could see the mangled girders and places where large chunks of concrete had fallen, leaving gaping holes around which someone had placed sawhorses and crisscrossed ribbons of yellow tape. More sawhorses guarded each end of the bridge, warning drivers to find some other route if they didn’t want their cars to become aquatic. Along the edges of the bridge, the metal railings tilted at crazy angles as if some enormous force had knocked the entire structure off-kilter. Which, in essence, it had.
    At that thought I smirked. I didn’t feel one ounce of regret for wrecking the bridge. I hoped a strong wind sent the whole thing crumbling down into the water below.
    I gave it a final scowl and then turned my attention to the barren trees across the river from me. Something about their skeletal branches, clawing at the gray sky, suited my current mood. And my current task.
    I closed my eyes and began to breathe heavily, slowly, in an effort to calm myself. To focus. Against the black canvas of my eyelids, I pictured a scene similar to that of the living world today but even colder. A place much darker, too, and more menacing. An otherworldly place where rogue ghosts, enslaved wraiths, and demons waited.
    Eli’s netherworld.
    I squeezed my eyes tighter, concentrating on the things I remembered about it: the violent purple sky; the gnarled, glittering trees; the river of tar moving toward the dark abyss underneath the netherworld version of High Bridge. Then I pictured the black shadows—dead souls trapped there by Eli under order of his masters—as they shifted among the netherworld trees.
    I wanted them to reappear so badly I could almost hear them whispering in the darkness. Begging, in hushed but urgent voices, to be set free. I kept my eyes shut for a few more moments, wishing, praying.
    But when I opened my eyes, my heart sank. Nothing around me had changed—not the cold gray sky, not the icy grass, not the muddied river.
    I sank to the ground, letting my dress puddle around me. I didn’t want to admit defeat, but I’d started to run out of excuses for myself. Every day I tried to reopen the netherworld, and every day I