I Become Shadow Read Online Free

comprehend the words before there was nothing.
    IN THE MORNING MY parents would wake up to find me gone. At first they would think I had just gotten up early to go to school. Eight angry phone calls and ten texts later, they would give up threatening me and become frightened. They would contact the police. They would file a missing persons report. Fear would become panic. After twenty-four hours
their
true terror would set in and never quite disappear. God only knows how much time they would spend looking for me. Both of my parents would develop any number of psychological and emotional issues because—regardless of what I believed—they did love me more than I could ever know.
    About a month after my “disappearance” a burned body would be found in the woods about seven miles from my home. This dead girl would be unrecognizable but the teeth would identify her corpse as mine. Whoever she was (I never found out) would be the same height—similar build, similar everything. The identical teeth would be the clincher, though. There would be no point in continuing the investigation.
    And thus the case of the missing person that was me would be officially closed. I was dead. Gone. Nonexistent. And thus: perfect for the task at hand.
    OF COURSE, I DIDN’T know any of this at the time of my kidnapping. No, I would be told this information later when they took out four of my teeth. I asked them, “Why?” They told me about teeth as positive identification and then proceeded to steal them from me. There was no malice, just stating fact.
    But I’m way ahead of myself again, and that fun stuff would happen soon after I woke up. I was only justifying a tangent about what happened to my family once I was gone and, alas, I got on another tangent about teeth. I’m done here.

CHAPTER 4
MY NEW HOME
    I woke up strapped to a chair by my arms and wrists wearing only a hospital gown. The room looked like the Pap smear office, only whiter and cleaner and without any free samples. I could smell the bleach that was used to keep it so spotless.
    I instantly regretted my past love of horror movies because my mind suddenly filled with all of the greatest hits of the gory death scenes I’d once laughed at. They were so obviously fake. That’s what made them safe. Only now, they all served as education. My brain worked overtime to come up with the most painful, disgusting death scene of all time. I tried to convince myself that this was all a really bad dream, a movie. But for some reason that bleachy smell triggered something in my head. This
wasn’t
a movie or a dream. No, this was very real and very scary.
    I started to hyperventilate as I struggled against my bindings. I wasn’t very strong, so what I was hoping toaccomplish I didn’t know. But going down without a fight seemed sad. Tears poured out of my eyes. For the first, true time in my life, I was absolutely helpless.
    The door slid open. It made the futuristic hiss like in sci-fi movies. In any other circumstance, I would have gotten a kick out of it. But at that moment, it paralyzed me with fear. I watched, frozen, as an elderly man in a white lab coat entered. Behind him was a smaller, younger woman.
    The man was holding what looked like a tablet of some sort. But it was too thin to be an iPad; besides, it was transparent—it looked like a sheet of clear glass. I could make out a picture of my face and some backward writing all around it. I saw my birthday, height, and weight before the glass went blank. Or clear, I guess is more like it.
    “And how are we doing this evening?” he asked me.
    It was such a casual question and asked with such honest interest that it caught me off guard. Did he not know I was just ripped from my bedroom and taken here against my will? Could he not see the bindings? My tears?
    Something beeped. He looked back down at the glass, now flashing red.
    “Great,” he muttered sarcastically. He looked at the younger woman and asked, “Can you do