Spree (YA Paranormal) Read Online Free Page A

teen does.”
    “Why have I been called here?”
    “It was you who called us.”
    A girl stepped forward, dressed in gothic attire, with painted black eyebrows, empty eyes, nose rings, and burnt black skin. She stepped forth from the song, the music circling around her.
    “We lost our names when we lost our lives, but you can call me Burn Girl,” she told me. “I’m the oldest of the lost souls, after Crazy T. I like to burn things. Hence the name.”
    “How nice.”
    Several more shadows materialized. One looked like a preppy girl with hair-sprayed red curls, ripped jeans, and scabs all around her body. Casting a larger shadow still was a thin male figure hanging from a tree, its neck disjointed.
    “This is the land of killers, isn’t it?” I asked.
    “We’ve all killed. I set fire to a party I wasn’t invited to, killing seven girls,” Burn Girl said. “I was never caught until I set a fire so big I couldn’t even escape from it.”
    “And I cut and cut and cut until there was nothing left to cut,” the red-haired girl said. “They call me Cut Girl.”
    “Naturally.”
    “And I was a bully, sentenced to die the way my victim did,” the hanging shadow called out. “I don’t have a name.”
    “We’re what you can see and feel of The Spree right now,” Burn Girl said.
    “You’re Takers,” I insisted.
    “We’re the Takers who surrounded you when you got into the car, when you drove it, when you crashed, when you were beheaded,” Burn Girl told me.
    She pointed her singed finger at another apparition. It was me, a corpse with its bloody head in its hands, its eyes staring out into the metallic fire.
    “You will join us soon enough,” the hanging shadow said. “Every Taker does.”
    “What exactly is a Taker?”
    “Keepers preserve life; we take it,” Cut Girl said. “We’re drawn to the thrill of killing, of blood,” she said. “I can taste your blood—even now.”
    “Once you see what you’ve done, you’ll join us,” the hanging shadow told me. “A Taker must be with other Takers, must feed off of them.”
    “But first,” Burn Girl said, “you made a Death Day wish.”
    “I have to save the people I’ve hurt,” I replied. “I have to save my friends from ending up dead. I have to stop the school shooting.”
    “You won’t succeed,” Burn Girl told me.
    “Let me try.”
    “Your wish will be granted,” Burn Girl told me, “but know that we’ll be there, watching, and that we’ll pick our own Taker to go against you.”
    “Crazy T,” I said.
    “It’s his special project,” Burn Girl told me. “He died killing just two of his classmates. Zipper could be the first school shooter to kill them all.”
    “Not if I can reason with him.”
    “You can’t.”
    “Let’s wager, then. I lose—I’m all yours.”
    “You can’t barter with what we already have,” the hanging shadow told me. “But if you lose, you take whoever Spree tells you to, whenever Spree tells you to. You take Crazy T’s place until hell calls you.”
    “Agreed.”
    “You have a school week until the shooting,” Burn Girl told me. “Five days.”
    I felt myself pulled away from the parties, from the endless fires of color. I could see the school in the background and right in front of it, the hanging shadow, or Rope Man, as I called him, twisting in the air. Flies swarmed around him, and a smile took his lips as the lunch bell rang and kids with senior lunch privilege leaped through him on their way to their cars.
     
    * * *
     
    Later that day I wandered the halls of the school I couldn’t believe I wanted to save. Crowds of kids huddled and cried, while others were walking and talking, without a care in the world, but too afraid to even smile. Half of these kids spread rumors when I was alive. Now they all bawled like they were my friends. Not one ever said I had a problem drinking. Not a one ever really cared. Yet they set up a Facebook page in my honor, as if I’d died a saint and