The Kyriakis Curse Read Online Free

her.
    Focused on the chasing sounds behind her, Sarah didn’t see the rock until she stumbled over it, falling to the ground. On the verge of getting back to her feet, she was knocked down. Turning over, Sarah was confronted by two sets of glowing yellow eyes...
    She screamed herself awake. Sweat drenched her body, and her breathing was shallow.
    It took several minutes for Sarah to regain her bearings and realize she was in her
    bedroom. She glanced at the digital clock on her bedside table. Two o’clock.
    Damn. She’d had that dream again. This was the second consecutive week she’d had
    the nightmare, and it was getting worse, becoming longer and more graphic each night. Was she destined to never get a good night’s rest again?
    Sliding out of her bed, she slipped on the silk robe lying across a chair in the corner and went to her kitchen, thinking that eating something might help her get to sleep again, but one look at the contents of her refrigerator made her stomach turn. A half carton of sour milk, leftover Chinese take-out, ketchup, and a half-eaten, one-week-old pizza were her 12 Eve Vaughn
    only choices. So absorbed as she always was in her painting, Sarah hardly ever remembered to stock her refrigerator, ordering take-out whenever she bothered to eat.
    With a sigh, she strode to her balcony, shivering as the night breeze drifted over her skin and created goose bumps. She looked at the nearly full moon.
    “Lord, help me,” she softly pleaded. For some strange reason, whenever the moon was
    full, she blacked out. And the last time it had happened, she’d woken up the following morning, naked in the woods.
    Something was clearly wrong with her. The problem was, she didn’t know what it
    could be or what she could do about it, other than going to a doctor -- something she avoided like the plague. The last thing she wanted was someone to confirm her suspicions that she truly was a freak of nature.
    Growing up, Sarah could run faster, jump higher, see further, and do most things better than the other children in school. She’d been labeled a freak, of course. The social ostracism from an early age had made her a loner, and art had been her only refuge. Even in the homes she’d briefly lived in after her parents’ deaths, she had never felt as though she quite fit in.
    She hadn’t been treated unkindly, but Sarah could never shake the feeling of being an outsider. And knowing that she was different, Sarah had found it difficult to open up to others. At nearly sixteen, she’d left the home she’d been staying in and had supported herself ever since.
    Those early days had been a struggle, and she’d scraped by living in shelters and low-income projects, as well as finding a job as a waitress in a seedy bar. Of course, she’d had to lie about her age at work -- although she suspected the owner had figured it out -- and had been paid under the table. All that time, however, she’d never given up her dream of becoming an artist. She hadn’t wanted or expected to be famous; she’d just wanted to make enough to earn a decent living.
    Sarah had sold her work on street corners until, at the age of seventeen, she’d caught the eye of a major art dealer, who’d help her sell her first painting to a local gallery. That had been an incredibly fabulous thrill. Twelve years later, she was now well known among art connoisseurs -- or at least S.E.D was known. Her paintings sold steadily, and she had plenty to live on.
    Sarah knew that part of the reason her paintings attracted buyers was the apparent
    mystique that surrounded them and her. There was much speculation about who she was
    and even whether she was male or female, because she never appeared at any of her
    showings, preferring to maintain her anonymity. Sarah had read many articles and usually got a good laugh out of the purported reasons why she chose not to reveal herself. Her favorite explanation was the one which theorized that she was some severely