Under a Dark Moon (The Keeper Saga Book 7) Read online

  Under a Dark Moon

  K.R. Thompson

  Magic Quill Press

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Excerpt from Blood Moon Rising

  More books by K.R. Thompson

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 K.R. Thompson

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Cover Design: Blue Valley Author Services/Victorine Lieske

  Chapter 1

  A BOOK FLEW off the shelf and smacked me as I sat, cross-legged on the floor.

  “Ow!” I exclaimed. After the initial shock, I looked up, expecting to see Brian nearby. There wasn’t anyone there though, and I found that I wasn’t particularly surprised. Bland High’s library had a reputation for being odd and magical. Books had been said to fly around in the air and the big spiraling metal staircase in the center of the room occasionally contracted like a big accordion. Both my boyfriend and my best friend had both seen these strange occurrences, but in my opinion, nothing Brian and Nikki had seen could top the grouchy, pinched face of the librarian in charge of this place.

  Said librarian was leaning over her desk now, skewering me with her beady, little eyes. She lifted one eyebrow, clearing asking…no…daring me to explain my sudden outburst. There wasn’t anyone else around, but that didn’t seem to matter. Silence and libraries were one and the same, as far as Mrs. Graham was concerned.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Apology begrudgingly accepted, Mrs. Graham leaned back over her desk and went returned to whatever it was she’d been doing.

  I rubbed the sore knot forming on the top of my head and looked down. A History of Bland County was sprawled in my lap. Books sat in piles all around me, and the one I’d been searching for had been here all along, lying in wait to murder me. I looked up, wondering if it had maybe fallen. Sure enough, on the top shelf, between two enormous books was a smaller slot, just big enough to accommodate that book. Nobody could have gotten up there and thrown it at me unless they had the step-ladder, which was still sitting at the end of the aisle.

  I opened the book to flip through it and caught a familiar name in the list of chapters on the first page. Ratherby House. Excited, I flipped to the page it specified and found a grainy, black and white picture of a big, two-story house—my house. After a couple months of staying with Nikki and her family, my mom and I had finally found a place of our own and today was the day we were getting the keys. I’d only been inside for a few minutes a couple of weeks earlier, but those few moments had pricked my curiosity. It had belonged to old Ms. Ratherby, the school secretary, who had fallen into a mysterious coma toward the beginning of the school year and had never recovered. She was now in a nursing home and all of her effects were being sold, the house included, to pay the bills.

  When I knew for certain we were going to buy it, I began searching for information. Naturally, the school where she had worked for so many years seemed the perfect place to start.

  “This is it,” I whispered, grinning to myself as I stared at the towering two-story with the huge windows and the big, twisting porch columns. Even though the picture had to be eighty years old, the house still looked exactly the same.

  An amused giggle broke my attention, and I looked up to see a little girl peeking through the open spaces on the bookshelf in front of me. Shocks of wet, blonde hair were sticking to her forehead and hung around her blue eyes, as if she’d just ran inside from the rain.

  “If you get her books wet, she’ll eat you alive like the evil witch in Hansel and Gretel,” I told her quietly. I nodded toward Mrs. Graham, who, thankfully, hadn’t noticed the little girl or the sounds of water dripping as it hit the tiles on the floor. “You’d better go before she sees you,” I warned as the little girl continued to stare at me. Hoping to spot the girl’s brother or sister, since it was unlikely she’d be here by herself, I hopped up and walked to the end of the aisle and looked around. I still didn’t see anyone other than Mrs. Graham, so I turned to head down the aisle where the little girl had stood, but she was gone. A small puddle near the bookcase was the only indication anyone had been there, and as I watched, the water evaporated into a mist in front of my eyes. Then an eerie, soft giggle met my ears.

  “This is weird, even for this place,” I muttered. It was time to get out of here. I went back to where I had been sitting and hurriedly shoved all of the other books back in their places on the shelves, then snagged the book that had hit me, and took it to the librarian’s desk to check it out.

  “Did you find what you needed?” Mrs. Graham asked in a gruff voice, as if she was asking out of necessity, not politeness.

  “Um…yeah,” I answered. I looked uneasily back at the aisle where I had seen the little girl.

  “That’s good,” replied the librarian as she took my library card and stamped the inside flap of the book, before handing them back to me.

  As I reached the door to leave, a chill ran down my spine as I heard her mutter, “You go with her. I don’t need you in here getting everything wet. She’s the one you’re looking for anyway.”

  “I’M TELLING YOU, it was weird,” I told Brian later as we pulled into the driveway. “Really weird.”

  “Everything in that library is weird, including Mrs. Graham,” my boyfriend replied, holding the door of his truck open so I could hop out. “I don’t go in there for anything. If I need to search for something, I go to the public library in town. It’s too bad you can’t ask Ms. Ratherby about it. She’s lived in that house for as long as I can remember. She would have been sure to know everything about it.”

  I shook my head. “As far as I know, nothing they’ve tried has worked to revive her. She’s been completely unresponsive. If I’m able to find anything on the house, it will be from somewhere else.”

  Brian got out and came around to open the door for me. After I hopped out, he leaned against the truck and looked up at the old house. “It really is a great place and I’m happy you and your mom have it. I’m just going to miss being closer to you.” He looked over at me and smiled, his blue eyes sparkling like sapphires. “I’ve gotten spoiled to seeing you whenever I wanted.”

  “You can still see me whenever you want,” I grinned. “The forest runs right behind the house, just on the other side of the creek. You could be over here in like two minutes, if you wanted.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he laughed. “I’ll just have to be careful not to be seen. I don’t want to scare your mom. I don’t know if she’d be very happy to see another wolf so soon.”

  All had gone well, living with Nikki, until my mother had accidentally spotted a big black wolf at the edge of the woods. Adam, Nikki’s boyfriend, had slipped up and shifted before making it completely in th
e shadows of the forest. Luckily, my mom hadn’t seen him shift, she’d only seen his wolf. Still, that had been enough to begin her search of finding our own place.

  “You want to go inside?” I asked. “Mom should be here in a few minutes with the keys, if you want to hang out.”

  Looking down at his watch, Brian frowned, then shook his long, dark hair back from his eyes. “I wish I could, but I have to go and pick up my mom from work. Her car broke down earlier today, so I have to take her to the garage so she can get it before they close. I’ll stop by later and you can give me the tour, okay?”

  I nodded and he leaned down and gave me a quick kiss.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay waiting until your mom comes?” he asked, looking up at the darkening sky. “It’s supposed to pour the rain later. I can wait until she gets here. We can sit in the truck.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, giving him a smile as I patted my backpack. “I’m going to sit on the porch and read until she gets here, which should be any moment. I’ll be completely safe—and dry.”

  I watched him get in the truck and drive away, then walked the short distance across the weed-ridden front yard. When I walked up the front porch steps, my combat boots made heavy thumping sounds, as if I’d been trying to stomp holes in the old wooden boards. Something scurried beneath the porch. I leaned over the railing just in time to see a mouse dart out and disappear into a clump of weeds.

  “That’s lovely,” I muttered under my breath. “I hope there aren’t any more of them inside.” I didn’t mind spiders, bugs, or even snakes, but I wasn’t a fan of small furry mice. Taking another quick look around to make sure the mouse didn’t have a significant other or a fleet of baby mice hiding on the topside of the porch, I took my book bag from my shoulder and unzipped the back, then took the book out. In an attempt to keep something between my plaid skirt and the dirty boards, I plopped the canvas book bag down and sat on it, then leaned against the wall, propped the book up on my lap, and settled in to learn as much as I could.

  I’d been reading for literally seconds when I heard the gravels in the driveway crunch.

  “Hey, have you been waiting long?” my mom asked, shutting the door of her car.

  “No, not long at all. Brian just dropped me off.”

  “Great, I tried to make it here before you, but the real estate agent was taking forever. But, I’ve got them!” She lifted the keys into the air and gave them a quick, triumphant shake..

  I hopped off my book bag and shoved the book back in it, then went down to help her get the boxes out of the trunk. It didn’t take us long to unload everything we owned into the front foyer. When we’d left Florida, we’d brought very little, leaving most of our stuff in storage. Luckily for us, my cousin had offered to rent a U-Haul and pack everything into it and pay a driver to haul it up here once we found our own place. Even though the house had been sold with the furniture, appliances, and all of the big stuff that we’d need, I still wanted my own things—still wanted the parts of my life that hadn’t changed.

  I stacked the two boxes that were mine on top of one another and took them up the narrow staircase to my new room.

  There were three bedrooms on the second floor and Mom had given me free reign to choose whichever I wanted for my own. I’d made my choice on the day we first saw the inside of the house.

  I marched straight to the bedroom at the end of the hallway—the one that had an enormous window that stretched across most of the back wall. Right now, it held a great view of an overgrown, weedy backyard framed by the thick underbrush of the surrounding forest. Wolf Creek snaked lazily along at the back edge of the yard, running from one side of the yard to the other, and there was a big wooden bridge that curled over it. The view of the forest and the bridge were my reasons for picking this bedroom.

  I sat my boxes on the bed, thankful that the real estate agent had insisted on hiring a cleaning service to come in earlier in the week, once she knew the sale on the house would be finalized. “No one should have to air out mattresses and take down cobwebs when trying to settle into a new home,” she’d insisted.

  It was nice of her to do that, I thought. On our first trip inside, everything had been covered in a layer of dust. Now the hardwood floors gleamed and the air smelled fresh and clean.

  Having spent the last couple of months with Nikki and her family, I wasn’t used to silence, so I reached into the top box and took out my iPad and tapped out a playlist.

  Seconds later, the comforting beats of music filled the room.

  “You’ve already got this place feeling like home,” my mom said loudly in an attempt to be heard over her music. I grinned. I hadn’t heard her knock. “I brought you some sheets and blankets for the bed. Do you need anything else?”

  I took everything out of her hands and shook my head. “Nope. I’m good, thanks.”

  “All right. Well, if you need anything, just come on down. I’ll never hear you over that,” she replied, pointing to the iPad.

  “Sure thing.”

  After the door closed, I finished emptying my boxes. A small part of my brain registered the sounds of rain as it hit the metal roof of the house. It mixed in with my music and I didn’t pay any more attention to it.

  I hung most of my clothes in the closet, but the remainder of my belongings I spread out in an attempt to make the room feel more like my own. Then I put the empty boxes on the floor and made the bed.

  Not too shabby, I thought, flopping backward onto the mattress. A dull thump that didn’t match the beat of the music or the rain caught my attention. I propped myself up on my elbows to see what it was. Looking directly across from the foot of the bed, I noticed a bare space on my dresser.

  Raggie was missing. Frowning, I sat up the rest of the way. The old Raggedy Ann doll that I’d had since I was a baby was one of the few sentimental things I’d brought with me—and it had been the last thing I’d pulled out of the box and sat on the dresser.

  “That’s just weird,” I muttered. “I’m know I’m not crazy. I just put her there. I’m sure of it.” The reflection in the dresser mirror frowned back at me, then I glimpsed the edge of the familiar red-and-white checked apron of the doll on the floor.

  Heart hammering a mile a minute, I leaned forward to see the doll walking toward the bed with a lopsided, uneven gait, her limp arms stretched out toward me.

  Chapter 2

  “ARE YOU SURE YOU don’t need me to stay?” Brian asked for the millionth time as we got our lunch trays and went to sit with Nikki, Adam, and the others in the cafeteria.

  “Nope. I’m going to be fine.”

  He gave me a narrow look—one that told me he didn’t believe me for a second.

  I couldn’t blame him really. After I screeched and ran from my room the day before when my doll had decided to move on its own accord, apparently my heart had hammered so fast that Brian had picked up on my distress all the way over at his house and he’d raced over, hitting the back porch as a massive black and white wolf, teeth bared, ready to defend me.

  Luckily, he’d morphed back into a human and ran to the front of the house before he knocked on the door or my mom would have been worried about more than the supposed spider that had sent me screaming from my room. Although she’s pretty tough and can handle just about anything, I wasn’t ready to explain that moving to any place in Bland wasn’t going to solve her wolf problems—or that I was fairly certain our new house was haunted.

  “Seriously. It’s no problem. I can stay,” Brian said again as put his tray on the table and sat down. “If I go with the rest of the pack, I won’t be able to hear if you if you need me.”

  “They’re counting on you going with them,” I said, nodding to the five other Keepers who sat around the table before I took my seat.

  Our conversation wasn’t lost on them. Tommy, one of the younger ones in the Pack said, “She’s right. You’re the reason we’re doing the Varmint Run, after all.”

  “Yep,
” Michael, his cousin, added. “After all, you’re the only one who hasn’t officially learned to hunt. And there’s a black moon this week. There’s no better time to do it. Two straight days and nights of hunting.”

  Adam looked up, his silver eyes meeting mine, but his words were for the others. “If he needs to stay with Tori, we can reschedule. She’s more important. We can do the Run later.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but I’m okay and I’ll be fine. Honestly,” I turned to my best friend, who was taking everything in, a huge grin on her face. “Tell them, Nikki. You have a spooky, weird house and nothing has happened to you. Tell them I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, my house isn’t exactly like yours. Mine’s got some magic. I think yours just has a ghost who likes to play with dolls.” The grin on her face stretched wider. “Still, I think you’ll be all right. I’ve never heard of ghosts hurting anything. Besides, you were part of the Paranormal Activity Society back in Florida.”

  At that, the group hushed, and I suddenly felt very ashamed that I’d let my Raggedy Ann doll get the best of me. Nikki was right. A group of friends and I had started our own club a year or so back and had done our own bit of ghost hunting, anywhere we could go that people would let us in. We’d never found anything that was truly haunted though. Now that it seemed I actually had a ghost, I’d run away screaming. I wasn’t nearly as tough as I’d thought I was.

  Odd what a year and moving to a different town can do to a person.

  “Yep,” I announced, deciding to pretend I was still as tough as ever. “So, see? I’ve got everything under control. And if I need any help, I’ll call Nikki. Problem solved.”

  Nikki nodded. “Deal.”

  Everyone stopped staring at me, and went back to eating and discussing their planned hunt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Brian’s eyes narrow. He hadn’t believed me, but seemingly he was going to let it drop.