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  More hands pushed up from the ground, a half-dozen now. Soon, entire arms appeared…and then heads. Heads that were part flesh and part bone. A few were wrapped in rotting cloth; one wore what could only be the remains of an old-fashioned tri-cornered hat.

  Leesa watched, frozen to her spot atop the wall, as six corpses climbed out of their graves. They moved awkwardly, clumsily, but moved nonetheless. They looked at each other and walked in circles, almost as if they were waiting for direction. They didn’t seem to notice her.

  Suddenly, all six collapsed to the ground, like marionettes whose strings had been cut.

  Leesa awoke again, the image of the corpses falling to the ground clear and sharp in her mind. Her room was lighter now, with the first gray light of dawn spilling in through the windows. She could hear muted sounds from elsewhere in her dorm—music playing softly, a door closing—as some early risers prepared to start their day. Outside, a truck beeped annoyingly as it backed up to unload its cargo somewhere nearby.

  She seemed to be dreaming more and more frequently of late, but she could not remember one staying with her so clearly after she woke up. While the rotting, reanimated bodies were not a pleasant image, the dream had not really been frightening, and she much preferred it to what she had experienced earlier that night, waking up with her heart racing and not being able to recall why.

  9. VIDEO CONFIRMATION

  Leesa sat hunched over her desk, slogging through her physics book, struggling to understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Her room had grown dark while she was studying, but her desk lamp provided a small island of light. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was playing in the background. Leesa loved the young British singer’s voice, so powerful and full of raw emotion. It was hard to believe she wasn’t even twenty-five years old yet. Leesa let her mind drift for a moment, escaping into the lyrics. She particularly liked the part about a fire starting in her heart. That was definitely a good description of how Rave made her feel—in more ways than one!

  As the song wound down, she turned back to her physics book. “Uncertainty” was a fitting word for her right now, she thought. Not only was she uncertain about this whole Heisenberg Principle, but she was uncertain about so many other things going on in her life as well. Just when things were finally becoming normal with her mom and her brother, all this other stuff kept cropping up. Rave losing control of his fire, the strange phone call, her difficulty sleeping and her weird dream—all that was way more than any one person should have to deal with.

  There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about those things, though, so she forced her mind back to physics. Final exams were only two weeks away. They were something under her control, at least. She just had to concentrate.

  Suddenly, something gripped her tightly by the shoulders. She almost jumped out of her skin as adrenaline shot through her system. She whipped her head around to see Cali grinning down at her.

  “Sorry,” Cali said. “Your door was open and I just couldn’t resist. You were totally lost in that book. I didn’t know physics was so enthralling.”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” Leesa said, her heart still racing.

  Cali plopped down on the edge of Leesa’s bed. She was wearing ripped jeans with tiny red sequins outlining the front pockets and a dark brown T-shirt with a gold tic-tac-toe game etched on the front. Instead of O’s, the designer had used shiny gold hearts. Three hearts formed a diagonal row from the bottom left square to the top right, with an arrow drawn through them to show hearts had won the game.

  “I really am sorry, Lees. Rule ninety-four: sneaking up on someone who hangs out with vampires is not a good idea.”

  Leesa smiled, her body beginning to recover from the adrenaline jolt. “I don’t ‘hang out’ with them. I just happen to know one. And if I never see Stefan again, that will be just fine with me.”

  “Speaking of things that go bump in the night, did you hear about that thing in the graveyard over in Higganum?”

  Leesa’s heart rate spiked again as the images from her dream came rushing back to her. Higganum was a small rural community less than ten miles south of Weston College. She hoped Cali wasn’t going to say what she thought she was going to say.

  “Graveyard?” she asked. “No, I didn’t hear anything.” She was almost afraid to ask about it, but she had to know. “What happened?”

  “It’s really freaky. Someone dug up a bunch of bodies, and then left ‘em lying right there on the ground.”

  Leesa closed her eyes for a moment. She could see the images from her dream as clearly as if she were dreaming it right now.

  She opened her eyes. “How do they know someone dug them up?”

  Cali’s brow knit in puzzlement as she stared at Leesa. “How else would they have gotten there, silly? They sure didn’t climb up out of the graves themselves.”

  I hope not, Leesa thought. I really and truly hope not.

  Cali saw the concern on Leesa’s face. “Oh, no…you’re not going to tell me zombies are real, too, are you?”

  “No, of course not,” Leesa said. “At least not as far as I know, anyway. It’s just that I had this weird dream last night. Some bodies pushed themselves up out of the ground in an old cemetery.”

  “Really? That’s definitely freaky, especially with this story today.”

  It was much too freaky, Leesa thought. But if vampires existed, and volkaanes, why not zombies? She was definitely going to have to ask Rave about it.

  “In your dream, what did they do?” Cali asked. “Once they got out of their graves, I mean?”

  “Nothing, really. They stumbled around in circles for a few minutes, then fell to the ground. That’s when I woke up.”

  “It’s six-thirty. Turn on the TV. Maybe we can catch something about it on the news.”

  Leesa grabbed her remote and switched on the television. The local news was just coming on. They had to sit through a boring story about some possible corruption in the state house, but then a jumpy video of an old graveyard, probably taken from a helicopter, filled the screen. It was still light out in the video, so it had obviously been taken earlier in the day.

  “There’s a strange story coming out of Higganum today,” the neatly coiffed, gray-haired anchorman began. “Police are investigating an unusual act of vandalism in one of the town’s old cemeteries.”

  The picture switched to a live shot of a reporter on the scene. Bright klieg lights lit up the graveyard behind her. A green knit ski cap pulled down over her blond hair showed how cold it was outside. Her foggy breath was visible on the television as she spoke. Still, she looked remarkably fresh and perky.

  “Here’s what we know so far,” she said. “Sometime last night, someone dug up six bodies here at the old cemetery. Police aren’t sure if this was simply a thoughtless act of vandalism, or perhaps the work of grave robbers searching for valuables. All the graves here are well over one hundred years old, so it’s doubtful thieves could have found much of value.”

  The camera panned over her shoulder to the graveyard, focusing on several very old headstones. Leesa looked closely, but no bodies were visible from this angle. The news director had probably decided that a pile of rotting corpses was not proper dinnertime fare. Either that, or the authorities had already covered them up.

  The reporter continued speaking. “Police are puzzled by several strange aspects to all this. Earlier, I spoke with Detective Dave Sanderson.”

  The picture reverted to a daylight shot again, and the mustachioed face of a good-looking man in his late thirties or early forties filled the screen.

  “We have no real leads at this time,” he said. “We’re asking for the public’s help. If you know anything about this brazen, disrespectful act, please call the number on the bottom of your screen. There are no signs of any heavy equipment having been in the cemetery, so we know the perpetrators had to be here a long time to dig up so many graves by hand. This is a pretty out of the way spot, but we’
re hoping someone driving by saw something unusual here last night.”

  A live shot of the reporter replaced the detective’s face. “There’s another troubling aspect about this incident that no one will talk about on camera,” the reporter said. “But I’ve been told by a member of the forensics crew that not only was there no evidence of heavy equipment, but they’ve been unable to find any sign of any digging equipment at all. ‘There aren’t even any shovel marks,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, but it looks like somebody dug the bodies up by hand.’”

  “Holy crap!” Cali said, turning to Leesa. “Did you hear that?”

  Leesa’s head was spinning. What the heck was going on here? Her fingers began twirling in her hair.

  “Shhh. I want to hear the rest of this.”

  The reporter flashed a cheerleader smile. “Now there’s a mystery wrapped up inside a puzzle,” she said. “Who or what would dig up a half-dozen dead bodies without even using a shovel? And why go to all that trouble, and then just leave the bodies lying there?”

  The picture returned to the earlier helicopter shot. “That’s all we have for now,” the reporter said as the camera zoomed in on the graveyard. Leesa leaned closer to the television. A ragged circle of dark lumps was barely visible now. They had to be the unearthed bodies. From this distance, she couldn’t tell if they were covered by anything or not.

  She shuddered. Even though the view was still too far to see clearly, she was struck by how similar the circle of bodies looked to the one she had seen in her dream. She switched off the television.

  “Wow, that’s freakin’ crazy,” Cali said. “Do you think your vampire friends could have done it?”

  “I keep telling you, they’re not my friends.” Leesa stood up and took a few aimless steps around the room. “But no, I doubt vampires had anything to do with it. What would they want with dead bodies? They only like live ones, filled with lots of warm blood.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right. I definitely need to take that Vampire Science class you’re always talking about next semester.”

  Cali looked at Leesa more closely and saw the worry etched on her face. She reached over and gently pulled Leesa’s hand from her hair. “So, how close was that to what you dreamed?”

  “I’m not sure. It was hard to see. I wish they’d zoomed in closer, but I guess it’s not the kind of thing they’re going to show on TV.” Leesa took a deep breath. “But from what I could see, it looked way too similar.”

  “There were a bunch of people watching from outside the cemetery,” Cali said as an idea popped into her head. “I bet someone took pictures or video with their cell.” She grabbed Leesa’s laptop from the desk. “Let’s check YouTube.”

  Cali sat back down on the edge of the bed and opened the computer on her lap. Leesa came over and sat beside her, unsure whether she wanted Cali to find anything or not.

  Cali’s fingers pecked rapidly at the keyboard, opening the YouTube home page and then typing in her search.

  “I knew it,” she said excitedly. “Look. Someone posted a clip from the cemetery. Gotta love all those smartphones out there.”

  Leesa leaned in more closely as Cali started the video. At first, the picture was grainy and jumpy—barely recognizable as a graveyard. The phone’s owner was behind the police crime scene tape, well over one hundred feet from whatever was in the center of cemetery. As he or she zoomed in and found the proper focus, the image began to grow clearer.

  Leesa found herself holding her breath. She forced herself to exhale, but kept her eyes glued to the screen. Finally, the details became sharp enough to recognize the bodies for what they were. And they were not covered, at least not when the video was taken. The low angle of the shot prevented her from being able to see all the corpses, but she could see most of the closest body and parts of two others. She looked more closely at one of the farther bodies, whose head and shoulders jutted out from behind the first one. She blinked, unable—or unwilling—to believe her eyes. She was pretty sure the corpse was wearing the remains of a tri-cornered hat….

  10. MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION

  “So, what do you think?” Cali asked when the video ended. “Did it look anything like your dream?”

  “The video wasn’t that clear,” Leesa said, “but yeah, it definitely seemed similar.”

  Cali pecked at the keyboard again, searching for another video, one that might show things more clearly, but there were none.

  “That was the only video,” she said, closing the laptop. “You got any idea what the heck is going on?”

  Leesa thought for a moment. That was the million dollar question. What the heck did this all mean? She closed her eyes and tried to bring back the images from her dream, but she kept seeing the pictures in the video. She wondered if she was making the two more similar than they really were, if her brain was taking the fresher images and making them part of her memory. Even if that was true, how had she managed to dream about corpses rising from their graves the night before real bodies were found in a graveyard—a graveyard less than ten miles away, no less. That in itself was strange enough, regardless how similar or not the actual images were. And she was pretty sure there’d been a tri-cornered hat in her dream. Her brain wasn’t making that detail up.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I really don’t have a clue.”

  Cali could see how disturbed Leesa was by all this. She draped her arm around Leesa’s shoulder.

  “Maybe it’s just one of those freaky coincidences. Like déjà vu or something, only in reverse. Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”

  Leesa shook her head. “No, never. My sleep’s been kinda messed up the last week or two, but that’s about it. This is the first weird dream I remember.”

  “Well, if anyone has a reason to have a few sleepless nights or some weird dreams, it would be you, with all you’ve been through recently. Your mom and the one-fang, the thing with Stefan to get your brother back—I’d be having nightmares, for sure.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Leesa grabbed a bottle of water from atop her mini-fridge and took a drink. “But I wasn’t having any dreams while all that was happening. Not that I can remember, anyhow. So why now?”

  Cali shrugged. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” she quoted.

  Leesa grinned. “Now I’m really amazed. Since when did you start quoting Shakespeare?”

  Cali smiled back. “That’s one of the few things I remember from high school. Never thought I’d actually get a chance to use it, though. Are you impressed?”

  “Totally.” Leesa took another swallow of water, then asked, “Got any more words of wisdom for me from ol’ Will?”

  “Just this: ‘To be or not to be.’ But damned if I know how that applies here, though.”

  Leesa laughed. Cali was always so good at cheering her up.

  “Too bad there won’t be any of that on my English Lit final,” Cali continued.

  “Speaking of finals, I’d better get back to my physics homework, or that’s one final that will kick my ass.”

  “I’m glad I don’t have physics,” Cali said as she got up off the bed. “Algebra is hard enough for me. Why’d you take that class, anyhow?”

  Leesa smiled. “To quote a very wise person of my acquaintance, ‘damned if I know.’”

  Cali cracked up. “Good one, Lees,” she said when she finished laughing. She turned and headed for the door. “Have fun with your physics.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Leesa said as she sat down at her desk.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Cali said.

  Leesa turned and saw that Cali was halfway out the door, but had grabbed the doorframe and twisted around to face back into the room.

  “What’s that?” Leesa asked.

  Cali grinned. “Sweet dreams tonight.”

  Leesa picked up a pen from her desk and threw it toward the door, but Cali spun out of the way before the pen co
uld hit her.

  “Thanks a lot,” Leesa said, laughing. She could hear Cali laughing as well as she headed down the hall.

  11. SPECIAL PERMISSION

  Edwina prowled the dark caverns of the vampire lair. She had formulated the beginnings of a plan, and now she needed to find Stefan so she could start to put it into motion. She’d seen him earlier, conversing with Ricard, but for what she wanted, she had to get Stefan alone. Only then could she pressure and persuade him to give her what she needed.

  She finally came upon him in one of the tunnels leading from the Council chamber. She pasted a sweet smile upon her face.

  “Stefan, I’ve been looking for you. I need to speak to you.”

  Stefan’s black eyes were wary. He had forced Edwina to give up her feeder, with no recompense for her, which was no small thing. He did not trust her friendly manner, not even a little. And he certainly did not trust her smile.

  “What is it, Edwina?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral.

  “I want to go outside.”

  Stefan folded his arms across his chest. “So? Why tell me?”

  Edwina stepped closer, cutting the distance between them by half.

  “Because I want to go out alone,” she said in a near whisper.

  Stefan studied her face, but Edwina’s expression gave away nothing. “You know the Council’s decree. As long as the Destiratu continues to strengthen, only Council members may go out alone. If you want to go, you must find two others to go with you. It’s for your protection, as well as for the coven’s.”

  “I don’t need protection,” Edwina said evenly.

  “Perhaps not, Edwina. But Destiratu can fan your blood thirst when you least expect it. Without companions to restrain you, you might act foolishly. You know we cannot risk attention being brought upon our kind. Hence the Council’s decree.”

  “But the decree also states that a Council member may grant permission. You are a Council member, Stefan. You can give me permission.”