Bitten (Once Bitten, Twice Shy #1)(9)
Forcing herself to push past the horrible feeling of apprehension, she carefully slid her trembling fingers inside the decrepit sneaker. Taking out the small, crumpled ball, she slowly straightened out the shabby piece of paper. Sloppy cursive stained the paper in a red ink.
You are in danger. If you value your life, meet me tonight at the house at the end of Miller Road. I’ll be waiting.
CHAPTER THREE
Blue eyes were staring at her again. They were more passionate than ever, almost urgent in their intensity. The eyes were begging her to listen, to do as she was told. But what do you want, she felt like screaming. What could you possibly want?
Katherine woke with a start, gasping for air and drenched in a cold sweat. After taking a moment to calm her erratic breathing, she slowly relaxed her fingers from where they were clenching her bed sheets in tight fists. Untangling herself from the blankets that she had managed to twist around herself, she sat up tiredly.
Katherine blearily looked at the alarm clock on her nightstand. It informed her that it was barely past five in the morning and she sighed, knowing there was no way she’d be able to fall back asleep.
Ignoring how stiff her body felt, she pulled herself out of bed, intending on going for a brisk morning run. She hoped the exhilaration she usually experienced while running would serve to relax her frayed nerves.
However, even as she prepared herself for the planned run – changing out of her pajamas and throwing on a tank top and a pair of loose athletics shorts – she couldn’t stop her mind from drifting back to her dream.
It had happened again.
Every night since the events of the Friday last, the stubborn wolf – or the animal’s penetrating eyes at least – had haunted her dreams, and every night the eyes were getting more and more insistent. But she still had no idea what they wanted.
The dreams were slowly wearing on her and she often woke up feeling more tired than she did before falling asleep. As a result, she felt more exhausted than she had in a long time and didn’t need to look in the bathroom mirror to know that there were dark circles under her eyes.
A suppressed shudder wracked her body as she thought of the intensity at which the blue orbs had stared at her. The dreams didn’t frighten her, per say, but she was becoming increasingly unsettled as they grew in both frequency and intensity. They were distracting her from her daily life and she was spending more and more time daydreaming about what they could mean.
She had gotten so desperate for answers that she had even checked out a book – The Hidden Meaning Behind Your Dreams by Stephanie Crown – that had been tucked away in a secluded corner of the school library. Upon reading it, however, she quickly realized it would be little use to her. The only thing she could find about eyes appearing in dreams were interpretations of what it meant when dreamers dreamed of their own eyes.
According to the book, seeing one’s eyes in a dream represented unconscious or repressed thoughts, often hidden desires of the soul, that were breaking through the surface of consciousness.
It sounded like a load of tripe to Katherine.
Not that it mattered.
She wasn’t dreaming about her own eyes. She was dreaming about someone – something – else’s.
Shaking herself out of her thoughts, Katherine snatched a hair band from her night stand so she could quickly pull back her wavy hair – made even more unruly after having slept on it – into a messy ponytail. She grabbed her MP3 player on her way out of her bedroom before quietly tiptoeing down the stairs, not wanting to wake her parents. She made quick work of tugging on her sneakers – their stark whiteness a constant reminder of their newness – before quietly letting herself out the front door.
After finding an energetic song to run to, Katherine plugged the MP3 player’s buds into her ears and started up the driveway. Soon she was jogging at a comfortable pace, the slight morning breeze cooling her face as she ran.
It was still rather dark out, the sun just barely peeking through the horizon, but Katherine knew Middletown like the back or her hand and could have easily navigate the small town even if it had been completely black out.
The brunette was slowly able to unwind as the run had the invigorating effect she had hoped it would. Unfortunately, as her body relaxed, her mind began to wander, the music blaring in her ears gradually becoming more like background noise.
As was typical of late, when Katherine’s mind wasn’t preoccupied with thoughts of the strange dreams she’d been having, it’d turned to thinking about the note she had found in her tattered shoe.
She still didn’t understand it. Not only did Katherine have no idea how whoever had planted the shoe had managed to get into her locked locker, she had no idea why they would want to do it. The only explanation she could come up with was that it had been some sort of prank – a prank that had failed when she didn’t show up on Miller Road that Monday night.
It had been five days since then – it was Saturday morning – and nothing had ever come of her not going.
But that didn’t mean that strange things weren’t happening.
Katherine was sure that her body was changing in weird ways that had nothing to do with puberty, but she was the only one who seemed to notice it.
When she had brought it up with her mom earlier in the week, Elaine had been quick to assure her daughter that she was merely experiencing the natural changes that all teenagers went through.