Spirit Mountain

SPIRIT MOUNTAIN

A Novel

by

J.K. DREW

and
ALEXANDRA SWAN

Other Books by J.K. Drew

STANDALONE NOVELS

The Heart of the Forest

Magic Quest

Spirit Mountain

Little Wolf

The Emerald River

The Angel and the Gift

Forever Silent

THE ROBOT TWINS

The Mystery of the Walking Statue

The Secret of Stonehead Island

The Mystery of the Lightning Cave

KID QUEST ADVENTURES

The Secret of the Sphinx

The Gateway of the Sun

The Treasure of Oak Island

THE DISTANT WORLD TRILOGY

Dare to Enter a Distant World

Dare to Rule a Distant World

Dare to Escape a Distant World

YOUR CHOICE BOOKS

Deep Sea Danger

The Legend of Eagle Eye Mountain

Playoff Pressure

Spirit Mountain

Published by J.K. Drew

Copyright © 2016 by J.K. Drew

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Spirit Mountain

Chapter One

“Wait!” I reached out my hand to try to grab onto his. With brown hair, tanned skin and eyes as dark as the deep sea, he looked enigmatic. He looked about seventeen: my age.

I’d had the same recurring dream for fourteen days straight. But tonight, as he’d reached for me, we’d locked eyes. Tonight, the boy in my dream had seen me. As surely as I knew myself, I also knew that in some strange way, we’d connected.

Then he faded, but I wasn’t ready to let him go. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the boy in my dreams.

A soft cushion hit my face, pulling me from my sleep. The snickers of my idiotic younger cousin frustrated me and without much thought, I threw the pillow back at him and pulled the covers over my face.

“Get up, Beth,” yelled my cousin, Teddy. He fled from my room and back downstairs, taunting, “Mom, Mom, she won’t get up for the last day of school.”

Oh, how I hated that brat. He was like the pesky vermin we had back in New York City. The kind that were big and annoying and difficult to get rid of. I’d never met my cousin until my mother had died and my father had taken a job in Europe. Dad couldn’t take me with him, so he’d shipped me off to relatives in a small, frightening town called Castleborough. I was still mad at him for missing my seventeenth birthday and couldn’t wait to remind him the next time we spoke.

I placed my bare feet on the hardwood floor, shivering as I searched for my slippers with the tips of my toes at the edge of my bed. Finding them and dragging them out, I slipped them on. When I moved toward my closet, I stopped to stare at the snowcapped mountain that framed my bedroom window.

“Beth!” my aunt called from downstairs. “Let’s go. You need to eat breakfast before you go to school.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m getting ready,” I called back.

With a sigh, I dug through my closet for a fashionable outfit. Even in a remote place, some things didn’t change about a New York City girl. After perusing through countless choices, I settled on a yellow crop top and tight DKNY jeans. Too many minutes later, I finally chose a cute pair of boots to complete my outfit. “Voilà,” I said to myself, feigning a smile, “ready for school.”

I ran downstairs to the kitchen.

“It’s about time you got out of bed. I swear, kids today.” Aunt Vine glared at me through disappointed eyes. Aunt Vine’s eyes never showed any emotion except for disappointment. I knew she didn’t want me there. She’d told me several times, albeit subtly, but a kid knows when she’s not wanted somewhere.

“Sorry, Aunt Vine. I was having a dream.”

“Get your head out of the clouds, girl. Your mother’s head was always in the clouds and where did that get her? Dead!”

“I don’t think a cloud killed her,” I whispered under my breath, irritated that she’d always find a way to drag my mother, her sister-in-law, into any negative conversation.

“Don’t get smart with me, Beth Ann Abbott. Your father found a way to dump you on us while he tours Europe with some blonde hussy, leaving us to endure all the work of raising his kid.”

Raising me? Oh, please. I’ve only been here for two weeks. Two very long weeks.
I hated when she talked about my father, too. The blonde
hussy
she was referring to was Dad’s secretary, and somehow, to her, having to see me through my senior year of high school meant Aunt Vine was
raising
me. Now, I understood why my mother had forbidden us from ever visiting Aunt Vine and Uncle Ernie. “Yes, Aunt Vine.”

“That’s more like it.” She turned to her son. “Teddy, sweetie. Don’t stuff your face. Leave at least one pancake for your cousin. We wouldn’t want her to go to school complaining that she was hungry, now would we?” Aunt Vine leaned in and kissed her son three times on the cheek in a weird, three-peck manner. Then, of course, she gave me the stink eye—another disappointed look for no darn reason.

“I’m fine, Aunt Vine. Teddy can have my pancakes, too. He’s a growing boy. Plus, he needs all those carbs to keep him warm in this freezing town.” I smirked when I saw my aunt’s eyes narrow at me as she tried to decipher if I was being snide about his weight or being kind by letting her chubby son eat all eight pancakes that she’d made.

Grabbing my backpack off the floor near the front door, I stepped out into the six-inch snowfall. Today was the last day of school before winter break and that alone should have been enough to make me smile. But what would I do in Castleborough during winter break?

Before taking another step, I glanced up at the mountain.
Maybe I’d spend my time finding out about that mountain and the boy who sought me out each night in my dreams.
His eyes haunted me. I had to find out who he was.

Chapter Two

Castleborough had one high school and our graduating class had a hundred students. The difference between this school and my school in New York was like night and day. In New York, I could easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of it all, but here, the second I’d arrived in Castleborough, everyone had seemed to know I was new. I didn’t like that.

But that was how I’d met Emmy and Hillary, two girls who had befriended me on my first day of school. We now sat in history class, listening to Mr. Smith, our teacher, rant on and on about the Holocaust and the tragedy of that era. When the bell rang, Emmy grabbed my arm.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

“Okay. But I want to talk to Mr. Smith for a minute. I’ll meet you guys in the lunchroom.” I glanced from Emmy to Hillary. When the classroom was empty, I approached Mr. Smith’s desk.

“What can I do for you, Beth?” Leaning back in his chair, his eyes remained fixated on a paperback book. He’d been reading it during class while we were taking tests.

“That looks like an interesting book.”

“Well, it’s not a book about the hottest trends, so I hardly think you’d be interested in it.” He glanced up at me with that Castleborough look—the one that told me I wasn’t wanted in this town—and then, he glanced back at his book.

“Mr. Smith,” I ignored his last snide comment, “I have a question about that mountain outside the window.”

I must have piqued his interest because he moved his eyes from his book to me, then to the mountain. He closed his book and sat up straight. “What do you want to know?”

“Did something happen there?”

He shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“It seems kind of... I don’t know, eerie? Like, is there a weird story about it, or maybe about something bad that happened there?”

“So, you’ve heard of the legend?” He set the book on his desk.

I could feel my eyebrows come together at the bridge of my nose. “I’ve heard subtle remarks about it, but…legend?”

He nodded. “Yes, it’s a tragedy that has left Castleborough with some strange anomaly that no one will talk about.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

He smirked. “It’s not easy to explain. Go to our library and look up Spirit Mountain. There should be some information there. Once you read the legend, you can always come back here and talk to me about it. It’s part of our history and I know the legend well.”

“Have you ever been to the mountain?”

“No one goes to that mountain, Beth. It’s best left alone.”

“But why?”

He frowned, as if reflecting on a troubling memory. “All I can say is that mountain is bad news. Many believe it’s cursed and, in turn, has cursed Castleborough. I’m sure you’ve heard that the snow never melts here. It’s snowy and cloudy a hundred percent of the year.”

Something told me I wouldn’t get much more out of Mr. Smith today. I nodded and said goodbye to him. On my way to the lunchroom, his words echoed in my ears.
Many believe it’s cursed.
What did that mean? Did someone die there? I had to know and I was determined to find out. Back in New York, some people thought I was stubborn, but I liked to think I was just persistent, which I believed was a good thing in certain situations.

I punched in my lunch number at the school cafeteria cashier, grabbed my tray and made my way to the table where Emmy and Hillary sat.

“What did you want to tell me, Emmy?” I asked.

She smiled. “Next week, my parents are getting a new car and they’re giving me their old one.”

“Sweet!” I said. “Does this mean the three of us can actually get out of this town and go see a movie somewhere?”

“Definitely!”

“So, what did you want to talk to Mr. Smith about?” Hillary asked, as her long fingers texted on her cell phone.

“A question about Spirit Mountain.” I sat opposite the two girls.

Both girls stopped what they were doing and stared at me.

Emmy leaned forward. “Shhh. Don’t say that name out loud.”

“Why not?” I took a swig of my chocolate milk. No matter what school it was, cafeteria food was always the same—bad.

“It’s said, if you say the name of the mountain, then the kid who haunts it will visit you in your dreams and kill you.”

I laughed, dismissing Emmy. “No way.”

Hillary nodded. “Um, yeah. Trust us. Two kids from our school were killed randomly after they mentioned the name of the mountain.”

“And you girls really believe that?” I munched on my greasy slice of pepperoni pizza.

Emmy nodded. “It’s true.” She turned and sought out someone. When she found him, she pointed in his direction. “See that hot guy sitting alone at the table over there?”

“Yeah, the one with dark hair?”

“That’s him,” Emmy said. “His sister was one of the girls. She died twenty-one days after she spoke about the mountain by name. It happened earlier this year, this past spring. He used to be captain of our ice hockey team, but he hasn’t been the same after that.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Logan.”

“Logan Hall,” Hillary chimed in.

“And his sister’s name?” I couldn’t stop staring at him, watching him eat.

“Ashlyn Hall. She was the captain of the cheerleading team,” Hillary answered.

“Yeah.” Emmy nodded. “Gorgeous, too.”

“How did she die?” I turned my gaze back to the two girls in front of me.

“In her sleep,” Emmy whispered. “The authorities claimed she had some kind of a heart condition, but we know that wasn’t true. She’d been visited in her dream by the kid on the mountain for twenty nights straight. And on the day after the twentieth night, she told us that she’d reached for his hand and the tips of their fingers had almost touched. We suspect that on the twenty-first night, they must have touched, and that’s when he took her soul.”

Rolling my eyes at the pair, I gasped. “No way. I don’t believe you guys. Who was the other girl?”

“Her name was Madison McDade. She died in the exact same way as Ashlyn.”

“And get this, Madison was the mayor’s daughter,” Hillary added.

Emmy shrugged, grabbing her tray from the table. “You don’t have to believe us. Just pray that the boy with dark eyes never visits you in your dreams. And if he does, start counting because there’s something scary about the twenty-first night.”

Hillary nodded with a smirk as she grabbed her tray, too. “See you in final period.”

I couldn’t move. I sat at the lunch table, staring at Logan as I contemplated my own fate. I’d already been visited by
the boy with dark eyes
for fourteen nights. What did that mean? Did I only have six more days to live? My stomach ached with a desperate longing to know—an understanding of a legend that people, young and old, from Castleborough, believed to be true.

And what if it was? What would happen to me then? With my appetite—and the remainder of the school day—an afterthought, I left my food on the table, grabbed my backpack and headed for the town’s only library—one that served the high school and the public—to research this legend of Spirit Mountain for myself.