Veiled
Authors: Karina Halle
A Novel
by Karina Halle
Contemporary Romance Novels
Love, in English
Love, in Spanish
Where Sea Meets Sky (from Atria Books)
Racing the Sun (from Atria Books)
The Pact
The Offer
The Play
Winter Wishes
The Lie
Smut
The Debt
Romantic Suspense Novels
Sins and Needles (The Artists Trilogy #1)
On Every Street (An Artists Trilogy Novella #0.5)
Shooting Scars (The Artists Trilogy #2)
Bold Tricks (The Artists Trilogy #3)
Dirty Angels
Dirty Deeds
Dirty Promises
Paranormal/Horror Romance Novels
Veiled
The Devil’s Metal (Devils #1)
The Devil’s Reprise (Devils #2)
Donners of the Dead
Darkhouse (Experiment in Terror #1)
Red Fox (EIT #2)
The Benson (EIT #2.5)
Dead Sky Morning (EIT #3)
Lying Season (EIT #4)
On Demon Wings (EIT #5)
Old Blood (EIT #5.5)
The Dex-Files (EIT #5.7)
Into the Hollow (EIT #6)
And With Madness Comes the Light (EIT #6.5)
Come Alive (EIT #7)
Ashes to Ashes (EIT #8)
Dust to Dust (EIT #9)
First edition published by
Metal Blonde Books July 2016
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Karina Halle
KINDLE Edition
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover design by Hang Le Designs
Edited by Laura Helseth
Metal Blonde Books
P.O. Box 845
Point Roberts, WA
98281 USA
Manufactured in the USA
For more information about the series and author visit:
For everyone who asked
(except for Sandra).
But
mainly
for myself.
“If life is but a dream, wake me up.”—
Keep Your Eyes Peeled
Queens of the Stone Age
“What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself afraid to see?”–
Right Where it Belongs
Nine Inch Nails
Note:
Veiled is a new adult paranormal romance/urban fantasy novel. It is a spinoff of the Experiment in Terror series but is a standalone – meaning people do not need to read EIT to understand or enjoy this book. In fact the book is perfect for those who haven’t read or even heard of EIT. If that’s you, thank you for picking up Veiled and keep on reading! I hope you enjoy the ride!
However
,
if
you are a reader of EIT and you have NOT finished the last two books, Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust (particularly Dust to Dust), reading Veiled will completely spoil Dust to Dust for you. Seriously. It will
ruin
the last EIT book for you. Dex and Perry’s journey deserves better than that.
You
deserve better than that!
So if that’s
you
put this book down and go read Dust to Dust. When you’re done, come back here. The book will be waiting.
I wake up with a gasp that freezes in my lungs.
My body is strained, nearly paralyzed, a stark contrast to my heart which races erratically inside my chest, as if looking for a way out.
It was the noise that woke me.
That same noise, night after night.
One knock.
Two knocks.
Three knocks.
Like someone’s at my door, even though they never are.
I wait, trying to suck the air deep into my lungs, realizing I couldn’t move even if I tried. There’s nothing else to do but wait and hope my heart calms down and I don’t die from a fucking heart attack.
It’s in your head
, I tell myself.
You know this. You looked it up.
But after growing up with a sister like Perry Palomino, it’s hard to know what’s in your head and what’s real. I much prefer it when my mind plays tricks on me.
Even so, I lie there in the dark, listening to every sound in my room. Outside a cricket chirps once, twice. A light breeze rustles the trees and I feel the air as it comes through the open window and washes over my body, my limbs that are outside the sheets. It’s been stinking hot in Portland this summer and this breeze is nearly cold. It would be refreshing if I wasn’t so rattled.
Strength slowly returns to my body. I’m able to suck in a breath and let it out carefully, even though it’s far too loud for my liking. I’m still trying to listen, still trying to figure out if the knocks are part of my dream or part of something real.
I’ve had this condition for about as long as I can remember, though it was only recently that I looked it up and discovered it was quite common. It also has a disturbing as hell name: Exploding Head Syndrome. Yup. Ada Palomino’s head might explode on occasion. Hope you’re wearing a poncho.
Apparently though, it’s not that big of a deal and it doesn’t mean your head is just going to spontaneously combust, like that dude in
Scanners
. Now, I’ve never seen
Scanners
because it looks like a terrible 80’s movie, but anytime someone’s head explodes, that’s the movie they refer to.
Instead it just means it’s an auditory hallucination, one powerful enough to wake you up. Some people hear cymbals crashing, others hear a bang or gunshot. I hear three loud knocks. I used to think it was someone at my door, so I would get up and answer it, thinking it was Perry. No one was ever there. Sometimes I’d have to go downstairs and check the front door, usually with a steak knife or blunt object in hand, but it was always the same deal.
No one there.
Then this spring, when I slept over at my ex-boyfriend’s cabin in Astoria, I woke up convinced someone was trying to get in the place. My ex, Dillon, was already awake, having gone to the washroom and told me he hadn’t heard a thing.
Finally, I had to look up on the internet what the hell was going on. I discovered it had a name (albeit a pretty shitty one) and that many people suffered from it, usually women and usually when they were overly tired.
I’ve had it a few times since, but sometimes it’s just so real that it’s hard to imagine your brain could come up with something like that. Not to mention that often my body goes rigid, paralyzed, for a few moments after.
Then there was that one time I was pretty sure I felt someone sitting on the end of the bed, only I was on my side and couldn’t look.
The weight lifted, as if someone stood up, and when I was finally able to move, no one was there. I’m going to assume that’s part of the hallucinations as well.
I sigh, relieved that my heart is no longer racing, even though I’m still faced with that overall sense of unease and
what the fuck
. My throat and mouth feel desert dry, so I slowly get out of bed, grabbing the empty glass on my bedside table, and head to the washroom. The air from outside now feels warm, like it has been all summer.
In the bathroom I flick on the lights and wince, but make a point not to look at myself in the mirror. On nights like this, when I wake up in the middle of the night, either because of my apparent condition or for no reason at all, other than this feeling of dread, I feel the mirror holds the truth. I’m terrified that if I look at my reflection, it might not be me. And if it is me, I might be different.
But who can blame me for thinking the impossible? Because, after all I’ve been through, I know nothing is impossible. And even though on the surface I have a pretty average life for an eighteen-year-old, beneath the surface I’m anything but average.
Luckily, very few people scratch beneath the surface. If they did, they’d either run screaming or have me committed.
Sometimes I think the latter might be preferable.
After I fill a glass with water from the tap, I flick off the lights, my reflection still unseen, and creep past the nightlight in the hall back to my room. My father sleeps at the end of the hall, but ever since mom died he’s been a light sleeper. In fact, I see him popping his sleeping pills every night. When he doesn’t, I can hear him downstairs in his study during all hours.
I inherited my sister’s room since she moved to Seattle. It’s a lot bigger, brighter, and better than my old one, which is now a (much-needed) extension of my closet. The only problem is, it’s hard to forget all the shit that went down in this room. For all of my fifteenth year, Perry’s bedroom was a miniature house of horrors with some very big, very real, scares.
I down some of the water and crawl into bed, the breeze still wafting in. The streetlights provide comfort and a faint orange glow that not only keeps the room from being pitch dark, but reminds me that I live in the suburbs. There are neighbors on either side of the house and neighbors across the street. Our yards are big enough that everyone isn’t up in everyone else’s business (though tell that to Mrs. Hedley down the street), but close enough that I don’t feel all alone.
With my mom dying and Perry moving out, it’s been really fucking hard not to feel alone. The last two years have been a special kind of hell.
I let my head sink back into the cool of the pillow and close my eyes, finding that current of peace and contentment that will hopefully pull me under, when I hear a faint scratching sound.
Oh god
, I think, just wanting to drift away, just wanting the world to go black so I can wake up with the sun and have the world light again.
But it goes on. Not louder, just more . . . deliberate.
I slowly sit up and hold my breath, listening. The scratches sound like nails against a door. The closet door, to be more specific.
I swallow hard and my heart begins to thud. It’s not my imagination. I’m not asleep.
The sound continues, the strokes longer, the sound succinct, almost echoing throughout the bedroom.
It could be a mouse. A really large mouse. Okay, it could be a rat. A really large rat. God, I hope it’s a rat. If it’s a rat it can just stay in there until I get my dad to deal with it in the morning. Anything other than some type of animal is completely unacceptable.
I ease out of bed carefully, not making a sound, and stare at the closet, feeling frozen in place. There’s no way in hell I’m opening that door, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to spend the night in here either. I wonder if I should wake up my dad, but the man needs his sleep more than ever and knowing my luck, the scratching would stop when he gets here and there’d be nothing in the closet after all.
I’ll sleep in the other room.
I can’t help but pause by the closet on the way to the bedroom door.
The sound changes. A flurry of wings now, flapping against the closet door, the scratching louder.
My breath is caught in my throat. It sounds more like I have a chicken in the closet than a mutant rat, but even though I know there’s something funny about that scenario, this doesn’t seem funny at all.
Because a giant rat is plausible and a chicken is not.
And the wings don’t exactly sound like feathers either.
The flapping is thick, like someone throwing slabs of raw meat against a wall.
I am zero seconds away from either vomiting from fear or literally losing my shit, but if I keep standing where I am I feel like I’ll be stuck in the room forever.
And then I hear it.
A rough yet somehow familiar voice comes from the closet.
“Let me out,” it croaks and the sound is a fist in my lungs.
The closet door rattles as someone on the other side knocks.
Three times.
I wake up.
***
“New purse?” Amy asks me as I get in the passenger seat of Smartie, her Ford Focus she bought second-hand a few months ago after saving for every pretty penny.
I look down at the micro YSL bubble-gum pink purse that’s slung over my shoulder, which I chose to save up for instead of a car.
“Kind of,” I tell her. I bought the purse on an online sale a couple of months ago, I just hadn’t found the opportunity to wear it until now. I buy new things all the time—I mean, I’m a fashion blogger, it’s kind of my job—but more often than not I get stuck in the habit of using the same bag over and over again.
Today though, today I needed some cheesy bubble-gum brightness in my life. I’d been having the worst sleep for the last few nights, ever since that dream upon a dream and the knocking and the chicken thing in the closet. Thankfully I hadn’t experienced that again, even though I was giving my closet a wide berth now. The irony, that I’d be afraid of it when I’m about to start art school for fashion design next month and would probably be spending more time in my closet than ever before, wasn’t lost on me.
But I had been dreaming about a guy I met once, and in some ways those dreams were worse. I’d wake up in this happy, warm state, like my heart was glowing and I was just floating through life. The opposite of waking up from a nightmare. Because even though I couldn’t remember the specifics of the dreams, I knew I was with this guy and I was safe and I loved him. I couldn’t even tell if he loved me back, it was just this feeling of being on top of the world, something I’d never really experienced.
And that’s what made it worse. When you wake up from a nightmare, the reality comforts you. When you wake up from the best dream ever, reality is a burden, a slap-in-the-face reminder that you could feel this, you could have this, but you don’t and you won’t.
What’s really weird is that I can’t really recall the guy. Like in most dreams, he starts off as one person and then morphs. I lose focus. But I just have this image, this feeling, that he was this guy I met at Perry and her husband Dex’s wedding two years ago (still weird to think of Dex as her husband—my brother-in-law—and not some douchecanoe that hangs around).
His name was Jay and I really wish I hadn’t swigged so much champagne at the wedding because, just like the dream, the real-life details of him are kind of blurry. I know he was tall, maybe in his mid-to-late-twenties, which to my then sixteen-year-old-self seemed all sorts of ancient. He had reddish brown hair and manly scruff on his strong jaw. I’m not really sure why I think I know the feel of his rough stubble—I think if we kissed I would have at least remembered that.
Regardless, there was something about him that was vaguely magnetic and, considering my aversion to gingers, that said something. And what it said was that the last time I felt real butterflies around a guy was ages ago, I was drunk, and I never saw him again. How sad is that?
“Are you okay?” Amy asks as we head across the Fremont Bridge, the Willamette River sparkling below us.
I slide my eyes over to her and give her a tepid smile. “I’m heading to Sephora. Of course I’m okay.”
Amy Lombardo is pretty much my closest friend. She’s been there for me through everything from losing my virginity with Dillon (okay, she wasn’t actually there for
that
, but she helped me deal with the aftermath), to breakups, to cramming for final exams. She, along with her boyfriend Tom and our friend Jessie, make up our little posse that has managed to last throughout the crazy high school years and now into this scary big world of the beyond. Jessie has already gone off to school in California, so our pack has dwindled to me being the third wheel most of the time.
Amy takes her eyes off the road and slides her sunglasses down on her nose, inspecting me with her chocolate brown eyes. “You sure?”
Her voice is soft and I know she’s worried about me. The first year after my mother died, I was practically inconsolable. I’m surprised I even finished high school to be honest. Life was just a blur and when it wasn’t a blur, when I was feeling things too deeply, too much, I made it a blur. I never thought I’d follow in my sister’s footsteps, but I turned to drugs and alcohol in order to get through the days.
But the nights were always worst. The drugs never helped me with the nights. The dreams would come for me, no matter how doped up or drunk I was.
Somehow I got out of it. The days seemed brighter, steadier. When I hurt, which was all the time, which still is all the time, I was able to absorb it, deal with it. I was able to think, to actually see myself, my life, and distance myself from the substances. I leaned on Perry, my father, even Dex. Amy, Tom, and Jessie were there too. My ex bailed when I was too much of a mess, but he was just extra baggage anyway. The heartbreak over losing him was nothing compared to losing my mom.