Wraith Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Wraith

  Wraith

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Sometimes I wonder

  how things would have turned out if I hadn’t. If I’d kept my nose buried in that menu in search of a dish I couldn’t pronounce. But I didn’t. I looked up and saw Annie, hanging onto the banister as she descended the stairs that led to the Michaels’ apartment. She clung to the hand of a girl I guessed was her babysitter as the two of them made their way across the room toward the kitchen. Annie wore a pink fleece footie sleeper and her auburn hair hung loose around her face. I think that’s what pushed me over the edge. She looked so damn innocent.

  I pushed my chair back from the table and grabbed the wolf hat out of my jacket pocket.

  Hunter’s eyes darkened. “What are you doing?”

  “Be right back.”

  “Kira, don’t.”

  “I have to. I’m sorry.”

  Before I could stop myself, I stood up and set off after Annie and the babysitter. They were waiting outside the kitchen doors. Annie was staring at the doors as if she were waiting for her mom to breeze through them, like she always did. The babysitter’s eyes flitted across the restaurant, looking for people she recognized. Then she turned back toward Annie and smiled down at her.

  Liv appeared just as I reached Annie and the sitter. Her eyes locked onto mine and even Annie could read the warning there. Stay away from my child.

  Praise for Wraith

  “Hauntingly Suspenseful.”

  ~Stephanie Lasley, The Kindle Book Review (4.8 Stars)

  ~*~

  “This was an exciting and suspenseful read with paranormal mystery and a bit of romance too.”

  ~Kitty Smith

  Wraith

  by

  Gwenan Haines

  Shadow World Series

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

  Wraith

  COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Gwenan Haines

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Kim Mendoza

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Fantasy Rose Edition, 2017

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1732-8

  Shadow World Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For the seers among us…

  Chapter 1

  Amarok, Alaska

  There are two kinds of dreams. Dreams that come true and dreams that don’t. When I say that to most people they think I’m talking about wishes. What I want out of life, like going to college or getting married or having kids. They think I’m wondering about the future or maybe reflecting on things that happened in the past. They don’t say it to my face but I know they’re thinking about my brother. I know they’re thinking of the dream of our family that died when he disappeared.

  That’s not what I mean. Because when I dream at night some of my dreams are just like everybody else’s. The kind where you’re taking a final you didn’t study for or you have to recite the lines to a play you didn’t know you were cast in. Or the senseless dreams everybody has where your mother turns into a stranger but you know it’s really your mother and you’re at your house and it’s definitely your house even though it looks completely different. Then you wake up and try to sort it all out and sometimes you can but more often you can’t so you just forget about it.

  I have dreams like that all the time. In fact, most of my dreams are dull as white rice. Or maybe just plain weird. But none of those dreams ever come true.

  Sometimes I have the other kind of dream though. When I was four I dreamt of my father floating beneath the water surrounded by cool green light. It closed over him as he sank farther and farther from the surface until at last he stopped struggling and disappeared inside the darkness.

  I woke in the night, his bright eyes still before me, and cried out. My mother came running and smoothed my hair back from my forehead. “It’s just a nightmare, Kira,” she whispered. “Your father will return in the morning. Go back to sleep.”

  I told her it was more than that, but she didn’t believe me. Not that I blame her. She couldn’t imagine the Great Spirit would take her husband from her after he had already called back her only son. When the fishermen found my father’s boat drifting on the ocean the next day my mother refused to believe it. “He’ll be back,” she told them, even after two weeks had passed with no sign of him. “Wait and see.”

  After two months went by and the ice began to freeze up for the winter she finally held a funeral for him. That was sixteen years ago and some nights she sits out on her porch with her eyes fixed on the sea as if he’ll still sail back to her.

  I never waited for my father. I knew my dream of him was the kind that comes true.

  My brother is a different story. I’m the one waiting for him to come back to us someday. I’m the one who knows he’s not really dead, whatever my mother says. The dreams tell me so and I believe them. Unlike most of the people I know, they haven’t lied to me yet.

  Lately I hadn’t been dreaming about my brother, I’d been dreaming about Annie. Annie was the four-year-old daughter of Liv and Gavin Michaels, the couple who ran the Blue Moon Café in town. It was more of a restaurant than a café but the Michaels had relocated to Alaska from New York City and I guess they missed the whole urban mood. Or maybe they were trying to recreate it in Amarok.

  Yeah, good luck with that guys.

  Not that they had done a bad job with the place. Before they moved into town five years ago the restaurant had been a complete dive, the kind of place that served greasy food and lousy coffee. Liv and Gavin had been sous chefs in the lower 48, which meant they could actually cook. They added a lot of frou-frou items to their menu after they bought out the former owners but they serve the standard fare too. Their buttermilk pancakes are epically good and their fried chicken is amazing. Best of all, they brew really good coffee.

  Add a couple of comfy couches and a bunch of mismatched chairs and voila, you’ve got a pretty cool place to hang out. As eclectic as the décor is, the Michaels haven’t been able to completely shake the small town mentality. There’s a big-ass moose head over the fireplace, a pool table in the bar, and a wolf hide hanging on the far wall. But somehow even that stuff seems cool and not tacky like it did before they took over. Anyway, the town name—Amarok—means wolf so it makes sense to keep the hide up. At night you can hear the wolves howling and sometimes a few of them will appear at the edge of the pond I use for a landing strip for my plane. But they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them, so it’s a pretty low-maintenance relationship.

  In a town where there were only three restaurants counting The Donut Hole, it didn’t take long for The Blue Moon to become the local hotspot. Just about everybody stop
s in at some point during the week and some of the regulars practically live there. I got into the habit of popping in after I got back from my deliveries. To state the obvious, it can get pretty cold flying supplies to the bush villages north of Amarok and it’s nice to warm up in front of a roaring fire while sipping a gingerbread latte. If it’s not too busy Liv and I gossip about life in town or she’ll ask how business is going.

  I’ve been flying planes longer than I’ve been driving my car but I didn’t start my own business until the year before, not too long after I graduated from high school. To say I love it would be the understatement of the century. Flying is my life. Maybe I should want more and maybe someday I will. But for now I have everything I need. There’s no better feeling than being up in the air, flying through blue sky as the sun sinks below the mountains. It’s like swimming in beauty.

  But I can’t live in the sky. There’s still reality to deal with. Lugging supplies out into the middle of nowhere is hard work, really hard work. So after I land on the ice I rush off to the Blue Moon for my latte. Annie’s always there, playing with her toys on the bearskin rug or following Liv around in the kitchen. At first I worried she’d get hurt or just be in the way but she’s a smart kid and knows how to stay out of trouble.

  Which is why when I started having the dream I didn’t take it seriously right away. At first I pegged it as one of the other dreams, the kind that don’t come true and are just weird without being scary. But then I kept having it, night after night, like somebody was trying really hard to get my attention.

  I wish I understood more about what happens to me. Wait, edit that. I wish I understood more about me, about who I am or maybe what I am. Because unless everybody’s been holding out on me I’m pretty sure most people don’t dream the future. Maybe they say they do and charge you twenty bucks an hour for it over the psychic hotline but the things they tell you don’t happen. Either that or their statements are so general they could apply to anybody. Believe me, I’ve tried, mostly in hopes that I’d meet somebody who was the real deal and have the chance to ask them some pressing questions about being psychic. When I was in high school I went through what I call my Obsessive Period, when I got into the habit of calling this one psychic every day or two. Eventually two things happened. One, I ran out of money and my mom freaked when she found out I’d been using her credit card behind her back. And two, the psychic got tired of my questions and told me not to call her again. Ever.

  That marked the end of my Obsessive Period.

  I never got over the actual obsession though. Like I said, I always got the feeling somebody was trying to let me know things for a reason. But who wanted me to know and why? The why was what killed me. What if I was supposed to do something about these dreams? For example, the dream I had of my father drowning. Could I have done something, anything, to prevent that from happening? Or did being four let me off the hook?

  That’s the other thing that had been bothering me about the Annie dreams. Annie was four, just like my brother was when he disappeared. Not killed, because I’ll never believe that’s what happened to Miki. Even my mother admits that much. He wasn’t killed right away. He simply disappeared one afternoon. One minute Miki was outside in the yard building a snowman, the next minute he was gone. About a year later my mom got a call that she wouldn’t talk about. It was right around Christmas time and for one week it was like an alien had taken over her body. She couldn’t stop smiling, not to mention the damn humming. The day before Christmas she put on her coat and walked to the door. She told my father and me she wouldn’t be back until the next morning but that when she returned she’d be bringing “a Christmas present for us all.” That’s exactly how she said it. But here’s the kicker. Right before she walked out of the house she said the word miracle. Of course she denied that later. She told me I’d misheard her but I knew she was lying.

  She’d been going after my brother and something went wrong. At least that’s what I think. When she came back the next day the light had gone out of her face. She wouldn’t speak at all for eight days, not even when I opened my presents. On the ninth day she sat my father and I down on our couch and told us Miki was dead. She told us if we ever mentioned his name again she’d leave and never return.

  We never mentioned his name again. Only it wasn’t my mother who left, it was my father.

  The more I thought about it, the more it troubled me, all those fours. During the days, when I wasn’t making deliveries or servicing the plane, I found myself doodling the number over and over. Or drawing squares. Windows. Anything with four corners or four parts. After a couple of weeks I started wondering if I was going crazy or having some kind of OCD Event Horizon. Maybe insanity was a thing that happened to pilots who spent most of their time alone far above the earth. I had my huskies, Boris and Natasha, but other than the occasional phone call to mom and my visits to the Blue Moon, I was on my own.

  There was another issue besides all those fours. The dream itself. In the dream Annie was outside playing. And then she wasn’t.

  In the dream someone took her. Always.

  Chapter 2

  About two weeks after I started having the dream I decided to tell Liv and Gavin. I didn’t want to tell them because I had a pretty good idea how they were going to react. But I had to give it a shot because if something happened to Annie it would be my fault. I’d let my father drown and allowed my brother to be taken and I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I wasn’t four anymore. I could do something to keep Annie safe—or at least I could try.

  The dreams weren’t the same night after night but they ended the same way. In some of them Annie was swinging at the school playground. In others she was lying on the bearskin rug coloring. Or wandering around in her backyard. My dreams weren’t blueprints, more like impressionist paintings. Or maybe overlapping kaleidoscopes. That’s not usually how my dreams worked. Usually I didn’t have so many.

  Which gets me back to the idea that somebody—Great Spirit or otherwise—was trying to tell me something. Annie was in danger and I had to help. If I didn’t They were going to take her, just like they took my brother.

  They say Alaska’s the number one state in the U.S. when it comes to alien sightings. When my brother disappeared sixteen years ago without a trace some people said he’d been abducted. The local police didn’t go for that theory, but did they consider the idea that one or both of my parents were responsible. Both my parents were cleared of any wrongdoing but even now there are a few in town who still whisper when my mother passes by. The police eventually settled on the idea of a possible serial killer, despite the lack of evidence.

  Some blamed the wolves. It was the wolves that took him that day, the wolves that took the others. Whatever their theory of choice, after a while everybody got back to living their own lives. Alaska’s a dangerous place and maybe that makes people harder when it comes to loss.

  I’d just gotten back from Anchorage with the new teacher. After dropping her shell-shocked self off at the cabin reserved for her, I fed Boris and Natasha then swung by the Blue Moon. It was dinner time by then and the place was mobbed. I sat down at a corner table and ordered a latte and fried chicken. Liv and Gavin were both back in the kitchen and from the looks of it they weren’t going to have time to talk for another hour or two. I’d brought a new novel with me, so I didn’t mind the wait. After a couple of minutes Tammy brought me my latte and hurried off to pick up somebody else’s order. I opened the book and started reading.

  “Hey, Pakak,” a deep voice said, “so what have you gotten into now?”

  Hunter Jackson slid into the chair across from me and grinned. I’d known Hunter since first grade and in all those years he hadn’t forgotten his nickname for me. It’s the Inuit word for One Who Gets Into Everything. Apparently I used to cause quite a bit of trouble back in elementary school because I was always curious. Come to think of it, I guess I hadn’t changed all that much. Because I was about to get myself into somethi
ng I wasn’t sure I had any business getting into.

  “Hey, yourself,” I looked up from my book but didn’t close it. “What are you doing here?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed it’s March,” he said, signaling to Tammy. “Spring Break.”

  “Aren’t you college types supposed to go to Florida?” I asked. “Or at least someplace without subzero temperatures?”

  “Warmth is for the weak.” Hunter grinned. “And the rich.”

  Tammy came over to our table and set down my basket of fried chicken, along with a mug of coffee for Hunter. “Fixed it just like you like it.” She gave him a wink. She was at least ten years older than he was but that didn’t stop her from flirting with him. “Extra cream and one sugar.”

  I waited until she walked away to roll my eyes. “Is there a woman between the ages of 14 and 40 that’s not madly in love with you?”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “Actually, I think your age range is a bit narrow.”

  I laughed. “Ten and eighty?”

  “You’re getting closer.” He reached across the table and gently closed my book. “Though there are a rare few who are immune to my charms. Mind if I join you? I know you usually bite if somebody interrupts you while you’re reading, but think of it as an act of charity. I could be doing Jello shots at a Hooters in Miami but I’m stuck here instead.”

  If you asked most women in town if having dinner with Hunter Jackson could be categorized as an act of charity under any circumstances the answer would be a resounding no. Hunter is about as good looking as they come, with chiseled features and hazel eyes that almost match his dark blond hair. He also happens to have the body of a Navy SEAL. His dad has been Amarok’s chief of police for the past ten years and Hunter plans on following in his footsteps. After we graduated he went off to the University of Alaska to study criminal justice. He’d spent last summer in town and Christmas break but I hadn’t expected to see him for a few more months.