Addicted to the Light

by S. E. Amadis

  “I know, Calvin. Just, please, get off my case. I’ve told you all I’m sorry. A hundred times. And I’ll never do something so stupid like that again.” She bit her lip. “Let’s just make a fresh start, okay?”

  Calvin nodded and gazed at the sky. “You don’t think that mean guy you told us about, that Elder Brooks, will ever come after you, will he?” he mused, and a faint frown of worry crossed his brow.

  Lindsay studied him, thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know.”

  She leaned backwards, posed her hands against the concrete behind her.

  “But come off it, Cal. Are you for real? You don’t really believe he’d still give a damn about me, do you?”

  She fanned herself with her hand and feigned a light-heartedness with gestures that didn’t match her expression.

  “I’m sure he’s forgotten all about me by now.”

  We sat in silence, just staring out at the lake. The waters black and churning, dark and menacing in the April sunshine.

  I raised my head to study the beloved features of my best friend in the whole wide world. The friend whom I’d just gotten back and whom it had cost me the world to win back again. The friend for whom I would do anything, give anything. So many people undervalued, even scorned, the value of friendships. So many people lived in a world where friendships came and went like the wind in the sails.

  I knew Lindsay and I would never become like those kinds of people.

  So I turned to study her beloved features — and he was right there. Just behind me.

  The clearly outlined shadow.

  The brooding silhouette.

  The profile I would never forget.

  Hugh.

  I whirled around.

  There was no one there.

  ~ ~ ~ F I N I S ~ ~ ~

  Don’t leave yet! Get your Bonus Chapters from the Carrie Anne Houghton Thriller, A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DIE, at the end of this book.

  Acknowledgements

  Dedicated to everyone who has ever been deceived by or lured into a cult

  And most especially to my friends Eva and Teresa

  I pray you find your way out to the light one day

  No man is an island and there is no way I would be here today, writing books, if it hadn’t been for the help and support of a number of people, whom I want to acknowledge and honour here.

  First I want to thank my mother, who will surely be reading this up in the Spirit World. She always believed I would be a writer one day. Her own dream was to become a writer, and the fact that she never fulfilled it only gave me greater incentive and motivation to not let that happen to me.

  A gigantic thank you and hug to my two sons. I want to thank you for putting up with so many hours when you wanted to go out for a walk around town, but you couldn’t because I was too busy pounding away at the keyboard. Or when you wanted to play videogames with me, but you couldn’t because I was too busy pounding away at the keyboard. And most especially for putting up with semi-starvation because I chose to live on welfare instead of working so I would have the time to write these books.

  A huge hug for my critique partner Marcus Brown. For all your support, for all your advice and information and cover savvy and even for helping me with gnawing cats. Thank you!

  So many hugs and hearts for my critique partner and life support, Netta Newbound, there is no way I would be here if it hadn’t been for you!! Not only did/do you help me in every way possible on the professional terrain, you were also always there for me so I could rant and rage and talk about all the people who made me feel bad or who I felt had let me down throughout the years. The only person I had in my life who encouraged me to keep going and to keep writing and to have the courage to put that writing out there. Words are not enough. Thank you, Netta!!

  And finally to YOU, my beloved reader! I would be nowhere without you. THANK YOU!

  Other Books by S.E. Amadis

  HARROWING

  PATRICIA

  IN THE PRISON OF OUR GRIEF

  THE DEPTHS OF SORDIDNESS

  A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DIE

  TANKER BILL: A MAN IN SEARCH OF REDEMPTION

  Available from all Amazon stores and other retail outlets

  Including Amazon.com

  And Amazon.co.uk

  About The Author

  “I write novels in order not to forget, because I’ve never been capable of writing memoirs.”

  I could never write about a happy, conventional couple living in a happy, conventional, suburban neighbourhood with two cars and one and a half children, a dog and a pet bird, working at happy, conventional, uneventful jobs.

  My heroes and heroines have to walk through fire (or rather, crawl through fire), get strangled, beaten, shot at, drowned, poisoned, get caught in tornados or earthquakes or get attacked by mutant gnats. Or, they have to strangle, beat, shoot, drown and poison other people.

  A story with anything less than these dramatic, hair-raising elements was always too boring for me to even consider telling.

  I believe in magic. I believe that the world is full of mystery, and that there are more things in heaven and earth than could ever be dreamt of in our conventional, logic-based philosophies.

  It’s very important to me to write stories that are impeccable and free of grammatical mistakes and typos. I also do my research to be sure that I get all my facts straight haha! Several people have read through this book before it was published. But if you do spot anything amiss, I’d feel so chuffed if you could send me an email at info@SEAmadis.com and point it out to me. I probably won’t give you any free gifts for that haha, but you’ll get my eternal thanks!

  Outside of that, as a dry, mundane list of facts about me, I’m a single parent from a village near Montreal, Canada, who now enjoys the freaking great good fortune to live happily with my two sons and a creepy, affectionate black cat on the almost-tropical south coast of Spain, basking in summer eight months of the year. Typical activities include running a marathon with the kids to school every morning and cooking frequently for an Always Hungry teenaged son with four stomachs.

  Drop by my website to read juicy tidbits of trivia about the books that I write, quirky facts related to these books that no one knows about, musings about how I write and more. You can find me at:

  www.SEAmadis.com

  Follow me on Facebook for all the latest news:

  www.facebook.com/seamadis/

  To see more books that I write as they get published, visit my Amazon page at:

  Amazon.com

  Amazon.co.uk

  As long as you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing more books, because I LURRVE to make up stories more than anything!

  And if you really dug this book (or even if it was just okay), I would really dig your support if you could take the time to leave me a review on Amazon! Reviews are very important to authors. Even one short line is happily welcomed and very much appreciated!

  Thank you!

  Don’t leave yet! Turn the page to get your Bonus Chapters from the Carrie Anne Houghton Thriller, A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DIE.

  A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DIE

  Patricia was only the beginning...

  S.E. AMADIS

  A CARRIE ANNE HOUGHTON THRILLER

  Seas Of Mintaka Publishing

  Spain

  Copyright © 2016 by S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Published by Seas Of Mintaka Publishing

  First Published: August 2016

  For all inquiries please contact:

  S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com

  info@SEAmadis.c
om

  Malaga 29006

  SPAIN

  www.SEAmadis.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design © 2016 S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com

  A Beautiful Day to Die / S.E. Amadis – 1st ed.

  BONUS CHAPTERS

  Chapter 1

  I lay precariously balanced on the ledge near the top of the cliff. I had been lying there for hours, immobile. My muscles were cramped, shaking.

  My breath rasped in and out, in and out. I was nearly panting, and this faint movement was the only one I dared to make. A single false move could push me over and send me crashing down to the raging river below.

  I wasn’t too sure where this cliff was, or what was behind me. But I could hear a steady roar, a constant churning, a menacing clapping of waves upon rocks, and I guessed that there was probably some sort of river just below me.

  My breath rasped in and out, in and out some more. I wondered if this would be my fate now. If I would spend what remained of my life perched precariously on this ledge here, unmoving, until I died of thirst, starvation or inanition.

  With the long, interminable night looming ahead of me, I had nothing better to do than to mull things over obsessively. Turn all the events over and over again in my mind without respite, wondering just where the heck I’d gone wrong. When I’d veered off the straight and narrow and wandered onto this fatalistic track.

  I realized, with a quickening of my breath and a sudden lump blocking off my throat, that this could well be my last night on earth. If something happened, if I wasn’t capable of lying still enough and I tumbled off this ledge...

  My hands began to shake. I reached out, groping around, and grasped a small, fragile twig, sticking out of the soft mud on the side of the cliff.

  I would leave my life written on the wind. Written in the air. It was all I had left to leave behind.

  “My name is Carrie Anne Houghton,” I traced with delicate movements of my twig in the air. “I’m eighteen years old and I come from New York City.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” I said out loud, almost in a sob, and the twig fluttered from my lax fingers and drifted down into the roaring river below me. “You want me because you think I killed your beloved Patricia. But I didn’t. Whoever you are, if you know about my relationship with Patricia, then you must know it was an accident. Only a bloody, freaky, hellish accident.”

  Patricia had been the ringleader. The head of the orchestra, so to speak, of the gang of bullies who had banded up against me and taunted me so cruelly – when I was a student at Miss Havisham’s Exclusive Boarding School for Respectable Young Ladies – that they nearly killed me.

  I had had the good fortune to be able to return to that school a few years later and exact my revenge on those girls, disguised as the school’s new head teacher, twenty-seven-year-old Carola Hochmeister.

  “All right,” I continued to my imaginary interlocutor. “Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps I did go a little overboard and maybe I was a bit too harsh with those girls, when I took my revenge on them. But I didn’t leave them with any permanent injuries or disabilities. And in the end they managed to escape. I let them go. I didn’t give chase. I felt they’d already paid their price. I let Patricia go. Her death had nothing to do with me.”

  I listened for a reply, but of course there was nothing. Only the sound of the wind, howling impassive and dispassionate through the trees in the deep, quiet forest above me, and the pounding of the river below.

  “Why are you killing them off?” I went on. “Is it you? Are you the one who’s been killing off all those girls? The ones who used to be Patricia’s friends? Why? They were her friends.”

  It had all started with a series of murders back in New York City. One by one, someone started killing off my former classmates. But only the three girls who had been friends with Patricia. The three who had tortured me. And now I was next on the murderer’s list. I had no idea who he was, why he was doing this or what he wanted from me. Only that for some reason he blamed me for Patricia’s death.

  So Jamie and I started sleuthing around.

  I had originally hired Jamie Barrett to work as a teacher when I had been masquerading as Carola Hochmeister, the Head of School at Miss Havisham’s. A cordial professional relationship filled with a profound mutual respect soon extended beyond the borders of the school. When we both left the school, out in the “real” world, our relationship had continued, deepened. The incredible trials and tribulations we’d come up against had only served to strengthen our bonds to each other.

  That was how I’d ended up on the edge of this cliff. Trying to hunt down the person who was hunting me.

  I flicked my palm against the soft earth on the cliff wall. Even this slightest of movements threatened to barrel me from my shaky foundation at the edge of the cliff. I didn’t dare make another move, even though my muscles were screaming for relief. For a chance to stretch themselves out just once. I only needed to listen to the violent waves pounding against rocks below me to cower into silence and stillness again.

  Time and the blackness of the night loomed before me, immense and immeasurable, eternal, unending. I realized that no one could see me from the top of the cliff. No one knew I was here. There was only one way this could end: with me plummeting to my death on the crags below when my muscles gave out and I could no longer keep this up.

  And now my legs were beginning to tingle. An irresistible itch crept up on my shin and I nearly jerked involuntarily. I flexed my fingers, opened and closed my fists compulsively to distract me from all other sensations. It was the only thing I could do without shaking myself from my precarious position on the ledge.

  In spite of all my care, I couldn’t keep this up. Muscles were built to stretch and contract, living beings are compelled to constant movement. My legs convulsed suddenly like frog legs tied to a live wire and the next thing I knew the fragile ledge started crumbling from beneath me. Disengaging from my skin.

  Disappearing from underneath me right before my eyes and hurling me out over the thundering waves into the jagged rocks below.

  Chapter 2

  Two Weeks Earlier

  Jamie accompanied Carrie Anne on the bus to the last stop before Charles Houghton’s Fifth Avenue penthouse suite. Their hunt for the man responsible for the serial murders had led them to Carrie Anne’s father, Charles Houghton. He wasn’t the killer. But somehow he was connected to whoever the real killer was.

  Their ploy was for Carrie Anne to return to her father’s home to keep an eye on him and to act as bait, hoping to flush out the real killer this way.

  Carrie Anne chatted about the first time she had ever taken that bus, up Madison Avenue behind her father’s home.

  “It was when I ran away from Miss Havisham’s,” she said to Jamie, then laughed softly. “I still had my dreams then. I still believed my father would just open his arms to me and take me back in. How naïve I was.”

  They didn’t say much more to each other. They were both uptight.

  “Do you think nerdy Brass Buttons will still be there?” Jamie asked idly.

  Brass Buttons was the name they used to refer to the new doorman in Charles Houghton’s luxurious uptown condominium. That lanky, oafish and disagreeable youth appeared on all accounts to be missing a few light bulbs up there.

  Carrie Anne shrugged.

  “I miss Georges,” she said. “He made life a whole lot easier. But I don’t care who’s there anymore.”

  She hugged Jamie.

  “I just wish I had my father back. My real father.”

  Jamie didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how delusional Carrie Anne still was
about what her father was really like. Everyone knew he was a scammer and a con artist.

  But he supposed, in Carrie Anne’s eyes, he would always be her father first. Regardless of anything he had ever done.

  The bus stopped and they got off. The light summer breeze ruffled Jamie’s hair. He studied Carrie Anne standing in front of him and reflected that later on, he would want to remember every single detail of this moment together. This last moment he would spend with Carrie Anne for a very long time.

  He felt the caress of the clothes he was wearing against his skin, the thin shirt with the light-coloured checks, the sagging jeans. The sunlight reflecting off the high glass windows glaring into his eyes. The stink of smog and contamination, baking lazily above the asphalt on this stiflingly warm June morning. The usual crowds and rude passers-by shoving against them carelessly, indifferent to the fact that he was about to say good-bye to the girl he loved, and he didn’t know when he would see her again.

  He noted Carrie Anne’s knuckles as she grasped her suitcase, white and determined. The sun glinting auburn and gold against her recently-washed hair, the loose waves curling in that same light summer breeze that ruffled his own hair. Her adolescent face that, in his eyes, he found stunning and almost perfect even when devoid of makeup. Even if other people didn’t always agree with him.