Page 179 of Tis the Season to be Bullied

Brutal Bully

Prologue

Life isn’t fair.

Life is fucking cruel.

But we only get this one, so we have to make it count. You can’t dwell on the past. You have to look ahead, count your blessings, and make plans for the future.

That’s what my mother used to tell me, when I was sad because my best friend moved out of town. When I had to have surgery to remove my tonsils. Then, a year later, my appendix.

She’d always have faith that a better day was just behind the horizon.

Go to sleep, my girl.

Have pleasant dreams.

Tomorrow is a new day.

My mother was raped, tortured, and murdered last week during a home invasion. The sadistic criminal who did it then set fire to our home.

Where was I?

At a party, getting drunk and trying to lose my virginity.

It’s been eight days, fourteen hours since my mother’s beautiful soul left this earth. Life should have been easier by now, but it’s not.

See…Mom lied.

It doesn’t matter how many times I go to sleep, I don’t have pleasant dreams anymore.

When I try to count my blessings, I come up short.

My plans for the future?

I don’t have any.

When I look ahead, all I see is darkness.

I’m waiting for that bright new day you promised me, mom.

Because tomorrow still hasn’t come.

Chapter One

Indi

I don’t remember Lavish being this travel-brochure perfect town nestled against the gentle slope of a mountain. Somehow, it’s impossible for me to picture myself ever having lived here. I travelled through Mallhaven—Lavish’s sister town—to get here. The towns share sinister-looking black peaks, as if they were split down the middle when those spires rose up out of hell.

When I drove through Mallhaven, the town was already cast in shadow. Lavish, on the other hand, dazzles in the remaining hour of sunlight.

My GPS sends me straight through town, where my path winds up one of the roads leading higher into the mountains. There are tons of pines here; so many that twilight’s shadow falls around me as I stop outside a fanciful wrought-iron gate. I can’t see a house from here. Instead, I’m surrounded by more firs and the dark, distant peaks of the Devil’s Spine.

Getting out of the junker Mom’s insurance company passed off as a rental car, I head over to the gate and grab hold of one of the iron flourishes.

The metal is ice-cold, slightly damp.

There’s an intercom to one side. I press its button, and seconds later a voice warbles out through the speaker.

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