A Dance with Darkness: An Angelfire Novella (HarperTeen Impulse) by Courtney Allison Moulton

heavy, inky, merciless, and without warning. I wheeled around and slashed with both swords. The firelight illuminated the colossal, bearlike shape of the reaper as he reared up, his front legs outstretched, waving paws the size of dinner plates. His eyes were black and empty like a shark’s, and his Goliath jaws dropped to release a roar like an oncoming train straight into my face.
    I ducked into a roll as the reaper swiped his foot-long claws at my head. I jumped to my feet and bounded backward. The reaper heaved toward me and took only a half stride to reach me. He spread his mouth again, revealing a set of enormous teeth that could have belonged to a sabertoothed cat, each fang easily as long as my forearm. He reared over me and his roar thundered once again through the factory. I dropped to my knees and slashed at the reaper’s chest and across his hind legs. He collapsed in a spray of blood but righted himself quickly and leaped into the air, landing thirty feet away from me. His flesh sizzled where the silver blades had sliced and the fire had burned. He wheeled and charged.
    I stepped back onto my right heel and prepared for impact. Instead, the reaper slipped to my left just before he would have collided with me, and he disappeared for a moment. Claws slashed down my back, shredding my body like hamburger meat. I screeched and fell forward. I shuddered and dropped my swords. The pain I expected never came; I felt nothing at all.
    The reaper was distracted by my pooling blood for a moment as I lay unmoving. He paused to taste it and growled a guttural noise of approval with his inhuman mouth before descending on me to finish the job.
    I couldn’t finish my last breath before I died.
    I sat straight up with an enormous gasp of air, feeling as if the life had been taken right out of me. I reached around my back and felt smooth, undamaged skin there and let out a sigh of relief. My nightmares were getting more and more real every time I slept, and I began to worry that I really needed to go back to therapy.
    Beside me, Kate stirred. She sat up with me and frowned. “You okay? Bad dream?”
    I tucked my knees up to my chest and rested my cheek against them. “Yeah.”
    She touched my hair soothingly. “Want to watch a movie?”
    I nodded. Kate never judged me for my nightmares, never treated me like a psycho, and she understood better than anyone else that the meds and therapy didn’t help. She was the only one who listened to me instead of trying to constantly diagnose me. I folded over and curled into a ball while Kate fumbled through the DVD binder on the floor in front of my TV. We went through three fun movies, including one of my favorites, Sixteen Candles , to remind myself that it was my birthday the next day. That movie always made me feel better. Happy movie marathons—and pancakes—had been our bad-day cure since we wore pigtails, and I figured the ritual would follow us to college the next fall. But attempting to make today seem less crappy was useless.
    “What next?” Kate asked, dragging the binder onto my bed. “ Clueless ?”
    I shook my head. It was after four now, and I was beginning to feel restless. “I don’t feel like watching another movie. Do you want to go do something?”
    “Like what? The mall? We should investigate before Gucci’s fall stuff is picked clean.”
    I scrunched my face. “No, I don’t want to have to straighten my hair and look decent. We could just go get ice cream.”
    Kate brightened a little. “Sounds good. I’m game.”
    I pulled on jeans and a lightweight zip-up hoodie over my tank top. “Should we call Landon to meet us there?”
    Kate gave a quick nod and dialed him up. We let my mom know where we were going, headed outside to Kate’s BMW, and drove to Cold Stone. Landon was waiting for us in the parking lot, talking to a few other people in our circle of friends: Chris, Evan, and Rachel. Chris was on the soccer team with Landon, and they’d been best