Free DARK SOULS (Dark Souls Series) by Ketley Allison Page A

gaze.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
    I decided to give up the act. He clearly knew something that I didn’t. “How—how did you know?”
    His eyebrows rose at that. “You’ve really got to be kidding me. You’re a newbie? I’m not dealing with any newbie. If the Hunter gets you, it’s your own Sect’s fault for letting you out way too early. Try asking the Hunter for mercy before you cease to exist. Nice knowing you.”
    He started to turn but I called out, “Wait! What’s going on? Please help me, I don’t know what’s going on...” I trailed off, my stomach clenching hard as I watched him go.
    “Talk to a member of your Sect!” He called back over his shoulder. “I ain’t dealing with this shit. I can barely survive on my own.”
    I shook my head back and forth, totally and utterly confused.
    “At least tell me your name!” was all I could muster. I didn’t really know how to respond to his previous sentences. They sounded like words from the English language, but the way he was stringing those words together made absolutely no sense at all. 
    “Derek. That’s what this host’s name is anyway, and because of your stupidity, I probably won’t have it much longer.”
    I was surprised he even answered. Even though he only managed to confuse me even more, at least he gave me something to grasp onto. Hunter. Sect. Host. Trine.
    He also managed to convince me, if only a little, that I wasn’t alone in this.
    There was at least one other person who was just as crazy as I was.
    ***
    Once back in my apartment, after a particularly tough climb up the stairs, I dropped down onto my mattress, staring up at my dusty ceiling fan and wincing when I touched my fingers to my nose.  
    Tired and confused, I let the twisting rhythm of the fan lull me into a state of complacency, a place where I didn’t have to think anymore or solve any supernatural problems that were sprouting up in my life lately. At around the hundredth spin, my eyes shuttered closed and I drifted off, praying for a deep, dreamless sleep.
    It didn’t happen.
    I slept fitfully, dreaming about lost souls and broken hearts, awakening only at the slam of the apartment door beside me, signaling my inconsiderate neighbor’s late night departure.
    I pulled out of the sheets that had tangled around me in my sleep and headed over to the floor length mirror stuck on the back of my door to assess the damage that Derek’s book caused me.
    It was what I expected. All swelling, all traces of any impact were gone. My ski-slope nose was completely back to normal, almost as if a strange guy had never lobbed a book at my face in alleged self-defense.
    Something was happening with my body; it was just a matter of narrowing it down and figuring out just what, exactly, was occurring. My mind flashed with the words Derek had used. Certain key phrases that didn’t make sense to me right now, but maybe the trusty Internet could figure out for me.
    I made my way to my desk tucked into the corner, just to the left of my clouded-over windows. I opened my clunky laptop in anticipation. Maybe I could get to the bottom of this sooner than I’d thought.
    I started by typing out all the words Derek had used at once: Trine Hunter Sect Host , but that didn’t bring up anything relevant to my research. Everything from online gaming blogs to the “ Dallas cast members” came up, the search engine flooding my monitor with irrelevant results.
    Always up to a challenge, I rolled my shoulders back and readied myselfto continue jousting with the Internet. I decided to pair the words into categories, and when that didn’t work, I entered each term in separately.
    Nothing. The search engine didn’t pull up anything useful to my cause. I clearly needed more information.
    Hmm. Maybe what I was trying to discover went a lot deeper than what modern search engines could find.
    Although I hadn’t really been to the New York Public Library, I figured that it