Free Alive at Sunset (Rituals of the Night Series Book 2) by Kayla Krantz Page A

interrupt her.
    “I’m having a bad day,” Luna continued.
    Max was silent for a moment. Luna knew that he wanted to press more about DreamWorld, but he could tell he hit a wall with her. He knew she wouldn’t listen to a word he said when she was in that kind of mood.
    “Well, what happened to you?” he asked, sounding slightly flustered.
    “Lucky died today,” Luna said, feeling grief crash over her again. She really didn’t want to talk, but she couldn’t hang up when the phone was on the other side of the room.
    “How? Why?” Max asked.
    “She was dead on the porch this morning when I woke up. I think she got ran over and someone put her there and left because it happened in the middle of the night,” she replied. “There wasn’t anything we could do to help her.”
    “Did you see that happen?” Max asked.
    “No, not exactly. I was sleeping. Why?” Luna asked, having a bad feeling where Max was going with the conversation.
    “Why do you think she got hit then?”
    “She had a wound on her neck,” Luna said hesitantly.
    “Uh-huh, just one?” Max asked, his voice growing more critical.
    “Yeah?”
    “Luna, don’t you see what really happened to her!” Max exclaimed. “Come on!”
    “See what?” she asked.
    “Do you really need me to spell it out for you?” he asked, exasperated. “It’s happening again, all the evidence is right in front of us! Luna, you have to believe me that we need to take this seriously.”
    “I don’t have to believe anything,” Luna said, feeling frustrated with her old friend. Accidents happened, and she wished that Max would leave it at that instead of trying to use it to prove his point.
    She finally hit her breaking point. She climbed out of the shower as fast as she could and pressed the end button before chucking it across the bathroom. It hit the hard tiled wall with a clunk that made her sure that it had broken before it fell solemnly to the floor and laid there alone.
    Max was convinced that something was deeply wrong, something ominous that could affect both of them, but Luna didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to ignore it, wanted to mourn the loss of her dog and have life go back to normal.
    But history tended to repeat itself, why should her past be any different?

                                          Chapter Ten
     
    W hen Luna was finally done with the shower, she carefully put on clean, dry clothes. She picked up her phone and went into her room only to throw her phone across the room again. She wondered how it wasn’t broken. It was days like that that made her regret ever buying it. After the phone left her fingers, she forced herself to stop for a minute as she took a breath. She could feel the anger flooding through her, and she knew she needed to calm down.
    When she walked into her room, she realized she had left her precious leather bound notebook open beside her bed. The paper was still a tattered mess on the floor beside it. Her heart sank as she wondered if Amanda had read any of it when she had answered her phone.
    Luna pushed the thought away. She knew that anyone that read it would be bound to have questions, especially Amanda. Luna hurried over to it and picked it up. She balanced it on one hand as she plucked the torn paper up off of the hardwood floor. She realized again that the knife was missing.
    After the discovery of her dead dog, she had completely forgotten about the suddenly missing knife. Nothing else had mattered when she watched her precious puppy bleeding on the kitchen floor. Luna frowned as she remembered that she had assumed Lucky had had it. She felt bad for blaming her once faithful dog. She was faced with the same question again; where had the knife gone?
    She shook her head in the fruitless hopes of clearing it and tucked the paper away into the empty page of the book. She hugged it to her chest and sighed sadly. She was no closer to finding it than she had