Stargazer (Evernight Book 2) by Claudia Gray

Author:Claudia Gray [Gray, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Teen & Young Adult, Literature & Fiction, Girls & Women, Social & Family Issues, Romance, Paranormal, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy, Paranormal & Urban, Horror, Paranormal & Fantasy
Amazon: B001NLKUIW
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-09T23:00:00+00:00

“Let’s.” Balthazar’s hand closed around mine, and at the perfect moment, just on the beat, he pulled us back into the dance. The swirl of people all around us caught me up, as if I could feel the tempo of the music in my own pulse. The taste of blood had made me dizzy with excitement. Never again, I thought. Lucas wouldn’t like it. At all.

I stumbled a little on the slick floor and started to apologize—but then I slipped again. When I grabbed Balthazar’s shoulders to steady myself, he frowned, and I realized that he too was having difficulty remaining upright. We both looked down to see that we stood on ice.

All around the room, people began to murmur and shout in dismay as the ice thickened, crackling from a paper-thin sheet into a thick, uneven, blue-white surface. A couple of people fell, and one girl shrieked. I caught sight of a bundle of white flowers tied with ribbons on the wall; each petal was sparkling with frost, rigid, frozen solid.

Balthazar muttered, “Is this—”

“Uh-huh.”

The cold, shivery wind I remembered swept through the great hall, and some of the candles flickered out. The orchestra broke off playing, instrument by instrument, moving from melody to cacophony to silence. Some of the chaperones had begun pulling people toward the doors, but as scared as everyone was, nobody wanted to look away. Bluish ice covered the walls and frosted every single window; icicles as thick as stalactites hung from the ceiling rafters and descended lower every second. They were two feet long, five feet long, then ten, and thicker around than I was—all within moments. I could feel flecks of cold against my skin, but it wasn’t soft and snowy the way they’d been before. Instead, they were needle pricks like sleet.

“What did we do?” I clung to Balthazar’s jacket. “Did we wake up a wraith?”

“Wraith?” Courtney had apparently overheard the last word we wanted anybody to overhear. “This is a wraith?”

People started to panic. Everyone rushed at once for the exits, but people were skidding on the ice, yelling and shouting, falling over one another, and creating a mob. Balthazar grabbed me around the waist and slung his other arm over my head to protect me from the fray. The cold breeze whipped through the room, extinguishing the rest of the candles. Every second, it became darker; every second, I became more afraid.

They’ll know what to do, I thought, though now I was trembling all over. Surely Mrs. Bethany or my parents or somebody knows how to handle this because, oh my God, somebody needs to handle this and make this stop—

In the frost across the one plain window of the great hall, a few lines suddenly melted clear, and those lines formed a scrawled word: OURS.

Then the ice cracked everywhere: walls, ceiling, floor. As we staggered sideways, thrown off balance by the jolt beneath our feet, I heard a terrible groaning above. I looked up and saw the stalactites tremble—and then they fell, ten-foot-long knives of ice stabbing downward toward all of us.

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