Dark Angel Academy (The Complete Series) - G. Bailey Page 0,1

handle me if she tried,” he cheekily replies, resting his head on top of mine.

“Plus, he is a brother to me; we literally grew up in each other’s houses,” I remind Mandy and Jordan. Riley and I… It just isn’t like that.

“Right…” Jordan mutters and walks off with Mandy following behind him, tugging her short skirt down so her ass doesn’t pop out. Jordan grins at Mandy, and she steps a little closer as she laughs at something he said.

“Our dates are totally going to bang tonight, aren’t they?” I ask Riley, who grins down at me.

“Totally,” he replies and laughs. His laugh makes me feel better about ruining his night. The date was over for me the second the ghost sensed me, like they all do, and decided to try and get me to talk to him all night.

“We suck at dates,” I mumble, feeling guilty as I tuck a strand of my wavy blonde hair behind my ear.

“Well, I could have been sucked, but our ghost friend ruined that. What happened?” he replies, and I screw my face up.

“One, gross,” I mutter. “And two, the ghost just hovered in front of me throughout the whole movie, trying to pick popcorn out of my hair but failing. I couldn’t see the movie,” I explain. Riley leans down and picks some of the popcorn caught up in my curly blonde locks that bounce around everywhere. Dad likes to joke that he fell in love with my mum because of her curly blonde hair and how he could store his snacks in there and she wouldn’t know. I push my waist-length hair behind my back and out of Riley’s hand, sighing.

“That’s shit, Katy, has the ghost not moved on?” he asks me, looking around, not that he can see them. Sometimes the ghosts are strong enough that Riley can feel the coldness, the feel of death as I call it.

“There’s a light near him, but he doesn’t look at it like the ones who are going to move on,” I explain, as that’s really the only way to describe the light. Some ghosts have a light nearby, and many of them spend days staring at the light before going into it and disappearing. Others have a swirling black circle near them, and they are forever running from it. I gather the light is what some people call heaven, and the dark must be hell.

Or some version of it.

I think true hell is in the minds of the lost souls with nowhere to go…forever trapped, watching the world go by.

“You want to drive?” Riley asks, holding his keys in the air, the shiny Iron Man helmet keyring hanging inches away from my fingers. I won him that keyring when we were twelve and his dad took me, Riley and Riley’s younger sister to Blackpool.

That was the only good part of the trip…turns out Blackpool has a lot of ghosts.

“Really?” I snap the keys out of his hand and run through the car park, pressing the button to unlock the car doors. Riley’s red Land Rover sits in the corner of the lot, and I climb into the driver’s seat, messing with the seat height as Riley gets in. I love Riley’s car; it’s so much better than the tiny pink Mini Cooper that my parents got me.

I hate pink for starters, but I couldn’t tell my parents that. They went to so much effort to find me the car in the first place.

“See, I knew this would put a smile on your face,” Riley comments, knocking my shoulder with his, and I grin at him. Riley just gets me. I start the car up and change the gears as we leave the car park and head down the empty country road to home. The Lake District is beautiful, but it’s miles between anything out here. I leave my full beam lights on as Riley turns the radio station on, making me shift my eyes to his birthmark on his wrist, the one that looks like angel wings. I have one nearly exactly like it on the inside of my thigh, but mine is a lot bigger, taking up nearly all my thigh. Riley jokes that we were destined to be best friends, and who knows, maybe he was right.

“Are you going to ask Jordan out again?” Riley asks, relaxing back in his seat.

“Nope. We both are on summer break, but it’s nearly September,” I remind him. Riley has certainly had his summer