The Shattered Seam (Seam Stalkers Book 1) Read online

  The Shattered Seam

  Seam Stalkers Book One

  Kathleen Groger

  Leaf & Thorn Press, LLC

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Kathleen Groger

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Seam Stalkers Series

  Also by Kathleen Groger

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is a crime punishable by law. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded to or downloaded from file sharing sites, or distributed in any other way via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 (http://www.fbi.gov/ipr/).

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Leaf & Thorn Press, LLC

  Edited by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae

  Book cover designed by Deranged Doctor Design

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 2016 by Kathleen Groger

  First print publication: September 2016

  Print ISBN: 978-1-945040-03-0

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-945040-02-3

  Also by Kathleen Groger

  Rasper Series:

  The Colony

  Seam Stalkers Series:

  The Shattered Seam

  Silencing The Seam

  To my family, I love you!

  There is a space that exists between the living and the dead.

  A hollow.

  A void.

  A seam.

  And once trapped inside, getting out is all kinds of hell.

  1

  Everyone at school wanted to be someone special. The popular cheerleader. The super student. The girl with the highest number of followers on this or that social media site. Everyone fought to be different, to be noticed. Everyone except me. Every day I struggled to just be normal.

  But normal hung outside my grasp, mocking me with its unattainability, its routineness, its boring existence.

  And this weeklong trip to a “haunted” castle in the Thousand Islands of New York had zero chance of helping me achieve normalcy.

  It seemed like I’d been waiting for hours on the docks while the guys tried to rent a boat to take us to the island. The cold from the metal bench seeped through my jeans and chilled my already numb ass, making me wish I was at Nana’s house in Florida. We’d spent every spring break together shopping, staying up late, sharing secrets. I swallowed the ache working its way up my throat. Our annual ritual wasn’t happening this year. Or next year. Or ever again.

  I twisted the silver bangle bracelet she’d left me and took two deep breaths of the arctic-like air. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself.

  My fingers ached to draw. With Nana gone, it was the only thing I had I could count on. I pulled out my sketchbook and penciled the scenery, shaded the jagged branches of the skeletal trees, rubbed my almost frozen finger over the harsh shoreline, smudging the charcoal to blur the edge.

  “What are you doing?”

  My heart jumped at the high-pitched voice. I turned. A girl about seven or eight, with frizzy blonde curls and wearing a long black wool coat, sat less than a foot away.

  “You scared me.” I picked at my chipped hot-pink nail polish, pretending I hadn’t freaked out because a little girl asked me a question.

  She set a doll down between us and stared at her scuffed Mary Jane shoes.

  My heartbeat returned to normal. “I’m drawing.” I added a few more pencil strokes. “Do you like to draw?”

  The empty docks took shape on my page. Ghosts of the summer crowds hid in the stacked row boats and closed souvenir shops.

  The girl peeked at my sketch from under her bangs. “Your picture’s pretty.”

  “Thanks.” I blew into my frigid hands. “I’m Sam. What’s your name?”

  “Amelia.” She picked up her doll and smoothed its straight brown hair. “You two have the same hair.”

  I tucked a strand behind my ear. “Pretty close.”

  “What happened to make you so sad?” She tilted her head, and for the briefest of moments, her grayish eyes glistened.

  I glanced around for her parents, but we were alone. “Where’s your mom?”

  Amelia ran her hands over the doll’s hair again. “She’s dead.”

  The shock I felt had to be plastered across my face. I was an idiot. “I’m sorry. I lost my Nana recently. It hurts a lot to lose someone you love.”

  “Do you ever feel her with you?”

  “I’m—I’m not sure.”

  “So that’s why you’re sad? I—” A bell rang, cutting off her words. Amelia looked to her right. “I have to go. He’s calling.”

  She scrambled to her feet, clutching the doll to her chest.

  “Amelia, wait.”

  She turned.

  I ripped my drawing out of the sketchbook. “Here. I want you to have this.”

  She took the page and touched my hand for a second before pulling away. Her fingers were colder than mine.

  “You’re very nice, Miss Sam.” She skipped away, singing in a voice that should have belonged to someone older. The words floated back:

  “Sitting by the water

  Waiting for my father

  Tick tock

  Tick tock

  Time goes by.”

  She went down the dock, then jumped onto the rocky ground.

  I watched until she disappeared around a boat wrapped in blue plastic sitting on a trailer. I turned back to my sketchbook, and with her image fresh in my mind, quickly drew the girl. My hand shook when I shaded in the dark circles under her eyes.

  Someone tapped my shoulder, and I spun around so fast, I almost dropped the sketchbook into the St. Lawrence River. “Jeez, don’t sneak up on me.”

  “Sorry. Save that kind of reaction for when we get to Shadow Island and document the ghosts.” Uncle Eric ran his silver-ringed fingers through his spiked dark hair, making it stick up even more. “People will love you.”

  I tucked the sketchbook under my arm, stood, and gave him a you’re-full-of-crap face.

  “This episode’s gonna rock. Not everyone gets to spend their spring break with me and my crew on a deserted, haunted island. You have to be stoked.”

  I glanced at the two guys filming the area and moving up the dock toward us. What if I started imagining things in front of the TV cam
eras? What if I started acting nutty with the whole world watching? What if they took me back to the shrink for another evaluation? A noose tightened around my chest and inched its way up toward my throat.

  “I’m so lucky.” My deeper than normal voice sounded bitchy even to me. I’d be on the island seven days. One hundred sixty-eight hours. Ten thousand eighty minutes.

  A lifetime, exposed and alone.

  “I know you’re upset about Nana and not being with her this week. I miss her too. We’re dedicating this season to her.”

  I sniffed back tears and wiped my nose on my sleeve. Nana was the only one who’d understood me, believed in me, helped me through the dark times. Not like Eric, who had a hard time seeing past the lens of his camera. Dad was always too busy with his job as a forensic pathologist. And my mom didn’t have the time for my “foolishness.” “Nana would have liked that. She loved the show.”

  “She loved you more. Always telling me how special you are. Samantha this, Samantha that.”

  His words almost made me smile. Almost. “She said the same thing about you.”

  The two members of his crew arrived. Eric spun the silver cross ring on his pinkie. “Look, I know you’d rather be at home. Or even on that lame trip with your parents. I get it. But I promise this week will be awesome. Maybe even life-changing.”

  I didn’t want a life-altering experience. I didn’t want to search for ghosts. I didn’t want Eric to know I didn’t believe in his quest to capture the paranormal. And I sure as hell didn’t need any help seeing stuff that wasn’t real. I just needed to get through this trip without losing my grip on my splintering sanity.

  It’d been five months. Five months free from imagining things that didn’t exist and being unable to tell reality from fiction.

  “Hey, Samantha, are you listening to me?”

  “Please, Uncle Eric, call me Sam.” I didn’t try to hide my exasperation.

  “Only if you stop calling me uncle. It makes me sound like some black-sock-and-sandal-wearing old fart.”

  Randall Smead, the main cameraman on the show, laughed and stroked his orange-red beard. “Thirty is old, dude.”

  Eric’s glare was colder than the air. “Come on. We should be able to get a boat from this joint. I can’t believe that other asshole stiffed us and kept our deposit.” He dragged me down the rickety dock. The wake from a passing yacht sloshed water on his black boots and pants. “Son of a”—he glanced at me—“hairy monkey butt.”

  I snorted. “It’s okay, you can curse around me. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re sixteen. I’ll try to remember that, kiddo.” He emphasized the kid part.

  “Jerk.”

  He curled his lip, mimicking Elvis. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  His words weren’t deep or southern enough, and I had no comeback to his awful impression.

  Eric walked to the window of a wooden shack on the dock, where a grizzle-haired, raisin-faced man stared at him. “We need to charter a boat.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Eric York, lead investigator for Horrors & Hauntings, and my crew.” Eric turned and gestured at the guys. “We’re filming an episode of our TV show. We seek out and investigate the paranormal and the haunted. We’re on a quest to prove the truth. To prove the otherside exists.”

  When the shack dude saw the guys and the cameras, his eyes widened to the point I was sure his eyeballs would pop out of his skull, cartoon-character-style. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Shadow Island.”

  The guy mumbled something, flipped the sign to “Closed,” and slammed the shutter.

  Eric squinted and pounded on the wood. “Hey, man. What gives? Open up.” When the shutter didn’t budge, he slapped the wall and turned away.

  A crazy tingling and burning zipped along my nerves from my ears to my toes. It was a weird sensation, almost fear-like, that prickled my skin and made me shiver. I shoved my hands into the pocket of my gray hoodie, pulling down the design of my school’s blue tiger mascot on the chest, and tried to shake off the eeriness.

  I glanced at the three guys. They were all acting normal. Well, as normal as you’d expect from professional ghost hunters.

  Eric took a camcorder out of his pocket and filmed the shack. “That’s the fourth mofo who’s refused to take us out there. It’s not like we want to rent a boat for the week. Pisses me off, but that means there’s something to this place.”

  He clicked off the camera, stormed down the dock, and leapt back onto solid ground, clearing the two-foot gap with ease. He never missed a chance to look cool. If I’d tried that, I would’ve landed face-first in the water. His crew followed. With a firm grip on my sketchbook, I caught up to him and the other guys.

  “Maybe it’s an omen that we shouldn’t go on this spook-a-palooza.” I didn’t want to go. “If we can’t get a boat, maybe we should leave and return home.”

  Eric stood straighter and gave a barely-there head shake. “We’re working, not on vacation. Leaving isn’t an option.”

  “Whatever happened to exotic places for spring break? You should have picked somewhere with sun and sand to investigate.”

  “Sorry, chica. We’ve been trying to get access to this place for a year. The only reason we got the green light was the owner, Ms. Davidson, finally answered one of our many requests. She said she can’t afford the inheritance taxes and—”

  “She wants us to document and verify the place is haunted so she can turn it into a spooky tourist resort. Guess her dad bought the old place at an auction. Said he was drawn to it and didn’t know why. But he had one too many paranormal experiences and died from heart failure, leaving his daughter an island castle she can’t afford.” Daniel Levin, the third member of the H&H team, rubbed his fingers together. “She needs to make money to get the renovations done to get it to code. And confirmed haunted places bring in big bucks.”

  “There better be electricity and heat and indoor plumbing.” I hadn’t even considered it might be lacking the basic necessities.

  “Don’t worry, it has heat.” Eric turned the camera to film himself and winked. “At least I think it does.”

  Perfect. He wasn’t even sure if Castle Creep had a heater.

  My parents were in Jamaica, the land of sun and beaches and warmth, for their anniversary. Mom had planned to ship me off to Nana’s as usual, except Nana died, leaving Mom with a dilemma. Cancel their trip, let me stay home alone, or send me on Eric’s haunted holiday. Since Mom doesn’t believe in the paranormal, Dad finally got a break from the bodies, and they both thought Eric’s show was a joke wrapped in good PR, they jaunted off to the Caribbean. And I got sent away, signed waiver in hand, to freeze my face off in the WiFi-less middle of nowhere.

  Daniel glanced down at his notebook full of loose paper. “The last boat charter in this podunk town is over on dock twelve.”

  Daniel. The only thing that promised to make this trip less miserable. I checked out his slightly-longer-than-a-crew-cut brown hair and matching goatee. I normally wasn’t a facial hair fan, but he amplified the rugged look with jeans and a black leather jacket, making it hard for me to stop watching him. The ten-year difference in our ages didn’t matter to me, but he treated me like a kid. Life wasn’t fair.

  “Let’s hope Captain Frank’s Funtime Tours will take us to the island, since no one else seems to give a crap about money.” Daniel shoved the notebook into the back of his jeans. I tried not to stare at how the denim hugged his ass. But I didn’t try too hard.

  Eric rocked back on the heels of his combat boots, turned his camera back on, and filmed us walking.

  “We’ll get to the island, and when we do, we’ll get the proof the owner needs.” He aimed the camera at me. “And we’ll capture it all on video for everyone to see.”

  I covered the lens with my palm. “Ah, don’t film me.”

  I didn’t need my school, teachers, or the world to see me looking rattled befo
re we even reached the castle. My spring break was under a microscope. Just great. Someone was sure to find out my secret, displayed in high-def.

  We walked to dock twelve as the locals stared. Eric and the crew moved with a swagger in a staggered, single-file line: Eric in front, the natural leader, winking and waving; Daniel two steps behind and to the right, scowling and staring, the bad-boy sidekick; Randall behind and to the side, smirking and stepping with as much bounce as he could without jiggling the camera. He filmed how every person we passed stood straighter, tilted their heads, and gave a knowing smile at the charm and charisma and celebrity status pouring from them.

  And then there was me. The locals had to be curious how I fit in with the crew. With my light brown hair, jeans, school hoodie, and the slumped posture Mom was always nagging me about, the locals might think I was cranky and would rather be anywhere else. And they’d be right. Then again, they probably wouldn’t even remember me.

  Most people never got past Eric, the show’s main host and investigator. Compared to him, I was no one, just the “death chick,” as the brilliant minds at school called me.

  Dad spent his days cutting open the dead at the city morgue. Eric searched for those who had passed on. Even Mom’s job as a chef dealt with animal death.

  “I think this gem of a joint is the place.”

  I snapped to attention. Captain Frank’s Funtime Tours occupied a small shed-like building in the middle of dock twelve. The guys filed inside, and I squeezed into the doorway. A dead-fish scent filled the air. If Captain Frank turned Eric down, I hoped the guys would decide they needed to investigate an outbreak of ghosts on the beaches of Cancun.

  “We need to charter a boat to Shadow Island.” Eric’s tone sounded part determination, part desperation.

  “Y’all want to go to there?” Captain Frank’s voice held a dab of a southern drawl. His sun-weathered skin creased in the corners of his pale eyes. “Now why would ya want to do something that stupid? Unless y’all have a death wish?”