Kelly Hashway 

 The Monster Within

CHAPTER ONE

MY life began again the second I pulled myself out of my grave and looked into his beautiful blue eyes. This was my second chance, and he was the one who had given it to me. I wasn’t sure if I was a living being in the traditional sense. What did you call someone who came back from the dead? A zombie? Undead? I wasn’t happy with either term. I certainly didn’t feel like a zombie. I still had all of my own thoughts and memories. It was nothing like I imagined it would be.

“Sam.” My name was barely a whisper on Ethan’s lips. Even in the dim lights of the cemetery, I could see his eyes watering at the sight of me. “It worked. You’re you again.”

I looked down at my body, inspecting every limb. I was wearing a black dress. Mom’s favorite, so I understood why she’d had me buried in it. I stared at my casket, unable to get over the fact that I’d been dead.

I raised my eyes to Ethan’s. “How did you do it?”

“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is you’re here.” He stepped forward and pulled me close to him, running his fingers through my long, dark hair.

I rested my cheek on his chest, wondering what lengths he had gone to in order to bring me back. Before I died, Ethan said he’d find a way for us to be together again. That he refused to lose me so soon. I had shrugged them off as the desperate words of a guy watching his seventeen-year-old girlfriend die of cancer. He’d been so amazing through all of it. He’d never left my bedside, and I remembered he’d been holding my hand when I took my last breath.

I tilted my head back to look at his tear-streaked face. “I have to know how you did it.”

“Shh,” he said softly. “I found someone who could help me, who knew what to do. Besides that, there’s nothing you need to know.”

He was keeping something from me, and that could only mean he’d done something big. Big enough that I would get upset if he told me. Still, being in his arms again was heaven. He’d given me the gift of life. How could I question that?

“How do you feel?” He held me by my shoulders and looked back and forth between my eyes. “You look like you. Everything seem okay?”

“Yeah. I feel like me. Not like a zombie or anything.”

He squeezed my shoulders. “You’re not. You’re you. I promise. I made sure of it.”

“But—”

He raised a finger to my lips. “We have to go. We can’t stay here where someone might see you.”

I hadn’t thought about that. To everyone else, I was dead. My parents, my brother Jacob, my friends—they all thought I was dead. If I waltzed back into my old life, they’d think they were seeing a ghost. That, or they’d have me turned into a lab rat to figure out how I’d come back to life. Even I didn’t have the answer to that. Only Ethan did. And what if they figured out he was responsible for me being alive again? What if they locked him up for messing with the laws of nature?

“Where are we going?” I was suddenly determined to leave as soon as possible.

“My cousin has a little cottage in the Poconos. He never uses it. It’s not in the best shape, but we’ll be okay there.” Ethan let go of me long enough to close my casket and grab a shovel. “I have to get this back the way it was. No one can suspect your body isn’t inside this grave.”

“How long was I gone?” I had no sense of time, but the flowers on my grave were fresh, so I was guessing only a matter of days.

“Four days. The four longest days of my life.” He dropped the shovel and wrapped his arms around me again.

I breathed in his scent, not even caring that he smelled mostly of dirt and sweat from digging up my casket. Besides, I couldn’t smell much better. Nobody ever made a perfume in “Dirt-Covered Corpse” scent. “I’ll help you cover the grave again.”

“No.” He let go of me and picked up the shovel. “You’ve been through enough. I’ll do it. You go wait in the car. I can’t risk anyone seeing you.”

If Ethan got caught shoveling dirt back onto my grave, he’d be in serious trouble. But he was right. If he got caught and I was standing there with him, we’d both be totally screwed. I nodded and walked to his red Mazda 6. I had always loved his car. He used to take me for long drives down back roads, where we could pretend we were the only people in the world and there was no such thing as being terminally ill at seventeen.

I watched Ethan shovel the dirt back onto my grave, and it was surreal. I couldn’t get past the feeling that I didn’t belong here. I’d been dealt my hand, and yes, it sucked, but that should’ve been the end of it. I should’ve been in the ground or in the afterlife. Ethan walked back to the car, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. He threw the shovel in the trunk and got in the car in a hurry.

“Ready?” he asked, out of breath.

Was I? I wasn’t sure, but I had to at least pretend for Ethan’s sake. Whatever he’d done, it was huge. I owed him my life.

I forced a smile. “Ready.”

He started the car, and as soon as we were out of the cemetery and on the road, he took my hand in his. Our fingers laced and rested on the middle console below the gearshift. Ethan’s car operated as either an automatic or manual. When he was alone, he always drove it manually. But when I was with him, he kept it set to automatic so he could hold my hand while he steered.

I rested my head back on the seat and took a deep breath, wondering how long it would take for me to get used to being here again. I should’ve been happy, but something was nagging me. Pulling at my thoughts and screaming, “Look out!” Maybe it was just leftover anxiety from my illness, from knowing any moment could be my last. The final days had been awful. I hadn’t been able to get out of bed. Mom and Dad had let me stay home because I hated being in the hospital. I’d spent too much time in a hospital for one lifetime. Ethan slept over every night. My parents had practically adopted him by that point. He loved me and refused to leave my side, except to use the bathroom.

Mom always said what Ethan and I had was more than high-school sweetheart stuff. Maybe she was right. Maybe the universe decided that, since I wasn’t going live long enough to get married, have kids, and grow old, I should at least get to have the love of my life before I died. I was thankful for that much.

“What are you thinking?” Ethan asked, invading my thoughts.

“You were so amazing. Through everything. You were stronger than I was.” I choked back the tears.

“Hey.” He turned to face me, lifting our hands to his mouth and kissing my fingers. “Don’t think about that. We have a second chance. This is our life now.”

I didn’t want to break his heart with all my questions about how we would survive on our own, how we would support ourselves when we hadn’t even finished high school, but I couldn’t say nothing, either.

“What’s it going to be like? Our life? Will we be hiding out in the cottage?” Coming back to life to live in fear of being seen wasn’t my ideal.

“No. We’re going to get fake IDs. We’ll enroll in school and do everything we would have if—”

“I hadn’t died.” I swallowed hard, remembering the pain the cancer had caused. “Will I have to change my name?” I never liked anyone calling me Samantha, but I’d grown fond of Sam, especially the way Ethan said it. It always sounded like a sigh. A happy, content sigh.

“You can keep Sam if you want. It’s not like anyone is going to come looking for you.”

That was true. As far as everyone knew, I was six feet under. “So you’re not keeping Ethan?” I couldn’t imagine calling him by any other name.

“Would that bother you?”

“A little.” I knew I was being a baby, wanting him to keep his name, but he was my Ethan. He always would be.