Read God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel for Free Online Page A

or made of corduroy and wool. Clover had gotten uncomfortably warm on even the short morning walk to Angie’s house.
    At school that day she’d changed into a cotton, v-neck t-shirt and a pair of shorts. Not even booty shorts , not short-shorts, and certainly not, as her parents had called them, hooker-shorts. They were even an inch past her fingertips when she stood with her arms to her side, as was required by the school dress code. She’d traded the thick, shin-high tube socks and penny loafers her parents made her wear for a pair of Angie’s flip flops.
    The problem was, she’d forgotten her geometry book and hadn’t realized she had forgotten it.
    Mom, though, Clover now thought. Mom found it, going through my room.
    About halfway through second period she was called to the office over the intercom. Clover had gotten a hall pass from her teacher and bopped happily down the hall, no inkling of how wrong things were about to go.
    She turned a corner and saw her mother standing there, textbook clutched to her chest. She looked at Clover and her face twisted into that little moue of distaste she seemed to use so much.
    She doesn’t know it’s me, Clover had thought . I still have time to—
    That was when her mother finally did recognize her. And oh, what a shock it must have been for her, to realize the tramp in hooker-shorts oozing down the hall toward her was her own daughter. The little moue of distaste was gone and it was replaced by something like fury.
    Her mother had drug her out of school that afternoon by the ear as many of the upperclassmen and some kids from her own grade watched and laughed.
    In the car, the screaming had started.
    Then they got home and the screaming continued, her mother only taking a break to call her father at work and tell him what she’d found. Then the screaming resumed and, just before her father got home, her mother had slapped her across the face.
    It wasn’t the first time her mother had hit her but it had been a long time since she’d done so, the last incident having been in sixth grade when Clover had made the mistake of saying church was stupid.
    It turned out that time in freshman year had been the last time her mother had lain hands on her—her father too, for that matter, but it had been the worst. The sound of the slap echoed off the walls of their living room and her cheek had felt touched afire, tears springing immediately into her eyes.
    “You can’t hit me!” Clover remembered screaming and remembered that her mother had seemed to take it as a challenge. She’d wound up and backhanded her, this time across the other side of the face.
    “ I hate you !”
    “That’s fine, sweetie,” Mom had said. “As long you know I’m doing this because I love you.”
    Her mother had slapped her then, twice more in fast succession, like an open-handed, one-two combo, the old left-right, and Clover hadn’t heard her father walk in, or come into the living room, hadn’t known he was standing behind her, already taking off his belt.
    “FUCK YOU!” Clover screamed, her nose bleeding now.
    She felt an explosion of pain then as her father strapped her across the back with his belt, the sound of it like a gunshot. She had staggered forward under the force of the whipping and her mother greeted her by punching her-- fucking punching her-- in the stomach. She had dropped to the ground then on her hands and knees.
    “Get used to that position, dressing like that,” her father had said before bringing the belt down again, even harder this time, right across the small of her back, then once more across the shoulders. She’d been out of breath from the blow to stomach and couldn’t breathe, and all she wanted to do was scream. It felt like she was going to explode somewhere in the middle; between trying to suck air in and trying to scream at the same time, something in her was just going to give.
    Her mother had stomped on one of her hands then, and when Clover heard one of