Read Once Upon a Haunted Moon (The Keeper Saga) for Free Online Page A

splat as it landed on the paper in front of him.
    Oh, crap! He’s big, ugly, and his teeth are bigger than mine…
    Another uneasy growl escaped before I could stop it.
    “You…will…GO,” he answered my growl in a deep, gravelly voice, which should have been impossible for his tusk-like teeth. He gripped the edges of the table again as if he were getting ready to throw it at my head if I didn’t agree.
    “No problem, I’ll go!” I somehow found my voice and the doorknob in the same second and twisted, hopping out of the room as a big crash slammed against the door, followed by smaller ones as the desk disintegrated.
    “Wow…” I mumbled under my breath, and turned to see Ms. Fernandez as happy as ever, with the phone receiver to her ear.
    “Yes, we need to order another desk, please…” she bobbed her blonde head in agreement to whatever the other person had said on the phone, then waved at me as I walked to the door, “Yes, hickory this time, please. The other one was faulty. Yes, not strong at all…”
    I ran out the door and jumped down the stairs, plowing directly into Tommy and Michael who just happened to be walking by.
    “What is Mr. Giles?!” I demanded of the rather startled-looking cousins.
    “The principal,” Tommy answered cautiously as if wondering if I had lost my mind.
    “… and a Woodsburl.” Michael added helpfully. At this point, I really must have looked confused, so he continued, “You know — a Woodsburl. A forest gremlin. They like to hang out in trees a lot. They’re not bad normally. They just have really nasty tempers. I don’t think he’s cut out to be principal, though. He’d be good as a coach or something, I think. I know one thing though, he’s lucky he’s got Ms. Fernandez as his secretary. She’s as human as they come and just thinks he’s rough on furniture.”
    Another loud crash reverberated down the stairs behind us making me wonder what he had thrown next, since I was sure his desk had died upon my exit.
    “As long as he takes out his frustration on that desk, you’ll be fine,” Michael added conversationally, “It’s when you’re around more than one Woodsburl that you need to worry, they tend to get irate really fast then. Hey! Check it out! It’s snowing!” he ran over to the window, “How cool is that!”
    “Yeah, really cool,” I muttered, “Catch you guys later.”
    “Later!” they called back in unison, mesmerized by the snowfall outside the window.
    It was still snowing at noon. Giles apparently had sent word to my biology teacher who shooed me out, promptly at the end of the period, reminding me of my “other classes.”
    “It’s October,” I grumbled, trudging through a snow-covered parking lot, “It never snows in October!”
    I slammed the door of my old truck, and a sheet of snow fell from the window in a great splat as if to say, “Yes, it does so snow in October!” It was lunchtime, and instead of piling through the cafeteria line with all the other “normal” kids, I had a soggy-looking sandwich wrapped in cellophane lying on the seat next to me to munch on while on my way to the reservation for my “special classes.” Disgusted with both lunch and life, I picked up the sandwich and slung it at the passenger floorboard, where the plastic broke, and a long line of mayonnaise smeared across the vinyl floor mat. I jammed my key into the ignition and for the very first time ever, I prayed the truck wouldn’t start, that it would just stay in the school’s parking lot looking like a giant hulking snowball, forever buried, complete with the soggy sandwich — and me — until spring. But, unwilling to cooperate, it groaned to life. Wipers cleared the rest of the snow from the glass, and it rumbled down the road as if it had memorized every curve, and the slick road just wasn’t an issue, and it truly didn’t care what I wanted.
    A few minutes later, it delivered me, unfortunately in one piece, to the reservation.
    I