Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) by Joy Elbel Page B

that he was a super genius and my total hero at the moment, I picked up my phone and dialed home.  If I was correct in my theory, Misty would have had to have died a few days ago and Dad or Shelly would know about it by now.  I was right—I knew I was right.  And I was pissed.  Seriously pissed.  If she couldn’t win Zach’s heart in life, stealing it in the afterlife was cheating.  And I was gonna kick her sorry succubus ass back to Hell where it belonged.
         Anxiously, I waited for one of them to pick up the phone.  One ring.  Two rings.  Three rings.  This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have by text.  How dare the two of them go off and have fun together now that I was miles away!  They should be home.  Feeling lost without me.  Standing in my bedroom crying because their little girl grew up.  After the fourth ring, I was about to hang up and resort to a text when Shelly answered the phone.
         “Ruby!  How are you?  Is everything okay?  You better come home this weekend!”
         I didn’t have time to chat.  There were two pressing matters on my mind—setting up a doctor appointment with Zach to see what was wrong with him physically and confirming my thoughts on Misty.  Misty first, bodily ailments second.  Selfish of me?  Perhaps.  Honest of me?  Absolutely.  My dad could handle the lab tests but I would have to be the one to deal with Zach’s supernatural woes.  And I could only imagine how hard it would be to get rid of Misty in ghost form.  Knowing her, she would have found a way to raise the bar on hauntings, making wraiths seem as harmless as Casper in comparison.
         “Hey, Shelly!  Things are okay, I guess.  Zach and I will be home this weekend to get my car but I have a weird question for you.  Did Misty Landrum die recently?”
         “What?  No!  As a matter of fact, I just saw her at the hospital earlier today.  She looks terrible Ruby but I get this weird feeling that maybe in the end, this accident was a good thing.  She even smiled and said hi to me.  But why do you ask?”
         “Are you absolutely certain that she was actually alive?  Don’t tell me you already forgot about those rumors over the summer—the ones about Kody Kirk being a zombie!  Jordyn told Chloe who told Zach who told me that her cousin Sasha swore that she saw Kody rooting around in the dumpster down at the Chicken Shack a month after he died!”
         A full sixty seconds’ worth of hearty laughter filled the line before Shelly was able to give me an intelligible response.  During that time, I rapped my nails against the nightstand and rolled my eyes as far back into my head as they could possibly go. 
         “Now Ruby, listen to what you just said to me and tell me that it doesn’t sound completely, well, idiotic—for lack of a better term.   Zombies don’t really exist—you know that.  And yes, I am certain that Misty wasn’t a member of the walking dead.  She was quite pleasant, as a matter of fact.”
         She was right, of course but I wasn’t as gullible as Shelly was.  Well, maybe when it came to the zombie thing I was.  But one smile wasn’t going to convince me that Satan had changed her ways.  But Misty was still alive—that was the only piece of information here that truly interested me.  If Zach was being haunted, his Harpy ex-crush wasn’t the one doing it.  I wasn’t ready to discuss the Zach situation with Shelly just yet but I didn’t really want to lie about it either.  Lying was a thing of my past.  So I handed her a truth that was watered down enough to satisfy both of us. 
         “I thought maybe she was haunting us but I guess I was wrong.  Or maybe paranoid is a better word to describe it.  Anyway, that brings me to my second question.  Zach hasn’t been feeling well since he got back.  He’s constantly tired and downright cranky.  Is there any way that Dad could give him an