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Ghosts Bite Back (Volume 2) (Rules for Vampires) - Hardcover

Buch 2 von 2: Rules for Vampires

Foulkes, Alex

 
9781534498389: Ghosts Bite Back (Volume 2) (Rules for Vampires)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1534498389 ISBN 13: 9781534498389
Verlag: Aladdin, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Roald Dahl meets The Beast and the Bethany in this second exciting middle grade adventure following young vampire Leo as she strives to prove herself.

A vampire and a ghost being friends is unheard of. It makes no sense. The two factions have despised one another for all eternity. But Leo the vampire and Minna the ghost have battled side-by-side: they’re sisters-in-arms, they’re best friends, and they’ll have to work together to vanquish a new, deadly threat.

Summoned to the Ghostly Realm for the murder of the Orphanmaster, Leo must complete three tasks to prove herself worthy of her unlife, each more treacherous than the last. Can Leo convince the Ghostly Realm of her innocence and earn her freedom, or will she be trapped there forever?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alex Foulkes is from Stoke-on-Trent in the Midlands of England, and she’s lived in and around the Staffordshire Moorlands all her life, now with her boyfriend and their dog, Mac, who is just small enough to sit on the back of a broomstick (very convenient!). She works as an inclusion support assistant (a fancy term for TA) at a school where she used to run the library. Alexandra’s passion is amazingly fantabulous books for children. When she’s not reading and reading and reading, she’s writing her very own stories with chills, thrills, and maybe even a talking spider! Visit her online @FoulkesWrites.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: Target Practice

ONE TARGET PRACTICE
The Ghost-Hunter’s Companion is an ancient book from a time forgotten by history. It is also so rare that only one copy exists in the known world, stashed in the labyrinthine library at Castle Motteberg, high up on Mount Moth.

Presuming you survive the trek through the Dreadwald—a dank, dismal, and deadly forest, as vicious as it is vast—a terrible trial will then await you. To read the book you must brave magical warding spells, a telekinetic baby, an enchanted suit of armor, and the single most evil, most horrendously bloodthirsty VAMPIRE there has ever been, among other horrors.

This is a pity, because the book contains expert advice on an oddly specific but worthwhile topic: HOW TO KILL A GHOST. It includes even more information than The Novice Hunter’s Murder Manual, a popular title found in all good libraries today (which is to say, every library).

Ghosts, according to the Companion, are some of the most difficult creatures to kill. They cannot be staked like vampires or burned up in sunlight. Nor can a ghost be slain by silver bullets like a werewolf or cut down by iron or steel like the fey folk. Not only this, though they themselves cannot be touched, a powerful ghost is undeterred from interacting with our world. Ghostly tactics may include dropping a heavy book on your head, throwing you off a cliff, or squashing you flat against the ceiling. Few have successfully banished a ghost. Even fewer live to tell the tale.

Leo the Vampire—a natural enemy of ghostkind—already had quite the story. The question was: How long would she survive to tell it?

Dropping to her knees, Leo ducked behind a lopsided tree stump, snow soaking through to her skin. The impact made her wooden right leg groan beneath her, but she was too busy listening out to pay it any mind. All around her, the Dreadwald forest was abuzz with familiar sounds of the night. Winter insects whirred sleepily in the thorny brush. Pines stretched and sighed. Malevolent laughter approached, winding through the branches overhead—

“Leeeeoooo! Where, oh where, did you go?”

Eerie light emanated from the canopy, casting a sickly glow. Leo hissed and crouched lower, mindful of her wild hair poking out.

It was here, wasn’t it? This was where Leo had left what she was looking for. It was definitely this stump; she had hopped over the River Mothling to the north, turned left at the clawed-up beech tree, and then snuck beneath the bowed willow. Her wayfinding in the forest was second to none and she would need it to escape unscathed. Leo scrabbled in the dirt with both hands, reaching through a hole in the bark to nudge aside the mushrooms that grew inside.

“Are you… HERE?” A branch shuddered directly above her. Leo’s skin prickled at the sight of pale toes drifting through the pine needles. “Oh, come ON now—you know you can’t hide from me!”

The ghost-killing ritual—good for spirits, specters, phantoms, wraiths, and all manner of apparitions—is complex. It demands the total destruction of the bond between the ghost and the world of the Living. Leo knew this ritual very well, having learned every component by heart. The list had been stuck in her head for weeks, replaying over and over in her mind.

To kill a ghost, you needed salt. You also needed sulfur. And smoke. If they weren’t difficult enough to come by, there was also twice-blessed water and the glow of a sunrise—good luck getting ahold of those. Finally, perhaps trickiest of all, you needed a weapon of intent: something to actually wield. Leo gritted her teeth and stretched, reaching deeper into the stump….

Yes!

Her questing fingertips found no weapon of intent. Nor was there salt, sulfur, or indeed any of the ghost-killing items. Rather, there was the thick coil of rope she had previously stashed, its rough fibers stiff with frost. Leo hurriedly unwound it. She could feel her black heart pulsing, strong enough that her usually dormant vampiric blood began to rush in her ears….

“HEY!” she shouted. A thrill knifed through her as the pale light drew closer. “Who said anything about hiding?”

Throwing her weight backward, Leo tugged the rope with all her strength.

A shrub rustled violently. From the tangle of twigs sprang three circular targets. Each had been cut from wood, then crudely painted with white rings and a red dot in the center for—

“BULL’S-EYE!” someone yelled. There was an almighty CRACK as the first target burst into splinters. “Ha! Too easy!” The second target was swiftly snapped in two; the broken half ricocheted off a tree trunk and clattered out of sight.

Zooming overhead, brandishing a shimmering poker like a sword, was a girl who looked about Leo’s age—she could have been no older than perhaps eleven or twelve. Unlike Leo, however, she was floating in mid-air. Her long colorless hair fanned outward as if she were underwater. Her ratty nightgown was cast in the same peculiar translucent white color as her body. She could be made of misty glass all the way down to her bare toes.

The ghost.

Perhaps Leo should have been afraid. The Companion detailed more than three hundred different ways unlucky souls had fallen victim to ghost attacks. They were alphabetically listed from ABSORB’d BY A GHOSTLY FOG to ZIPP’d AWAY THROUGH AN OPEN WINDOWE AND UNTO THE AWAITING JAWS OF THE NIGHT.

But…

“Hey! You missed one!” Leo called out, hopping up on top of the stump. The ghost girl wheeled around, a young tree bending as she swept past it.

Before Leo could react, the ghost sailed straight through her in a freezing rush.

“I know, I know!” the ghost’s voice snapped in Leo’s ears. “Give me a chance!” She jabbed with the poker. A ragged circle was punched through the center of the third target. The deadly prong gleamed sharp through the hole.

A shower of splinters rained down on Leo’s head.

“There!” the ghost exclaimed haughtily. She flew down, brushing her hair away from her face and adjusting the see-through hairband she wore.

Jumping down from her perch, Leo’s feet hit the icy ground. Inside her scruffy winter boots, one foot had gray flesh and clawed toes. The other was a heavy prosthetic, whittled from oak. Thin and spindly and easily six feet tall, Leo loomed over her ghostly companion as she drew herself up to her full height. She grinned her needle-toothed grin. Her black eyes, deep and dark and unsettling, curved happily.

Leo and Minna made an odd pair. Vampires and ghosts, despite both being technically Undead, were as different as night and day. There was a reason the two factions had been SWORN ENEMIES for as long as unliving memory, ever since the very first vampire-ghost war.

The vampires needed the blood of the Living to survive… and an unfortunate side effect of the vampiric diet was that the Living tended to die. The ghosts blamed the vampires for their deaths. The vampires thought the ghosts should stop complaining and continue about their business. And so it had been forever, back and forth, locked into a never-ending cycle of hatred. In some corners of the world, it was now a sport for each side to...

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Verlag
Aladdin
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1534498389
ISBN 13 
9781534498389
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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