The Rules (Wolf Spring Chronicles, Band 2) - Softcover

Holder, Nancy; Viguie, Debbie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385741014 ISBN 13: 9780385741019

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

It’s Saw meets I Know What You Did Last Summer in this dark thriller by the New York Times bestselling authors of the Wicked series.
 
Narrated by alternating members of an unreliable group of teens, this riveting thriller will have readers on the edge of their seats. No one is safe, and everyone is a suspect.
 
Callabrese High’s exclusive parties are famous for booze, sex, and most especially, their scavenger hunts. But when the latest invitees RSVP yes, they have no idea what they’re in for. Because this time the high school elite aren’t the ones doing the hunting. They’re the ones being hunted.
 
“The Rules follows all the rules of a truly creepy teen thriller: start out fast, keep the tension high, and kill great characters. Loved it!” —Kami Garcia, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Beautiful Creatures and author of Unbreakable
 
“The Rules is a must-read for fans of thrillers with truly frightening twists.”—SLJ
 
“Fans of the genre will be horrified, just the way they like it.” —Booklist
 
“Holder and Viguié keep the action churning along as they bounce from teen to teen for different perspectives on the action, sometimes recording a murder with appropriate gore, sometimes an escape.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Turn on the fog machine and the theremin, and you have yourself a teen slasher movie replete with twists, deceits, romance, pyrotechnics, and a cute little dog."--The Bulletin 

 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NANCY HOLDER has published more than 78 books and more than 200 short stories. She has received four Bram Stoker Awards for her supernatural fiction and is the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling Wicked series. She lives in San Diego with her daughter. You can visit her at NancyHolder.com and follow @nancyholder on Twitter.  
 
DEBBIE VIGUIÉ is the coauthor of the New York Times bestselling Wicked series and several other books, including the Once Upon a Time novels Violet Eyes and Midnight Pearls. She lives in Florida with her husband. You can visit her at DebbieViguie.com and follow @DebbieViguie on Twitter. 

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1
August in
the Cemetery
fourteen hours earlier
august’s rule #1:
Don’t get caught.
August DeYoung and his sister, Alexa, who had been barely one year older than he, had grown up with just one rule: don’t get caught. Some kids grew up with parents who cared and paid attention. Others had parents who handed down so many rules it was impossible to keep them straight. All August and his sister had learned from their parents was to steer clear of blame. Their last name gave them a free pass. Money smoothed out . . . situations. Use both to get out of trouble. That was how the rule worked.
Until it didn’t.
Almost three years earlier, back in New York, Alexa had broken the rule—­resulting in expulsion, addiction, and a serious breakdown—­so their mother and father had yanked August and Alexa out of private school and rehab, respectively, and “moved” to Callabrese, California, a town so tiny that it shared a country club with three other agricultural pit stops also stinking of manure. Although they opened a fine-­dining restaurant called DeYoung’s, they hired staff to run it . . . just as they hired staff to raise their children while they spent ninety percent of their time back in New York.
Alexa tried so hard. But she got caught in the worst way possible.
She had died exactly one year ago today.
And their parents managed to disapprove even of that. August couldn’t remember if they had cried at her funeral.
He stood in front of her crypt, wondering if it would be for the last time. Set on a grassy hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay, the DeYoung tomb looked like a little marble Roman villa, an eight-­foot-­tall rectangle topped with an angled tiled roof. Four fluted columns anchored the corners, and a sad marble angel drooped on top of each one. The door was black as death and the brass fittings gleamed like halos. The little villa had cost the equivalent of a year’s tuition at Harvard, which Alexa had been expected to attend. But the crypt was a bargain, really, because there was room for a dozen more dead DeYoungs inside it.
They hadn’t buried Alexa in New York or Callabrese. San Francisco was a good address as cemeteries went, and it helped them keep the whole mess quiet.
August was fiercely glad that Lex was finally out of Callabrese, which was nothing but grapevines and torment. Their parents had dumped them in a hellhole. That horrible, hopeless town had killed his sister. And it had been the people she knew, her friends.
They had betrayed her.
He remembered Alexa from the good days, when her light blond hair had glittered and her skin had not been sallow, and whenever you looked at her, she was smiling in a way that made you smile. Tiny and mischievous, like a little mouse. That was the Alexa he missed. But the one he mourned had been nothing like that. Dull eyes, hair of straw, scary thin. No mischief. The trap had sprung on the little mouse.
Once the tomb had been completed about a month after her murder, August had started driving to San Francisco every Saturday morning in his new Porsche. His parents had bought him the car in the hopes of cheering him up. That was their answer to everything: more possessions, more stuff.
It took about an hour to get there. He would buy a bouquet of miniature roses wrapped in tissue paper at Fisherman’s Wharf. He and Alexa used to ditch school and cruise the wharf, eating cracked crab on sourdough bread and guzzling Anchor Steam beer even though they were underage. They’d feed the seagulls and talk about moving to San Francisco once they could leave without being reported as runaways. Lex begged August to just blow it all off and bail out of Callabrese. Not to wait any longer. She couldn’t bear it. She said their parents would never report them because of all the hassle it would cause. He wished to God he’d listened to her.
They used to get their pictures taken in the photo booth and go to the wax museum and send each other on little scavenger hunts all over San Francisco. He didn’t know how many times she had made him find the Yoda statue in the Presidio or pick up something with a sea lion on it. He still had her sea lion collection.
That was how the scavenger hunt tradition had been born. Just for fun. Just to be goofy. Until August got his driver’s license—­Lex never learned to drive because she was afraid of cars—­they hitchhiked to San Francisco and zoomed all over the city via cable cars and taxis. Alexa causing scenes, leaping into fountains and singing “What Does the Fox Say?” at the top of her lungs in the lobbies of all the exclusive hotels. August trailing behind, handing out money with his apologies, smoothing it over. She wasn’t hurting anybody. Not when she was with him.
But back in Callabrese, the fun faded quickly. She got into the kind of trouble that money could not fix. And her “friends” just made it worse.
Her friends. She had never had friends in Callabrese. She had users, the so-­called cool of the school, taking her down after they watched her flail for a few months to gain their acceptance. She didn’t see that at first she scared them, and then they got off on letting her think they’d given her a place among them, when really, it was just to wind her up and watch her spin.
He learned by example. When she died, he did not have one single friend at their school. Correction: not one single betrayer.
God, he hated them.
“You’re getting payback, Lex,” August promised her, his fingers closing around the bouquet that dangled at his side. “Tonight.”
And to execute it, he had a better weapon than knives or guns: an IQ of 160, which made him a certifiable genius. After what had happened to Alexa, he was certifiable, all right. He had spent hours planning his revenge, and it would be sweet.
And they didn’t even have a clue that he was using them, manipulating them. Every smile he had flashed, every joke he had laughed at—­all lies to throw them off the scent. All a part of his big scheme.
After tonight, they would know exactly what he thought.
But truthfully? Realizing he was about to cross that line scared and saddened him as much as the horrible police visit he’d received one year ago this very night. It had been three a.m. His parents were in Manhattan as usual, so it had been just him and Alexa, two feral children raising each other because their parents couldn’t be bothered.
Only, Alexa hadn’t been home. She wasn’t asleep in her room, as August had assumed. She’d snuck out, not because she had been “wild,” like everybody would say later. She’d just wanted to go to a party. She’d wanted so badly to fit in. She would have done anything.
He was standing beside Abbie Meyers, one of a string of ineffectual housekeepers his parents had hired, when two police detectives rang the bell. They stood there grimly, and the tall one said, “We’re afraid we have some bad news.”
Down at the morgue, he had seen what she looked like dead. The place was ice-­cold, and they had a viewing room, where he stood panicking in front of a window. They drew back the curtains like he was there for a slow-­motion magic trick, and there she was. Lifeless and gray. She looked like a rotted rubber doll.
He nodded before throwing up. They took that as a positive ID.
August knew he was in a spiral, going down, down, down. He needed help. His parents made extremely halfhearted attempts to make sure he was coping—­appointments with one of the most highly regarded shrinks in San Francisco, a couple of dinners together where they mostly checked their cell phones for messages. He thought about telling...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385741014
• ISBN 13: 9780385741019
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland