A flash of white light . . . and then . . . nothing. When sixteen-year-old Kyra Agnew wakes up behind a Dumpster at the Gas ’n’ Sip, she has no memory of how she got there. With a terrible headache and a major case of déjà vu, she heads home only to discover that five years have passed . . . yet she hasn’t aged a day.
Everything else about Kyra’s old life is different. Her parents are divorced, her boyfriend, Austin, is in college and dating her best friend, and her dad has changed from an uptight neat-freak to a drunken conspiracy theorist who blames her five-year disappearance on little green men.
Confused and lost, Kyra isn’t sure how to move forward unless she uncovers the truth. With Austin gone, she turns to Tyler, Austin’s annoying kid brother, who is now seventeen and who she has a sudden undeniable attraction to. As Tyler and Kyra retrace her steps from the fateful night of her disappearance, they discover strange phenomena that no one can explain, and they begin to wonder if Kyra’s father is not as crazy as he seems. There are others like her who have been taken . . . and returned. Kyra races to find an explanation and reclaim the life she once had, but what if the life she wants back is not her own?
Excerpt:
Finally, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do and when I
couldn’t put it off any longer, I knocked. My throat felt suddenly too tight,
which seemed silly. Of course they’d be mad, but they’d forgive me too.
It was an accident, me staying out all night. Somehow I’d have to
find a way to explain that to them. To make them believe that I didn’t know
exactly what had happened the night before.
I shifted nervously back and forth as I waited, thinking of a
million ways to say I’m sorry. The seconds seemed to stretch and bend and last
an eternity, and just when I was about to give up, when I was sure that neither
one of them was home, I saw the curtain on the other side of the door—the one
above the couch in the living room—part.
A face appeared.
A child’s face.
I was confused, startled by the appearance of the toddler.
I was an only child—the product of parents who’d spent my entire
life doting on me, and only me. I was the center of their universe. Their sun and their moon and their stars,
as my dad liked to say when I was little.
The little boy lifted his hand in a motionless wave, pressing his
chubby fingers to the window and leaving a steamy impression around them. I
thought of my mom, and the way she’d always told me not to touch the windows
because it left fingerprints.
But when the man appeared behind him, I physically jolted. I
looked at the door again; a sense of dread filled every crevice of my being,
like I’d made some terrible mistake and gone to the wrong house. Like there was
some other blue-gray house with my handprints forever imprinted in the walkway.
My panic subsided somewhat when I saw the worn gold numbers
running alongside the front door: 9-6-1-2.
My address.
My house.
My home.
I was definitely in the right place. So who were these people?
These strangers staring at me from the other side of my window?
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Kimberly is the author of the BODY FINDER series (HarperCollins), THE PLEDGE trilogy (Simon & Schuster), and THE TAKING trilogy (coming April 29th from HarperTeen). She lives in the Pacific Northwest, the ideal place to write anything dark or creepy...a gloomy day can set the perfect mood. She lives with her husband and their three beautiful (and often mouthy) children who provide an endless source of inspiration.
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