Oh, this couldn’t be happening to her, and yet that old internal voice in her head was already laughing at her. “Shapeshifter, huh? Is this before or after she drops acid?”

Leo made an irritated noise. “Why don’t you at least try to get into the spirit of the job? You know, it’s really not bad at all. In fact, it’s actually highly entertaining. Live a little, Sue. Let go of the venom. Enjoy it.”

Enjoy it… enjoy being a laughingstock after she’d been working for the Washington Post … yeah. It was hard to Carpe Crap when what she really wanted to do was get her reputation back.

But those days were over. She’d never be a real reporter again.

This was it. Her life. Joy, oh joy—the bad-luck fairy had really screwed her over.

No, she thought as her chest tightened again, that wasn’t true. She’d screwed herself over and she knew it. Heartsick, she turned around and headed back to her desk as she looked at the blog address in her hand.

It’s stupid. Don’t do it. Don’t even go to the site…

But before long, she did, and there it was… a black page with some hand-drawn Gothic artwork on a Web site called deadjournal.com. But her absolute favorite part had to be the header that read: “Musings from the Dark and Twisted Mind of a Damned College Student.”

The girl, Dark Angel, was certainly that. Her entries showed the typical angst of an average student… who was seriously delusional and in need of years of therapy from between the walls of a padded room.

JUNE 3, 2006, 06:45 a.m.

Someone please shoot me. Please. I really can’t stress the “please” part enough. So here I was trying to study for my test tomorrow. Note the word “trying.” So here I am engrossed in the complexities of Babylonian Math, which isn’t really engrossing, to say the least, when all of a sudden my cell phone rings and scares the total shit out of me because the house is even more silent than a tomb—and trust me, I’ve been in enough tombs and crypts to know this for a fact.