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Mary expected her seventeenth birthday to be a blowout to remember, courtesy of her best friends, fellow New York City prepsters Amy and Joon, and her doting boyfriend, Trick. Instead, the day starts badly and gets worse. After waking up in a mortifying place with a massive, unexplainable hangover, Mary soon discovers that nobody at school is even aware that it's her birthday. As evening approaches, paranoia sets in. Mary just can't shake the feeling that someone is out to get her-and, as it turns out, she's right. Before the night is over, she's been killed in cold blood. But murder is just the beginning of Mary's ordeal. Her soul gets trapped in a strange limbo, and she must relive the day of her death through the eyes of seven people-each of whom, she finds, had plenty of reasons to hate her. As Mary explores the mysteries of her world, discovering secrets that were hidden in plain sight while she was alive, she clings desperately to the hope that she can solve her own murder, change the past, and-just maybe-save her own life. With its blend of suspense, horror, fantasy, and realism, 7 Souls is an adrenaline rush of a thriller. From the Hardcover edition.

Barnabas Miller haswritten many books for children and young adults. He also composes and produces music for film and network television. He lives in New York City with his wife, Heidi; their cat, Ted; and their dog, Zooey.

Jordan Orlando sold his first novel before his twenty-first birthday. Besides writing, he creates Web sites and works in graphic design and digital cinema. He lives in New York City. You can visit him at www.jordanorlando.com.

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1

6:47 a.m.

There was the pain, first and last, that booming drumbeat of agony in her head—the kind of pain that made her want to curl up and die. It was woefully familiar. She recognized that pounding, that rhythm: her heartbeat, as slow and regular as a muffled bass drum from the worst band in the world, playing their worst song over and over. Vodka-based pain, she’d once called it—a dismal, throbbing ache.

She tried to squint her eyes tighter against the glare—the white glare, like a dentist’s lamp—and that made the pain worse. She was curled up in fetal position, coated in slime that she recognized as her own sweat, overheated beneath some kind of impossibly smooth fabric like the metallic surface of an oven mitt, her hair tangled hopelessly around her face, her ears and head ringing with that endless drumbeat.

Hangover, she thought hopelessly. I’ve got a hangover—a really bad one. It’s my birthday and I’ve got the worst hangover in the world.

Mary fixated on those two facts, holding on to them like floating planks after a shipwreck in a heavy storm, for the simple reason that, beyond those rudimentary ideas, she was stumped. Her name was Mary and she was seventeen—just seventeen, today—and her head was suffering the kind of rhythmic, merciless killing blows ordinarily reserved for tennis balls or nailheads. But that was it. Whatever was supposed to be occurring to her, it just wasn’t coming.

Happy birthday, she told herself weakly.

Squinting made her head hurt more, but opening her eyes fully was out of the question—it was as bright as the surface of the sun out there. She twisted around in her envelope of sweat and smooth fabric and tangled black hair that smelled of sweat and Neutrogena and tried to figure out what time it was, where she was, and how she had gotten there.

In bed, I’m in bed, she concluded. Ten points for that one. The problem was that she didn’t know which bed. There were several obvious candidates. Her own bed, that creaky, narrow, loved-and-hated wooden-framed contraption she’d slept in since she was five, which still had pink and orange paint on its headboard from when her father helped her decorate her bedroom? The bed none of her friends had ever seen, because she’d never invited them to brave the Upper West Side and visit her, because she was embarrassed by her family’s tiny, run-down apartment?

But it wasn’t her bed, because the mattress was just too good—too wide and smooth and firm. Her own bed was bearable, edging into comfortable, but it was nothing like where she was now. I’m not at home.

Patrick’s bed? That was the next possibility: that wide, deep, soft, platform bed that always had perfectly steam-laundered sheets with the highest thread count available, not that Patrick ever made the bed. He didn’t have to, with the cleaning girls and the concierge and the entire staff of Trick’s five-star hotel waiting on him hand and foot all the time, pretending to ignore the tequila bottles and thumbed-open plastic bags they cleared out of the way as he bounded off to school and they began the hopeless task of cleaning his suite.

Mary wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn’t there. No booze smell, she noticed groggily. No Hugo Boss cologne, no Dunhill cigarettes. None of the expensive continental aromas of the young, wealthy gentleman who’s been affecting high-class vices since before he started shaving. The bedclothes—their smooth, unearthly, sweat-drenched surfaces like some kind of NASA space-program fabric against her naked skin—felt expensive enough to be Patrick’s, but again, no young-dangerous-man-of-the-world smells.

So I’m at Amy’s, Mary thought, through the ongoing drumbeat in her head. That was reassuring, somehow: it

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Seven Souls : Sieben Gründe, Mary Shayne Zu Hassen

Seven Souls : Sieben Gründe, Mary Shayne Zu Hassen

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