Knowing I’d be chastised in front of the whole class for being late, I decided to go to the nurse’s office instead, if for no other reason than to buy myself some time to think. My legs wobbled as I staggered to the sink and rinsed out my mouth. Then the door opened and someone walked straight up to me. I recognized the long legs of Kenya instantly and half expected a switchblade to be glimmering in her hand. Instead, she dropped my backpack at my feet. With the threat of imminent death gone, I splashed water on my face and reached for a paper towel.
“What’s wrong?” Kenya asked, and again the usual menace was absent from her voice. Her tone wasn’t exactly caring, but it wasn’t threatening either.
“Nothing,” I said before reaching for my backpack.
She put a foot on it, held it to the ground, so I straightened, too exhausted to negotiate the terms of my surrender.
“What?” I asked, weariness evident in my voice. The fight in me fled the premises every time I had a vision that strong, that blindingly real, but I normally had only one at a time. I’d never been bombarded to such a degree. One was enough to knock me on my butt. Several in a row were enough to put me in a coma; I was certain of it. Yet there I stood. Facing off against the mean girl, not worried in the least. What could she do to me that wouldn’t happen in five days anyway? Or even sooner if Death Threat Guy had his way. Clearly, I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. I should’ve just stayed in Riley’s Switch, where I at least had friends and family. I had no one here. Several weeks into my stay, I still had no one I could turn to in times like this. Then again, who would believe me?
I figured I could stand there feeling sorry for myself, burst into tears lamenting the depths of my aloneness, or I could get in a fight with the mean girl. It was probably time. I’d pretty much met my quota of death threats for the day. If I were going to get my ass kicked, I’d darned sure go down swinging.
Then another thought hit. Since when did I even think the word “ass”? This school was a bad influence.
Another girl walked in. Kenya glanced over her shoulder, then slowly, reluctantly, disengaged her foot. I picked up my backpack before she could change her mind and headed toward the nurse’s office. Or, as it was called here, the infirmary.
I could feel Kenya’s gaze burning into my back as I walked out and down the hall. That girl needed to adjust her meds before she had an aneurysm. Then again, in five days, it wouldn’t matter.
* * *
Since I had no fever and there were no signs of an infection or a virus, the nurse wasn’t sure whether to believe I’d just emptied my stomach into a toilet or not. But when she touched me and her death rushed into me, clenching my gut, causing me to hurtle toward her wastebasket and dry-heave into it for a full minute, she shut up, put a cool cloth on my forehead, and darkened the room to let me get some rest. Outside, clouds hung low and blocked what little sun might have filtered into the room through a small window above the nurse’s desk.
Normally, the low light would have been comforting, but the nurse’s death was worse than the rest. Death was hard to see anyway—surreal, unwanted—but hers was darker, more brutal. The black figures from the storm entered her and systematically broke her bones. One by one, her own muscles spasmed, jerked, and contracted until her fragile bones snapped under the pressure. An agonizing jolt of pain shot through her with each break. Causing her body to spasm more. Her spine to bow. Her ribs to crack. Her lungs filled with her own bodily fluids and she could no longer scream. She lay in a contorted heap of limbs and torso until the sweet release of death came when she drowned in her own blood.
I swallowed the bile burning the back of my throat. Fought the feeling of drowning and drew in long gulps of air. The infirmary smelled like sanitary hand gel. It was a clean scent and helped calm my stomach.
So the clouds were not clouds at all. The darkness was a plethora of spirits that had escaped onto this plane, just as they had when I was six. The gates of hell had been opened before, and I’d seen it in a premonition when I was barely old enough to pick out my own clothes. I’d led my parents there, hoping they could close the lightninglike fissure in the sky, the one through which beings as black as midnight were escaping from their plane and onto ours. A demon came through. One demon, and after my parents disappeared into the fissure, after they vanished, the demon dematerialized and I breathed him in. His essence scorched my throat and filled my lungs, and he’d been inside me ever since.
But even then, the spirits didn’t enter people and torture them as they had in my visions. Maybe spirits were like people. Maybe some were worse than others. Meaner. Sociopathic. Or were they demons? The demon that entered me was a massive, shining black guardian of the underworld. I wondered if a demon had entered the nurse—her death was so horrific—or if it was a spirit. A fallen angel or a former human. The demon that entered me did nothing to harm me. Not ever, but I’d been told my experience was extremely unusual. Since I had nothing to compare it to, I couldn’t have said one way or the other.
I lay there with my eyes closed, not sleeping but replaying the visions over and over in my mind. After seeing that, after hearing the snap of bones, feeling the rip of flesh as the jagged ends protruded out of the nurse’s limbs and torso, I figured I would never sleep again.
I turned onto my side, peeked out from under the cloth, and unzipped a side pocket on my navy backpack. My fingers found what they sought instantly. A picture I’d copied from an old annual, one that had actually captured the Angel of Death scoping out his next assignment, which happened to be at Riley High in 1977. Of course, no one but my friends from back home and I knew that. He looked like any other student, only with muscles that rose and dipped magnificently and eyes that glimmered with an intelligence far beyond his presumed years.
A crowd of students stood around the flagpole of the old high school. They were laughing, as though in disbelief, at what must have been some kind of a prank. Mr. Davis, the principal at my old alma matter, Riley High, had an older brother named Elliot. When Elliot was in high school, he and some friends had chained themselves to the pole and were holding a sign that I still couldn’t quite make out.
But they were laughing, too. Every student in the photo was laughing, except one. A boy. He was standing closer to the camera yet apart from the rest, his stance guarded, his expression void, and as always, my gaze gravitated toward the image of Jared Kovach.
He looked exactly like he did now. Same boyishly handsome face. Same mussed hair. Same T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms long and sculpted like a swimmer’s. There was no mistaking the wide shoulders, the solid build, the dark glint in Jared’s eyes. Even the bands of tattoos peeked out from under his shirtsleeves, the rows of angelic script that encircled each of his biceps. He was just as breathtaking back then, just as surreal.
The first time my best friends and I saw that picture in a yearbook from the ’70s, we had a difficult time swallowing the fact that it was the same guy. Until we learned what Jared was. Why he was there in the first place. He’d been sent for Elliot Davis much the same way he’d been sent for me. That was his job, after all. That’s what the Angel of Death did. He answered prayers, keeping people safe when they might have died or tweaking the timing, nudging it a bit, in an effort to keep someone else safe who died as a result of the first person’s tragedy.
For me, his mission was to take me sooner than nature would demand. On the day Jared showed up in Riley’s Switch, I was hit by a truck, flew fifty feet in the air, and landed on solid concrete, sliding several more feet before crashing into a lamppost. With bones crushed and organs pulverized, I lay there as Jared came to stand over me. He kneeled down, and instead of taking me, per his orders, he brought me back to life. I felt it flow into me from his touch, warm and revitalizing.
I found out later why he’d been sent. His presence was in answer to the prayers of a little girl who just wanted her father to come home safe. But because I would’ve still been alive whe
n the ambulance arrived, because I would’ve been medevaced to Albuquerque in a futile attempt to save my life, because my grandparents, in their haste to see me, would’ve sped through the mountain pass, crossing the center line and having a head-on with the little girl’s father, Jared was sent to take me sooner. The little girl’s father would’ve died peripherally, as a direct result of my getting hit by that truck. Jared’s mission was to take me before I ever made it to the hospital, before the helicopter was even called, but he’d disobeyed those orders and saved me instead. Much to my glee. As a result, however, because he broke one of the three celestial laws of his kind—he’d changed human history—Jared was now stuck on earth as punishment, helping a group of us fight an upcoming war. This war. The war I’d just seen in my visions.
Or at least that was the plan before I ran off into the night. I thought that perhaps by disappearing, I would change the future. The war wouldn’t happen.
Clearly, I’d made a mistake.
The war was going to happen anyway. My running did nothing to deter it. I was hoping that all the prophecies were wrong. The ones that said the last prophet of Arabeth, aka me, was going to stop a supernatural war before it ever started. I didn’t know how to stop a war, supernatural or otherwise, and if my visions were correct, that meant the prophecies were wrong. I was about to stop absolutely nothing.
With sadness weighing me down, I touched the picture, let my fingertips slide along the cool surface until it paused on Jared. Then I took a deep breath, concentrated on the image, and dived inside.
When I first began entering pictures, there was a kind of curtain, a barrier I had to get past. That was no longer the case. I could now enter any picture in a matter of seconds. I barely had to concentrate anymore, I’d become so proficient at it.
And this particular picture, I’d entered at least a hundred times. Maybe two. I knew what was waiting for me. I had memorized the roar of laughter and idle chitchat. I automatically squinted my eyes, trying to block out the blinding sun, even though I could only see in. I was not physically there. I couldn’t really squint my eyes or raise my hand to block it.
Just like every other time, I entered the scene at the exact same moment. I felt the heat of the New Mexico sun rush over me. It was warm and comforting, so opposite the damp, cold air of Maine. And the fact that I could feel the sun at all was new. When I first began, I could only see into the picture. Could only hear voices, music, birds … whatever gems the picture held. But now I could feel things. The heat in the air. The texture of the brick building Jared was leaning against. The soft breeze as it ruffled his hair. And I could manipulate my vantage point. I could look around, see things that were not in the picture itself.
I looked up at the boys chained to the flagpole. The sign that I could never make out in the picture read STATE CHAMPIONSHIP OR BUST. I’d learned that it was actually part of a skit for a pep rally they were having outside. The football team was going to the championship playoffs, and the school was sending them off in style. Elliot Davis, the team’s quarterback, died barely an hour after this picture was taken. I wondered what it did to the rest of the team. How his death affected the players. I knew that they didn’t win state that year, but I wondered if they even went. If they played at all.
I glanced to the side and saw the now familiar faces of the cheerleaders as well as several other students, mostly girls, looking toward what they must have thought was a new kid at school. But Jared was not there to attend class. He had been sent for Elliot and was … what? Stalking his prey? Biding his time? Did he like to watch humans interact? Did we fascinate him? Repulse him? I couldn’t help but wonder what he thought of us.
I moved forward until I was standing beside him. The thing about going into these pictures was that I was a ghost. No one could see me. No one could hear me. I was simply an observer. I could not interact or alter my surroundings or change the outcome. I could only watch.
And yet, Jared could see me.
“I thought you were going to stop doing this.”
I turned to look at him.
“Why are you here?” I asked. I’d thought of the question only recently, but now it burned inside me. “Why did you show up to take Elliot Davis an hour before his time when you can appear, take a person, and disappear within the span of a heartbeat?”
He regarded me from underneath his long lashes, and said quietly, “I came to see you.”
I blinked in surprise. “I don’t understand. How could you—?”
“You look tired,” he said, interrupting.
“I’m fine.”
The barest hint of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. He leaned over and whispered into my ear. “Go to sleep.”
Before I could protest, the world fell away and oblivion, that dark vortex of nothingness, swallowed me whole. It was comforting and warm. I hadn’t been warm in weeks, and I suddenly felt as though I weren’t alone at all. As though I’d never been alone.
* * *
“Lorraine?”
My lids fluttered open and I peered into the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw a pale face with round-rimmed glasses and a light dusting of freckles. Crystal gazed down at me, her blue eyes huge with worry. I lay there a moment, trying to gain my bearings, then bolted upright, almost head-butting her in the process. The world was about to end and I was napping. Napping!
Crystal almost fell back, her arms flailing for something to grab on to. She regained her balance, then said hurriedly, “I’ll get you some water. Would you like some water? I’ll get you some water.” She jumped up to grab a cup just as reality crashed through the surface.
“Someone’s trying to kill me!” I said, staring straight ahead in astonishment. “And the world is going to end.”
She paused, bit her bottom lip in thought, gestured toward the cup. “So, no water?”
I swung my legs over the side of the cot and she hustled forward to help me stand. After swaying a little, however, I sat back down, the effects of the visions still weighing heavily.
“Should I get the nurse?” she asked.
I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Fought to regain my balance. This had happened before. The worst was when I saw a classmate die of thirst in the desert. Death by dehydration was not a good way to go, and I was thankful when Crystal drew me a cup of water anyway.
She put it in my shaking hands before sitting beside me on the cot. “Did you say someone is trying to kill you?”
Apparently parched, I emptied the cup in three gulps, then handed it back to her. She rose to refill it, then took up position beside me again. I was short for my height and Crystal was actually a tad taller than me, yet I couldn’t help but think of her as small, childlike. It was her innocence. Her inquisitive disposition. So when her brows cinched together, her expression grave, and she said, “You know you can tell me anything, right?” I was surprised at how mature she sounded. How concerned.
I nodded and decided to let her into my warped little world. Even though I probably shouldn’t have, I took out the note and showed it to her. I simply didn’t know what else to do. Who else to talk to.
“Do you recognize this artist?” I asked.
She studied it, turning her head this way and that, then said, “My nephew draws like this, but he’s not usually so morbid. Is that supposed to be you?” She pointed to the stick figure on the ground covered in blood.
“That’s my take on it, yes.”
She turned her head again, furrowed her brows in concentration. I wanted to hug her, she was so adorable, but that would mean touching her. That would mean getting a vision. I didn’t want to see her death. I didn’t want to see the deaths of her friends or family members, the devastation and fear in her eyes, so I stayed insulated with several inches between us.
“What is he doing?” she asked, indicating the dark matter leaving my mouth and entering my attacker’s. “Why is he throwing up on you?”
Surprised, I regarded the pictur
e again and realized that is exactly how it would look to someone who didn’t know what was inside me. Who didn’t know how it entered my body or the fact that it would probably exit the same way.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“That’s just disgusting. We have to take this to the headmaster.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll figure it out.”
“Lorraine, this is a death threat.” She shook the note at me. “They don’t take these things lightly. He has a knife.” Her voice rose an octave as she spoke.
I took the note back and tucked it into my pocket. “I know, but it’s okay. Someone is just trying to scare me.” It was too much to hope that she would know who did it, but it’d been worth the shot.
“Scare you? Well, then, it’s working,” she said. “On me anyway.”
I pulled out my cell and dialed the phone my grandparents got that was reserved just for me. For my calls.
Crystal ignored the communication device at my ear. “Maybe you’re not scared, but trust me when I say fear has entered the building.”
“You have reached a private number. Please leave a message.” I soaked in the soothing sound of my grandmother’s voice and waited for the beep.
“I’m scared.”
Beep.
“Grandma, Granddad—,” I began, but Crystal interrupted me.
“I mean, who wouldn’t be scared?”
I shook my head and continued. “—something happened. Something changed.”
“You act like this is nothing,” she ranted.
“Call me back,” I said into my phone. “Please.”
“Like you get death threats every day.”
I cupped my hand over the mic and whispered into the phone, “I need help.”
Oblivious, Crystal stood and waved her arms about wildly. “We need to get the authorities involved.”