by Shaye Easton
“Yeah, and you’re martial arse at it.”
Crickets. Levi visibly cringes. “Sis, that was probably the worst pun you’ve ever made.”
Lauren folds her arms, not even close to be embarrassed. “Thanks, Levi, much appreciated. I guess we should skip me, ‘cause we all know I’m Lauren Archer, shitty pun princess, related to shitty person prince over there.” Levi bows. “So last but not least—”
“It’s Evan, right?” I ask. I haven’t said a word in ages. And the way everyone looks at me suggests they’d forgotten I could speak.
Evan is in many of my classes. He’s very tall and fairly thin but still manages not to be lanky. I can’t exactly say he’s attractive either; he has slightly chubby cheeks, plain brown hair and stock standard brown eyes. He’s the sort of person who blends in with the crowd, whose face you forget the moment you look away. I’m surprised I even recognised him at all.
“Evan Whitaker,” he says, and then starts laughing. “I suppose you could say I’m the normal one.”
This launches everyone into another round of arguing and chucking insults over the table. I watch on, amazed. It almost feels like I’m a part of something normal. But the more I watch, the more I recognise the difference between me and them. The more I start to realise I’m still alone.
“Okay, Melissa, your turn.”
“My what?”
Kira laughs. “You should see your face. Anyone would think I’d slapped you. Let’s hear it. Name and one thing about you.”
Suddenly my tongue feels like a dry lump in my mouth. “I, um…I’m Melissa Croft, which you all know, and I—”
“I swear to god, Melissa, if you tell us you make the weather cold, I’m gonna fucking deck you.”
I know Levi’s joking—he smiles, and everyone at the table laughs—but it doesn’t help to take off any pressure. What am I without my disease? What could I possibly tell them?
“I…,” words fail me. I sit there, trying desperately to think, and my mind goes blank. The only thoughts that surface in my mind are things I can’t say: I’m not Melissa Croft, I have supernatural abilities. There are people out there trying to kill me.
I look to my left and spot Caden across the courtyard, sitting with Branden and Drew and their pack of dogs. Why? I think of him, as if my question can traverse the space between us and coalesce in his mind. Why am I like this? Why is all this happening? What’s so special about me?
“Melissa?”
I realise the group is still waiting on my answer. “Someone broke into my house the other night,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I nearly died.”
Everyone’s staring at me, jaws dropped, and it dawns on me that that was not the best thing I could have said. Levi laughs awkwardly. “I think Ice Queen’s special talent is bringing down the general mood. You were meant to keep it light, Croft.”
Lauren looks at me like I’m suddenly a complete different person. “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay.”
“Hold on a sec.” Piper leans forward, arms on the table. “I thought I heard something about this. It was on the news, right?”
I nod. “The other morning, yeah.”
Piper’s eyes become golf balls. “They said he strangled you. What the fuck, why are you at school right now? I’d be traumatised.”
I shrug.
“Did she just…shrug?” Cooper asks, incredulous.
And now everyone is silent and staring again, like I’m a curiosity in a museum, like I’m an alien. This is what I was afraid of. This is what always eventually happens.
I turn my eyes away from their scrutinising gazes, looking back across the courtyard. Someone says something and the conversation moves forward, but I’m no longer interested.
I find Caden again with my eyes. He’s laughing along with his group, his mind a million miles away from thoughts of me. I can’t understand it at all. One moment he wants to tell me everything. The next he avoids me. One moment, he wants to move me out of my house to keep me safe. The next, it appears he couldn’t care less. It just doesn’t make any sense.
As if he can somehow sense I’m watching him, the laughter dies on his lips and he turns his head in my direction. There’s a frown on his face, though I can’t understand why. Then his eyes skip past me, across the courtyard.
I follow his gaze, and my heart drops.
The ghost is back.
There’s no way to tell how long it’s been watching us. It’s far enough away that I can’t feel the cold it radiates. I can only see its pale grey skin and dark soulless eyes. A chill runs down my spine and my heart starts to beat faster. Seeing it, unmoving and undeniably there before me, makes everything that’s happened in the past few days that much more real. Because you can’t deny the presence of the supernatural when you’re staring at it.
Which means the supernatural is real.
Which means Caden and Rand were telling the truth.
Which means—
“Melissa, are you alright? You look pale. Well, more pale than usual.”
I shake my head. “It’s nothing, I’m fine.”
But I’m not fine. Suddenly my head is spinning and my palms are sweating. My vision fades in and out, blurring at the edges. The world starts to tilt.
What’s happening to me?
In a daze, I manage to look left at Caden. He’s already staring at me, concern obvious on his face.
“Melissa?” Lauren asks, her voice shaking. The world is shaking. The world is dimming. “Melissa, what’s happening?”
And just like that, I lose my hold on reality. Everything tips upside down, goes dark, and slides away.
Chapter Thirteen
Except it doesn’t entirely.
For a few moments, I float in darkness, unable to move, unable to wake up, but still terrifyingly conscious. Then images start to form in the darkness, moving shapes and figures and that slowly coalesce, gaining saturation and clarity until the darkness is gone—and I’m somewhere else.
It’s like I’m viewing the scene on a TV screen, a quiet road lined with large office complexes and warehouses, a solitary black van parked out front an unmarked compound. I’m not truly there, but it still feels like it. I’m conscious enough to be aware of the fact that I can’t move, that I can only be led where the dream takes me.
The dead leaves littering the bases of all the trees are kicked up by the wind, spiralling like they’re caught in miniature tornadoes. The scene narrows, zooming in on the van. A side door of the compound opens and a man emerges, dressed in a black suit. He’s got hair the colour of wet sand and a pleasant face, drawn downwards by anger.
A second man steps out of the van to join the newcomer, his back to me. “Before you say anything, I’m sorry,” he says. “I screwed up.”
“Where is she?” Black Suit asks. The voice strikes me as familiar, but I can’t place it.
“Where I left her.”
“Where you left her?”
“Look at my face!” he shrieks. Now my angle changes, zooming around the men until I can see both of their faces at once. The first one’s face is red and swollen, with two distinct blistered handprints on either side. Most of his eyebrows have melted off. It’s my attacker. “Look what she did to my face!”
“You’re not done,” Black Suit says stonily.
“Are you for real?! I ain’t going anywhere near that chick again. She’s a fucking freak.”
Black Suit is livid. The anger transforms his face, makes it dark like a storm. “I got your arse out, Newman,” he growls. “Now it belongs to me. I want the girl out of the picture, and next time, I want you to get it done. Whatever you have to do, do it. If it means you have to handicap her, then so be it. I don’t care if you have to murder everyone in your path, just bring her to me!”
“Keeping it under the radar, though, right?”
“Like you did the first time?”
Newman swallows.
“It was on the news. Your face
. On the news. What could I possibly do with a hit man whose face is recognisable by everyone in the city? You’re damn lucky she burned you beyond the point of recognition; otherwise, your arse would be rotting in jail.”
My attacker remains silent, his figure shrinking down to almost half his size as he cowers. Black Suit straightens and turns to head back into the compound.
He stops a few paces in to look back. “Oh, and another thing, you better fucking thank Brett for getting you out. Don’t think that debt will go unsettled.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to see you shortly, Newman. And with the news this time, not on the news.”
Black Suit heads off again. As he does, the details of the dream start to collapse, the colour draining out of the landscape. He’s walking towards a small, camouflaged side door, so nondescript I wouldn’t know it was there if I hadn’t seen him walk out of it. Darkness creeps in at the edges of my vision, swallows the sky and the trees, swallows the van and my attacker. It swallows the compound before Black Suit can reach it.
I watch him walk into darkness and disappear.
***
Out of the darkness rises the sound of my beating heart, thumping painfully against my ribs. For few moments, that’s all there is: the dark, my heart, and my fear, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Then the world comes back to me. I regain feeling and movement in my limbs. I feel the itchy grass of the courtyard underneath my back, against my hands. My eyes flicker open to an overcast sky.
“Hey, she’s waking up!”
There are people crowded around me, their faces displaying everything from curiosity to concern to trepidation. Amongst the crowd, I spot Lauren and Kira, and a kid I recognise from my PE class. The rest are strangers.
A teacher emerges from the mass and shouts at people to move back. “Give her some space,” she tells them all. “Shoo.” They move a little back, but no one goes away. And why would they? I’m the number one attraction at Southlake High, their own C-grade celeb, as Caden put it. These kids are getting a front row seat to all the latest drama.
The teacher stands over me. She doesn’t crouch. She doesn’t get too close. “Are you alright, hun?”
The words flow in one ear and out the other. I blink a few times, edging up onto my elbows. “Woah, Melissa, not too fast.” Caden’s voice. My head snaps to the right where he crouches beside me, forehead creased with concern. Was he there a moment ago? I don’t remember.
He looks up at the teacher in irritation. “She’s clearly not alright. She needs to go home.”
“Yes, alright,” she says, her head bobbing up and down. She’s quite young and clearly new. I doubt she’s ever had to deal with anything like this before. “I’ll get the office to contact her parents.”
“They’re out of town for the week,” Caden replies, which is obviously a lie, but the delivery is so smooth that even I nearly believe it. “I can drive her myself.”
“I don’t think that’s appropriate. I’ll have to check with the—”
“Miss,” he says. “Look at her. Let me drive her to a doctor. Please.”
She turns a conflicted pair of eyes in my direction while I try to act as out of it as possible. Not too hard, considering my head is clanging like a bell. A little distance away, Lauren is looking at Caden like he’s just dumped her.
Really, the teacher has only one option: follow the official protocol, contact the office, and look after me until I can be passed off to the next person. But she clearly doesn’t want to be around me any longer than she has to, and Caden’s given her an easy way out. I see the moment she decides to take it, all the tension rushes out of her body with a sigh. “Alright, go. But you have to come straight back to school once she’s home.”
“Of course.”
Everyone’s still hovering around us. A little embarrassed, she rounds them up. “Okay, shows over! Off with you!”
“Yeah, scat,” Kira says, making little ‘shoo’ gestures.
“You alright, Mel?” Lauren asks, drawing closer.
I pull myself up into a sitting position. Honestly, I feel almost fine, aside from the throbbing at the base of my skull. I give it a rub.
“Oh yeah,” Lauren says, “You hit your head when you fainted. I didn’t want to risk catching you because, well, you know.”
Because she didn’t want to get burned.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I shake my head. It turns the pounding into a sharp stabbing, and I stop immediately. “It’s fine.”
Lauren casts her eyes sideways at Caden. She flicks them quickly away when she sees he’s already looking at her. I cough.
“You good to stand?” he asks me.
“I think so.” I get to my feet, wobbling slightly, and he places a gentle hand on my elbow and the small of my back to stabilise me.
“We should get going.”
I look up at him—up, because he’s a good foot taller than me. And it’s funny—despite how strange he acts, how much he can freak me out, and all the ways he’s turned my life upside down in the month we’ve known each other, I find that I trust him. “Okay,” I say breathlessly.
Okay.
***
Caden doesn’t take us to a doctor, and I really shouldn’t be surprised. Why else would he lie about my parents being out of town if he wasn’t planning on whisking me away somewhere I wouldn’t have otherwise gone?
As we drive, the dream I had when I passed out resurfaces, the images swirling around and around in my brain until I get dizzy. The strange thing about it is that it felt so real, almost like I was there. The details were so vivid and even now I can still remember them; they’re as clear as if the scene were playing out right in front of my eyes, over and over again.
“You’re not going back to school after this, are you?”
Caden’s dark eyes are focused on the road. “I got permission to leave. You really think I’d turn around and go back?”
“Honestly, who knows with you?”
He raises an eyebrow, sparing me a glance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shrug. “Nothing.”
I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. Now he’s diverted more of his attention in my direction, and I feel myself itch under his scrutinising gaze. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I reply, maybe a little too quickly.
“Melissa, I need to know—”
“I had a dream,” I blurt out.
“You had…a dream.”
It’s not a question, but I answer it. “When I fainted, yeah.”
“What was it about?”
I shrug. “Oh you know, the usual: flying, falling, turning up to school in my pyjamas.”
We come to a red light. He slams on the brake a little harder than necessary. “Melissa, what was it about?” He’s turned his whole body to face me. An emotion akin to alarm—or is it a warning—saturates his eyes, and the darkness inside them swirls like a midnight storm. It’s as though I’m staring into two expanding black holes.
I swallow. “These two men were…talking. One I didn’t recognise, but the other was the same guy who attacked me.”
“The man who broke into your house?”
I nod.
“But he’s meant to be in jail,” he says, frowning, thinking.
I laugh nervously. “It was a dream, Caden.”
“What were they talking about?”
“I don’t know . . . bad guy stuff. Does it matter?”
Now the alarm is mixing with frustration. His knuckles are white from where he’s squeezing the steering wheel. “Yes, it matters,” he says, taking deep, measured breaths. “Will you please tell me?”
For whatever reason, this is really important to him. It’s almost scary. The light changes, becomes a green-eyed monster pinpointing me with its gaze, demanding action. We aren’t moving, and a car behind us blares its horn.
“Caden, the light’s green.”
“Tell me.”
; I’m the subject of his black-eyed focus, and I hate it here. I shiver involuntarily. “Caden, the light.”
“I’ll drive when you tell me what they said.”
A car swerves around us, honking furiously.
“I’ll tell you what they said when you drive!” I counter.
Caden hits the steering wheel with his fist in frustration, then falls back into his seat and stomps on the accelerator.
I exhale. “Thank you.”
“So?”
I comply and relay the details of the dream, once again surprised that they come to me so clearly. When I’m finished, Caden says, “Melissa, I need you to understand something: that wasn’t a dream.”
Ha! “Then what was it?”
He takes his gaze off the road long enough to look me square in the eyes. “It was a vision.”
“A-a vision,” I repeat, half laughing. I nod to myself. “Of course it was.”
“Everything you saw was real. It happened. Which means—”
“Which means I’m in imminent danger again. Got it.”
“There’s another thing.” He leans forward, repositioning and straightening himself in his seat. “Your vision is the consequence of possessing a power known as chrono vision, the ability to see past, present, and future. It’s extremely rare. The last person who had such an ability passed away half a century ago. He was a prophet, like you, and he had a vision that changed everything for us.
“He prophesised a war would come, between us and people like the man who attacked you the other night, and that the next prophet to be born would be destined to end it. Melissa, there’s a reason we’ve reached out to you now. There’s a reason you’re in danger, and there’s a reason we’re doing everything in our power to keep you safe.”
Don’t say it, I think, hoping to convey the message with my eyes. Because I know what’s coming, and it terrifies me. Don’t say it.
But he does.
“We believe the prophecy is about you.”
Chapter Fourteen
It’s ridiculous. It’s the most ludicrous, nonsensical, impossible thing anyone’s ever said.
