He looks insane.
I notice, when I turn away, that he’s still got blood on his fingers. Blood smeared across his throat. Blood streaking through his gold hair.
“Look at me,” he says.
“Um, no thanks.”
“Look at me,” he says again, quietly this time.
I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I give in. I don’t know why there’s still a part of me that believes in Warner and hopes to see something human in his eyes. But when I finally look up, I lose that hope. Warner looks cold. Detached. All wrong.
I don’t understand it.
I mean, I’m devastated, too. I’m upset,too, but I didn’t turn into a completely different person. And right now, Warner seems like a completely different person. Where’s the guy who was going to propose to my best friend? Where’s the guy having a panic attack on his bedroom floor? Where’s the guy who laughed so hard his cheeks dimpled? Where’s the guy I thought was my friend?
“What happened to you, man?” I whisper. “Where’d you go?”
“Hell,” he says. “I’ve finally found hell.”
ELLA
JULIETTE
I wake in waves, consciousness bathing me slowly. I break the surface of sleep, gasping for air before I’m pulled under
another current
another current
another
Memories wrap around me, bind my bones. I sleep. When I sleep, I dream I am sleeping. In those dreams, I dream I am dead. I can’t tell real from fiction, can’t tell dreams from truth, can’t tell time anymore it might’ve been days or years who knows who knows I begin to
s
t
i
r
I dream even as I wake, dream of red lips and slender fingers, dream of eyes, hundreds of eyes, I dream of air and anger and death.
I dream Emmaline’s dreams.
She’s here.
She went quiet once she settled here, in my mind. She stilled, retreated. Hid from me, from the world. I feel heavy with her presence but she does not speak, she only decays, her mind decomposing slowly, leaving compost in its wake. I am heavy with it, heavy with her refuse. I am incapable of carrying this weight, no matter how strong Evie made me I am incapable, incompatible. I am not enough to hold our minds, combined. Emmaline’s powers are too much. I drown in it, I drown in it, I
gasp
when my head breaks the surface again.
I drag air into my lungs, beg my eyes to open and they laugh. Eyes laughing at lungs gasping at pain ricocheting up my spine.
Today, there is a boy.
Not one of the regular boys. Not Aaron or Stephan or Haider. This is a new boy, a boy I’ve never met before.
