Death and the Girl Next Door - Darynda Jones Page 0,2

would I be if I were a light switch? Just as the tips of my fingers found the switch, a silhouette stepped out of the shadows and brushed past me. I startled with a gasp.

“Excuse me,” I said, placing a hand over my heart.

“Sorry.” The guy paused slightly before continuing on his way, and in that instant, I saw the makings of utter perfection: a long arm with shadowy curves that dipped around the fluid lines of muscle; a tall, wide shoulder; dark hair that curled playfully over an ear and led to a strong, masculine jaw. Something inside me lurched, craving a closer look at his face, but he walked by too fast and the hall was too dark for me to catch anything else.

After a couple of seconds, I realized my hand had brushed against his arm. It was enough to send a vision crashing into me, like the flash of a nuclear bomb, bright and unforgiving. Tamping down my surprise—I hadn’t had a vision in a very long time—I pressed shaking fingers to my forehead to wait out the familiar storm, to see what treasures would wash ashore in the aftermath.

Yet the things I saw were unreal, impossible, and certainly not of this world: A desolate landscape lay before me with scorched clouds and a roiling, violet sky. The air was stagnant and so impossibly thick, breathing it took effort. Then I heard the clanging of metal. I turned to watch in horror as a being, a boy of no more than sixteen or seventeen, fierce and somehow not quite human, struggled with a dark, monstrous beast. The boy’s arms corded as tendon and muscle strained against the weight of the sword he wielded. He slashed again and again, but the monster was fast, with razorlike talons and sharp, gleaming teeth, and the boy knew what those teeth felt like when they sank into flesh, knew the blinding pain that accompanied defeat. But he also knew the power he himself wielded, the raw strength that saturated every molecule of his body.

Another herculean effort landed a thrust in the monster’s shoulder and continued through its thick chest. The monster sank under the boy’s sword with a guttural scream. The boy looked on while the beast writhed in pain, watched it grow still as the life drained out of it, and somewhere in the back of the boy’s mind, he allowed himself to register the burning of his lungs as he struggled to fill them with air.

Blood trickled between his fingers, down the length of his blade, and dripped to the powdery earth beneath his feet. I followed the trail of blood up to three huge gashes across his chest. Evidently three of the monster’s claws had met their mark, laying the flesh of its enemy open. I gasped and covered my mouth with both hands as the boy spun toward me, sword at the ready. Squinting against the low sun, I could almost make out his features, but the vision evaporated before I got the chance. A heartbeat later, I was back in the dark hallway, gasping for air, one palm pressed against my temple, the other against the wall for balance.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fought the memory of the vision, the fear that summoned the taste of bile in the back of my throat, the feel of blood dripping down the boy’s arm.

Ever since I could remember, I had a tendency to see random flashes of inconsequential situations in my head, which, by definition, could point to any number of debilitating diseases. I wasn’t psychic or anything. I couldn’t conjure visions whenever I wanted. Images just seemed to crystallize in my mind out of nowhere, and at the most inopportune times too, shimmering like reflections off water. Sometimes they were just flashes of nonsense, glimpses of the impossible, like a rip in the afternoon sky that let night seep through. Nothing ever came of those.

But sometimes the visions either had been or would be, as though I could see into both the past and the future. Like the one time I accidentally saw into the past after touching my grandfather’s hand. He had been a thousand miles away, and I caught a glimpse of the first time he laid eyes on Grandma. She’d tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she walked to class with her friends, only to have the wind toss it back across her face. She laughed and tried again, and