Whispered Darkness by Jessica Sorensen Page 0,1
really am. I need to get some answers before I go completely crazy.”
“What you need is to talk to Kingsley.” Beth appears in my room, dripping dirty lake water onto the carpet, her skin rotting, her eyes hollow.
The first time I saw her, her appearance startled me. Now I’m used to it, which brings me a whole new set of discomfort.
I sit up on my bed. “I have been trying to talk to him,” I inform her. “He won’t call me back.”
She steps toward the bed, her bare feet leaving imprints in the carpet. “Then go look for him.”
“I don’t think I can.” I stare down at the footprints, wondering if they’ll remain there and if anyone else will be able to see them. “My parents will freak out if I try to leave the house this late. Plus, I promised Kingsley I’d keep myself safe, which probably means no wandering around this late at night.”
She rolls her eyes. “Why are you so worried about what everyone else wants you to do? You need to start making your own decisions. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere. And all of us will be doomed. If you don’t solve our deaths, Harlynn, not only will the killers continue to murder, but us and you and Kingsley will be doomed. Everything will be doomed.”
“I know that. Though I think you’re being a little overdramatic with the whole everything-will-be-doomed thing.”
She frowns. “You’ve never been more wrong than in this moment.”
I huff a weary sigh. “And you’re the most riddle-y talker I’ve ever met.”
“And you’re naïve, which again worries me that we all might be doomed. And poor Kingsley … his life is in your hands.”
I swallow audibly. “I know that. And I’m doing my best to figure out what happened to you and Paige and the rest of the girls, but I’m not a detective. I don’t know what to do.”
“I know you’re not. You’re much better than one.” Blood trickles from her eyes.
“I highly doubt that,” I say. “The only thing that makes me different is that I can see you. And maybe that would make me better if you’d tell me who killed all the girls, or maybe where their bodies are. But you won’t.”
She stiffens, choking out, “Because I can’t.” Water begins to waterfall down her body, coming from seemingly nowhere and pouring onto the floor. “You’re better than you know. You just haven’t discovered your true potential yet. Once you do, everything will change. You’ll be able to do things no one else has ever been able to do. You’ll be able to save so many others from evil. From death.”
“You’re acting like I’m some sort of murder detective, but I’m not. I’m just a girl who died, came back to life, and is now cursed with being able to talk to corpses. No offense or anything, but that’s not a superpower.”
“No offense taken. I know what I am,” she tells me dismissively as she sinks onto the edge of the bed. “But you have no clue what you can do yet. You’ve been marked by death, and once you start accepting that, you’ll be able to tap into all sorts of abilities.”
“Abilities?” I question with an arch of my brow. “You make that sound like I’m not human.”
Pity stains her bloody eyes. “You died. You went into the land of the dead—the in-between. You’ve seen things behind the veil that divides life and death. You may not be able to remember them, but you did. And no one stays the same after that.”
She’s right; I’m not the same Harlynn I was before I went off that cliff that night. I’ve known that from the moment I opened my eyes in that hospital bed.
But the other stuff she’s saying has me sort of wigged out.
“What sort of abilities?” I ask.
She gives a pressing glance at the feather-shaped wound on my arm. “The answers are in there.”
“In my wound?” I say flatly.
“Yes,” she replies tiredly.
I internally sigh. “I wish, for once, you could give me a straight answer.”
“There are no straight answers in life,” she replies. “And the answers you need, they lie in death.”
“Again, I don’t know what that means.”
Her lips part, but then her eyes suddenly snap wide, her gaze darting to my window. “Oh no.”
An electric current zaps through my body, and my back stiffens. “What is it …?”
She dissolves into nothing but air.
When she first did that, I nearly pissed myself. Now I’m sort of getting used to