Prologue
Where was he?
Dear God, please don’t take him. Don’t take another person from me.
“Perry?” I called, my voice ringing through the hollow black winter air. Footsteps shuffled across the frost-fielded grass, and my heart hammered. Keeping the knife in my shaking sweating hand was more or less impossible; only adrenaline-pumping fear managed to keep it between my icy fingers.
Whose footsteps was I hearing? Perry’s? The killer’s?
It didn’t matter. I had to find him. Alive or dead. Whether or not it was the definitive thing that reasoned this very same fate for me. “Perry!” I screamed, and the footsteps ran forward, wordless in their pursuit. Night allowed for me to see nothing, and I felt succumbed to this lightless world lacking moon and stars. My breaths were strained. I’d seen this all before.
December 13th. My 17th birthday. The day I was destined to die.
~*~*~*~
Chapter One
“Tell me what your dream was about this time.”
I sighed. The rhythmic tapping of his fingers on his black pants bugged the crap out of me, but I didn’t need him finding any other psychological insecurities that apparently riddled my shattered psyche.
Why did adults always turn their chairs that way when they were trying to be relatable? You know, how they turn it backwards but then they sit to face you anyway. Ugh. I wished Mr. Shorts would turn himself around so I didn’t have to look him in the eyes like he always required. Or better - have him leave the room completely. I hate psychiatrists.
“Marra?”
I blinked back to reality. “Oh. Yeah?”
“We were discussing your nightmares.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it and gnawed sheepishly at the chapped surface of my lower lip. My eyes swiveled to trace the weary old hands of the wall clock, trudging their way around the face and up to the 10.
“Marra.”
“Yeah? Oh, right.”
Okay, so a moment of honesty - I think he was onto something about my ADD.
I cleared my head, and for a second caught the frosty-blue gaze of my own eyes in the mirror. Another moment of honesty?
Nope. “I had a dream about…well, I was back at my old home, playing with my dog Keefer in the yard. So no nightmare.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, smiling wryly. Even though he was right, I wanted to respond Of course you don’t believe it, it’d mean that these sessions are paying off and my parents don’t have to pay for your B.S. therapy anymore.
I…didn’t say that, of course…
Unfortunately.
Instead, I said, raising my hand, “I vow to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”
So help me God. I wish.
“This isn’t court.”
“Yeah, but it sounds official.”
He gave a small laugh, and rubbing his somewhat-beardy chin there was a second where I didn’t completely hate his guts. These were what I called the Mr. Shorts Moments. They were rare windows of time, milliseconds usually, where I didn’t completely despise my horribly unconfident and clueless counselor. These moments where he wasn’t trying, I almost felt his understanding genuinely was beyond skin-deep.
The next words broke that: “All right, Marra. You’re sixteen years old. You and I both know you’re mature enough to discuss this openly and whole-heartedly, to make you better.”
“Make me better? Last time I checked, my ‘condition’ wasn’t even that.”
“I’m not referring to your…” he danced around words precariously when it came to this topic, “abilities, here. I’m only suggesting that we find a way to improve your suicidal impulses.”
Before you start questioning, I’ll tell you that I’m actually not suicidal. Sure, I have my moments, but all-in-all it’s a complete misunderstanding. The thing is, my premonitions seem to get me into trouble. Ever since that car accident, I haven’t gone a full week without them. Always fuzzy, but always so…real. My first dream - a flight of stone steps, blood pooling at the bottom. I’d woken up to find a dead finch on my windowsill, just lying there. Its neck was snapped, it’s little birdie eyes staring into oblivion. Then I heard the news, only hours later. My neighbor Mrs. Finch was dead. She’d fallen down the stone steps of her garden, and in a one-in-a-million chance snapped her neck during the fall as well as having been skewered by a pointed spike ornament that had fallen in the process and pierced her torso post-mortem. According to the rumors, there’d been a lot of blood.
Circumstance? Maybe. But the more this stuff happens, the more I have to suspect it’s not. And the more I try to stop it - the more I fail to stop it - the harder I try. Risks are no object. Risking my neck’s a small price to pay for helping someone I know doesn’t deserve to die. As far as I can figure, these are the only kinds of deaths I see.
“Marra, I will openly say that I have faith in what you can do. Finding people who are dead or dying…it’s an incredible gift. But a terrible one. I completely understand the trauma this has on you, especially given the circumstances surrounding it.”
“That’s a lot of words for saying that it’s just the karma coming back, because the accident was my fault,” I said bitterly, looking down towards my hands. It’d been an accident, but does it matter? I’d taken a man from his pregnant wife, for God’s sake. Why did God keep coming up? ‘So help me God,’ ‘for God’s sake.’ If God were so willing to help, why wouldn’t he? In my mind, God’s existence had been lost with the man in the silver ‘97 Pontiac.
Mr. Shorts sighed. “I know it’s hard to forgive yourself, Marra, but car accidents happen. I’ve had to work with plenty of bad people. The criminally-insane. Men and women on death row. They all have tying similarities…things that make them all alike. You don’t have any of those qualities.”
“None?”
“Nothing but manic and suicidal impulses.”
I nodded grudgingly. My toes curled uncomfortably in my tennis shoes. I was sweaty in my shorts and tee, but I felt a little cold now too.
“So,” Mr. Shorts said, “your dream?”
“This one wasn’t as terrible.”
“And why’s that?”
My eyes pierced through his, an unintentional but somehow terrifying action that caused him to blink away for a moment. My voice was strangely casual as I said, “Because, I was the victim.”
Gender:
Points: 28282
Reviews: 884