Page 11

O ne, two… I sensed two Voices out of the three.

Sensed, not heard, because they were barely audible, as if they couldn’t break through the normal static of the universe to reach me.

Meeting it head-on—that deep-rooted fear I’d fought so hard to ignore—turned my blood to stone.

Something wasn’t just off.

Something was wrong.

Every inch of me froze, including my lungs.

A desperate cry gurgled in the trickles of a drainpipe, loud and unsteady, like someone was applying pressure to my ears, on and off.

A forlorn wail slipped through the incessant yowls of a prowling feline, so rough and unbearable that every hiss and whine curdled my blood.

I parsed through all the noises, praying their choppy wavelengths would yield something I could read.

But they just built and split and sputtered, exhausting my concentration, as I hyper-analyzed every little variation of sound.

The outside world fluctuated in and out the harder I tried to focus.

My legs folded under me, and as everything grew louder, oppressive, unending, I curled into a fetal position, clutching the sides of my head in the middle of the alley.

I lay flat against the ground, hiding from the soundstorm like it was violent, whirling, desert sand—hoping to meet the Voices, dying to hear them reaching out for me, as I was for them—when a human-shaped glowing apparition flickered through tears that had started to form.

It billowed against the night with a rhythmic crackle that shushed everything else around me.

In the silence, I mustered the strength to stand.

The alley and the darkness swirled around me as I took a step towards the figure, my foot thudding into the asphalt, heavy as an anchor dropping into the ocean.

Feeling like the slightest wind would knock me over, I tried to blink through the dizziness and balance myself by clenching every tooth and bone.

But before I had a chance to try to walk again, my knees once again struck pavement as the apparition exploded into flames.

My lungs ignited as I gasped at air that was heavy, burnt tasting, like it’d been torched—like someone had come down the alley with a flamethrower and I was sucking up all the fumes while being burned alive.

My eyes fluttered to stay open, searching for the source of the white-hot light, but there was no visible blaze.

The phantom had disappeared.

The flames were gone.

Yet somehow…I was still burning.

I screamed the heat pushing my body further into the ground, grit scraping my cheeks.

Every inch of me ignited.

I pounded my fists until the indents bled, until the pain numbed, and I could no longer feel it, could no longer feel myself.

Then…there was nothing.

Hours, days, decades later—I had no clue how long had passed—someone picked me up and carried me through the sky.

My muscles immediately went lax, the breath whooshing out of me as I drooped against them.

It was over. Death had come for me, finally, and carried me like a princess.

A raw scent—pine—entered my nose.

Mmm. Death smelled good.

Wait a minute.

Despite my tender skin, and mind even tenderer from the phantom burning I’d just endured, my eyelids showed no resistance when I shot them open and peered into the dark expanse.

The blackness was punctuated by stars and planets and—nope, I wasn’t facing up, I was facing down—that was gum and glass I was staring at.

I flopped, frantically waving my limbs as the gravity of the situation hit me.

I wasn’t floating in the hands of a saint.

I was being carried in the arms of a stranger.

I glanced at nails, stained in Sharpie, bunched into my corduroy shirt, the smokey-lettered knuckles wrapped around my torso, the strange tattoo that resembled an N and an S wrapped in a snake head on the web between their thumb and index finger.

Instinct took over from there.

I didn’t direct my legs to kick or my throat to scream, they just did .

“Watch it!” My courier huffed.

“Let me go!” Slipping out of their grasp, I dropped to the ground and bear-crawled away.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Pressed against the brick wall of a building—a safe distance, enough—I surveyed my…

Abductor? Savior? Whatever they were, suited in black from head to combat-boot toe.

If their leather jacket hadn’t reflected the face of the moon, they’d pass for the grim reaper.

Death isn’t that stylish, but I knew another creature of the night that was.

When he flipped off his hood it came as no surprise.

If anything, it explained the bank-heist ensemble, the after-hours loitering, the fluttering in my chest…

This time the ocean’s mist didn’t block the moonlight—instead, it revealed the parts of him my imagination had once filled in.

Like his untextured waves, the darkest brown, longer strands curling around his ears.

And the twin to his freckle, mirrored on the apple of his cheek on the other side of his face.

And the glyphs on his clavicle, that area a minor shade lighter than the rest of his visible, ivory skin.

I might’ve been staring, and he seemed to relish that.

Damn him.

Still, I demanded some answers.

“Ryder. What are you doing here?”

“Great running into you, too.” He snickered and considered me, hunched on the ground.

“And I mean that almost literally.”

I declined his bid at formalities and pushed myself to standing, having—and hating—to clutch the wall when my stiff limbs refused to bear my weight at first.

It was slightly less humiliating up here, even if I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes.

Arranging my face into a scowl, I crossed my arms. “Stalk much?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“We do live in the same town.”

“And take the same shortcuts?” I wiped the dirt off my thighs.

“You know, this is the second time I’ve saved you, and I don’t think I’ve heard thank you once.” He tilted his head, as if waiting for the gratitude to come singing out of my mouth.

My ass. It may have been cute the first time around, but were we really doing this again?

He evaded my questions like he did the city streetlamps—at some point, he’d have to come into the light.

Or I’d just straight up walk away.

“Saved me? Oh please, you ran into me on a train trestle at midnight.” I resisted the urge to march towards him and poke him in the chest, deflate it a bit.

“Do you even know my name?”

He rocked on his heels and for a beat looked away before settling into stillness again.

I scoffed. Of course, he didn’t know my name.

He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t cared.

“It’s River.”

“River.” He repeated it purposeful, slow, like he was savoring it on his tongue.

Ending with a softer R than a local would say.

British, maybe? The accent faded the more he spoke.

“Well, if it weren’t for me, you’d either have walked off a trestle by now or been flattened by a car. You could just say thank you.”

“Neither of those situations called for you to fly in like Superman.” I combatted his glare with my own.

“Is that your thing? Because if it is, I’m the wrong girl. I’m not helpless, it’s called an episode. I can’t control it—neither can you. But I guess you got to be the hero after all. So…thanks.”

Ryder’s look hardened.

“I’m anything but a hero.”

Something in his face told me he was done with this conversation.

Well good, ’cause so was I.

Without a goodbye, he stepped backwards.

It didn’t take long for him to blend in with the shadows, unfurling at his shoulders as if they might become wings and he’d take flight.

Not even halfway down the street, he disappeared altogether.

By the time the adrenaline started to thaw my frozen muscles, my lungs worked to catch up on that whole intake-of-oxygen thing.

Then again, I imagined his arrogance would leave anyone breathless.

A loud bang came from the construction site on the other side of the alley.

Flinching, I turned towards the sound but held firm where I was standing.

There was a solid chance Ryder was messing with me and I wouldn’t indulge him, no way.

I squinted into the darkness, trying to find the source of the noise in the vacant pile of beams. “Ryder?” I called.

“I know you’re there!”

There was no sign of him.

Kneading the raised flesh on my arms, I continued towards my original destination—the bus stop—when I heard it again.

Another crash, this time closer.

As in right next to me, just beyond the screen-in fence.

Was he following me again?

I didn’t wait to find out.

“This isn’t funny,” I said as I increased my pace and ran towards the main road.

The beep of swiping metro cards was music to my ears, even as hydraulics lifted the vehicle away from the curb, ready to depart.

I’d be damned if I didn’t join the last group of people stepping onto the platform for final boarding—I was over this.

The freezing air choked me as I shifted into a sprint, and even though the succession of crashes from whatever pursued me grew hot on my tail, I didn’t look anywhere but forward.

Ignoring the driver’s scowl, I waved my hand between the doors before they could seal shut, then darted to the very back.

When the bus finally lurched forward, I pressed a hand below my collarbone to slow my thundering heart.

Collapsing into a sweaty rumpled slump in the gray plastic chair, I rested my head against the window and stole a glance at the unlit concrete.

I assumed this’d been the work of Ryder, just to mess with me, until a pair of glowing red eyes glowered back from among the beams. I blinked and they disappeared.

Or had they even been there?

A more ominous idea formed—maybe my brain was progressing from hearing things to feeling things—to seeing things.

My muscles trembled, and my heart leapt so fast it felt like it would bruise my rib cage.

The stuffy heat inside the bus compartment wrapped around me as the construction site disappeared into the distance.

With my appendages now thawed and working, I unzipped my backpack and crowned myself with my headphones.

Sweat lined my fingers, staining the screen as I pressed play.

The melancholic guitar riff temporarily washed away whatever I was running from.

Fear. Reality. My own fucking mind.

I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to escape anymore.

Because the Voices had already escaped me, and I never thought they’d do it—pick up and leave.

But they did—they had abandoned me.

I pressed my palms into my eye sockets, then brought my fingers to my mouth until I bit the little nail growth I had back to nubs.

Chewing, chewing, chewing, like every sliver of keratin I spat was one more worry I shed.

Where were the Voices?

Better yet… what were they?

Something more than a figment of my grief?

Something that summoned sprites and red eyes and invisible flames…

? I bit the inside of my cheek—it was a question that’d hovered on the tip of my conscious, but I’d never allowed myself to fully think it.

Because that would mean…

so many things.

So many things I didn’t dare tackle yet.

The next song riffed through my headphones, slowly diffusing my tension as the acoustic strings lured my paranoia into a slumber.

Two of the Voices had returned earlier.

Well, tried to. Hints of their inflections had lined the sounds in the alley, but they came out low, mumbled, like a hand covered their mouths to prevent them from speaking.

I wanted to say it was for the best—that three’s company, and four’s a crowd.

That the missing one, the third, the most brash and resolute that they were better off without me, was the one I could do without.

But I couldn’t, even if I’d told them otherwise during our fight at Grad Night.

Something leaden weighed over my heart.

My necklace. I balanced the pendant in my palm, pinching its raised pattern into my skin, a tide of calm washing through me.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’d reach inside the darkest, hollowest parts of my skull and figure out what happened to the Voices—what was happening to me.

I yawned past a growing, gnawing concern that I’d likely have to visit my most forbidden memory.

I didn’t have enough brainpower for that, not after this hellish evening.

For now, I let the bus rock me and my eyes grew heavy, even as unease prickled alongside my limbs that had already fallen asleep.