Page 33 of Not Her Day to Die (Star-Crossed #2)
R ain falls around me, in large piercing pelts, it bounces off the road, but not my skin. Instead, it goes straight through me, onto the ground.
I can’t exactly feel it, but my mind plays tricks on me and it isn’t long before I am crawling out of my skin.
My head pivots, searching for clues of where I have landed this time.
A single flickering street light blinks through the otherwise darkness. The moon is covered by clouds and the storm that rages on around me.
A flash of lightning in the sky illuminates the area.
Déjà vu swallows me whole.
A flickering light. A bend. One side is a forest, the other is an embankment. The guard rail is bent.
It still hasn’t been fixed.
Why am I here?
Why of all places am I where Tripp and Auggie were killed?
The questions move my feet closer and closer to the edge.
Just as I am about to look down, hands land on my shoulders.
I feel them. How cold and stiff they are, the roughness of the fingers digging into my shirt; they cause me to jump out of my skin.
“Sunday, you shouldn’t look.”
Flinching, I twist around. “Why are you here?” I ask.
It’s the last person I expect to see.
They raise their lips in a knowing smile. “One of us is going to die. ”
Staring at the space between us, I wait for a light to form, for it to guide me in this instance, just as it has so many times before.
It takes only a few seconds for the red strand to shine brightly through the darkened skies.
It wraps around us both, covers us in its weight, douses us in its essence.
I must have been dazed not to see it before, but now that I do, it nearly blinds me.
“What is going on? What is this? When did this happen?” My hands stretch out around me. “And why are you here?”
“It hasn’t happened… yet .” The hands that I had knocked from my shoulders, pull back further. The person steps back. “But we can’t stop it.”
“What does that even–”
They push me with all of their might, the red explodes around us, a million ashes in the sky tossing and tumbling.
I lose my balance, falling back, over the guardrail.
Lightning ignites around me as I tumble to my demise.
Down and down and down.
***
Slap!
“Wake up you stupid girl!”
Slap!
“You’re not going to fucking die on me now! You idiot.”
Slap!
“Childish!”
Slap!
“Undeserving brat! ”
My eyes flash open, but it is nearly just as dark. It takes a few beats to understand where I am.
What’s going on?
I am somehow in Luna’s lap, her hand poised to hit my face again, my cheeks throb from her previous assault. My head pounds from where I hit it.
Seeing my eyes open now, she wraps her arms around me, hugging me to her. “Thank god. Thank god.” The red that shrouded her before has been completely replaced with purple ethereal threads.
“Luna, your mother’s alive,” I blurt out. “She isn’t dead.”
Luna flinches, her jaw clenching. “You don’t have to lie to me, Sunday. I heard the men shouting about it as they left. Carrie saw the news–” She pauses.
My heart climbs its way up my throat. My attention flashes to her body.
Carrie is dead.
That is a fact that I cannot change. But it hurts, nonetheless.
She didn’t deserve this. None of us do. I want to go to Carrie, to wrap her in my warmth, to shake her awake.
But I don’t. I need to focus on us. On the future. Need to figure out how Luna and I are going to make it out of here.
“We have to escape.” The crashes I heard before are gone now. “How long has it been? Has anyone come?”
Luna rolls her lips between her teeth, she bites down. “Half an hour, maybe. I was afraid you weren’t going to wake up at all. That this was all going to restart again.”
I can taste her terror. It suffuses into the air, it mixes with her pain and trauma. It crawls its way into my mouth, scurries along my tongue, slithers down my throat.
I gulp .
This poor fucking girl has been in this disgusting place for too long.
All because I was a stupid child.
All because I kept following the wrong strands of fate to my demise.
All because of a wish I made.
A wish with a horrible intent. I knew exactly what my desire meant. Knew exactly what I was longing for.
I had never admitted out loud, at least not in this timeline, but the truth of it is…
The wish I made?
It was to die.
And because of my own selfishness, because of that single wish, I had changed the course of all our lives.
Of Luna’s.
Of Axel’s.
Of Darius’s.
Of Grayson’s.
Of Julia’s.
Of Carrie’s.
Of Veronica’s.
Of mine.
The guilt swallows me whole. My vision darkens at the edges again as my anxiety and panic consume me.
I am a vacuum taking in all that Luna expels. I owe it to her. This is my fault.
All of this.
“Snap out of it!”
Slap !
My cheek stings, and I focus on it. Use it to stabilize myself. Breathing in a few more times, I do my best to suture myself back together again. To not fall apart. There isn’t time.
“I’m sorry,” I wheeze.
Luna levels me with an impressive glare, she straightens her shoulders. She pushes me off her lap and gets to her feet.
I’m not sure what I expect, but it isn’t the hand she offers.
“I don’t want a useless apology. I just need you to do better. To fix this.” She pauses, her fingers wrapping around my wrist. “You promise she’s alive?” she whispers.
“Your mom is alive, Luna, this was a part of the plan.” I try to put as much conviction as I can into my words and it must have the needed effect as Luna loosens her hold.
She steps back, her attention dances around the room, skipping from the razor blade, to Carrie, and back to me. “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”