Same day.
Same storm.
Same utter chaos.
Different death.
I jerked away from him and slammed into a girl. I now had an audience. Students surrounded me, and every one I touched died.
Same day.
Same storm.
Same utter chaos.
Different death.
One after the other until I stumbled into a bathroom and locked myself in a stall. The shock of each death shuddered through me as I heaved my lunch into the toilet. When the spasms eased, I spit out the sour taste and tried to clear my head. To understand what I was seeing.
Something had changed. Something had happened in the last few minutes that altered the fates of every kid at school. But they were in different places. On the water. In a storm shelter. In Town Hall. Fleeing the country in a chartered Learjet. And it wasn’t just them. It was their brothers and sisters, their parents and friends. In exactly five days, everyone in the city of Bangor, Maine, was going to die. But somehow, I didn’t think it would stop there.
What was different? What could have—?
Then it hit me. The boy. The tug at my coat. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a note. It was the third one I’d received in quite the same manner. Stuffed into the pocket of my jacket when I wasn’t looking or secreted into my backpack.
Dread consumed me as I opened it. This one had a stick figure drawing of two people, a boy and a girl. The girl—who I was going to assume was me since she had garishly curly red hair—was lying on the ground, presumably dead. Blood pooled on her chest and sat in puddles around her head and torso. The boy clutched a knife in his three-fingered hand, but he was leaning over her. Over me. And a darkness was leaving her mouth and entering his. Like he wanted what was inside me. Like he welcomed it.
And somehow he knew. When I was six years old, I had been possessed by a demon. A demon that was still inside me. But no one here knew that. How could they? And yet this boy did.
Five words made up the text of the note. I read them over and over in disbelief. Fear darkened the edges of my periphery. Five words. Five words that had the power to make the darkness inside me quake and buck inside my body. Five words that would change the fate of the world. Five words that read simply, I know what you are.
THROUGH THE GATES OF HELL DARKLY
I know what you are. Not “who.” What.
Admittedly, the “what” part was way more interesting than the “who.” And I’d found out myself only a couple of months prior. Though I’d had visions my whole life—premonitions, one could say—I only recently found out I was apparently a prophet. I was the last prophet, in fact, that hailed from a long line of female prophets that dated back hundreds of years, beginning with my ancestor Arabeth, the first woman in human history to be burned at the stake as a witch.
Historically, anytime a woman had the gift of premonition, she was a witch. Anytime a man was born with the gift, he was a prophet. Least that was the way I saw it, and the injustice did not escape me. I’d thought of it often while holed up in a boarding school a thousand miles from my home with nothing better to do than to consider the injustice of pretty much everything on earth. World hunger. War. School uniforms. But before I left my hometown of Riley’s Switch, New Mexico, a group of descendants of true nephilim—beings that were part human, part angel—killed people while trying to get to me. People I’d known since I was a kid. People I’d loved. My leaving was for the best. I couldn’t let anyone else get hurt because of me. My chest constricted painfully every time I thought about it, and yet it constricted more when I thought about how I missed my home.
Putting all that aside, how could anyone at Bedford Fields know who I was? What I was? What I had inside me? I figured I could hang in the bathroom for the next two days and try to figure it out, but loitering was frowned upon in this institution.
Knowing I’d be chastised in front of the whole class for being late, I decided to go to the nurse’s office instead, if for no other reason than to buy myself some time to think. My legs wobbled as I staggered to the sink and rinsed out my mouth. Then the door opened and someone walked straight up to me. I recognized the long legs of Kenya instantly and half expected a switchblade to be glimmering in her hand. Instead, she dropped my backpack at my feet. With the threat of imminent death gone, I splashed water on my face and reached for a paper towel.
“What’s wrong?” Kenya asked, and again the usual menace was absent from her voice. Her tone wasn’t exactly caring, but it wasn’t threatening either.
“Nothing,” I said before reaching for my backpack.
She put a foot on it, held it to the ground, so I straightened, too exhausted to negotiate the terms of my surrender.
“What?” I asked, weariness evident in my voice. The fight in me fled the premises every time I had a vision that strong, that blindingly real, but I normally had only one at a time. I’d never been bombarded to such a degree. One was enough to knock me on my butt. Several in a row were enough to put me in a coma; I was certain of it. Yet there I stood. Facing off against the mean girl, not worried in the least. What could she do to me that wouldn’t happen in five days anyway? Or even sooner if Death Threat Guy had his way. Clearly, I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. I should’ve just stayed in Riley’s Switch, where I at least had friends and family. I had no one here. Several weeks into my stay, I still had no one I could turn to in times like this. Then again, who would believe me?
I figured I could stand there feeling sorry for myself, burst into tears lamenting the depths of my aloneness, or I could get in a fight with the mean girl. It was probably time. I’d pretty much met my quota of death threats for the day. If I were going to get my ass kicked, I’d darned sure go down swinging.