Seconds Before Sunrise (The Timely Death Trilogy) (2 page)

I saw his eyes first, crystal-
blue but clouded with concern. When he met my gaze, he dropped the cold rag he had brushed across my face. The condensation awoke my consciousness.

I gasped, trying to sit up, but his hand pressed my shoulders down.
My body reacted to his touch, and his fingers lingered as if he couldn’t let go.

He spoke, but I didn’t hear him, and time blurred like the night had moments before. He moved too quickly, and I couldn’t follow him. He was by the window, and my legs burned as if I’d stood moments before. But I was still in bed, and he
spoke by the window.

I couldn’t hear him, but I knew what was happening. He was leaving, and he wouldn’t be back. He disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and I screamed.

…

My shout echoed against my bedroom walls as I sat up, clutching my blanket. My chest was pounding, but it felt like my entire body. I gasped, surveying my empty bedroom, and shuddered when my eyes flew over my window. No one stood in front of me
.

It was only a dream.

I climbed out of my bed and walked over to the glass. I moved the blinds over and gazed across our front yard. It was nighttime, but the road glistened from the streetlamps. I pressed my heated forehead against it and breathed. Despite the dream, my head felt as if it had smacked into the rock, and it wasn’t the only part of my body that hurt.

Everything did. My arms, my legs, my chest. It burned and shook, but my unscathed skin proved the lack of reality. I was perfectly fine.

“It was just a nightmare, Jess,” I whispered to myself, turning away. I snatched up my blanket, wrapped it around my shoulders, and walked downstairs. I needed to get out of my room, even if it were only for a minute.

I walked past my parent’s room and went downstairs. The house was quiet, and lingering nighttime comforted my sudden fears. I’d always been a night person, but it felt more essential to my wellbeing tonight than any other night I could recall. The shadows felt right.

I twisted through the kitchen, the living room, and into my father’s study. The computer buzzed, revealing my father’s late night of work, and I turned it off. It shut down, and the only light I had dissipated.

B
reathing was easier now, and the nightmare was beginning to make sense. It’d only been hours since I’d been in the forest with Robb and Crystal. Even if it were just a cluster of trees with a dark history, I’d dreamt I was almost killed in it.

“Jessie?”

I spun around, facing the high-pitched voice that broke through my train of thought. My mother, dressed in a pink robe, fiddled with her blond ponytail.

“Mom,” I exhaled, praying my adrenaline would calm down. “What are you doing up?” Unlike me, she was a morning person.

She smirked as she sat down in the computer chair, rotating it to face me. “I could ask you the same thing,” she said. “You have school in the morning.”

“I know,” I said, tightening my blanket’s embrace. “I’ll go back to bed soon.”

Her round face tilted. “Are you alright, sweetie?”

“I’m fine.” The words were beginning to feel repetitively empty. “I had a nightmare,” I elaborated, knowing
she would ask more questions.

She crossed her legs and placed her hands in her lap. “Wh
at was it about?” she asked.

I pressed m
y toes against the wooden floor. “I don’t really know,” I admitted, hoping to forget the scene as quickly as it came, but it echoed through me, refusing to leave. “It’s just a dream.”

“If it was, you would’ve stayed in bed
.” She raised her thin eyebrows. “You used to have really bad nightmares as a child.”

“I did?” I couldn’t remember.

“All the time, but you grew out of them.” Her face tilted to the other side, and her ponytail waved over her shoulder. “They were really confusing for you.”

“Why?”

She bobbed her foot up and down. “You thought they were real.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“I thought it was entirely probable they were caused from trauma—”

She stopped
because she didn’t have to explain.

“They were fleeing, you know,” I said,
recalling the newspaper article about my parents’ untimely death.

“I wish you wouldn’t take Crystal so seriously, Jessie,”
she dropped her tone into a scorn. We had the conversation numerous times during the summer, but she wasn’t budging. “She doesn’t know any more than the police do.”

I bit my lip and looked away. The lack of information had been the most aggravating part of my adoption. Even with months of researching, I couldn’t find extended family. It was as if my parents had only existed to bring my life into the world, nothing more. I couldn’t even find people who remembered them, and residents rarely left Hayworth. It seemed impossible, but it was the truth, and I didn’t like it.

“Is that what you’re dreaming about?” my mother guessed. “The car wreck?”

“No,” I said, fighting the flashing forest as it burned into my mind like a memory.

She ignored my answer. “What’s done is done, Jessie,” she said. “There’s no worth in losing sleep over it.”

“They were my parents,” I argued quietly.

“And they still are,” she agreed. “But death doesn’t mean they aren’t around you.”

I groaned. “You sound like a Disney movie.”

“I’m old. I’m allowed to,” she said, standing up to approach me. She opened up her arms, and I fell into her embrace, closing my eyes. She smelt like lavender. “Get some sleep. You have school in the morning,” she whispered.

I
stepped away. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“Good
night,” she said. “I love you.”

“L
ove you, too, Mom,” I said.

S
he left the room, her robe dragging behind, and disappeared around the corner. I collapsed in her chair, unable to settle down. While some of her words had been comforting, the others disturbed me. As a child, I thought my dreams were real, and despite the illogical notion, I saw the truth in it.

My dream
had felt more like living than my current life did. Every part of me wanted it as a memory instead of a nightmare.

Eric

I shoved my head into my locker and breathed hoarsely. It was the first day of school and sitting next to Jessica was already killing me. I wanted to talk to her, hold her, be with her − anything really − but I couldn’t. If the Light realized who or what we were, she’d be killed, and there was nothing I could do except stay away.

“
You okay?” Jonathon asked, his voice squeaking through the slits of my locker.

I leaned back to stare
at the blind artist. I wouldn’t believe he was Pierce, a powerful shade, if I hadn’t known his identities myself.

“I’m dealing,” I grumbled, unable to keep eye contact as Jessica passed us.

She flipped her brunette curls as she playfully hit Robb McLain’s arm. Robb McLain with his sparkling teeth, gelled hair, and playboy personality was the perfect jerk.

Robb slipped his arm over Jessica’s petite shoulders, and I gripped my locker.

“I am this close to killing him.”

Jonathon chuckled. “I’d like to see that.”

“This isn’t funny.”

Jonathon’s hands struck straight up.
“No. No. Of course not.” He tried to smother his laughter. “Not funny at all.”

I ignored his humor and uncurled my hand from the locker. “This is a lot harder than I thought it’d be,”
I said.

Jonathon
gestured to the bent door I’d practically destroyed. “I can tell.”

I pushed it back into place, cringing at the sharp noise.

“You have other things you should fix, too,” he said, pointing to my face.

I knew what had happened. My ey
es were ice blue, not green.

I rubbed the partial transformation away. “Great,” I muttered. I couldn’t even control myself during the day.

“Why don’t you go home already?” Jonathon knew my schedule better than most. Homeroom was over and so was my day at school, but I hadn’t gone straight to my car. I was too aggravated to drive.

“Are they dating?” I asked Jonathon, pointing my thumb over my shoulder. I knew Jessica and Robb hadn’t moved. I could still hear her giggles, and I knew Jonathon was more in tune with gossip than I’d ever be.

“Would it matter?”

I glared.
“Are they, Jonathon?”

“No.”

“Good,” I said. “I’d have to kill him twice if that were the case.”

Jonathon sighed. “Jessica warned you this might happen,” he said, attempting to be the angel on my shoulder. “You can’t expect a seventeen-year-old girl to be single for long.”

“Thanks for that,” I snarled, swinging my bag over my shoulder. “I’m going home,” I said, snapping my headphones on before he could speak again. I brushed past him, but his voice telepathically pushed through the tunes.

Take some of that anger out in training,
he said.
You only have four months.

I didn’t respond. Instead, I waved my hand over my shoulder and shut our telepathic line. He couldn’t continue the conversation even if he wanted to. I was done, and I wanted everyone else to be, too.

…

The
doorbell rang, and I knew it was Camille before I heard her voice.

“Hello, sir,” Teresa
− my guard, Camille, in her human form − said, and my father’s grumble drowned her out. She’d started using the front door ever since I hadn’t bothered to hide my strange comings and goings. I’d be in my room one minute, and then I’d transform to leave. I never used the front door, and my stepfamily was starting to notice.

“They aren’t here,” my father
dismissed Teresa’s concerns. “But they’ll be back soon.”

“Is Eric—”

“In his room,” he answered.

Teresa tapped
her foot against the wood floor. “He’s not taking this very well.” She didn’t bother dropping her voice since she knew I was listening.

“Did you bring him home?”

“He drove.”

I turned over, staring at my car keys on my desk. I hadn’t bothered hanging them up. I hadn’t bothered doing much. My room was a mess, and two of the light bulbs were broken. My room, aside from the nightlight beneath my desk, was dark, and I liked it that way.

“I should’ve figured,” my father sighed. “He hasn’t left his bedroom since he got home.”

“He saw Jessica today,”
she said. The house creaked, and the couch squeaked as someone fell into it. I could practically see what they were doing.

“I shouldn’t have told him about Jess, Camille,” he said, using her Dark name. Apparently, the confusion with double identities was genetic. My father couldn’t stand using human names any
more than I could. “We should’ve kept it from both of them.”

I
knew what he was talking about. My life was destined for a successful battle by killing another, and Jessica was my only weakness. I was in love with her, and she was in love with me, but our relationship − our identities − would kill us both if the Light figured out whom she was and used her against me. She could be absorbed, whatever that meant, and my battle’s outcome would flip. I would lose, and everyone in the Dark would lose their powers. I couldn’t see her, and I hadn’t since Independence Day. Not until I saw her at school.

“With all due respect, sir,” Camille began, quiet enough that
even I, with my heightened hearing, could barely listen. “They found out on their own.”

“Not about the destiny.”

“Yet it happened,” she said, and her nails tapped against the stairwell. “Do you know how Jess is?”

His jacket rustled, signaling a shrug. “I followed her around
yesterday with her guard-to-be. She seemed normal enough.”

I sat up.
Jessica getting a guard was news to me.

“I’m going to speak with him,” Camille said, but my father didn’t respond.

I listened as Camille walked upstairs. She passed the kitchen, turning into the hallway, and soon her hand was on my doorknob. It twisted, clinking against the lock, and she breathed against the wood.

“I know you heard me,” she said, but I didn’t move. I listened to the metal lock release, and she opened the door. Her eyes were black, a sign of her power, and then they flickered back to blue.

“Why didn’t I know about the guard?” I asked.

S
he stepped inside, supporting herself against the doorframe. Her pixie cut had grown to her shoulders. “Maybe if you talked to someone, you would’ve been told.”

I flinched.
“I don’t feel like it.”

“Quit the bullshit, Shoman.” She threw her hands into the air.
“It’s incredibly frustrating, and it isn’t helping anyone.”