Dying Day Read online

  He hopes it is higher. For the sakes of the countless souls air-bound.

  Before he can guess which enemy must’ve launched the attack, before he can even say a prayer for them all, the ground begins to quake.

  *

  Julia?” Regina calls. Her heart hammers in her throat as she runs along the beach, searching for her daughter. “Julia, where are you?”

  She turns in every direction, her fingers pushing into her temples. She assumes the worst, of course. That her husband has found them or Caldwell has found them. That one or the other is here to kill her daughter and then Regina herself, but only after making her sorry that she disobeyed him. For all of their careful planning, somehow, they’ve been found, and Julia has been taken, and she will never see her again.

  A woman in a red bikini spreads lotion across her bare, brown legs. A man in a wet suit shakes the water and sand out of his face before dragging his board back into the waves again. A black dog runs down the beach, barking and snapping at the gulls who take flight. Only the bravest remain, destroying a crumpled bag of Cheetos between their snapping beaks.

  “Momma!” a voice cries. “Momma, look!”

  Regina whirls and sees her daughter twenty feet away, yellow and white sundress twirling in the sea breeze, her feet sinking in the wet sand. One of her white hair ribbons has come undone, and it’s flapping in the breeze.

  Regina runs to her, scoops her up, and squeezes her so hard the girl cries out. “Don’t you ever!” she hisses. “Don’t you ever! I told you to wait for me! I told you to stay where I could see you!”

  “But I—”

  “I don’t care! I don’t care! You do what I tell you, do you understand me?” It isn’t a real question. It’s the kind of nervousness her own mother was prone to, and she hates herself for unleashing it on Julia now, even as relief rolls over her like a wave. But she can’t bring her fear entirely under control. She can only run her hands over her daughter’s bare, tanned arms and legs and pray under her breath.

  “But Momma, look!”

  Regina follows her daughter’s pointing finger out over the bright horizon. Past the sailboats and jet skis and paddleboards littering the Caribbean waves. Julia is pointing too high for it to be something in the water.

  Regina shields her eyes against the sun. First, it is only white clouds and sunshine rippling on the water. Then, as if on cue, the sun darkens. It is as if someone has thrown a sheer, purple scarf over a lampshade. The world dims. The dog, the people, and even the gulls fall silent. The waves still.

  “What is that?” Regina whispers. She hears someone behind her murmur the word eclipse, and that sinking dread in her chest eases. An eclipse? Regina doesn’t follow astronomy. Eclipses, Bastille Day, there will just always be some things in the world she’ll never take note of, and she is okay with that—as long as Julia remains alive, safe.

  “It’s the clown, Momma,” Julia says, wiggling down out of Regina’s arms, her feet splashing in the surf. Regina has just a moment to wonder where her sandals have gone—the red Mickey Mouse ones she’d slipped onto her daughter’s feet that morning.

  “The clown?” Regina asks. “What clown?”

  “She came to my birthday.”

  The blood in Regina Lovett’s veins turns ice cold. Thinking of Jesse Sullivan will do that to a person. Regina lets her gaze slide lazily up and down the beach, at its disturbing stillness, but she doesn’t see the death surrogate she hired years ago.

  “What do you mean?” Regina asks. She hopes she sounds interested. Nonplussed. But all the spit has left her mouth, and her lips are suddenly, unexplainably dry enough to crack.

  Julia places a hand over her chest. “I feel her. I feel her right here.”

  “You think this purple light has to do with Jesse Sullivan?” Regina asks calmly. Amazingly calm, given the fact that everything inside her is screaming run! For god’s sake, run!

  “Momma, right here.” She taps her little fingers with their peeling, pink nail polish against the front of her sundress again.

  Does she feel something? Regina wonders. Some connection to the young girl who saved her life? And if so, she wouldn’t be the only one. Surely it would be every person that Jesse Sullivan has replaced.

  Regina imagines them as they sit in their cars, or behind their desks. As their eyes open in their beds, or their showers pound down on their heads. As they pause in lifting a hammer to nail on a shingle, or as they pull their cars into the garage at the end of a long day. Does every single one feel a strange current in their body as Julia is describing?

  Her five-year-old asks, “What’s happening, Mommy?” And Regina hears her daughter’s fear for the first time.

  Regina takes her hand, and they look out over the water together. All eyes on the horizon for what is to come.

  “I don’t know, baby,” she whispers. “I don’t know.”

  *

  Eve Hildebrand tosses and turns on the stiff jailhouse mattress. A coil pushes defiantly through the lumpy cotton and discolored sheets. It jabs her in the hip whenever she seeks refuge on her right side, causing her to roll again onto her left side.

  Dreams of her dead daughter keep her up most nights, the girl’s voice inciting a flash of thick, cold sweat to form on the back of her neck and across her greasy scalp. This night is no exception.

  Her daughter, chubby-cheeked and smiling, is running toward her open arms, giggling and laughing. Eve bends down to scoop her up the same moment a shadow rises high behind her. Eve’s heart drops. The shadow advances, swooping in quick like a gaping, carnivorous mouth.

  “No!” Eve is on her feet running, desperate to reach her daughter, certain she will throw her body over her daughter’s, and somehow through the power of love alone, save them both.

  But the shadow is too fast. And in this dream, like all the others that have come before it, the girl is snatched up by the darkness. She’s dragged away, her face red and wet from wailing, as Eve runs helplessly after her.

  She jolts upright in bed, her head scraping the bottom of the bunk above. The sudden burst of pain across her scalp only heightens her panic. Her body is cold and clammy with sweat. The hands she brings to her hair shake. Her pulse is so loud, it’s like the thrash of an ocean between her ears.

  Only a dream, it was only a dream, her mind chants, dragging her back from the precarious edge of hysteria. It surprises her that her mind is so ready to cling to sanity even after everything has been taken from her. But reality is worse than the dream. In reality, Nessa isn’t in danger.

  Nessa—sweet, sweet Nessa—is dead.

  No, not carried off by the shadow monster of her guilt and grief, but taken as leverage, and murdered because Eve had failed to comply. Her baby killed because a bad man had tasked her with murdering Jesse Sullivan, and she’d failed.

  She failed, and it cost her everything.

  She’d love to make Jesse Sullivan know what it feels like. Maybe she could kill her little friend. What was her name?

  A sharp pain stabs through her skull, cutting off all thought.

  Eve shoves the heels of her hands into her eyes and cries out.

  “Stop your fussin’. I’m tryin’ to hear,” her bunkmate says.

  The black woman stands by the cell bars, staring out into the corridors. She’s got her arms folded across her chest as she presses her right side into the bars as hard as she can. The beads at the end of her long braids clink together as she angles herself, trying to see something down the way.

  “Somethin’ be happening,” Kenisha says. “The guards came ‘round lookin’ in on e’rbody. They were runnin’ and carryin’ on. Woke me up.”

  Eve tries to get out of the bunk, but her hair snarls on metal wires, yanking a yelp from her. She reaches up and carefully picks strands of her hair out of the wires, and when that proves too frustrating, Eve rips the last few strands free from the metal hatchwork, and a blond tuft comes away in her tight fist.

  Kenisha doesn’t
make room for Eve as she comes up behind her. Just as well. Eve is four inches taller—supermodel tall, as her father would say—and Eve can see over the woman’s shoulder just fine. Rubbing her throbbing head, she peers into the low light.

  At the end of the hall, near the security station, all of the guards stand in a cluster. Shoulder to shoulder, their gazes are fixed on the television hanging over their heads. It’s impossible to see what is on the screen, but their worried murmurings and wide eyes make Eve’s heart speed up. The flashing television lights give each guard a ghostly pallor.

  “I can’t hear shit. Can you hear what they be sayin’?” Kenisha asks, uncrossing her arms and pressing herself harder into the bars.

  “No,” Eve says.

  “What’re they lookin’ at?”

  “The television.”

  “No shit. What station? The news? It’s not like a titty show or somethin’ is it?”

  Eve doesn’t see any tits. She sees Nessa’s screaming face, flashing as clear as any emergency bulletin. If only I’d been stronger. If only I hadn’t hesitated when I had the chance to cut off that bitch’s head, Nessa might still be alive. Alive.

  Not for the first time, or the hundredth, Eve wishes she’d been successful in killing Jesse Sullivan.

  She isn’t the only one.

  What if I could grant that wish? A cold voice whispers in her mind.

  The hair on the back of Eve’s neck prickles. A cold sweat stands out on her skin.

  “What did you say?” Eve asks.

  The other woman clucks her tongue and rolls her eyes. “I ain’t said nothing to your crazy ass.”

  What if I could help you achieve the revenge you seek against Jesse Sullivan? The voice coos. What if you could make her suffer the way you have suffered? Make her hurt the way you hurt?

  Impossible, she thinks. Eve’s locked up in jail, and who knows where that bitch is.

  I can help with both.

  The lock on their cell door clicks open, and the steel door slides an inch away from the latch.

  “The fuck—” Kenisha jumps back from the door as if it’s just sparked. “What the fuck you doin’ girl?”

  Eve looks across the walkway and sees a man standing there. He is tall, long hair blowing as if in a gentle breeze, and there’s a glow about him. He shines, so bright that she can’t clearly see his face.

  “You’re the devil,” she whispers.

  No, the man replies, speaking straight into her mind again. I am your salvation.

  They’ll shoot me. They’ll kill me before I ever get one foot out of this cell.

  I will remove every obstacle, the man assures her. Believe in me, and I will avenge your daughter.

  Still, Eve hesitates. Leaving her cell, trying to escape jail and the authorities, that could earn her half a dozen bullets in the back at best.

  What do you have to lose? the man asks.

  Eve sees her daughter’s face in her mind. The big grin. The freckles. The eyes that would never shine again.

  “Nothing.” Eve slides open the door.

  Chapter 1

  Ally

  3 days earlier

  The hospital room is cold and dark like a cavern, but I barely notice. I’m obsessed with the sketchbook in front of me as I flip frantically through its pages. I see pencil drawing after pencil drawing, beautifully rendered, but I can’t find what I’m looking for, and this seems to be the trend as of late.

  For every inch we crawl forward, we slip a mile back. At least, it feels that way. Caldwell and his wife Georgia are finally dead, and we’re free from his attacks. But Gloria is in a coma. Maisie is gravely wounded, nearly dead. And Jesse is gone.

  My stomach flops, twisting itself like a rag in a furious fist.

  Jesse is gone.

  I flip through the sketchbook faster and faster. It lays open on Gloria’s motionless legs. The heart monitor attached to her finger beats a slow, steady rhythm. I’d have to be in a coma myself to remain that calm.

  At the fourth or fifth pass through the sketchbook, the pencil sketches become completely illegible. Gray lead clings to my fingertips as I flip. The tears stream over my cheeks, plopping onto the page.

  There’s nothing here. Nothing I can use to turn this situation around.

  No sign of how to save Jesse. No sign of how to stop her either.

  There’s not even a clue for where to look. Every picture I see is what’s already come to pass.

  Either Gloria was incapacitated before she could see this far into Jesse’s future, or even Gloria couldn’t possibly predict how this would end.

  I slam the cover of the sketchbook closed and collapse into the hard plastic chair by her bed.

  I put my face in my hands and cry. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t call Jesse. She has Caldwell’s teleportation ability, so I can hardly chase her down. I think of Caldwell leaping from New York to San Diego in a single step. If she doesn’t want to be near me, there is nothing I can do to make her.

  She’s also absorbed Caldwell’s power of telepathy when she killed him, but I don’t think she can hear me wherever she is now.

  Jesse, I beg. Please come back.

  Jesse, please.

  Nothing. Nothing but panic making my limbs heavy and stomach sour.

  Yet I can’t stay still in the chair. So I stand again. I pace, hands on hips, and try to steady my breath. I need to clear my head. I can fix this if I can just have some time to think.

  I keep glancing at the doorway, but it remains empty. She’s gone, I tell myself. She’s really gone.

  I have to, she’d said. But what exactly is she going to do?

  It gets so much worse, Al. More wars. More death. It’s unbelievable. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

  I throw my head back and swear at the ceiling. “Damn it, Jess. Don’t do this.” Whatever this is.

  I realize I’m listening for her response—that part of me still hoping that she can hear me. That somehow, I can talk some sense into her.

  Nothing. No response. Not even a tingle in my gut.

  I’m stuck in this freezing hospital room, cold sweat soaking my palms, until I have a better plan.

  When Nikki returns from her call to Jeremiah, hopefully she’ll have good news. She called him a prophet. Jeremiah himself told me in Chicago he’s been having visions of Jesse ever since she was called to be a partis—one of the original twelve with a gift. He warned me that she shouldn’t be the one to ascend, that she would kill us all. She would end the world.

  But I can’t accept that. I refuse to believe that the girl I know and love could do that.

  With Gloria wounded, and her sketchbook useless, we’ll have to keep our eyes open for other leads.

  At the very least, I hope Maisie’s alright.

  If Jesse has all the partis powers, I don’t know how it’s possible. Taking Maisie’s power from her was supposed to kill her.

  Don’t think about that now. That isn’t something you can fix.

  I wish I could talk to my brother, Elijah. He’s supposed to be the older, wiser one.

  Six impossible things before breakfast, Alice. That’s what Eli would say, a reference to a favorite book from our childhood. To hear his voice now, even imaginary, is a comfort. Picturing him in Louisville with his pregnant wife, in his JC Penney suits and gator-skin shoes, running his law firm while the rest of us fight forces unseen—it’s a comfort to know there are other good people in the world—

  fighting the good fight—but also living normal lives.

  That’s what I want with Jesse. That’s what I should’ve said when Jesse asked me what I wanted. I should’ve said utility bills and fights about loading the dishwasher. Innocent squabbles over which movie to watch and if it should be pizza or pad thai for dinner.

  No more dying. No more picking up her corpse from the morgue or funeral home. No more hiding or running away from people who want to murder her for her power—either because they want it for themselv
es, or because they fear it.

  Well, that one problem is solved I suppose—there are no other partis left. No one gunning to absorb her gifts. But I’m not sure the other dangers have passed. And I don’t think I’ll ever look at a pizza menu again, let alone have an argument about it.

  Before Gideon took off to “handle a pressing matter,” he told me to keep Gloria and Maisie close. I’m trying. With Maisie in tow, we left the desert, Nikki and I, and came to get Gloria in Nashville. Thank god, we found her alive. Dr. York has done what he can for her, but who knows if she’ll fully recover? Who knows if she’ll be able to see what comes next?

  Georgia and Caldwell are dead. Rachel is dead and Jesse is on the loose. Why aren’t we coordinating our efforts better? Why don’t we have a direction? A plan?

  I don’t think a single one of us knows where to start.

  I wipe my runny nose on my sleeve and look around for a tissue. When I don’t see a box readily available, I stand and head for the private bath opposite Gloria’s bed.

  I only take two steps and freeze.

  Against the opposite wall stands a man. Tall, slumped with his arms folded over his chest. He’s dressed for the cover of GQ Magazine, clean lines hugging his perfect form. His eyes are brilliant green with a chin that you could break a board on. The only feature even approaching imperfection is his mouth, which sits full and a little too large for his face.

  I’ve seen this man before, projected from Jesse’s mind into my own.

  “Gabriel?” I whisper, my voice cracking from either tears or utter surprise.

  I’m frightened to look away or blink for fear he’ll disappear. Again, I’ve only seen him through Jesse’s eyes, through that strange telepathic connection, but Jesse isn’t here now. For all I know, I’ll never see her again.

  “I chose well,” he says. He flicks those emerald eyes up to meet mine. An unnatural light shines through them, illuminating him from the inside out, like there is a lamp deep in his chest, and I can see those flickering flames shining. “I stand by my decision.”