Chapter 8
At first I wasn’t sure I heard him right.
Dead?
Dead.
Nicholas is dead
What was I supposed to do with this?
“Are you alright?” Alex asked me after my silence became almost maddening.
“I…I don’t know.” I took in the feeling that was poking at my neck. What was this—this horrible, wretched, awful sickness building up in my body? I gripped tightly at the blankets, wishing desperately that the pain would go away.
Go away. Go away. “How did he—he die?” Alex swallowed hard. “When we hit the Death Walker, it threw the car into a telephone pole…he didn’t make it.”
“But I did,” I whispered.
Alex’s eyes were wide. “But you shouldn’t have….You shouldn’t be here, Gemma…” He looked like he was about in tears and it was kind of freaking me out. I have never seen so much emotion pour out of those bright green eyes before. “You almost…you almost died.”
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
He stared down at the hardwood floor, breathing loudly, as he mumbled to himself, “one minute you were dying and then suddenly you weren’t. God, what if you hadn’t made it.” I thought of the words my father whispered to me. “‘Today is not the day you’re going to die.’” I suddenly wondered if maybe my dad knew when my death day was.
Alex’s head whipped over to me. “What?”
Whoops. I did not mean to say that out loud. “That’s what I heard when I…when I was dying. ‘Today is not the day you’re going to die.’” I paused. “It was my father’s voice.”
“You heard your father?” he asked, stunned.
I nodded. “He also reminded me that I needed to fix his mistakes.” Was that why I was still here? Was that why I didn’t die?
I thought of Nicholas and how fixing my dad’s mistakes no longer seemed possible. How was I supposed to go into the mapping ball without him?
The thought of Nicholas made my stomach lurch. Yes, he had been slightly obnoxious, he teased me to no end, and he did things that could be considered evil, but only because he was marked with the Mark of Malefiscus.
My stomach churned again and suddenly I knew…
I was going to puke.
I jumped up, ignoring the pain in my stomach. “Where’s the bathroom?”
Alex, looking mystified, pointed over his shoulder.
“There’s one right there.”
I ran over to the door and threw it open.
“Gemma, what’s wrong?” Alex asked worriedly, getting to his feet.
I slammed the door shut, ran over to the toilet, and puked until my stomach was empty.