Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. She pinched her arm. Nothing. Slapped her cheek. Nothing. No escaping.
“Please. I need your help.” A male voice. Volume normal, not excruciating. So everyone else’s volume was normal, but hers would be punishing?
She forced herself to face the horror she knew was behind her.
Lying on the ground was a guy. His brown hair boyishly long, feathered over his forehead like a pop star. In his eyes she saw the fading hubris of someone who thought he’d live forever, but made it only to his early twenties. He looked so normal.
Except his torso was severed from his hips and legs.
Organs oozed out of him onto the stark white surface. Blood pooled around him, framing him in crimson. His foot twitched, slapped in a puddle of blood. Splack. Splack. Splack.
Vomit gushed from her mouth, slobbering down her chin and neck. She bent and heaved on the floor. Splatters of her foulness pelted the guy’s face. He didn’t flinch, didn’t blink.
“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” She fastened a hand over her mouth, but then realized her volume was normal. Normal. Not the magnified resonance that threatened to liquefy her brain.
Her legs wobbled, threatened to let her down, but she locked her knees. She might be shaking so badly she looked like she was seizing, but she was going to keep control of her body this time.
The guy’s chocolate-colored gaze met hers. “Tell my mom to stop looking for me. I don’t want her to find out about this.” Water swelled in his eyes, overflowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and cleared his throat. “It would kill her, and she needs to be strong for Kallie.”
“Kallie?” She shouldn’t have asked, shouldn’t encourage communication with him when he felt so, so…evil.
A genuine smile brightened his eyes. “My little sister. She’s my heart. She has leukemia. Me being gone will be hard on her, but if something happened to Mom, it would decimate her. She’s only twelve. She has an entire lifetime in front of her.”
Evanee’s eyes burned, but she swallowed back the tears that wanted to form. Crying never solved a problem. “I’ll tell your mom. And I’ll tell your sister how much you love her and want her to live.”
Maybe she could handle these dreams. If all she had to do was relay a message.
“You need to take this.” He held his hand out to her. Scarlet covered his fingers, coating the chunky ring he held.
“I’ll give her your message. That’ll be enough.” She felt like a shit for saying that, but she didn’t want to touch him or his ring. He might look like a typical guy—except for the severed torso—but there was still an aura of wrongness about him.
The Thing, that invisible force that controlled her, grabbed her arm, yanked her toward what the guy offered.
She clenched her fist. The Thing hadn’t taken over her hand yet. And she wasn’t going to let it. She concentrated all her energy on clenching her fingers as tight as they would go. Her jagged nails sliced into her palm. A bead of blood welled up, higher and higher until it hit the tipping point and dripped. It hung suspended in midair for an impossible length of time. Then crashed to the floor.
A sonic boom gusted over her, whipping her hair around her face, burning her ears so badly she swore they had to be bleeding, but still she didn’t open her hand.
The Thing, invisible to her eyes but very real, tugged at her fingers, harder and harder. Her hand shook with the effort it took to maintain a fist.
The pressure vanished.
Had she won?
She watched her thumb rip backward, felt the crack, the pop of her bone being torn out of its socket, but didn’t hear anything. Pain ricocheted from her thumb to her wrist, up her arm to her elbow, and faded as it got closer to her shoulder, then boomeranged back down to her thumb and back up again with each beat of her heart.
Her knees buckled. She fell, landing in her own vomit, but her arm remained bizarrely suspended in air. Her shoulder socket stretched and strained from the suspension of her hand. The warm, wet weight of the ring fell into her palm.
“Honey. Wake up.” Lathan’s voice penetrated the White Place like the omniscient voice of God.
The white faded away. Underneath was nothing. Nothing she could see, name, hear, or feel. A void.
Her heart, already running a sprint, kicked up the speed as if it recognized a threat her mind couldn’t comprehend. “What’s going on?” she asked the guy, but he was gone. The blood was gone. She was alone.
And then she fell. Arms flailing. Body twisting. Screaming. Waiting for impact.
*
Impact. Her entire body—arms, legs, torso, head—hit at the same time. But it didn’t hurt. And it should’ve. Was she dead? She held her breath, waiting for someone to answer that question for her. But if she was asking the question, that at least meant the neurons in her brain were still firing, so she had to be alive. Right?
Awareness, true awareness dove into her mind with all the grace of a belly flop.
She vaulted upright, but something anchored her left hand, holding it immobile. Panic burned through her stomach. The Thing. Her gaze swung wildly, found Dr. Stone standing at the foot of the bed—What was he doing here?—then landed on Lathan. He knelt on the floor next to the bed, cradling her hand against the tattoo on his cheek. Worry wrinkles creased his forehead, and concern colored his eyes in sadness.
“Hey, I’m all right.” She reached out to him to massage the wrinkles from his face, but her hand was splinted and wrapped in a thick, brown bandage. “What happened?”
“Your thumb was dislocated,” Dr. Stone answered.
“What are you doing here?” she blurted out.