Death, and the Girl He Loves - Darynda Jones Page 0,4

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.

Then another thought hit. Since when did I even think the word “ass”? This school was a bad influence.

Another girl walked in. Kenya glanced over her shoulder, then slowly, reluctantly, disengaged her foot. I picked up my backpack before she could change her mind and headed toward the nurse’s office. Or, as it was called here, the infirmary.

I could feel Kenya’s gaze burning into my back as I walked out and down the hall. That girl needed to adjust her meds before she had an aneurysm. Then again, in five days, it wouldn’t matter.

* * *

Since I had no fever and there were no signs of an infection or a virus, the nurse wasn’t sure whether to believe I’d just emptied my stomach into a toilet or not. But when she touched me and her death rushed into me, clenching my gut, causing me to hurtle toward her wastebasket and dry-heave into it for a full minute, she shut up, put a cool cloth on my forehead, and darkened the room to let me get some rest. Outside, clouds hung low and blocked what little sun might have filtered into the room through a small window above the nurse’s desk.

Normally, the low light would have been comforting, but the nurse’s death was worse than the rest. Death was hard to see anyway—surreal, unwanted—but hers was darker, more brutal. The black figures from the storm entered her and systematically broke her bones. One by one, her own muscles spasmed, jerked, and contracted until her fragile bones snapped under the pressure. An agonizing jolt of pain shot through her with each break. Causing her body to spasm more. Her spine to bow. Her ribs to crack. Her lungs filled with her own bodily fluids and she could no longer scream. She lay in a contorted heap of limbs and torso until the sweet release of death came when she drowned in her own blood.

I swallowed the bile burning the back of my throat. Fought the feeling of drowning and drew in long gulps of air. The infirmary smelled like sanitary hand gel. It was a clean scent and helped calm my stomach.

So the clouds were not clouds at all. The darkness was a plethora of spirits that had escaped onto this plane, just as they had when I was six. The gates of hell had been opened before, and I’d seen it in a premonition when I was barely old enough to pick out my own clothes. I’d led my parents there, hoping they could close the lightninglike fissure in the sky, the one through which beings as black as midnight were escaping from their plane and onto ours. A demon came through. One demon, and after my parents disappeared into the fissure, after they vanished, the demon dematerialized and I breathed him in. His essence scorched my throat and filled my lungs, and he’d been inside me ever since.

But even then, the spirits didn’t enter people and torture them as they had in my visions. Maybe spirits were like people. Maybe some were worse than others. Meaner. Sociopathic. Or were they demons? The demon that entered me was a massive, shining black guardian of the underworld. I wondered if a demon had entered the nurse—her death was so horrific—or if it was a spirit. A fallen angel or a former human.