Blurred

Chapter 18

Cash

The room was spinning. Or maybe it was just my head. I blinked away a few of the purple spots that dotted my vision and squinted at the chicken scratch Mr. Reynolds had scrawled across the chalkboard. He was saying something about…the Magna Carta? I didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t even care. I was starting to lose count of the sleepless nights. One night of sleep with Anaya was not going to make up for the rest. Especially when she’d proceeded to drag my ass all over the afterlife.

It had been two days and I still hadn’t fully recovered. Last night had been yet another night of tossing and turning, listing to the hisses echo across my room in the dark. After a certain point, could you even call it insomnia anymore? Could a person die from a lack of sleep? It sure as hell felt like it.

It felt like my insides were turning black like a banana you’ve left out on the counter too long. It felt like those little shadow bastards were killing me without even touching me. Like they were just waiting for that last puff of life to leave me.

I was waiting for it, too.

A wad of paper hit my shoulder and I flinched. I picked it up, fighting the urge to fling it back at someone, but stopped when I saw it was Finn. His eyebrows were all scrunched together. It’s how he looked when he was worried about Em, which was pretty much all of the time. I definitely didn’t need the guy looking at me like that. Especially after Anaya told me about him saving Em.

He lifted his hand and motioned to the paper. I unfolded it and laid it in my lap, so Mr. Reynolds wouldn’t get a bug up his ass about us passing notes. To be completely honest, I didn’t want anyone seeing me read his note. What were we, fifth-grade girls, for Christ’s sake? I unfolded it and searched for a part that wasn’t marked out.

You look like you need to talk

We can talk if you want after school.

We’ve seen each other in our underwear, so I think I’m allowed to say this now. You look like crap.

Finn

I rolled my eyes. Nice. Very astute of you, Finn . A wave of dizziness swept over me. Consuming me. Swallowing my vision for a few seconds before spewing it back up all tilted and off-balance.

Every passing second it felt as if the life were draining out of me, or rather like it was being siphoned out of me. I felt something wet under my nose and swiped the back of my wrist over my face. It came back red. I stared at the crimson smear on my hand for a few seconds. I was so used to having paint on my hands, it took a few seconds to register that it was blood. Like the real kind. Not the make-believe kind I splattered across my canvases. This was real. It was happening. I was dying.

I pushed out of my seat, swearing under my breath. The blood had dripped all over me.

“Something wrong, Cash?” Mr. Reynolds stopped, looking me up and down, his eyes going wide with alarm. I could only imagine how I looked right now.

“Um… Just a nosebleed, I think.” I held my palm over my face. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Of course.” He tossed me the hall-pass key and I clutched it like a lifeline.

By the time I got to the bathroom I was freezing. Not the kind of chill that came with January—the kind that turns you to ice from the inside out instead of the other way around. But at least my nose had stopped bleeding. I filled my palms with water and doused my face. Watched the red water swirling in little circles around the silver drain before washing clear and disappearing into darkness. I half expected a shadow to crawl up through the hole. When one didn’t, I waited for Anaya’s face to show up in the reflection over my shoulder. I forced myself to ignore the little pulse of disappointment that throbbed in my chest when she didn’t.

I looked at my pale reflection in the mirror and pushed the dripping black hair that was falling over my forehead back out of my face. Finn was right. I looked like shit. How much longer was this going to last? What was going to happen to me when it was over?

“You don’t belong,” a voice said from behind me.

I spun around, fear crawling up my throat. My heart pounded in my chest, reminding me it was still alive and fighting. Adrenaline surged through my veins. There was a boy behind me. Maybe twelve, thirteen. His skin was too white. Purple bruises painted the hollow of his cheeks and under his eyes. A gaping gash split the side of his face. He looked like a character in a Tim Burton film.

“What do you want?”

He stepped forward and a dull shimmer rippled in the air around him.

“What are you?” He cocked his head to the side and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jean shorts.

I couldn’t hold the laugh in. That laugh was the last of my sanity leaving my body, crawling across my lips to escape. “Me? What the hell are you?”

“You don’t belong,” he said again. His voice sounded like static. He sounded like a dream. Or more like a nightmare. Like I needed more of those while I was awake. I pinched myself just to make sure I wasn’t passed out at my desk in Mr. Reynolds’s class. God, what I wouldn’t give to wake up in a puddle of my own drool on a cold desktop right now, but I didn’t. This was as awake as I was going to get.

“I…I don’t belong where?” I asked, pressing my tailbone against the sink. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The boy looked sad. His lips looked all blue, cracked and pulled down at the corners. He started to shake. “Not him,” he whispered.

“What? What is it?”

His frightened gaze was glued to the spot over my shoulder as he stumbled back. Someone sighed behind me and I turned around to find Noah. His ash-blond hair was flipped down over one eye and a feral scowl curled his lips.

“Great.” He leaned back against the row of sinks, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “Now I’m going to have to chase him. Thanks for that.”

I looked over my shoulder to find the kid, and he…was gone. Just like that. The air was empty and cold. Absent of anything but me, Noah, and the stale scent of cigarette smoke and Pine-Sol.

“Why would you chase him?” I asked, stepping away to put some distance between us, thinking about the terrified look on that kid’s face the second he laid eyes on Noah. It was like he’d seen him before. The soul Anaya had taken hadn’t looked like that. If anything she’d looked…grateful. Even the one being shipped off to the Inbetween had looked confused more than anything, but not scared.

He folded his arms across his chest and his sleeves rode up enough to see a spiderwebbed map of black veins.

“If you’re here to help him, shouldn’t he be chasing you?”

“She’s getting to you, isn’t she?” he said. “You get that you’re falling right into the trap they have set for you, right? She lets you feel her up, tells you a few lies, and now you’re second-guessing everything I’m offering you.”

I clenched my fist and my knuckles cracked. I wanted to lay him out, but he was right. Anaya was getting to me. Hell, she was more than getting to me. She was consuming me.

“I’m not falling in anybody’s trap,” I snapped. “I’m just confused, all right?”

Noah nodded and kicked the back of his boot against the wall to knock what looked like a fine layer of ash off it. “You have questions? Ask them. I’m not here to lie to you, Cash. I’m here to help. I wish you could trust that.”

There was something inside me telling me that trusting him was the last thing I should do, a whisper that was getting louder every minute I spent with Anaya. But was it enough? Anaya was the one keeping something from me. I could see it in her eyes, a painful regret that took over every time I asked her about my future. Every time I touched her. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting her. That went beyond anything I could control, but trusting her? That was something else.

Noah, on the other hand, wasn’t holding anything back. He was an open book. If he had the answer he would give it. And whether I wanted to admit it or not, we were the same. I may not know how either of us got to be this way, but here we were, like two halves of a whole. Even now, standing a few feet from him, something dark pulsed in my veins, turning the blood almost black under my dying skin. I wanted to believe that Noah was good because that meant I’d be good, too, but I didn’t know anymore.

“I saw her take a soul,” I admitted, looking up from my wrist. “It didn’t look how you described it.

It was messed up, but it wasn’t all bad. There was another side.”

Noah laughed. “Did she show you what they do to the lost? The ones like I take? The ones they let rot until they are nothing more than a starving shadow with absolutely no recollection of who they once were?”

I shook my head, not knowing what to trust or what to believe. There was more than one side to this.

“Yes, there is another side. A better side. But do you actually think that you are going to get to have any part of that perfect, pretty peace you saw?” He laughed. “No. If Balthazar doesn’t destroy you once you’re free from that body—and that’s a big if—you won’t be delivering happy souls to some peaceful, perfect existence. You’ll be turning them into that.”

Noah pointed to a shadow that was swirling out from under a bathroom stall, a sickening hiss seeping from its belly. Before I could look away, three more followed, churning the fear in my gut until it bubbled up into my throat.

“Every soul you touch will rot,” he whispered, stepping closer. “You will be hated. You will be feared. You will be the very thing inside of you that you’re trying to fight. Don’t let one pretty face trap you into that kind of existence.”

I didn’t want to believe what he was telling me, but it made sense. Why the fuck did this have to be so hard? The feelings inside me that were building for Anaya, the connection that had nothing to do with attraction, it was twisting everything that should have been clear.

“I’m offering you friendship,” Noah said, sounding deflated. “I’m offering you a kind of immortality they will deny you. The chance to do something good in this world.”

Noah clasped a hand over my shoulder and the chill from his skin seeped through my T-shirt, bringing the brigade of goose bumps on my arms to attention. If it was possible, he was even colder than me. A bell rattled out in the hall, starting the countdown until students would start to rush through that door.

“Just think about it,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

The touch on my shoulder disappeared and when I turned around, Noah was nowhere to be seen.

Once again he’d left me not knowing what the hell to think or believe. Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of blue hovered behind an open bathroom stall.

“Hello?”

The kid who had taken off when Noah showed up crept out from behind its edge. “Is he gone?”

I nodded, not really knowing what to make of this kid who was obviously dead, or the fact that I was having a conversation with him. “Why are you afraid of him? He just wants to help you.”

The boy vigorously shook his head and wrapped his little arms around his middle. “The souls that go with him never come back,” he whispered. “He takes them down there.”

I knelt down in front of him, not wanting him to be afraid of me. I needed him to go on. “Down where?”

His gaze drifted to the shadow demons that were now hissing and snapping behind me. The kid backed up and they inched closer. “Down to them,” he finally answered before disappearing through the wall like a puff of blue smoke. The three shadows behind me zipped past in a black blur as they chased after him and I tripped over my own feet trying to stand up.

What had he meant that Noah took them down to them? As in, he delivered them to the shadow demons? That didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t know what he was talking about, could he? Maybe he had Noah confused with a reaper. You couldn’t really tell the difference after all.

Right?

Fuck, I didn’t need this. I needed to know who to trust. Maybe I couldn’t trust any of them. Maybe I really was alone in this. I grabbed the sides of my head to try to make the thoughts slow down. They wouldn’t. They just spun Tilt-A-Whirl circles in my skull over and over until they crept down my aching throat. Into my clenched fists.

Everything went black. A blinding, screaming black.

And when it was light again I was standing in front of a broken mirror. My fist was bleeding. My cheeks were wet. But at least the thoughts were gone. Everything in my brain was horribly blank, replaced by a hurt that wouldn’t go away.

The bathroom door swung open and I turned away from the broken reflection of my face in the mirror. Finn stood gawking at me, his green eyes sweeping over the bathroom like he was looking for who could have done this. Like he couldn’t believe that I’d done it myself.

“What happened?” he asked, walking over. Slow. Cautious. He pulled the gray sweatshirt he was wearing over his head and wrapped one of the sleeves around my trembling, bloody hand.

I didn’t know what to say to him. I still wasn’t ready to tell him about Noah, not when I didn’t know whose side he was really on—or what side I needed to be on, for that matter. What I did know was that

Finn was keeping something from all of us and I wanted to know what it was. Seeing the hard look in his eyes as he talked about Balthazar that night in Emma’s room was enough to tell me that he knew exactly what this Balthazar guy was capable of.

Swallowing a lump of pride down my throat, I stared at my replacement. The guy who had everything I used to have. Emma. A life. A future. I wanted to hate him for it, but I couldn’t. Not when him having all of those things meant Emma being happy. Even if that meant I didn’t get to have them anymore. Finn took another hesitant step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. I wiped my bloody hands on my jeans and shuddered out a breath full of want and loss and fear. Then I said three words I never thought I’d say to Finn.

“I need help.”