PROLOGUE

  Have you ever watched the world meld into a sea of glass as Earth’s air leaves your lungs for the last time? Ever heard the celestial music of the universe beckoning you away from thought and reason? Ever marked the absence of a heartbeat as first warmth, then cold spread from the gap an ounce of metal left in your chest? Ever felt the calm drag of the void pulling you toward a peaceful rest?

  Have you ever died?

  My first day of tenth grade, a life ended. Not mine, but that death opened the way. A crash lasting nearly seven and a half seconds changed the course of the world.

  As a small-town boy still getting used to the big city of Philadelphia, with its endless supply of alien faces, I hid my freakish side from the endless flood of awkward teens. When the intercom called my name to the office, I tried to think of what mistake I made this time. Didn’t I blend in? How did I give myself away?

  My concern had been misdirected.

  Father called the school to reach me. I can still hear his broken voice through the phone, warning he was on his way to pick me up. Pressure threatened to collapse my chest as I sweated in that too-warm office, waiting for him to arrive and deliver the news he would only give me face-to-face. I never saw him cry before, but pale cheeks and puffy, bloodshot eyes confessed the reality of my worst fears. The tightness of his embrace in the instantly chilly office is forever frozen in my mind.

  Mom’s peaceful face dominated my thoughts. She napped on the couch when I left for school that morning. Dad told me not to wake her. I would never get to tell her goodbye.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  We returned to our silent apartment and started packing immediately. Dad intended to bury Mom at home, a thousand miles away. Though these claustrophobic rooms would never echo with her laughter again, the soft melodies she sang to the potted plants on the windowsill would forever whisper through my mind.

  Dad took those plants across the hall to Mrs. Jenkins. How could he? He didn’t water, prune, or sing to them. They belonged here, as a monument. Without looking me in the eye, he said, “Pack everything, Micah. We’re not coming back.”

  Stepping from the rental car into the sticky Florida air of my hometown after being away for only one year and three months didn’t magically heal the wounds of an incomprehensible loss, but it stitched them closed. The black week shifted to dark gray, and with it came a sober acceptance of this new, yet familiar life.

  While I knew countless pizza dinners waited to be eaten in silence, I also knew my father exhausted all the goodwill he and Mom earned over the years in Madison by calling in every favor owed him at once. Over the next few days, he spent hours on the phone to buy a house and enroll me at the newly renovated James Madison Preparatory High School.

  My grim acceptance of these forced circumstances didn’t stem from the source my father expected—a familiar place with familiar faces to distract me from grief—but something far more specific. As a teenage boy, the main source of my relief was, of course, a teenage girl.

  Wynn.

  After fourteen years of friendship with the girl next door, I’d grown mature enough to understand why my breath caught every time she smiled. A year and three months ago, I feared I saw that smile for the last time as a hot breeze blew black hair across her freckled face. My heart stuttered out a goodbye, certain we wouldn’t meet again until college, or later. If ever. Now, she attended the same school my father pulled his significantly connected strings to get me into.

  The past is a collection of shining points on the timeline of life so bright you can relive them. Sometimes unwillingly. Moments mundane, yet transformative. Moments of regret. Revelation. Pain. Joy. Brief seconds of eternity when time slows to a stop. My sophomore year filled with such memories.

  The dire events of that first day commenced a momentous school year. The year I turned sixteen and got my first car. The year of my first kiss. I would discover abnormal abilities and ancient secrets. Learn the truth about my own frightening nature. Explore what it meant to love. Defend that love with my life. I’d never forget my sophomore year in high school because that year, I died.