Death and the Girl Next Door (31 page)

“Brooke,” I said, cringing as Grandpa cleared his throat and suddenly had a window to inspect. Not Grandma, though. She didn’t budge an inch, her gaze unblinking as she waited for my answer. “Um, no, you’re not getting my iMac.”

“Dang.”

“iPrecious stays with me. I have to write all this stuff down. I
am
a prophet, after all. I think that’s what prophets do.”

Jared grinned. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

I let my eyes drift shut and stilled the thoughts swirling in my head. The truck hitting me. Jared saving me. The fights, the ancient society, the visions. I pushed it all away and focused on the warmth of Jared as he sat beside me. With one final thought trying to surface—the demon inside—I forced it down with a hard swallow and whispered, “We’re fine.”

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the sequel to
Death and the Girl Next Door

death, doom, and detention

Coming March 2013

Copyright © 2012 by Darynda Jones.

DORMANT

“This class is never going to end.”

My best friend, Brooklyn, draped her upper body across her desk in a dramatic reenactment of Desdemona’s death in
Othello
. She buried her face in a tangle of arms and long, black hair for effect. It was quite moving. And while I appreciated her freedom to express her misgivings about the most boring class since multicelled organisms first crawled onto dry land, I wondered about her timing.

“
Miss
Prather,” our government teacher, Mr. Gonzales, said, his voice like a sharp crack of thunder in the silence of study time. “Is there something you’d like to share with the class?”

Brooklyn jerked upright in surprise. She glanced around, her eyes wide as our classmates snickered, either politely into their hands or, more rudely, outright.

She blinked toward Mr. Gonzales and asked, “Did I say that out loud?”

The class erupted with laughter as Mr. G’s mouth formed a long narrow line across his face. Miraculously, the bell rang, and Brooklyn couldn’t scramble out of her seat fast enough. She practically sprinted from the room. I followed at a slower pace, smiling meekly as I walked past Mr. G’s desk.

Brooklyn stood waiting for me in the hall, her face still frozen in surprise.

“That was funny,” I said, tugging her alongside me. She fell in line as we wound through the crush of students, fighting our way to P.E. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t particularly enjoy having my many faults and numerous shortcomings put on display for all to see, so why I would fight to get there was beyond me.

“No, really.” She tucked an arm through mine. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

I couldn’t help but laugh despite the weight on my chest. “Which is why that was funny.” I hadn’t felt good all day and was praying for some bizarre yet harmless disaster to close the school down early. Like a butterfly infestation.

“You don’t get it,” she said. “This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Everything is weird all of a sudden. People are acting strange and the world has dark, fuzzy edges.”

Before I could suggest a visit to the school nurse, an arm snaked around my neck from behind and I felt something poke my temple. A quick sideways glance told me it was a hand shaped to resemble a gun. “Give me all your money,” Glitch said through gritted teeth.

I shook him off and grinned at him from over my shoulder. “Brooke feels fuzzy.”

He bounced around until he was facing us, walking backward with his backpack slung over his shoulder, his brows drawn in concern. “Fuzzy? Really?”

“I didn’t say I
felt
fuzzy. I said the world has fuzzy edges.”

He looked around to test her theory then back to us before shrugging. How he managed to walk backward in this crowd was kind of awe-inspiring. If I’d tried that, I would soon resemble a pancake covered with lots of footprints.

Glitch, a connoisseur of computers, skipping and coasting through school with less than stellar grades, was best friend number two. We’d grown up together. He was half Native American and half Irish American and had the dark skin and green eyes to prove it.

He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so much fuzzy as nauseatingly yellow, a color that is supposed to calm us, I’m sure. But did you hear?” he asked, suddenly excited. “Joss Duffy and Cruz de los Santos got in a fight during third.”

Brooklyn pulled me to a stop, her expression animated. “What did I tell you? Joss and Cruz are best friends. Everything is turned upside down.”

As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. I’d felt it too. A quake. A disturbance in the atmosphere. Everyone seemed to have a short fuse lately. The slightest infraction seemed to set people off. We’d been warned about an impending war. Was this how it would begin?

With a sigh, I started for P.E. again. Maybe we were reading too much into it. Or maybe the moon was full. People did crazy things when the moon was full. I didn’t want everything to be turned upside down. I’d had enough of upside down when my parents disappeared ten years ago. When I was hit by a truck a couple of months back and almost died. And worse, when I was possessed by Satan’s second in command.

Some days I was almost okay with the fact that, when I was six years old, a demon slipped inside my body, nestled between my ribs, curled around my spine. Other days that fact caused me no small amount of distress. On those days I walked with head down and eyes hooded as my vertebrae fused in the heat of uncertainty and my bones writhed in sour revulsion.

Today was one of those days.

I’d awoken in a panic to the sensation of being crushed, unable to escape an invisible force, unable to breathe. The remnants of the nightmare still ricocheted against the walls of my mind, squeezing my lungs until air became a precious but fleeting commodity. Which could explain the panic attack.

And the dream was always the same. In it, I would float back to that day so long ago and inhale the beast all over again, his taste acidic, his flesh choking and abrasive. Since I was only six at the time, one would think it was a small demon, possibly a minion, a lower-level employee. Like a janitor. But I’d seen him that day. How his shoulders, as black as a starless sky, spanned the horizon. How his head reached the tops of the trees. Small was not an accurate description.

And now, thanks to my need to regenerate, I could relive that memory over and over. Yay, me. On the bright side, I’d ditched that other recurring dream I’d been having since I was five. The one where bugs scurried under my sheets and up my legs. That thing was messed up.

Still, if not for upside down, Jared would never have come to Riley’s Switch. We may only be a tiny speck on the map of New Mexico, hidden among juniper trees and sage bushes in the middle of nowhere, but we were important enough to warrant a guardianship in the form of the Angel of Death. That was something.

“And Cameron has been acting strange, too,” Brooke continued, mentioning the fifth member of our posse, as Glitch called our group of misfits. But I hadn’t seen him in a couple of days, which was odd.

“That’s because Cameron has a crush on you,” I said without thinking. I cringed when Glitch turned away.

“No, seriously,” she said, oblivious. “He keeps asking if I’m okay. If you’re okay. If Glitch is okay.”

Glitch whirled back around and glared, but Brooke missed it once again.

“We need to practice,” she said, pulling a compact mirror out of her backpack. “Try again, only harder.”

She handed it to me as Glitch glowered at her, suddenly in a sour mood. “Really? Here?”

“Yes, really, here. She has to be ready.”

Along with all the other magnificent oddities in my life, I’d apparently been born some kind of prophet. I had visions. Or, well, normally I had visions. I hadn’t had one in weeks, and Brooklyn was convinced I just needed to practice. She’d read that a shiny surface helped psychics see into the future or the past, hence crystal balls. But according to her research, mirrors worked just as well. Hence her compact.

“I have to get to History,” Glitch said, his shoulders tense. “Mr. Burke threatened to skin me alive if I’m tardy again, though I don’t think he actually has the authority to do that.”

“Later,” I said, opening the compact. That boy had issues of late.

As we exited the main building and headed for the gym, I looked down into the mirror. Brooke dragged me along so I wouldn’t stumble. I concentrated as best I could, trying not to focus on the fact that my gray eyes seemed darker than usual and my auburn hair seemed curlier. Curlier! I leaned in for a closer look. Oh, the gods were a cruel and humorless lot. Because that’s what I needed. More curls.

“Does my hair seem curlier to you?”

“Curlier than an ironing board, yes. Curlier than a French poodle, no. Now concentrate.”

Concentrate. Fine. But even at their height, my prophetic visions weren’t terribly useful. And I normally had to be touching someone to have them. I had to either be touching the person I was prophesying about or had to have touched him at some point in the recent past.

But Brooke was bound and determined to expand my skills, to widen my periphery so I could have visions on the fly. So far, our attempts had yielded exactly squat. Unless I was touching said fly, nothing happened.

Kind of like now.

After a solid twelve seconds, I gave up. “You know, it would help if I knew what to concentrate on.”

Brooke patted my arm absently, staring into her phone. “Concentrate on concentrating.”

For the love of Starbucks, what the heck did that mean?

I lifted the mirror again. Shook it a little to make sure it was working. Held it at arm’s length. Squinted. Just as I was about to give up entirely, a vision, dark and alluring, materialized behind me. I sucked in a soft breath at the sight, even though, admittedly, there was nothing prophetic about it. Wearing the sexiest grin I’d ever seen, Riley’s Switch’s own supernatural being in the form of Mr. Jared Kovach walked up behind me.

I stopped and turned. He was wearing his requisite jeans that fit low on his hips and a gray T-shirt with a brown bomber jacket thrown over his shoulder. The cloudy day had splashed color across the sky behind him. A hint of orange, pink, and purple served as a backdrop to his powerful set of his shoulders, the lean hills and valleys of his arms. Somehow I didn’t think that a coincidence.

I tried to subdue the jolt my heart I received every time I looked at him. The wind molded the T-shirt to the expanse of his chest, revealing the fact that he was cut to simple perfection. And he had this way of moving, this animal grace, that could mesmerize even the stoutest of minds.

“How was your last class?” he asked, stopping in front of me. His voice, deep and smooth like butterscotch, caused a fluttering in my chest, a rush of heat to my face. How could any being, supernatural or otherwise, be so perfect?

“Pretty boring,” I said, clearing my throat to recover. “But it did have an interesting twist at the end.” I grinned at Brooklyn.

“That’s good,” he said.

I nodded and glanced at his arms. The bands of symbols that lined his biceps were visible beneath the edges of his sleeves. The designs were ancient and meaningful, symbols that stated his name, rank, and serial number in a celestial language. Or that was my impression. I loved looking at them. Thick dark lines that twisted into curves and angles. A single line of them wrapping around each arm. They looked like Native American pictography combined with something alien, something otherworldly.

“Not good,” Brooklyn said, tapping on her phone. “It was awful. I’ll meet you in P.E. Keep practicing.”

She wandered off, still gazing at her phone, as Jared asked, “Practicing?”

I snapped the compact closed and stuffed it into a pocket. “The whole vision thing. Brooke swears I just need to practice.”

“Ah.” The humor in his liquid brown eyes was infectious.

Jared had come to Riley’s Switch a couple of months ago to do a job. That job was to pop in, take me a few minutes before I was slated to die anyway, then pop back out again. But he’d disobeyed his orders. He’d saved me instead, thus breaking one of the three rules that celestial beings are bound by. Even the powerful Angel of Death. As a result, he was stuck on Earth. Stuck helping me. According to prophecy, I was supposed to stop an impending war between humans and demons before it ever started, but how I was supposed to manage that, nobody knew. Least of all me.

I pointed over my shoulder and started to turn. “I guess I’ll get to class now.”

He nodded and looked into the forest behind the school. “Are you okay?”

“Me?” I stopped, surprised. “I’m great.” When he looked back at me, his eyes full of doubt, I said, “Well, I’m better than I was a minute ago.”

One corner of his full mouth lifted in a delicious smile that melted my knees. “So am I.”

A person would have to be blind not to notice all the attention Jared drew every time he made an appearance. And I couldn’t help but notice that when he bent to kiss my cheek, more than one girl at Riley High stopped dead in her tracks.

He put his fingers under my chin and lifted my face to his. “I’ll be close.”

Ever since Jared had arrived in Riley’s Switch, he’d been kind of undercover as a student. Partly because we didn’t really know what else to do with him without drawing unwanted attention, but mostly because he wanted to stay close to me, to keep me safe. I liked to pretend it was because he liked me, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was more because of my status as a supposed war stopper. I tried not to think about that part of the prophecy that had been handed down for centuries. My stomach clenched painfully every time I did.

So instead, I focused on the dark brown depths of Jared’s eyes, shimmering beneath his thick black lashes.

Oh, yeah. That felt better.

*   *   *

Sadly, P.E. was going to require effort. We were ordered to run the Path, which was a footpath in the forest behind the gym. Fun for some, life-threatening for others. I was about as coordinated and sure-footed as spaghetti. This was not going to end well.