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out why, I collapse to the ground and drift off… somewhere…
     
    You’ll understand soon. What I want.
     
    I try to make sense of the voice, but moments later, drift off into the blackness with feathers surrounding me. Then for the briefest moment, it feels like they’re falling off me.
     
    But I know that can’t be right.
     

Chapter 3
     
     
    I wake up screaming with my lungs heaving, terrified of what I’ve just done. Murder. Death. Reapers. Evil. All of it connects with me and I half expect to burst into flames as I bolt upright. Yet, as my heart settles—as I realize where I am—I start to relax. I’m not in the alleyway, but in my bed, surrounded by black and red walls that are sketched with mythical drawings and depressing poetry. A thin, black curtain hangs across the closet doorway that’s decorated with photos of dead poets and authors along with a poem Cameron wrote a few weeks ago.
     
    “It was just a dream.” I press my hand to my chest, relief washing over me until I realize the full extent of what this means. That I didn’t kill someone and take some of Cameron’s life, that Cameron didn’t tell me he knows something about my father. It was just a dream and I’m back to square one where I have nothing more than emptiness to accumulate my life.
     
    I tell myself to calm down as I keep my eyes on the door, wondering if my brother, Ian, heard me scream when I woke up. Even if he did—even if he is here—I doubt he’ll check in on me. That’s how things have been ever since I found Ian passed out in his bed with that photo of Alyssa, his deceased girlfriend, with the words, Death made me do it, Alyssa, and I’m sorry. But now I have to move on to the next angel written on it . I asked him about it the next day and he denied the photo ever existed along with the painting in the attic of Raven lying in the snow, wearing a cloak and holding an hourglass. Somehow, it disappeared and there’s no evidence that any of these things existed. For all I know, everything I’ve seen is nothing more than an illusion created by the Reapers.
     
    Then there’s my best friend, Raven, who I wouldn’t put it passed to be part of the murders also, at least her possessed, alter ego side. She’s actually been ignoring me, which I both like and hate because she’s evil at the moment, yet I miss my friend. We pass by each other in the school hallways like ghosts, neither acknowledging that we see each other. It makes me want to find that damn book that was stolen so I can translate what it said on those pages about freeing pure souls.
     
    I lie quietly in my bed for a while, the stillness absorbing into my skin as the loneliness weighs me down. The sun is sparkling through my window, the sky a clear blue and there’s a bird chirping from the branches. Thankfully, it’s not a raven; otherwise, I’d think it was Cameron.
     
    I decide what to do next for the day because if I don’t find something to keep me distracted, the hours are going to drag. I could write maybe, but I’m worried what might come out of me; my darkest desires I don’t want to admit, how I briefly loved the taste of Cameron’s life, the darkness living inside him. Even though it was just a dream, it frightens me.
     
    Sighing, I reach for one of my textbooks on the nightstand beside my bed, choosing to catch up on schoolwork since it’s the one thing I have left in my life that’s not centered by death, angels and Reapers. But as my fingers grasp the edge of the book, I catch sight of my arm and jerk my hand back.
     
    Lines vine up and down my skin and wind around my wrist in black ink, like a tattoo. My thoughts flash back to my dream and I can taste the feeling of Cameron’s life again, burning at the tip of my tongue.
     
    “No, it was a dream,” I whisper in horror as I grip my forearm, rotating my arm around to examine it. “It didn’t really happen… it couldn’t have.”
     
    I don’t think you really believe