Chapter 9
Nine
Aria
The dream always starts with the lights.
They’re strobing yellow and white on my face, a hypnotic rhythm from the streetlights passing overhead.
We’re flying down a deserted city street in Jade’s beat-up convertible.
The top is down, and the cool night air is a wild thing in my hair, whipping it across my face as I laugh.
Jade is laughing too, a loud, fearless sound that’s more beautiful than the music blasting from the speakers.
Her hand leaves the steering wheel to grab mine, her fingers squeezing tight.
Her skin is warm against the chill of the night.
“Best night ever?” she yells over the wind and the music.
“Best night ever!” I yell back, squeezing her hand. The world is a blur of neon and shadow, a tunnel of light and darkness, and we are invincible. We are nineteen. We are immortal. The feeling is so pure, so real, I can taste it on my tongue—like electricity and cheap cherry lip gloss.
Then the world shrieks.
It’s not a human sound. It’s a chord of screaming metal and shattering glass. A supernova of white light explodes behind my eyelids, and the world lurches sideways with impossible, bone-breaking violence. The streetlights are gone. The music is gone. Jade’s hand is ripped from mine.
I’m floating in a thick, suffocating darkness. There is silence, a profound, ringing silence that is somehow louder than the scream that just tore the world apart.
The smell hits me first, gasoline, sharp and nauseating. And underneath it, something else, something hot and coppery.
My eyes flutter open. I’m still in the passenger seat, but the seat is tilted, pressing me against the door. The windshield is a spiderweb of fractured glass. The world outside is a chaotic mess of twisted metal, lit by the flickering of a dying headlight.
“Jade?” I whisper. The word is a dry, broken thing.
I turn my head.
And the dream becomes a nightmare.
She is there, only a foot away from me, but she is gone.
Her head is tilted at an angle that necks are not meant to go.
Her eyes, the same bright blue that had been laughing seconds ago, are open and staring up at the dark, starless sky.
They see nothing. They are just glass. A thin line of blood, impossibly dark in the gloom, trickles from the corner of her perfect mouth.
Her favorite song is still playing, a distorted echo from her phone, which has landed on the crumpled dashboard. “We can be heroes, just for one day…”
My mind can’t make sense of it; The lights. The song. The blood. The silence. I reach for her hand, the one that was holding mine. It’s limp and so, so cold.
“Jade,” I say again, louder this time, my voice cracking. “Jade, wake up. This isn’t funny.”
She doesn’t move. The song keeps playing. The blood keeps trickling, and I am helpless. I can’t move, I can’t scream. I can only watch as the life, the energy, the laughter drains out of the world, leaving only this cold, silent, broken thing beside me.
Then a new voice whispers in the suffocating quiet, his voice, not hers.
This is what you wanted.
I gasp, and the scene shifts. I’m looking in the shattered rearview mirror, but it’s not my own terrified face I see. It’s his. Cassian’s green eyes stare back at me, impossibly bright in the darkness.
To feel something, his voice murmurs, a caress of sound right beside my ear. Anything. Even this.
The blood on Jade’s mouth seems to darken. The car groans, a final, dying breath.
I’ll see you soon, the whisper promises.
I finally find my scream.
I wake up thrashing, tangled in my own sweat-soaked sheets. The scream is trapped in my throat, a raw, silent sob. My apartment is dark, the only light is the faint, grey pre-dawn glow filtering through my window. It’s quiet. The only sound is my own ragged, desperate gasping.
I rip the sheets off me, my body slick with cold sweat.
The phantom smell of gasoline and blood is so strong I gag, stumbling out of bed and into the bathroom.
I brace my hands on the sink and my head hangs low, breathing in the clean, sterile scent of soap and tile, trying to chase the nightmare away, but it won’t go.
When I finally look up, my face in the mirror is a stranger’s.
The hollowed-out ghost I’m used to seeing is gone.
In her place is a woman with wild, terrified eyes.
Her skin pale and clammy, her lips parted in a silent scream.
There is color in my cheeks. There are shadows under my eyes. I look alive, I look haunted.
I look like the girl from the bar.
I stare at my reflection, and Cassian’s words echo in the crushing silence of my apartment.
You’re here because I’m the noise now. Aren’t I?
The nightmare wasn’t just about Jade anymore. It wasn’t just a memory. He was there. He had found his way into the most sacred, broken part of me and made it his. Cassian had taken my oldest ghost and wrapped it in his own shadow.
For two years, I have lived in a fortress of silence, a carefully constructed void where nothing could hurt me because I felt nothing. It was a half-life, but it was safe.
Last night, I walked out of that fortress. I chose to feel, and this is the price. The void is gone. The silence is shattered, and the noise that has taken its place is his voice, his eyes, his promises. I am more terrified now than I have ever been in my entire life.