Chapter 1 The Present #2
Can I do anything?
The thought slams into me harder than any fear. Because I don’t know.
I raise my hand slowly, as if it might bite me. My fingers tremble. My nails are suspiciously clean, no soot in the creases, no ash beneath them. Like I was truly born anew, and only the dust in the air has settled on my skin.
But what I’m really looking for is something deeper, some sense of energy. Power. The thrum of my soul still tethered to something beyond death.
There’s nothing.
This body… it looks like me. Moves like me.
But it doesn’t feel the same.
My throat tightens.
Where did this body come from?
Did Death build it from scratch? Is this some kind of Frankenstein reboot, and I’m the patchwork result?
As soon as that thought surfaces, another barrels in behind it—loud, panicked, and thoroughly unhelpful:
What the fuck?
Sirens scream somewhere beyond my already fragile little bubble of existential dread, and bile creeps up my throat.
Me and my three homicidal friends are standing in the open. I’m completely naked. And our not-so-subtle murder souvenir is leaking evidence in the back of a totaled car.
Who gives a shit what I am? We need to move.
“Um, okay,” I mumble, snapping my gaze to the three of them. “Let’s just… let’s do something. One problem at a time.”
“Alright,” Nathaniel mutters, slipping into problem-solving mode, which we all desperately need. “One, we can’t leave the body. Two, Skye, it seems like you’re… different.”
“Oh, you bet I am,” I breathe.
“Three,” Talon chimes in, “she’s still naked. Just circling back.”
Cassian growls something under his breath, something that sounds suspiciously like I will stab you, and for a second, I swear they all forget about the we-just-committed-murder-and-need-to-run situation just to look at my tits.
The same ones Cassian so helpfully pointed out earlier.
And yeah, it does something to me.
Terror’s still humming in my blood. But underneath it, something else flickers. Warm. Electric. Arousing in the worst possible way.
My nipples tighten under their gaze and—
Fuck. I think I’m getting horny.
How bizarre.
“Are we…” I clear my throat as Cassian’s eyes lock with mine. “Are we sure I’m, like, actually physical? Maybe you guys can just… see me better now. Maybe I can kind of touch things inside our murdery bubble, but it doesn’t go beyond that?”
It’s a logical question. Valid, even. But the way my voice cracks, just slightly, just at the end, it comes out sounding… needy.
I’m not trying to seduce them. I swear I’m not. I just want to know.
Because that would be the dream, wouldn’t it? If I were still dead but just slightly upgraded. Grim Reaper 2.0. With my murder trio at my side and no cuffs, no consequences, but able to touch whenever I wanted to.
“Why?” It’s Talon who speaks. “Got a theory you wanna test?”
“Stop,” Cassian cuts in, almost immediately. “We can see you with our normal eyes, not just the altered ones. That means everyone can see you. Do the rest of the math.”
Oh. Right.
A girl could dream.
“Even more reason to get out of here, I guess,” I say weakly. “How are we going to do that?”
They all exchange looks.
None of them answer.
And then, without warning, something in me snaps.
One second, I’m grounded. The jacket is heavy in my arms, the asphalt solid beneath my hip. The next, it’s all gone. The pressure, the weight, the texture—just gone. Not slowly. It just… cuts out.
Then it slams back. A jolt through my spine. And again, gone. Back. Gone. Faster and faster.
My body can’t seem to hold itself in place.
“Um,” I manage, but my voice falters. It sounds off, distant. Like it’s echoing from somewhere else. “Guys?”
My limbs twitch. Muscles seize and release without rhythm. My skin feels wrong, raw, like the air’s too much against it. My vision blurs, doubles, then triples, then splits apart.
“What the hell…” I whisper.
“Skye.”
Cassian’s voice cuts through the haze. He’s suddenly crouched in front of me, and the chaos in my body suddenly feels like it’s all being funneled toward him.
I blink, but his face doesn’t disappear. He grabs my forearms; not gently, not sweetly, just there, decisive and firm like everything else he does.
“Breathe,” he says. “Right now. In through your nose. Do it.”
“W-what…”
“Just do it.”
I inhale, shaky and shallow.
“Deeper,” he snaps, like a drill sergeant who’s personally offended by my panic. “Again. Pull it in.”
I do.
And again.
The spinning slows. With each passing moment, it gets better.
“Look at me,” he growls.
I do as he says again.
And this time, it’s a mistake.
Cassian is too close now, his gaze like a punch to the chest. I don’t even know how he got so close to me so fast but his eyes are dark, intense, scanning me like he’s memorizing every detail of me.
There’s tension in his jaw, in his shoulders.
His hands haven’t left my arms. He’s holding me like I might vanish if he loosens his grip.
“I don’t know what the fuck happened to you,” he growls, “but you’ve got this. Yeah?”
Something about the way he says it makes my throat tighten.
He exhales sharply, like I’m testing his patience, like he doesn’t have time for this, but then one hand moves, slow and rough, up to the back of my neck. His thumb brushes my hairline.
“Get your shit together,” he orders.
And just like that, I try, really try, to focus on anything besides the sickening sensation of my insides unraveling.
It actually works.
Nathaniel comes into my vision behind him. Moments later, I see Talon right next to the two of them.
“What was that?” Talon asks, his voice low.
“She’s having trouble staying tethered,” Cassian says. “Same as before.”
“Same as before…?” I echo, totally lost.
Cassian’s eyes catch mine. “Remember the glitches? When you phased in and out?”
I nod slowly.
“Yeah. That didn’t stop. It’s still happening.”
Talon narrows his eyes at me. “It looked different this time.”
“No, no, no,” I say quickly, forcing the wobble out of my voice. “This wasn’t like before. It wasn’t that... spectral kind of slipping. Back then, I could feel the void. I still felt like me. This time, it felt like…” I pause, searching. “Like I was torn up. Split apart.”
Nathaniel frowns. “Well, you have a body now.” He shrugs. “It’s bound to feel different.”
That’s… fuck. That actually makes sense.
So what, now I can vanish into the void and snap back, only this time, it’s dragging my real, breathing body along for the ride?
“Shit,” I mutter, shaking out my hands like I can reboot myself by force. “Guess the surprises just keep rolling in.”
Talon tilts his head. “Yeah. Apparently you’re half-dead, half-alive now. Or something.”
“Apparently,” Cassian grumbles, pushing to his feet. He throws me a look I can’t quite decode—something tight and unreadable, somewhere between I might murder you and... whatever that was earlier when he talked me down.
Of all people, it had to be Cassian pulling me out of an interdimensional meltdown. The irony is nauseating.
We’re supposed to be enemies, him and me. He’s always been the last one I’d count on—the brooding buzzkill with zero people skills and a disturbing habit of jerking off to me in his cozy little psych ward.
Sure, I saved him. Broke a few cosmic laws to bring his brooding ass back. But still.
It’s Cassian. He’s not supposed to care about me. And I’m definitely not supposed to care about him.
Unless the world is on fire.
Which, fair enough, it kind of is.
“As much as I’d love to unpack all of this,” Nathaniel cuts in, his voice quiet but urgent, “we really don’t have time. We need to move. Now.”
“Okay, let me repeat the question,” I snap, hands flailing. “How?! We are literally about to be ID’d on a million cameras. This is my neighborhood. People knew me here. I’ll be recognized in a second.”
The sirens are getting louder. People are definitely staring. And there’s still a corpse in the trunk.
Cassian catches my eye. His jaw tightens. His muscles flex. He crouches back down in front of me, and without warning—
He grabs my face.
Like, palms-on-cheeks grabs.
And somehow, in the middle of all this chaos, the panic boiling in my chest... starts to ebb.
“You saved my life,” he says, voice rough and quiet. “You’re gonna do it again. But first, put on the damn jacket.”
...Um.
What.
My brain short-circuits.
His gaze flicks down at my chest. A beat later, he yanks the leather jacket from my limp hands and throws it around my shoulders.
“Are you deaf now too?” he snaps.
I flinch, then fumble to slide my arms into the sleeves.
“Um…” I mumble. “No.”
He exhales hard through his nose. Locks eyes with me.
“Alright,” he says, steady now. “I’m going to say this slowly, and I need you to actually listen, Skye.” He gestures to the jacket. “The thing you keep refusing to wear? It flickered with you. During your… malfunction.”
I squint. “The jacket flickered with me?”
“Yes,” he bites out. Like that one word explains the entire universe.
I just stare. My brain offers exactly zero helpful insights.
He doesn’t move. Just watches me.
And then, click.
Oh.
I didn’t just disappear. I pulled something with me.
The jacket came through to the void.
Which means, when I shift, I’m not just slipping between realms.
I’m dragging pieces of this one into the other.
Oh. That’s new.
“So… I could technically flicker the corpse into another dimension?”
“Not just the corpse,” Cassian says. “You’re going to make all of us invisible, and we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“We might still be incognito if we’re lucky,” Nathaniel mutters, crouching beside us. Talon drops in behind him. “We just need to pop the trunk, grab the body, and disappear.”
The sirens are too close now, close enough that the lights are a physical burn against my skin. We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before the world explodes into uniforms, medics, and nosy-ass civilians.
And I… I have the fix.
Problem is, I only just found out about it.