Page 74 of Pulse Zero
So of course I do.
Just a brief brush of my knuckles against his cheek.
His eyes snap open. For a second, they’re unfocused with sleep, then they land on me and widen. He jerks backward across the concrete floor, scrambling away like the distance will make him safe from me.
I lean back on my heels, a slow smirk pulling at the corners of my mouth.
“Ready to play, little menace?”
I was never afraidof my own shadow, but Reese’s is a different story.
I wake sometime in the middle of the night. I don’t move. My brain feels like someone shook it loose inside my skull, and now it’s slowly settling back into place.
The concrete floor is cold beneath me, my cheek pressed against it. Somewhere nearby, a light hums with electricity. I let my breathing stay slow and shallow while my mind catches up with the last twelve hours.
Reese is alive.
Superpowers are apparently real, which honestly feels like the bigger problem but somehow also the least surprising development of the day.
Malcolm fucking betrayed me.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, just wanting to forget. But I can’t.
The memories come back in fragments. Reese standing in front of me with his hand around my throat, shadows crawling along the walls like they had minds of their own. The way the airin the room had felt wrong, heavy and pressing against my ribs as a dead man told me things I didn’t want to believe.
The moment those shadows snapped toward me, that part I remember clearly.
It wasn’t just darkness. It was something deeper than that. Something alive. They wrapped around my chest and throat, and for a second…I thought I was going to die. Not in the metaphoricalwow this situation suckskind of way. In the very realmy lungs are collapsing and the world is endingkind of way.
Then everything went black.
So…not my best day.
I still haven’t moved, yet I start feeling dizzy. It’s still all too fucking much. When darkness comes again, I willingly let it take me.
The next time I wake, it’s to a soft touch against my cheek. Then my eyes snap open to the sight of him kneeling beside me, and my body reacts before my mind does. I sit up and scramble backward across the floor so fast my shoulder slams into the wall behind me. The movement scrapes my palms against the concrete, but I barely feel it over the adrenaline flooding my system. Like my brain forgot he was alive, and it believed for a split second that I was seeing a ghost.
Reincarnation is real.
Near-death experiences can cause superpowers.
Ghosts would seemnormalright about now.
But here he is in the flesh, real and tangible, looking exactly like himself and completely wrong at the same time. Older and harder with something darker threaded through the sharp lines of his face. He’s wearing black again today like it’s the only color of clothes he owns. Apparently, he’s upgraded from gray.
He leans back on his heels like my reaction amuses him, and a slow smirk curves his mouth.
“Ready to play, little menace?”
I start shivering as though I just had a bucket of ice water dumped on me. It’s the way he said it, the way he looks at me like a predator would look at prey.
The shadows all around the room stretch across the walls and ceiling like ink spilled in water, thick and slow and wrong. When Reese moves, they move with him, not quite attached but close enough to make my skin crawl. There’s a strange pressure in the air when he’s around, like the atmosphere bends slightly in his direction.
“Always down for a friendly game of Battleship,” I say because…of course, I can’t help myself.
One corner of his mouth twitches. It’s not quite a smile, but it’s close enough that something traitorous in my chest reacts to it, remembering all those times I managed to crack through his hard shell.
At least he doesn’t seem as annoyed as he was yesterday.
