In The Dead of the Night

14 | falling stars

My hands were on the steering wheel, but they were numb and cold like winter, and I couldn't steer if I tried. My foot stayed heavy on the pedal. My eyes stared ahead at the blur of colors all coated by a thick black night, my tears making it hard to see whether my palms had truly started bleeding by my nails digging into them or if that was simply my wicked imagination.

I could tell the fires had started before I saw it, or smelled the wisps of black smoke. Whenever they started, a feeling traveled through my body that made me throw up that was much more than simply the heat of the flames. And then the heat sneaked onto my skin, my lungs filled with clouds of smoke, and my eyes flashed with memories in the blinding light of the flame.

In the smoke I saw a picture of him when I first stepped off the train and into the warehouse, the analytic golden stare. I saw him beside me on the rooftop as we ran like maniacs and felt him holding my hand. I felt the flutter in my chest as I heard his laugh for the first time in those warm, glimmering waters. I saw his smile when we had coffee and chocolate cake with Mr. Sunny and Shania. I felt his lips passionate against mine when we kissed in the fire-lit rain, and saw his sweet, gentle smile when I asked him about the braids a morning not long afterward.

There was a reason I wasn't made for this business. There was a reason I kept my heart under lock and key. There was a reason why I didn't get close to anyone. Because I was the person that fell in love with the wrong one, and watched with tears in my eyes as they threw my heart to the fires.

In a split second of a moment, I pulled over to a gravel road where the flames didn't burn my eyes and stopped the car. There was nothing I could do. If the flames were here, so were they, and if they were here, I was as good as dead.

So I set my bleeding hands on the wheel that his hands had steered for so long and laid my crying eyes on top of them. My cut burned like flames from the salty tears that ran down my cheeks, and my lungs ached from trying to breathe in enough air through the thick smoke to support my crying. The sky began to thunder above me, like a clash of ground and skies, or a unison of people and nature to defeat a common enemy.

Time seemed to pass slowly, even though the only thing I wanted was to have someone come to my side and stop my crying with my breaths as soon as I possibly could. I had nothing left to live for. I could feel in the blood in my veins that was the only left trace of my father, that I was a waste of 18 years and a horrible reason for people like the both of them to die.

And when I felt the tears come down harder than I'd ever felt them before, I knew I was an even more horrible person than I thought I was. Because the thought that made me sob harder and harder was the thought that if I died tonight, Shawn did too. And that thought ruined whatever part of my soul was left.

And any freedom I thought I'd had by being sure to die vanished in that second. I didn't just have my and my father's blood on my palms right then, I had Shawn's as well. I'd left him with someone who despised him with every ounce of their soul and without a vehicle to escape in, but I didn't have the slightest idea of where he was or if he was still alive, and even if I did, driving away from where I was in the open would only lead to a slower, but definite, death.

I couldn't take it anymore. I tried to stop breathing and wrap my frail hands around my neck, but my sobs pulled me back every time for another breath.

I cursed Shawn loudly again, because without the thought of him dying away from me tonight, I wouldn't be sobbing as I was. If I wasn't sobbing as I was, I wouldn't have to keep breathing. Even when he was a traitor, so far away from me, possibly dead, he was keeping me alive, and I hated him for it.

I stopped my pointless, endless attempts and laid my hand on my hands again. My hands were uncomfortably cold, and my tears were uncomfortably hot.

"It's going to happen tonight," I whispered through sobs. "They're going to come for me tonight."