Time Crawlers

Chapter 1

Roamer stares at me, eyes gleaming blue. He smiles, his jaw making his cheeks stand out. I smile back, touching his cut lip. 

"Did it hurt?" I murmur, wiping the dried blood from his chin.

"Did what hurt?" He whispers back, eyebrows disappearing into his messy auburn hair.

"Dying." 

 I wake up with a start. Sweat is dripping down my neck, hair matted to my cheeks. I wipe it back. I am panting with fear. Roamer? Dead? I roll out of bed and desperately grab for my phone, dialling a number that's so familiar I don't even have to have my eyes open.

"Yo." Roamer sighs, a yawn in his low, throaty voice. I close my eyes again, revelling in his voice. He's alive.

"Yo yourself. Are you okay?" My voice is fearful, panicked. He realises, because his few words are worried too.

"Fine, why?" I sigh happily.

"No reason, go back to sleep." I grumble. I turn the phone off and lay against my pillows. My breathing is rough and pained. My heart pounds against my chest. Roamer's face flashes in my mind. All of a sudden, I see him lying dead on a concrete street, a guy walking quickly away, bloody knife in hand. I'm running towards Roamer, hands bloody too. His eyes roll into his head, and his lips form a word I don't hear. I'm staring back up at the ceiling. Why now? Why this vision. I flip over to sob silently in my pillow, and fall asleep again.

The knock on my bedroom door makes me start. It's only Jensen, my brother. He grins at me.

"Hey sis, have another vision yet?" He smiles. It's been months since my last premonition, and this is common knowledge. Jensen comes in every morning to ask me if I have had a premonition. When he sees my face, angry but terrified, he stops smiling and sits on my bed.

"Sis, I didn't know..." He murmurs. He knows that visions take it out of me, no matter what I see. But since it's normally bad news, like this time, he feels guilty when he jokes about it.

"I know. But it was bad this time, Jen. Really bad. I saw- I saw Roamer die." Jen and me have always been real close. This is down to Mum dying when I was eight and he was twelve, and Dad leaving when I was thirteen and he was seventeen. Ever since Mum died, he's been looking after me. Dad was barely here when he hadn't left, so Jen gave up his childhood to see me into my teen years the second Mum was gone. It was hard for Jen, because he lost so much, but he always says he gained more than lost it. I love my brother more than anything in the world, and we depend on each other so strongly it would be stupid not to. When it first became clear I had the power of premonition, seeing things before they happened, we bonded further still. And it helped because at first I couldn't control it all, and I'd see when he was going to get hurt in a rugby match or when I was going to drop a bowl when cooking. So when I explain thoroughly what I saw, it isn't surprising that Jen pulls me into a tough bear hug.

"I'm so sorry you saw that, Willow." He growls in the softest voice he can manage. "But we've been able to stop it before. Maybe we can do it again..." He trails off. I shake my head forcefully, sending my head whirling because it aches from crying.

"No, I've never seen myself in a vision before. I touched him, watched his life drain away. I felt him go cold. There's no way I can stop it, just delay it at most. Roamer's going to die and I can't stop it this time." I say sadly. But I don't sob. My throat hurts too much to do so, and I can't make myself feel pain, just an odd numbness that stopped me from feeling pain. This always kicked in when particularly painful things happened. Jen used to say it was my subjective memory. I say it's my defense mechanism. Jen has stopped calling it anything except for my shield. It started when Mum died from cancer, when she died, at first I was crying and couldn't stop, but then a week later it was as if I didn't care, I was numb, laughing and smiling like I always did. 

"Maybe that's just a sign for how much you care about Roamer. Maybe it means that you were seconds too late and you need to get there quicker. Maybe you can help him..." Jen says with the slightest hint of anger. Anger at my numbness, anger at the fact I'm giving up. Anger at himself for not trying to make me help him.

"Maybe." I sigh. But it isn't true. I know it's because someone wants to get to me through Roamer. I can only hope that they don't actually put a knife through Roamer.