{Original Story}
Having supernatural powers should feel like a blessing, but for Jack Parker, the most powerful Gifted in the world, it means he gets to be haunted by ghosts, hallucinations, and premonitions. Oh, and he's also on the run to stay on...
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Seven-year-old Jack Parker had seventeen imaginary friends. He was too young and optimistic and naive to realize they were actually bloodthirsty monsters on the verge of ripping him to pieces. The most prominent one was a woman in a tattered white dress, with a black rose in her black hair and a smile of perfectly straight, blindingly white, somewhat pointier-than-normal teeth. She said her name was Mary Jane Calhoun and told him her origin story—but that's all he thought it was. A story, not history. He was seven, could you blame him?
He saw her everywhere. At the bus stop when he got home from school. In the grocery store where his family went shopping. In the mirror when he woke up in the morning. In dreams. At eleven, he began to suspect those shadows of his were real. At fifteen, she touched him for the first time, a gentle brush of a fingertip on his shoulder, and then he knew they were real, all of them. She left him alone for a few years, taking the other sixteen no-longer-imaginary friends with her, but it didn't matter. He was not normal and he knew it, and his childhood suffered from other paranormal things.
She came back when he was twenty, finally telling him what she wanted, why he was special.
He said no, of course, but now she'd come back every once in a while, making the same offer, repeating the same set of words every time she was refused. You'll come around. Eventually.
In summation, Jack knew everything about the century-old woman who now went by Death, and he knew almost everything about the cult, but he barely answered Maya's questions. He was willing to give up the basics. The details, however, were terrifying and unnecessary.
"Why'd she burn up?" Maya asked. "That lady who attacked you."
Because the fire that should've killed Death didn't. Now when the cult dies, they burn as she should have. "I don't know," he said.
"When did this cult form?"
"Early 1900s."
"Global?"
"Probably," Jack said, though he preferred not to think about it.
"How did they form? There had to be a beginning, right?"
Maya would be disappointed and disillusioned to find out that a Gifted had started the cult, so he said, "I don't know."
"I don't think you're telling me the truth."
"I'm barely telling you anything."
She frowned. "Same difference."
The frown made her look younger. Jack still couldn't get over how a twelve-year-old got from Colorado to Oregon. Why didn't anyone stop her? Ask her if she was alone? Was there more to her than he could see?
"Do you have a phone?" he asked.
"No."
"Mine's in the glove compartment. Call your parents and tell them you're safe."
