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Too numb to know if I had tightened my grip.
Too numb to do more than stumble and fall in front of the screaming feet.
A host. I’d been given a host.
Hand slick from trying to hold in what was left of my brain, I fumbled as I reached for the feet.
No time, I had to leap.
Incomplete. Only my memories seemed to be leaving.
Iwas staying behind. Dying.
I stared up yellow smiley faces and spluttered. The joke was on me. I was dying in a puddle of brain and blood beside the one man I needed to be dead.
CHAPTER4
Val
I staredinto the same bright blue sky as earlier, but this time I had a sense of the surreal. Debris drifted past, specks of ash or demolished paper. The ringing in my ears was more solid than my form. Slowly my body came back to me. My back registered the hardness of pavement. My nose registered a mélange of blood and screams. Which...wasn’t right. Crossed wires. My ears...
Screaming?
For a moment all I could think about was France. I hadn’t saved them.
And then I remembered the bomb. A second bomb.
Fuck.
The team—I had no earpiece, but my damn cell phone was vibrating like crazy in my pocket. At least I thought that was why I was trembling.
My fingers and limbs weren’t working, yet. For a while, all I could do was lie there and wonder if I was alive or dead. And whether it mattered.
Nerves still twitching from the after shocks, I scrabbled at the grit beneath my fingers. The sting of the small abrasions told me thiswasreal.
Definitely real.
A shadow moved over me, blocking out building and sky, then the face of a woman loomed above. Pretty magenta hair tips swung down between us, a striking contrast against her pale skin, ghost-white as if she’d been drained of any other color. She stared down blankly as if she too was here and not here just like me.
And then she blinked, the illusion gone.
Slowly, my body unlocked. Letting out a pained groan, I rolled onto my side.
The girl snapped back, quickly jerking out of reach. The tension in her body screamed run, but something on the floor between us had snagged her attention.
The sun glinting off the blade made me squint as if it cut straight into my brain—magpie brain because, like the girl, the antique knife held me transfixed.
Her hand sneaked towards the curiosity...
Mine.
I lurched forward on instinct, ignoring the scream of agony tearing through my head. Magenta girl snatched it away just as my fingers brushed the hilt. Fuck. Too slow. My body was still sluggish. Nausea rushed up my throat, and I ended up gasping.
Had to be concussion.
Had to be the reason I felt so strange.
Had to have the knife.
