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Prologue
Leader
“There’s a war coming.” My colleague stands in front of me with a worried look on his face.
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I take a drag of my cigarette and lean back in the chair.
He huffs in aggravation as he begins to pace in front of my desk. “How can you be so calm right now when evil is everywhere?”
“No, it isn’t.” Smoke laces the air and circles my face as I raise the cigarette to my lips. “Not yet.”
He stops pacing and faces me. “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. The portal to the paranormal dimension has already started to open and soon every paranormal creature will be invading our city.”
“Not every paranormal creature is evil.”
“I know, but the ones that are…” He shudders. “They’re going to tear the city apart.”
“No, they won’t,” I assure him, reaching forward to put out my cigarette.
He raises his brows. “How can you be so calm after everything you’ve been through? Considering your history with the paranormal, I thought you’d be more concerned about this.”
“I understand my history, and I understand the danger in our future.” My tone is clipped, but I don’t care. He shouldn’t have brought up my past. “But, like I said, they’re not going to tear the town apart.” I rise from my chair. “Because we’re going to be ready for them.”
His brows furrow. “How can you possibly be ready for something like this?”
“Because I’m building my own army.” I pick up a folder and round to the front of the desk. “I’ve found five candidates that, with the right training, should be able to protect our city.”
He takes the folder from me and frowns. “Look, I know our facility has been experimenting with creating the perfect superheroes, but so far none of our experiments are strong enough to take on the paranormal.”
“I know that,” I tell him, tapping the folder with my finger. “This is a different experiment. One that should create creatures strong and powerful enough to fight the most powerful evils of all.”
He opens the folder and reads the first page. “Wait… Are you thinking…” He glances up at me in astonishment. “You want to create our own paranormals?”
I nod. “What better way to fight the paranormal than with the paranormal.”
“But how will we control them?”
“By getting them to trust us,” I say. “And by leaving a bit of their humanity in them.”
His shock skyrockets, which I expected. While my ideas have always been a little out there, even for a place like this, this is by far my most insanely brilliant idea yet. “Wait? You want to turn humans into paranormals?”
“Part paranormals,” I clarify as I walk up to the window and stare out at the rooms stretching across the warehouse. In each room, doctors perform procedures to enhance abilities in humans to make them quicker, stronger, faster, super inhuman—superheroes. “They’ll still be half human, which will help them fight against the evil urges the paranormal blood will manifest.”
He remains quiet for a while. “But isn’t it a little cruel to do that to someone who’s innocent?”
I tuck my hands behind my back. “That won’t be a problem with any of the candidates I’ve chosen.”
“And why’s that?”
I turn to look at him. “Because my candidates are cursed with darkness already. And when we bring them here, they’ll already be dead.”
Chapter 1
Sometimes my life feels like a movie. Unreal. Plastic. Plastic houses, plastic furniture, plastic town, and me, a plastic doll living in the midst of the fakeness. My best friends are the same way. We’ve always been popular, always get whatever we want. Everyone loves us even if they don’t know us, and everything seems to work out perfectly for us.
It’s not like I hate my life or anything. I like it, and I’m completely grateful for what I have. But sometimes I wish everything wasn’t so… easy.
I live with my two parents in a three-story mansion on the highest hill in Willow Crest Falls, and the entire town looks like a field of fireflies at nighttime. My dad is a well-known lawyer who works high end cases and makes more money than we know what to do with. My mom has spent her life raising me while becoming a respected socialite. She oversees every town charity event and was even given the key to the city, which basically means she was given a large, shiny key that’s too big to fit into any door. It’s perched on the mantle where everyone can see it.
But life hasn’t always been perfect for us, at least that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve only heard one story about my family’s dreary past, told around the holidays after my mom drank too much wine and my dad passed out in the lounge chair. The story wasn’t even a real story, more like a warning that my family’s life used to be far from perfect.
“We’re so lucky, Remi, we really are,” my mom said to me on Christmas Eve. “I wish you could understand that—how lucky we are.”
I was twelve and had spent the day begging to open my presents early, to no avail.
“We’re not lucky all the time,” I replied as I sucked on a candy cane. “We got snowed in today, didn’t we? That’s not very lucky.”
But the truth was, the previous night I’d wished for a snow storm, so my dad would have to stay home with us instead of going to the office, like he did every Christmas Eve. I didn’t really believe my wish had come true—I mean, it’s not like people can control the weather—but a part of me pretended that I’d somehow made the snow storm happen. I wasn’t about to tell my mom that, though.
“Oh, honey.” She patted my leg and then took a sip of her wine. Her lips were stained red from the countless glasses she’d drank already, her hair was down, and she’d kicked her heels off a long time ago. “If only you knew how terrible our lives used to be.”
I finished the rest of my candy cane then relaxed back in the chair. “What’d you mean?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head once, something she did whenever she was about to lie.
“Mom, please tell me,” I said. “I want to know.”
She clasped onto the necklace she wore every day. The pendant was a small glass vial filled with purple sand that, in certain kinds of lighting, appeared as if it were glowing. I often pretended tiny faeries lived on the insid
e who granted wishes, and that’s was why my wishes came true sometimes. My mom ruined my dream, though, when she told me it was just dyed sand and nothing magical.
“Remi, please don’t ask me to talk about this,” she begged, clutching onto the vial. “I never meant to bring it up.” She glared at the empty wine glass. “I drank way too much tonight.”
“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” I pressed. “What’s the big deal?”
Regret flickered in her eyes. “Because I hate remembering what we were and what we did to get here…. And what lies ahead in the future.”
For the briefest instant, I swear the vial shimmered, but it happened so quickly that I questioned if it was the reflection of the fire in the fireplace.
After that, my mom rose to her feet and hastily left the room.
My families past was never brought up again. Even though I desperately wanted to understand what my parents gave up for our luxurious life, the fear in my mom’s eyes made me afraid of the answer.
