Hope Gentry doesn’t believe in Fate. Born with an unusual power to see the dark memories of those around her, Hope just wants to be a normal teenager. But on the first day of her senior year of high school, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to a transfer student named Micah Condie. At first glance, Micah seems like a boy that most girls would dream about. But when Hope's powers allow her to discover Micah's darkest secret, she quickly becomes entangled in the lives of mythical entities she never dreamed existed. Was this her destiny all along? And will her powers help her survive the evil of the Demon Impiorum?
Mythology isn’t just for English class anymore.
It’s an interesting
photograph, the one by Draper. It’s of the crowd at a city train station like
the one on Exchange Street. The subjects of the photograph are a man and a
woman on opposite ends of the frame. They’re highlighted, but by being
transformed to black and white while everything else in the photograph is in
true color. There’s almost a tragic feel to it, like they’re forever imprisoned
apart from each other in monochrome.
I take a step back to look
at the photograph from a distance. But the other person in the gallery must
have been standing right behind me, and I crash into him. I step forward and
spin around.
He’s wearing all black – a
black suit with simple, elegant lines, a black dress shirt, black shoes. He has
dark eyes, a dark complexion, jet-black hair. I wonder if he dyed it to match
his suit.
His eyes are fixed on me.
And this is exactly where I stop noticing anything about the rest of his face
because there’s an eerie white fire blazing in his pupils. I’ve never seen
anything like it. I don’t think it’s an aura – auras always manifest themselves
to me as distinct colors, never white. No, not an aura. Something completely
different. I realize that I’m in a sort of trance, waiting for the visions to
come. But they don’t.
I’m usually pretty good at
it, at pretending I’m like everyone else. I hardly ever let the things I see
get to me. Except for right now.
“Are you all right?”
His voice breaks through to
my consciousness. Given the strangeness of his eyes, I guess I also expected
his voice to be different. Resonant or echoing, maybe, but it isn’t. He blinks
and the white evaporates into nothingness, leaving just the perfect blackness
of his pupils. I come back to myself immediately, my trance broken.
“Are you all right?” He says
it in exactly the same tone as before. He doesn’t sound annoyed, even though
annoyance would have been perfectly justified. I’ve just been standing here
staring at him like he just sprouted a third eye.
“Yeah, sorry. I just thought
you were someone I knew,” I say, mentally congratulating myself for the save.
Better late than never.
Fiery Eyes smiles at me, and
I notice for the first time that he’s kind of a looker. He’s not at all my type
with the well-dressed vampire thing he’s got going on, but then again, I don’t
consider anyone to be my type. The suit makes me think he must be in his
twenties, but he really doesn’t look that much older than me.
His eyes, exactly the shade
of hot cocoa, are looking at me curiously. “I would have remembered if we had
met before,” he says. His voice has a certain kind of charisma to it now, and I
pick up the slightest hint of an accent, one that I can’t quite place.
“Do you want to know the
story behind Fate?” he says suddenly.
“Huh?” I immediately wish I
hadn’t said anything. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but that doesn’t
mean I have to sound so... inarticulate.
“Fate,” he repeats with an
indulgent smile. “The title of the piece you were examining so closely.”
I know the placard doesn’t
show the title for the photograph, but I glance over my shoulder anyway. Nope,
just the name of the artist.
“Is it yours?” I ask.
“Oh, no,” he says. “But I
know its story.”
“Okay,” I say gamely. Maybe
he read about it somewhere. Maybe he made up the name himself. Either way, I’m
too curious not to ask. “So what’s the story behind ‘Fate’?”
“It’s about finally meeting
someone. And never meeting someone.”
I don’t want to sound
inarticulate again, so I don’t respond right away. But I think I get it. “Not
for just the black and white couple in the photograph, but you mean in a bigger
sense? Like whether we meet certain people through chance encounters?”
He shakes his head. “Like
whether we meet them because of Fate.”
“Semantics,” I argue. “It
basically winds up being the same thing in the end, doesn’t it?”
“Without Fate, there can be
no end nor any beginning.” He says it simply, and he sounds just like a fortune
cookie.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
<
1 comment:
Thank you very much for hosting this excerpt on your blog!
Post a Comment