Extraits

He tightens his hold around my arms and I can’t squirm away from him. He leans in dangerously close to my face and I don’t know why but I can’t breathe. “I’m not afraid of you, my dear,” he says softly. “I’m absolutely enchanted.”

“Don’t dare to hate me so quickly,” he continues. “You might find yourself enjoying this situation a lot more than you anticipated. Lucky for you, I’m willing to be patient.” He grins. Leans back. “Though it certainly doesn’t hurt that you’re so alarmingly beautiful.”

“You can have the rest of the day to yourself. Our real work will begin tomorrow. Adam will bring you to me.” He holds my eyes. Suppresses a smile. “In the meantime, try not to kill anyone.”

“You and I,” I tell him, anger coursing through my veins, “you and I are not the same—”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“You think you can compare my—my disease—with your insanity—”

“Disease?” He rushes forward, abruptly impassioned, and I struggle to hold my ground. “You think you have a disease?” he shouts. “You have a gift! You have an extraordinary ability that you don’t care to understand! Your potential—”

“I have no potential!”

“You’re wrong.” He’s glaring at me. There’s no other way to describe it. I could almost say he hates me in this moment. Hates me for hating myself.

“Well you’re the murderer,” I tell him. “So you must be right.”

His smile is laced with dynamite. “Go to sleep.”

“Go to hell.”

“I don’t want you to hate me,” Warner says as we make our way toward the elevator. “I’m only your enemy if you want me to be.”

“We will always be enemies.” My voice is cracked into chips of ice. The words melt on my tongue. “I will never be what you want me to be.”

Warner sighs as he presses the button for the elevator. “I really think you’ll change your mind.” He glances at me with a small smile. A shame, really, that such striking looks should be wasted on such a miserable human being. “You and I, Juliette—together? We could be unstoppable.”

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.

In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.

I’m breathing so hard my frame is shaking. “You want me to torture people for you?”

His face breaks into a brilliant smile. “That would be wonderful.”

We were killing ourselves by trying to stay alive. The weather, the plants, the animals, and our human survival are all inextricably linked. The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.

I hate the heat and the sticky, sweaty mess left behind. I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us.

The moon is a loyal companion.

It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human.

“Hey—”

“You can’t touch me,” I whisper. I’m lying, is what I don’t tell him. He can touch me, is what I’ll never tell him.

Please touch me, is what I want to tell him.

But things happen when people touch me. Strange things. Bad things.

Dead things.