A smile twitches on her lips. “I’m just two floors down and one door over. You’re in what they called...the ICU? Both of us are sleeping. Obviously.”
I process it for a minute. “And you’re okay?”
“As right as I can be.” She sits down on a garden bench and curls the blanket around herself.
I sink to a seat beside her. “What happened to you?”
She shrugs. “My mom brought him home after a date on Friday night. She never did have good taste. He killed her. Then he was going to kill me, but he decided to keep me instead.”
My heart twists. “Why did you come to me for help?”
She blinks. “Here in my sleep, when I skip, I can explore and dream and do things. And talk to boys, like you.” Harriet winces. “But most of them aren’t nice boys. They won’t talk back. Not the ones who know me. They’re just disturbed to see me, and treat me rudely. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat people in their dreams.” She smiles. “But you talked to me nicely, until you got scared.”
Sorrow winds tightly in my heart. If I’d listened to her sooner, I could have cut her suffering short. But I’d held back, resisted, tried to push her fear and misery away.
I cast my gaze down at my arms, layered in bandages.
Harriet reaches out tentatively and brushes a hand across the gauze, her voice timid. “I’m sorry he did that to you. I didn’t know you’d actually...come to help.”
“It’s nothing!” I shake my head hard. “Nothing compared to what you’ve been through. It’s an honor to bear these scars for your sake.”
Cautiously, gently, I take her smaller hand in mine.
She rocks forward and back again. “In the daytime, when I wake, I’ll be the same I always am. I won’t talk. I won’t eat.”
I hold her hand more tightly. “I won’t leave you.”
“I will cry a lot.”
“That’s okay.”
“And maybe hit people.”
I smile and stroke her thumb with my finger. “It won’t scare me away.”
Harriet bites her lip. “You told me to go away. To stop coming to your dreams. Is that what you want?”
“No! No. I’m sorry. I didn’t understand—I should never have said that.” I wrap my arm around her frail figure, tucking her blanket tighter. “Whatever life is like in the waking world, no matter how many people drive you away, or hurt you, you can always share my dreams with me. Every night. As long as we live.”
“Promise?” Light dawns in her blue eyes.
“Promise. And in the waking world, I’ll try to make sure you are safe,” I add. “I can’t control the world of dreams, any more than reality, but I can promise you this. I will always defend you, awake or asleep.”
The distant beeping of a monitor stirs my consciousness. I feel the dream fading, letting me rise toward day—toward light, toward pain.
“I’ll visit you in the morning,” I whisper.
Harriet breaks into a smile as she slips away. “I’ll visit you in the night.”
ALSO BY BETHANY A. JENNINGS
Her husband is a dragon. And the dragon is hungry.
Drawn by his allure, Theryn left everything behind to live with Roth in his mountain cave. But then her fiery-eyed husband transformed into something else: a monster of scales, claws, and wings. The dragon has only one use for her—to bear his dragon egg, now forming in her womb. After the egg is laid, she will be nothing but fresh meat.
But Theryn refuses to suffer the same fate as Roth’s former brides. For her own sake, and for the baby dragonshifter she carries, she must find a way to escape the monster, and break the enchantment of the dragon lyric.
What happens when your gift turns against you?
All her life Bess has known the magic streams around her, waves of power she can draw from to wield the gift of magical threads. Now the youngest member of a team of Anchors, she helps protect the city streets from Drifters—energy thieves who prey on the life force of ordinary humans.
But when a battle leaves Bess’s threads in an irreparable tangle, she is faced with an agonizing choice: sever her threads and lose her magic forever—or be slowly consumed by her own power.
COMING SOON!
A girl who can’t die
and a guy with healing powers
are the ultimate crime-fighting team...
until someone takes off with her head.
Well, here I am. Dead.
I stare down at the shallow grave, where my charred remains have been abandoned, mid-shoveling, the blackened bones protruding from the soil.
Frustration fills me. I wasn’t even given a proper burial. Thugs.
“I can’t deny it, Mel,” says Wesley, rounding the dump site. “This is the deadest you’ve ever been.”
Normally I’d riposte something back to shut up his cheeky Scottish brogue, which is far too cute for his own good, but right now I feel like I’d get a lump in my throat.
If I had any throat left.
“Took me awhile to find myself,” I say softly instead—resenting that I must speak through my friend’s neural pathways instead of with my lips. But I’m always amused by the shiver he gets when I slip through his mind like a knife. It’s not quite pain. More like a startled delight mixed with fear.
He sighs. “And it’s gonna take me awhile to raise you, too. I wish I could do it right now, but after all that running…”
Of course. He needs sleep, and to recharge. He isn’t a miracle worker.
Well, he is. But there are miracle workers and then there are...miracle-miracle workers. Wesley is one of the former. The non-supernatural kind. Human. Just with perks. Like being able to heal any wound, even his own, with the touch of his fingers—and being able to bring one particular girl back from the dead.
OVER MY DEAD BODY: A NOVELLA
Releasing in 2019
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bethany A. Jennings is a YA fantasy author, sandwich aficionado, and star-loving night owl. In addition to her work as acquisitions editor at Uncommon Universes Press, she is a freelance editor and graphic designer, and also runs #WIPjoy, a popular hashtag game for authors. Born in SoCal, Bethany now lives in New England with her husband, four kids, zero pets, and a large and growing collection of imaginary friends.
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