To Kill An Angel
Page 22
“Are you alright?”
The deep voice startled me. With a gasp, I put my hand to my chest to steady my runaway heart.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. It was the runner. He’d stopped and walked across the grass to check on me.
“No, no, you’re fine. I was just, uh-. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just a little preoccupied. The first day of school and all.” I shrugged my shoulders in what I hoped was a casual gesture.
“Freshman, huh?”
“Is it that obvious?” To this, he said nothing. He just smiled, revealing a row of perfectly straight, white teeth. “Do you go here?” I asked.
He appeared to be college age. I’d have guessed maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. And he was probably a jock. He had that athletic build: wide shoulders, narrow waist, long legs. He looked like a clean cut, wholesome, all-American guy right down to his trendy blonde hair and sky blue eyes.
“Until next May, I do. It’s my senior year,” he said with a smile. “Jacob Wheeler. But you can call me Jake.”
It surprised me when he stuck out his hand. Few men had ever offered to shake my hand, so I faltered a bit before I raised my hand and pressed my palm to his. His hand was big and warm and a little rough. “Mercy Holloway. But you can call me…Mercy Holloway,” I said with a nervous laugh. “Nice to meet you.”
“Well, welcome to University East, Mercy Holloway. I’ll see you around.” With that, he turned back to the sidewalk and jogged away.
Shaking off the unnerving start to my day, I walked around Lisa’s now translucent body and tried to put her face behind me as I continued my trek to class.
Fortunately, the rest of the short journey was vision-free so I was a bit more collected by the time I took a seat in my biochemistry class. By the looks of the empty room, I figured I was early so I took out my book and started flipping idly through the pages.
Within a few minutes, other students started filing in and a few minutes after that, the teacher arrived.
Dr. Bradbury was his name and he looked every bit the science teacher. He was a walking cliché with his black horn-rimmed glasses, atrocious comb-over and stained lab coat.
He was well into his first-day-of-class spiel when a straggler student darted through the door. She hurried across in front of the first row then turned to climb up the center aisle toward me.
The breath hitched in my throat when she lifted her head to look for an empty seat. Her face, like all the others I’d seen die over the past ten years, was permanently etched into my mind. Only this one was very much alive.
The student was Lisa.
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