Unravel Me: The Juliette Chronicles Book 2

waving a lazy hand in our direction. “We have more important things to focus on right now. More pressing issues to deal with.”
    “What,” Warner asks, “are you talking about?” He doesn’t seem to be breathing.
    “Justice, son.” Anderson is staring at me now. “I’m talking about justice. I like the idea of setting things right. Of putting order back into the world. And I was waiting for you to arrive so I could show you exactly what I mean. This,” he says, “is what I should’ve done the first time.” He glances at Warner. “Are you listening? Pay close attention now. Are you watching?”
    He pulls out a gun.
    And shoots me in the chest.

SEVENTY
    My heart has exploded.
    I’m thrown backward, tripping over my own feet until I hit the floor, my head slamming into the carpeted ground, my arms doing little to break my fall. It’s pain like I’ve never known it, pain I never thought I could feel, never would have even imagined. It’s like dynamite has gone off in my chest, like I’ve been lit on fire from the inside out, and suddenly everything slows down.
    So this, I think, is what it feels like to die.
    I’m blinking and it seems to take forever. I see an unfocused series of images in front of me, colors and bodies and lights swaying, stilted movements all blurred together. Sounds are warped, garbled, too high and too low for me to hear clearly. There are icy, electric bursts surging through my veins, like every part of my body has fallen asleep and is trying to wake up again.
    There’s a face in front of me.
    I try to concentrate on the shape, the colors, try to bring everything into focus but it’s too difficult and suddenly I can’t breathe, suddenly I feel like there are knives in my throat, holes punched into my lungs, and the more I blink, the less clearly I’m able to see. Soon I’m only able to take in the tightest breaths, tiny little gasps that remind me of when I was a child, when the doctors told me I suffered from asthma attacks. They were wrong, though; my shortness of breath had nothing to do with asthma. It had to do with panic and anxiety and hyperventilation. But this feeling I’m feeling right now is very similar to what I experienced then. It’s like trying to take in oxygen by breathing through the thinnest straw. Like your lungs are just closing up, gone for the holidays. I feel the dizziness take over, the light-headed feeling take over. And the pain, the pain, the pain . The pain is terrible. The pain is the worst. The pain never seems to stop.
    Suddenly I’m blind.
    I feel rather than see the blood, feel it leaking out of me as I blink and blink and blink in a desperate attempt to regain my vision. But I can see nothing but a haze of white. I hear nothing but the pounding in my eardrums and the short, the short, the short frantic gasp gasp gasps of my own breath and I feel hot, so hot, the blood of my body still so fresh and warm and pooling underneath me, all around me.
    Life is seeping out of me and it makes me think about death, makes me think about how short a life I lived and how little I lived it. How I spent most of my years cowering in fear, never standing up for myself, always trying to be what someone else wanted. For 17 years I tried to force myself into a mold that I hoped would make other people feel comfortable, safe, unthreatened.
    And it never helped.
    I will have died having accomplished nothing. I am still no one. I am nothing more than a silly little girl bleeding to death on a psychotic man’s floor.
    And I think, if I could do it over again, I’d do it so differently.
    I’d be better. I’d make something of myself. I’d make a difference in this sorry, sorry world.
    And I’d start by killing Anderson.
    It’s too bad I’m already so close to dead.

SEVENTY-ONE
    My eyes open.
    I’m looking around and wondering at this strange version of an afterlife. Odd, that Warner is here, that I still can’t seem to move, that I still feel such extraordinary pain. Stranger still to see Sonya and Sara in front of me. I can’t even pretend to understand their presence in this picture.
    I’m hearing things.
    Sounds are beginning to come in more clearly, and, because I can’t lift my head to look around, I try instead to focus on what they’re saying.
    They’re arguing.
    “You have to!” Warner shouts.
    “But we can’t—we can’t t-touch her,” Sonya is saying, choking back tears. “There’s no way for us to help her—”
    “I