The Shadows Never Lie

Prologue

I first discovered my unwanted talent the day I turned five years old. My mom and dad were throwing this fabulously huge party for me, the way they'd done since I was born, the way they've done every year since.

I can no longer recall what game we were playing when I made the discovery, except that it was one of those silly little games that small children seem to enjoy so much. I suppose it no longer matters.

The first thing I really remember is seeing Alice Pearson. I wasn't particularly good friends with Alice, but our mothers were in a book club together, so we were relatively well-acquainted with one another.

Anyway, she looked perfectly normal one minute. I glanced away, then looked back, only to see that she was surrounded by...well, to me, they looked like shadows. Alice was positively covered in them, as they pulled at her hair and clothes. She was completely oblivious, laughing and shouting like all the other kids.

I couldn't help myself. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Everybody immediately stopped what they were doing, and my mother came running as fast as she could.

She asked me what was wrong, if I was hurt, and all the other questions any good mother asks when something like this happens.

But I couldn't answer any of them. I was sobbing too hard to say anything intelligible. My five-year old self was terrified of the shadows swarming all around a blissfully unaware Alice.

My mom ended up apologizing and sending everyone home. It took her at least an hour to calm me down completely. When I could finally speak, I told her what had happened and what I had seen.

My own mother didn't believe me. She patted my back and told me, in that gentle way of hers, that it had all been in my imagination. Nothing I said could get her to believe it was real. After that, I never mentioned the incident again, letting her think that I believed her, that it was all in my imagination.

But I didn't. I knew exactly what I saw, and nothing my mother could've said would convince me otherwise.

One month later--to the day--Alice's body was discovered, just outside the city limits in the river that ran through the center of the city. Nobody knew how it had happened. No one knew she had even gone somewhere, no one had thought her missing. It was a complete and utter mystery, and remains so to this day.

After Alice, I kept seeing the shadows around people all across the city. I still didn't know what it meant, at least not for a long time. It took me nearly five years to understand their significance, to realize that for the people surrounded by shadows, they meant death in exactly one month from the first day they appeared.

I eventually became accustomed to seeing them, the shadows. I didn't enjoy the "gift" any more than I had previously, but they no longer terrified me the way they had that first time, with Alice, even though I knew what they meant now. I saw them, and looked at the person with a kind of sympathetic resignation. I knew what was coming, but they, of course, did not.

Alice was the only one I knew. They might sometimes be a familiar face, but I never knew them personally.

Never, that is, until I turned sixteen.

It should have been a happy day for me. I shouldn't have had to worry about anything.

Instead, I was miserable, shut up in my room for the most part, refusing to talk to anyone, barely even able to control myself.

"Why?" you ask. "What happened to bring about this change?"

Let me tell you.

After I got up, I went downstairs. I could hear my mom moving around in the kitchen. It was soon apparent that she heard me, too.

"Elena? Is that you?" she called.

She came around the corner, and when she saw me, presumably started telling me, "Happy birthday." I don't know. I couldn't tell. Her lips were moving, but I couldn't hear her.

For there she was.

A smile on her face.

And shadows all around her.

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