Fate's Return (Twisted Fate, Book 2)

Fate's Demand (Preview)

"Tell me again."

Suzie leaned back in her chair and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling as she tapped her nails against the top of my L-shaped mahogany desk placed in the far-left corner of my room. "I've told you everything that I know three times already, Aly. The facts don't change."

Right. The facts. Every time that Suzie went through her so-called explanation, I hoped to understand it better, but how do you explain dying, being saved by good angels, and then getting possessed by the Darkness that they couldn't seem to kill? It was like a dream: unbelievable. Nobody experienced that kind of stuff in real life. But I did, right before I tried to save my mom from a psych ward. That didn't work. So now I was doing as David, my dead boyfriend who'd turned out to be an angel, had said, and was trying my best to listen to Suzie.

I looked at Suzie until she focused on me again, and then asked, "So you get visions?"

Suzie bit her lip and nodded. "Yes."

I stood up and paced the floor of my maroon bedroom, hoping the movement would help me think. After being attacked last night, literally consumed by Darkness, I was scared to close my eyes. Worse than that—Suzie had known what was happening and didn't tell me, and I had thought I was going crazy. Heck, she'd thought it. I paused to look at her and opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I snapped it shut and began pacing once more.

"Aly, I wanted to tell—"

"So you had a vision, and—and that's why we stopped being friends? Because of a vision?" I stopped and leaned against the trunk at the end of my bed to glare at my best friend. Or, at least the girl who looked like her, but I wasn't sure. Were we friends? Or was she another piece of the manipulation machine cranking to play out the events in my life like actors following a movie script?

When I had woken from my dream with David, Suzie had been here, sleeping in the chair. Somehow she was chosen to instruct me on all the weird in my life. It seemed ridiculous. Until the aftermath of what happened at my birthday party, she had been the only one I'd thought had been spared, the least connected, and the last person who could explain what was happening to me.

"You died in that vision, Aly!" She threw her hands in the air. "What would you have done?"

"Me?" I pointed to myself, scoffing. "I would have warned you."

"Right." She licked her lips and nodded. "Until you died, you wouldn't have believed me."

"I died three times! You didn't think I'd get it after the first round?"

"I know how many times you died, Aly. I saw it."

"So what about all the times you could have said something since David died? You knew all about the weird crap going on and didn't think, "Hmm, maybe I should tell her?" You know, so I didn't feel like I was crazy?" Taking a deep breath, I pushed my hands down to my side, and closed my eyes. One, two . . . three. Exhaling, I opened my eyes. "Call me delusional, but that's something I thought was ingrained into the Best Friend Code. You see your friend die—three times!—and then begin doing magic or . . . whatever, and you're supposed to tell them what you know."

Suzie sat in the rolling chair between my desk and bed, silent. I could tell she was upset because she was wearing sweats. Suzie was the head cheerleader, the pretty, popular girl who didn't go grocery shopping without make-up. If the sun was shining? She'd call in sick to school if she didn't have a clean skirt and barely-there top to match. But she was sitting here, the girl who I didn't't believe owned comfy clothes, wearing a pair of gray sweats, unflattering black t-shirt, and bulky wide sneakers like some sort of Avril wannabe from that Complicated video.