Page 47 of Zero Happily Ever Afters

Only the pop of a hundred different visions snapping off simultaneously didn’t happen. Something new brewed at the edges of my mind. A vision that’d lain dormant among the collection. It boiled and sizzled, seared my inner core, twisting my perception of the mind, a place of my making, into a battlefield of carnage.

Rubble. Debris. Smoke. Flames. Chaos. Blood. Destruction. So powerful and palpable that the sheer devastation radiating off it swallowed every other vision entirely, leaving only the ruin of Chicago in its wake.

Silent screams.

Scorched flesh.

Crying corpses.

The city wept crimson tears, raining down the deaths of millions. Not a few unlucky souls but every single person. Maimed and slaughtered and left to rot on the fractured ground that rumbled with furious satisfaction.

I whirled through every corner of the city, every street, every building, every inch of the sky above and the tunnels below. Death. Death. Death. Everywhere and everyone.

Finally, the vision slowed like a rollercoaster inching its way back to the conductor’s station. Here, at the edge of the nightmarish vision, lay twelve bodies.

The fabric of uniformed blazers left burned and ripped. Bloodstained shirts tattered and frayed. Scorched emblems, ruining the golden sheen of Gemini Academy pins.

Yaritza Vargas.Dead.Melanie Dawson.Dead.Jennifer Jung.

Dead.Jamius Watson.Dead.Layla Smythe.Dead.

Carter Howe.Dead.Gael Rios-Vega.Dead.King Clucks.

Dead.Gael Martinez.Dead.Katherine Harris.Dead.

Tara Whitlock.Dead.Kenzo Ito.Dead.Caleb Huxley.Dead.

My entire homeroom coven lay across a sea of corpses, bloody and beaten and broken.

I screamed and shot up, shaking loose from the shadows and limbs that wrapped around my body, my throat. Fingers dug into the scar of my neck and ripped it open, painting blood and pain everywhere.

“No, no, no!” I shouted, gasping and desperate for a single breath.

The attack faded. The limbs that strangled me turned into tangled covers. I took rapid breaths, steadying my erratic pulse before I realized I’d levitated in my sleep. I floated high up off the bed, where both of my cats stared at me from the floor. Their eyes shimmered in the dark of the room.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, releasing the stress of the nightmare—the vision, actually—and descended to the comfort of my bed. “Bet I gave you two a scare.”

Charlie hopped back in bed, sniffing my sweaty face and then settling back into a comfortable spot on the bed. I hadn’t levitated in my sleep since I was seven or eight. Sleep casting wasn’t unheard of, and my telepathy remained active at all times, but I rarely lost control of my roots. That vision shook me to my very core. Quite literally the core of my abdomen where access to the levitation root lay.

I contemplated contacting Milo, telling him about the vision, but he would’ve already seen it. This was probably another outdated potential future, one he’d resolved years ago. The thousands of visions I’d absorbed from Milo exploded throughout my mind, an eruption of fireworks flickering out too quickly to make sense of but lasting too long to simply ignore. They rattled around my skull, scraping at the insides of my head, tearing everything apart to the foundations of my sanity.

“This can’t be real. It can’t be possible,” I said to myself a few times, repeating it until the truth that this wasn’t possible cemented into my thoughts. Only it didn’t work.

I grabbed a cigarette and tried to calm my shaky nerves. Continuous flashes played in my line of sight, warping my perception of the dark bedroom. Even the cherry ember of my cigarette appeared blurred when the flicker of some fast-passing vision looped by.

“Fuck it.” I snuffed out the smoke and reached for my phone.

Milo answered on the first ring.

“How are you even awake?” I turned the phone to check the time, squinting at the harsh bright light in the darkness of my bedroom.

“What can I say?” He smiled; I felt it in the single breath of his pause. “I had a feeling you might call tonight.”

“Damn clairvoyants,” I said with a breathy huff, also smiling because only Milo would stay up until three in the morning on the off chance I might have a nightmare vision panic attack and need his soothing voice to calm down.

“I had…” I bit my lip, contemplating because the second I asked for clarification on that nightmare, that past vision, that horrible hellish future, I knew it’d consume me. It’d haunt my every waking breath. My every sleeping one, too.

“Visions came loose, and you saw a really bad one.”

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