Page 5 of Veil of Death and Shadow

The same day Sora and I escaped to our freedom.

We’d been celebrating a birthday I’d otherwise tried to forget ever since. Her rule, not mine. She’d dubbed six years ago the official breaking of my curse—Anniversary Extraordinaire. Not that she’d ever really believed that I was cursed in the first place.

Her theory was that my fixation with death was just a manifestation of unprocessed trauma and bad luck. It was a theory my old therapist shared as well, and one I tried desperately to believe.

“Their deaths were a coincidence, Mars. They had nothing to do with you. Curses and bad omens aren’t real.”

Never mind that everyone I’d ever let myself get close to—except for Sora—had kicked the bucket.

But, more or less, she was kind of right.

Not because people I knew stopped dying.

I couldn’t seem to get away from death—not entirely.

We were all susceptible to his call, eventually, weren’t we?

But no one particularly close to us had died on my birthday since we’d escaped. As absurd as it might have seemed, I clung to that truth with every fiber of my being. A truth that Sora spent the other three-hundred-sixty-four days of the year drilling into me.

This was the one day I let myself think that she was right.

My brain believed things far wilder than broken curses after all, there was no reason I couldn’t force it into believing this reality as well.

And, well, I wasn’t currently roadkill, so maybe there was something to her half-baked theory.

“Right,” I whispered to myself, tugging the collar of my jacket close against my jaw. A dark chill carved along my neck, striking down to my feet.

As beautiful as it was, there was something unsettling about being down here alone, like I was in another world altogether. Sunlight crept through the foliage in iridescent stripes, highlighting dust and particles in the air until they looked almost like fairy dust. The air tasted strange—metallic and briny—and pulsed with a strange static that had the hair on my arms lifting with anticipation.

And then time seemed to stop.

My fingers grew stiff, my vision slightly blurry, and I felt the familiar current run through my body that preceded most panic attacks. The energy coursing through me was at odds with the general peace of the park—like my body was having a deferred reaction to the bus that nearly ran me over.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, waiting for my still-racing heart to realize I was fine and regulate itself back to a normal beat.

“Ground yourself, Mars.”

Sora’s frequent words echoed through my mind, as if she was here. Normally, I’d roll my eyes and ignore them. But now, I latched onto them as if they were the final thin ledge keeping me from toppling over the cliff.

Pressing the pad of my right thumb against the cool metal of my ring, I focused on the light, minty taste of toothpaste lining my tongue, on the soft, musical bird calls floating around me.

After a few minutes, it worked. My body regulated its way back to functionality.

I grabbed my arm, placing my fingers over where the man had held onto me, forcing myself to unbraid the strange feeling that his touch had rooted. I’d never seen him before; there was really no reason for me to be so shaken by the encounter.

It was probably just emotional transfer and gratitude from the rescue.

He didn’t just stand there and watch me die.

The bar for men was truly on the ground.

I shook my head. I didn’t have time for this.

Frank’s.

I was late. Thanks to this distraction, I was definitely way past my ten-minute promise to Sora.

Opening my eyes, I turned back towards the path.

---