The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

I AWAKEN WITH A SCREAM perched in my throat.Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

Flames licking at boxes, melting metal shelving. I glance down—I’m not holding the journal any longer. It’s morphed into a bottle of lighter fluid, and my hand is no longer my own. It belongs to a girl, her fingernails painted blue, wearing a delicate ring on her middle finger made of twisted gold. Her lungs are full of smoke.

Please I don’t want to die please I don’t want to.

I fall through a hole in the floor of my mind, landing hard in my own reality; back in the flat, back in the office. But my body still feels what hers does—my lungs shudder, trying to expel smoke that isn’t there. I stumble to the door to get everyone up, but it opens before I make it there. Mara and Jamie are in the doorway, together.

“Something’s happening to one of us,” I tell them, thirsting for oxygen. “It’s happening again. I don’t know if it’s Stella but —”

“It’s not Stella,” Jamie says.

“I need to stop talking,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “Search her mind—but I wanted you to know—” A coughing fit grips my body. “It’s happening,” Mara says, and takes my hand, tugs me down the hall. It takes every cell, every neuron firing to make sure I don’t fall down the stairs. I’ve got my back up against the wall when I reach the bottom, and when I catch my breath, I manage to ask, “How do you know it isn’t Stella?”

“Because she’s on the news.”

In the living room Goose is hunched forward, elbows on knees, watching a video of her on CNN, the massive screen split with an anchor speaking over Stella’s voice. I can’t hear what either of them is saying because the noises in my skull are too loud.

The girl in my mind is stepping on broken glass in her boots.

The girl on the television is in a dark room, her face glowing in the light her mobile gives off.

The girl next to me, my girl, has her hands in my hair and is whispering my name as I try to hold on to it, hold on to Mara’s voice. Get control, enough so I can look for a sign, something to tell me where the burning girl is and who she is, though I think I already know.

On the underside of her wrist is a small heart tattoo, the letter F inside of it. She turns it up as she reaches for something, I can’t see what—the flames are too bright, searing her retinas. It’s like she’s standing in an oven; I watch as her hand reaches out for something, and hot metal brands her skin instead. The fire roars, the smell of burning plastic, fabric, and paper, so much paper, and something under it, something dizzying, chemical—

Glass explodes; the shards fall like glitter, showering her body, a thousand stinging pieces piercing skin that is already blistering. Felicity stares up at the ceiling, and I know—

“She’s in the archives,” I say out loud, and I know Mara and Jamie and Goose hear me, though I can’t hear them, not anymore.

The explosion rings in my ears, swallowing my consciousness, but I know one thing: She is alive when she begins to burn.