Then another thought hit. Since when did I even think the word “ass”? This school was a bad influence.

Another girl walked in. Kenya glanced over her shoulder, then slowly, reluctantly, disengaged her foot. I picked up my backpack before she could change her mind and headed toward the nurse’s office. Or, as it was called here, the infirmary.

I could feel Kenya’s gaze burning into my back as I walked out and down the hall. That girl needed to adjust her meds before she had an aneurysm. Then again, in five days, it wouldn’t matter.

* * *

Since I had no fever and there were no signs of an infection or a virus, the nurse wasn’t sure whether to believe I’d just emptied my stomach into a toilet or not. But when she touched me and her death rushed into me, clenching my gut, causing me to hurtle toward her wastebasket and dry-heave into it for a full minute, she shut up, put a cool cloth on my forehead, and darkened the room to let me get some rest. Outside, clouds hung low and blocked what little sun might have filtered into the room through a small window above the nurse’s desk.

Normally, the low light would have been comforting, but the nurse’s death was worse than the rest. Death was hard to see anyway—surreal, unwanted—but hers was darker, more brutal. The black figures from the storm entered her and systematically broke her bones. One by one, her own muscles spasmed, jerked, and contracted until her fragile bones snapped under the pressure. An agonizing jolt of pain shot through her with each break. Causing her body to spasm more. Her spine to bow. Her ribs to crack. Her lungs filled with her own bodily fluids and she could no longer scream. She lay in a contorted heap of limbs and torso until the sweet release of death came when she drowned in her own blood.

I swallowed the bile burning the back of my throat. Fought the feeling of drowning and drew in long gulps of air. The infirmary smelled like sanitary hand gel. It was a clean scent and helped calm my stomach.

So the clouds were not clouds at all. The darkness was a plethora of spirits that had escaped onto this plane, just as they had when I was six. The gates of hell had been opened before, and I’d seen it in a premonition when I was barely old enough to pick out my own clothes. I’d led my parents there, hoping they could close the lightninglike fissure in the sky, the one through which beings as black as midnight were escaping from their plane and onto ours. A demon came through. One demon, and after my parents disappeared into the fissure, after they vanished, the demon dematerialized and I breathed him in. His essence scorched my throat and filled my lungs, and he’d been inside me ever since.

But even then, the spirits didn’t enter people and torture them as they had in my visions. Maybe spirits were like people. Maybe some were worse than others. Meaner. Sociopathic. Or were they demons? The demon that entered me was a massive, shining black guardian of the underworld. I wondered if a demon had entered the nurse—her death was so horrific—or if it was a spirit. A fallen angel or a former human. The demon that entered me did nothing to harm me. Not ever, but I’d been told my experience was extremely unusual. Since I had nothing to compare it to, I couldn’t have said one way or the other.

I lay there with my eyes closed, not sleeping but replaying the visions over and over in my mind. After seeing that, after hearing the snap of bones, feeling the rip of flesh as the jagged ends protruded out of the nurse’s limbs and torso, I figured I would never sleep again.

I turned onto my side, peeked out from under the cloth, and unzipped a side pocket on my navy backpack. My fingers found what they sought instantly. A picture I’d copied from an old annual, one that had actually captured the Angel of Death scoping out his next assignment, which happened to be at Riley High in 1977. Of course, no one but my friends from back home and I knew that. He looked like any other student, only with muscles that rose and dipped magnificently and eyes that glimmered with an intelligence far beyond his presumed years.

A crowd of students stood around the flagpole of the old high school. They were laughing, as though in disbelief, at what must have been some kind of a prank. Mr. Davis, the principal at my old alma matter, Riley High, had an older brother named Elliot. When Elliot was in high school, he and some friends had chained themselves to the pole and were holding a sign that I still couldn’t quite make out.

But they were laughing, too. Every student in the photo was laughing, except one. A boy. He was standing closer to the camera yet apart from the rest, his stance guarded, his expression void, and as always, my gaze gravitated toward the image of Jared Kovach.

He looked exactly like he did now. Same boyishly handsome face. Same mussed hair. Same T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms long and sculpted like a swimmer’s. There was no mistaking the wide shoulders, the solid build, the dark glint in Jared’s eyes. Even the bands of tattoos peeked out from under his shirtsleeves, the rows of angelic script that encircled each of his biceps. He was just as breathtaking back then, just as surreal.

The first time my best friends and I saw that picture in a yearbook from the ’70s, we had a difficult time swallowing the fact that it was the same guy. Until we learned what Jared was. Why he was there in the first place. He’d been sent for Elliot Davis much the same way he’d been sent for me. That was his job, after all. That’s what the Angel of Death did. He answered prayers, keeping people safe when they might have died or tweaking the timing, nudging it a bit, in an effort to keep someone else safe who died as a result of the first person’s tragedy.

For me, his mission was to take me sooner than nature would demand. On the day Jared showed up in Riley’s Switch, I was hit by a truck, flew fifty feet in the air, and landed on solid concrete, sliding several more feet before crashing into a lamppost. With bones crushed and organs pulverized, I lay there as Jared came to stand over me. He kneeled down, and instead of taking me, per his orders, he brought me back to life. I felt it flow into me from his touch, warm and revitalizing.