Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

find a cabin that had been abandoned for the off-season. He’d tend to her wounds.
    Inflict his own.
    You can’t die
, he told the Null silently.
Not yet
.
    If she did, her death would never be his.
    As he walked, feeling her chest rise and fall with each hard-won breath, he thought of the long, thin scar that ringed his own neck and the fact that if he failed to kill Claire, technically speaking, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d fallen short.
    She’d be the second to escape him. And he’d hate her for it.
    Almost as much as he hated himself.

    The blue-eyed boy had been aiming a gun at her for hours. For hours and hours and days and days, and every time the fog cleared enough for her to see the rest of the road, Claire tried to remember that she should run.
    But she didn’t.
    He shot her, and he shot her, and he shot her, but she couldn’t run. She had no body. No chest, no legs. Only a black, gaping hole where her body should have been.
    His blue eyes never left her. They never glazed over. They never wandered far from her face.
    Even when she averted her eyes, even when the pain and the fear and the certainty that she was going to die overwhelmed her—he didn’t disappear. He shot her, and he shot her, and he shot her, but he was there. And for the first time in a long time, it didn’t hurt.
    Nothing hurt.
    Claire could feel her body relaxing, could feel her mind losing its grip on this dreamlike place. As she began to drift into the kind of peaceful, inky darkness untouched by dreams, Claire saw the boy lean toward her, his face so close to hers that their lips very nearly touched.
    “Maybe I won’t die,” Claire whispered. Her breath bounced off his lips and came back to touch hers.
    She felt his response before she heard it. The words caressed her skin. “I’m the one who kills you.”
    Darkness washed over Claire. And just like that, she was gone.

6
    Claire is smiling
.
    Nix leaned forward, his eyes locked on to his captive’s face. Pink lips parted. Wrinkles—
three, two, one
—fell from her brow. It had been hours since he’d found this abandoned cabin and laid her gently on the couch. And still, he couldn’t get enough of watching her, drinking in the tiny details of her
Claireness
. He memorized her features and catalogued her expression, running exploratory fingers over the edges of his own lips.
    She was having good dreams, his Null. In the time he’d been watching her, that hadn’t always been the case.
    He’d already memorized the look, feel, and sound of her nightmares.
    “For a girl whose days are numbered, you sleep a lot.” Nix’s voice was rough from lack of use, but he wanted to say something. To talk to her. “You have light brown hair. I think your eyes are green. Your veins are blue.” He paused. “My hair is black. I’m not sure about my eyes. When I bleed, I bleed red.”
    Claire sighed, and he closed his eyes, savoring the sound, the look of her face, the haphazard spread of her hair. Her fingernails were uneven. Her wrists were small. She had six freckles on one shoulder and four on the other.
    She smiled in her sleep.
    Strapped to an exam table. Eyes closed
. The memory came on suddenly, without mercy.
Nix is cold, but he doesn’t want to wake up. He wants to stay in the dream, wants to—
    The table lurches. He’s plunged downward into the tank. His eyes fly open. Water fills his nose, his mouth. If he was cold before, he’s freezing now, but it doesn’t matter—he can’t breathe—can’t move. He fights against the straps that hold him immobile, but it’s no use. His lungs are tight. He’s choking
.
    Drowning
.
    He can see familiar forms leaning over the dunk tank, their faces blurred, their expressions impassive. Ione. Ryland. They’re not going to help him. They’re going to watch him die, unless—
    Less than shadow. Less than air.
He forces himself to stop fighting. Stop thinking. Stop
existing—
and he fades
.
    Nix came out of the flashback to