Spree (YA Paranormal) by Jonathan DeCoteau Page A

experience,” I said.
    Aliya flew up and down, laughed giddily as she flew colorful circles around me.
    “Aliya, this is important for you to remember,” I said. “You’re going to wake up again. I know it.”
    “Why would I ever want to leave this?” she asked, flying loops around the light.
    “Here you’re neither living nor dead.”
    “So how do you know you aren’t in a coma?”
    “Because I saw my head looking back at me,” I told her.
    Aliya slowed down in her flying, landed by me. Her smile vanished. She looked at me.
    “You’re not human,” she said. “You’re part mist.”
    “Whatever I was like when I died, that’s what I am here,” I told her. “I’m something called a Taker. I take lives.”
    “Not mine?” she asked.
    “No,” I told her.
    Aliya came over and hugged me. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should’ve been the one driving.”
    “I was meant to die,” I told her. “It’s a long story. All I need you to know right now is that you have to tell people what I’ve told you about Zipper. You have to speak until they listen.”
    “Who will listen to me?”
    “Alex,” I told her, “and Tom and maybe Steph.”
    Aliya nodded.
    “And Zipper. Try to get through to him before he does what he does.”
    “How?”
    “Tell him that I’ll save a dance at prom for him,” I said. “Tell him that I was with him, that I heard, that I’ll be there. Tell him that I promise.”
    Aliya looked at the swirling black and white mist that was half my body, at the empty eyes.
    “I’m not going to see you again, am I?” she asked.
    I hugged her.
    “Fay, I don’t want you to die,” she said, in between a few sobs.
    I kissed Aliya’s forehead.
    “It’s too late for that,” I told her. “Besides, they planted a tree. You can visit me there, if it grows. But first, you need to help me. You need to remember what I told you.”
    “I’ll try.”
    Aliya began to disappear again, fading into the white light.
    “Fay,” she called back.
    “Yes?”
    “What’s the afterlife like?”
    “There is a heaven and a hell,” I told her. “There’s just two groups of teens and kids waiting to get to one or the other.”
    “Are you going to heaven now?” she asked me.
    “That spot goes to you,” I said.
    We waved at each other. I smiled faintly at the beautiful light of heaven that Aliya would one day become. Then she vanished.
     
    * * *
     
    Back in her room, Aliya lied perfectly still.
    She looked so peaceful for a girl who was flatlining.
    Nurses swarmed around her, checking her respiration, her tubes, her injuries to see if there was anything that could be done. I heard them calling for a doctor frantically when nothing worked.
    And then, just as quickly as the commotion began, Aliya was there again. I saw her fingers twitch and her ribs rise and fall.
    The machines went silent, except for the occasional beep attesting to the fact that life was still there.
    The doctor arrived too late, but checked Aliya, probing each wound, determining that she had a crisis but that she was back now and that she should be fine. He assigned a nurse to watch Aliya’s room and Aliya’s room only for the next few hours. That was more than the hospital, skeletal as it was in its staffing, could afford, but the doctor made the attempt anyway. I sensed from the blue and gold orbs circling around in his aura that he had a daughter about her age, that he was reacting as a father as much as he reacted as a physician. I was the happier for it.
    When everyone went back to their normal duties, and only one nurse kept watch, ever so briefly, I went up to Aliya’s bed. I looked down at her beautifully curved face, at her closed eyes, at the beads of sweat that formed in her fingers. She was such a beautiful girl to nearly die. I always thought she was too vain, too into her looks, but seeing her aura I realized that she was the best of us all. Preggers always was jealous and hedonistic, and I was always