The Death Catchers by Jennifer Anne Kogler Page B

shouted, as if the words could hear me. Within a few seconds, they were gone completely. I shut The Last Descendant again and then opened it slowly, peeking in at the pages as if I was spying on them.
    The headline had disappeared. In plain text, there it was again: King Arthur and his passengers sailed from Avalon on the eve of the Feast of Samhain.
    The first sentence of the page I’d been reading reappeared. In fact, all the words, the regular words from the book, were back. I flipped through every page. All were intact. The image had come and gone in a matter of minutes.
    I’m not sure how long I lay there on the bed, The Last Descendant in one arm, my Crabapple Intermediate Yearbook in the other, in a complete daze. My mind had blown a fuse. I needed to reboot. It was all too much.
    My head felt like a hot air balloon that was about to lift off and separate from my body. I tried to calm down.
    I felt a slight tingle at the base of my left palm. I remembered the Hands of Fate and slowly lifted my hand within view.
    The crimson letters were back. The same as before. Bright as day. Like someone had taken a tiny hot poker and branded a name there.
    Drake Westfall. The Drake Westfall.
    If someone saw Drake’s name on my hand, I’d never hear the end of it. Instantly, what Bizzy had said about death-specters came to mind. A Hand of Fate only has death-specters about people she cares about , she’d said. Sure, I had a few conversations with him, but I didn’t really even know Drake Westfall, yet alone care about him.
    Or did I?
    Had Jodi’s teasing in the hospital been closer to the truth than I wanted to admit? Though I was alone, I became self-conscious, covering up Drake’s name with my other hand. I had no way of knowing then that my death-specter about Drake had nothing to do with our immediate pasts and everything to do with our futures.
    So I continued to rack my brain for possible reasons why I might have had a death-specter about Drake. When we were little, before he left for boarding school, Drake and I used to play together. But that was only because he lived across the street and Mom wanted to make sure I was properly socialized since I was an only child.
    Restless, I went to my window overlooking Earle Avenue. Directly across the street stood the Steins’ house, named Let the Good Chimes Roll because of the forty or so wind chimes that hung from the porch and two large elm trees in the front yard. Drake’s old stone house, Happy Landing, was next to it on the south side, opposite The House of Six Gables. I pressed my face to the windowpane, peering across at the window on the second floor that I knew was Drake’s.
    That’s when I spotted her in the middle of the street, standing there, motionless.
    Though I couldn’t see her bloodred eyes, her long flaxen hair and dark robe identified her immediately. I was beginning to think Vivienne le Mort was following me. Or was I following her? Vivienne seemed focused on the same point I’d been staring at moments ago—the window of Drake’s room. I ran downstairs, unsure of what I was going to say to Vivienne le Mort once I met her in the street.

 
    The Archetype
    When I finally reached the street, out of breath, nobody was in sight. Vivienne le Mort was gone and I wondered if I’d really seen her at all. My eyes turned upward to Drake’s window. I raised my hand to my face. The name was still there, in red letters.
    DRAKE WESTFALL
    I ran my index finger over each of the bumpy letters, trying to rub them off. But it was useless. I pulled the sleeve of my hoodie over my palm as I thought about what I knew about Drake and what it meant that his name was now on my hand.
    Let’s just say that if an archetype of “popular” exists in Crabapple, Mrs. Tweedy, it’s Drake Westfall. Everyone likes Drake. Seniors, teachers, Mayor Gilroy, Kenny the Quack (Crabapple’s eccentric cafeteria