Touch by Jennifer Snyder Page A

had missed him before; walking up the bank to the back of the ambulance I had to have walked directly past him. All that mattered now, though, was that I’d noticed him.
    A guy with bright red, curly hair lay flat on his back across the iced-over asphalt. His chest heaved while his lungs visibly struggled for every breath he took. I couldn’t bring myself to look away.
    “ Rowan, honey, is there a number you’d like me to call for you?” Claire asked, rephrasing her question.
    My dad’s cell number absentmindedly fumbled from my lips while I continued to stare at the guy with red curls whose face I couldn’t turn away from. Bits of glass had lodged themselves at odd angles in his forehead and thin rivers of blood trickled to the asphalt.
    A paramedic kneeling beside the red-headed guy yelled, “We’re losing him!”
    My throat tightened and my heart pounded against my rib cage. My eyes fixated on the guy, along with every other person standing along the sidelines, watching helplessly as three paramedics struggled to save his life. In the commotion my view became obstructed and I began to frantically search the faces of each person hovering around him for any sign of relief.
    And that was when I first noticed him.
    A complete stranger, who couldn’t have been much older than myself, standing beside the paramedic who knelt at the dying guy’s head. His expression was one of utter calmness as he gazed down at the mangled, bloody face I’d seen moments before. As strange as I found his expression to be, it was not what caught my attention and held it.
    I stared because no one else seemed to notice him at all.
    The longer my eyes lingered on him, the more I noticed how incredibly out of place he was, standing there unmoving, with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, just staring. I took in his disheveled dark hair which was cut short and his creamy complexion that looked smooth to the touch. He was striking and dressed all in black—a crisp, black, button-up shirt tucked in to black slacks—everything free of wrinkles. Even his scuffed-up Converse sneakers, poking from underneath his pressed slacks, were black.
    I stared, captivated, as the dark-haired boy bent down in one fluid motion. I couldn’t see why until a person shifted slightly to their right, which was when I realized he’d moved to touch the tip of his extended middle finger to the dying guy’s forehead. From where I sat, I could see the boy close his eyes. As he did, the dying guy’s body shuddered and then became still, as though his final breath had been forced out of him by a single touch.
    “ We’ve lost him!” a paramedic shouted, confirming my thought.
    My jaw went slack as I watched a see-through image of the now-dead guy step out of himself. A startled noise escaped my mouth and the dark-haired boy’s eyes shifted directly to mine. Even with the distance between us I still was able to make out how incredibly blue they were—an icy, sapphire-blue that would have frozen me in place had I not already been.
    A stunned expression swept across his face, but was gone as quickly as it had formed. He stood and placed a hand on the see-through image’s shoulder, and then they both vanished. I stared into the space the boy had occupied until my vision blurred.
    Movement on the snow-covered grass to my right caught my attention—three crows had congregated on the sidelines at some point during all of the commotion, and I’d only now spotted them.
    My eyes zeroed in on their glossy black feathers and beady little watchful eyes, knowing that something about them held the key to what I’d just witnessed and why. Questions branched out from this thought, crowding my mind and turning it into a tangled mess I could easily become caught in.
    “ Rowan?” A familiar voice was calling me, forcing me to recoil from the ever-thickening forest of questions in my mind.
    “ Dad!” I shouted in an effort to better help him find me.
    “ Oh good,” Claire