Immortal Echoes: The Forgotten Echo by Jen Wylie
Sometimes death is only the beginning…
Even after the bad day she’s had, Cassy is still surprised to find herself shot, an innocent bystander in a drive by shooting. Bleeding to death in an empty parking lot, she knows she is going die.
What she doesn’t expect, is the arrival of a strange, and unnaturally handsome, man who tells her he can keep her from passing on in return for being his forever. In desperation, she agrees but afterwards she is beyond dismayed to discover she has died.
To make matters worse, the stranger has disappeared, leaving her spirit to wander through a series of worlds unknown to her. Her existence is one of fear and loneliness, until she meets another like her and discovers she’s not a ghost at all but something much more.
Jennifer Wylie was born and raised in Ontario, Canada. In a cosmic twist of fate, she dislikes the snow and cold.
Before settling down to raise a family, she attained a BA from Queens University and worked in retail and sales. Thanks to her mother, she acquired a love of books at an early age and began writing in public school. She constantly has stories floating around in her head, and finds it amazing most people don’t. Jennifer writes various forms of fantasy, both novels and short stories. Sweet light is her debut novel.
Jennifer resides in rural Ontario, Canada with her husband, two boys, Australian shepherd a flock of birds and a disagreeable amount of wildlife.
Excerpt:
Maybe if I hadn’t turned to look I would have been alright. Well, maybe not. Things would have been different if I hadn’t stopped to get milk. If I hadn’t worked late I wouldn’t have stopped at this particular corner store on my way home. If I’d been quicker, or longer, inside the store, I wouldn’t have walked into the middle of a gang fight. If…if…if…
I barely made it to the parking lot before the yelling and shooting started. A car sped by, passengers shooting at their rivals two feet from me. In reflex, I turned as the car passed. A bullet ripped through me like a punch to the stomach. The force knocked me up against the side of a van.
I looked down in, yes, surprise. I don’t know what kind of guns they had, but the shot went right through me. Gasping in panic, I stared in shock at the blood blossoming through my white blouse. Pain radiated from the exit wound in my lower back. Shit. This couldn’t be happening!
The street kids shouted obscenities. Another shot echoed in the night. Ducking instinctively, I slipped around the back of the van. I had to get to my car, find safety.
I stumbled, leaving bloody handprints on a few cars. I’d been shot. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen. My brain refused to believe it. I didn’t make it far. Everything spun, fading in and out. Shit. Somewhere I dropped my purse. My keys were in there. Damn dress pants with no decent pockets.
When did I fall to my knees? I toppled to the hard asphalt and rolled to my back. I instinctively pressed my wound, trying to stop the warm, sticky blood pumping from me.
The pain twisted around and through me, but dim and distant, like it wasn’t mine at all. I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t have anyone to argue with anyway.
Screams echoed from the store, but the parking lot remained quiet and empty. Except for me.
Should I bother calling for help? I didn’t waste my fading energy. First, they wouldn’t hear me, not over the noise they were making. Second, I was dying. Not to be melodramatic, but seriously, I’d been shot. Blood coated my hands and poured from my wounds, running down my side, pooling beneath me. My blouse clung to my skin.
My eyes closed and I heard the blood pumping out of me. My life’s blood, as I’d heard it called once.
Tears fell, cold on the side of my face. Damn it, I didn’t want to die. I guess no one did, though. Death just happened. You could die any day, get struck by lightning, run over by a bus, or as in my case, caught in a drive-by shooting.
Thankfully, I didn’t have a family who needed me. My parents died years ago, and I hadn’t spoken to my sister in Nevada in at least four years. No husband, no boyfriend…thank god, no children. No one to miss me. That hurt more than I expected. Dying alone.
I’m afraid of dying.
Afraid of what came next, if anything. I didn’t want to simply end. I didn’t want to be forgotten.
I heard faint laughter, like bells and little children and angels. It made me smile. Which said something, since I was dying. Or was I dead already?
The sound grew closer, but not very much louder. As I listened, I picked out tiny voices within the laughter.
“Come, come!”
“We found her! We did! We found her for you!”
“Hurry, hurry!”
Their words didn’t make any sense, and the little voices tumbled over each other so I missed more than I actually heard.
“It’s time! Come, come!”
I opened my eyes, not because I wanted to, but because dancing lights flickered though my lids and caught my attention.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the voices, to find a dozen tiny, glowing people surrounding me. They continued their constant babble, and one flew so close I saw its wings before it darted away again.
They were no larger than a quarter, and were mostly wings. Their thin naked bodies glowed a pale gold, their wings beautiful rippling shades of orange and red. From even a short distance, they looked like little dancing flames.
Other than a most interesting distraction from dying, I had no idea what they were. Would I know if I was dead?
“Quickly, quickly!”
I wanted to close my eyes again. The cops hadn’t arrived yet, but it felt like I’d been on the ground forever, losing myself. Bleeding away. I’d never been so frightened, so helpless, in my life. A strange calmness washed over me, likely since I couldn’t help myself. Soon I would be dead. End of story.
I watched the little dancing flames as I listened to my heart slow and my breathing turn shallow. Everything faded and the flames rose up, their angelic babble so loud and fast I couldn’t understand them.
I didn’t need to. The person they’d been calling had arrived.
He strode into my blurred field of vision, the flames parting before him only to gather again behind him and follow as he came to me. His lean body was clad neck to toe in black, his hair long and pale. He dropped to a knee at my side and the flames fanned out around him, lighting his hair and throwing his face into strange shadows. Too tired, too weak, I couldn’t focus on his hidden face.
Beneath the stench of my own blood, I smelled leather and freshly turned dirt, newly cut grass, and the sea. How bizarre. Cologne didn’t have such a natural range of scents.
Men didn’t often appear out of nowhere, heralded by little dancing flames either. Perhaps I had lost my mind.
He raised a hand just slightly and the babble silenced immediately. This frightened me. I don’t know if the fear arose because I missed the little childish voices, or because he’d brought these chaotic little beings to order so damn quickly.
“Mortal,” he said quietly, in a normal voice.
I blinked. He should sound like silk or honey, yet instead he sounded…human, a bit rough, but human.
“You die,” he continued.
“No shit.” I paused. Maybe I shouldn’t piss him off. Maybe he could help me.
He rested a hand on my chest. I hope he didn’t mind all the blood. “Your soul will soon leave this body.”
Or maybe not.
“Can you help me?” Certainly there was no harm in asking.
He inclined his head slightly. “I can keep you from passing on.”
His words brought hope. They also brought panic. I knew he wasn’t human. The dancing flames behind his head and the strange way he talked kind of tipped me off. Could I simply be imagining this? Could it be real? If this stranger wasn’t the creation of my dying mind, then what exactly was he? An angel or a demon? Perhaps the devil himself? I could ask, but I doubted a demon would admit to being one.
“You do not have much time. Do you wish to stay?”
I struggled to get my dying mind to think. I worked for a lawyer and wasn’t an idiot. There was always a catch. “What…what is the…cost?” Speaking while dying is hard.
“If I take your last breath into me, you will not truly die, but you will be mine forever.”
What did he mean by that? “I don’t…understand.”
The little flames darted around, mimicking my confusion. He said, “You are running out of time.”
He avoided answering me.
I tried to think, to get my eyes to focus. A choice like this shouldn’t be made without more information, but I didn’t have the strength or time to ask more questions. However, I also didn’t want to sell my soul to the devil, or anything equivalent.
I whimpered, both confused and terrified.
“I do not think she will.” He sighed and bowed his head. His voice sounded strangely sad. As he began to rise, I slipped my blood-covered hand over his. I think he smiled a little. “You must choose now.”
One breath away from death, I whispered, “Yes.”
The babbling flames echoed faintly as he bent and placed his lips on mine. The sudden touch startled me. I wasn’t prepared for his kiss. Even though I parted my lips to allow him to take my dying breath, I didn’t expect his tongue. I didn’t expect him to taste so sweet, either.
He must have felt my surprise, because his lips smiled around mine. He gently held my face, deepening the kiss. I won’t lie, I kissed him back. When someone kisses you the way he did you can’t help it.
I inhaled a breath through my nose, and suddenly understood. He was waiting.
I closed my eyes and let my breath escape into his mouth. The kiss changed as he took my breath into him.
I felt it enter him beginning a strangely euphoric experience. I floated and swirled and spun all at once. I did so all around him, through him.
“Mine forever,” he’d said. I understood this also. He drew me into him, bound me to him. Strangely, the sensation didn’t make me afraid. I’d made the right decision, hopefully. He may not have been an angel, but I didn’t think him to be a demon either.
“Thank you,” he whispered and withdrew.
I opened my eyes slowly. “Shouldn’t I be the…”
He wasn’t there to hear me.
I lay in stunned silence, staring blankly in the direction he had first appeared. Did I imagine it all in a state of shock? I felt normal. Tired, almost drained, but otherwise perfectly fine. I sat up and looked around. I saw no evidence of a strange man, no eerie little dancing flames. I ran my fingers tentatively over the bullet wound, expecting it to be healed over, gone.
I started to shake when my fingers found the hole.
The hole no longer bled, yet I definitely had one. No, I did not stick my finger in to see if it really did go all the way through. I blindly reached around to feel the larger wound in my back. It wasn’t quite as shocking to feel a hole there as well.
Breathing rapidly, I scrambled to my feet and froze. I remained on the pavement. Well, my body had.
Stunned, I stared at myself, unmoving, hands still over my wound and eyes closed. I didn’t breathe. Apparently, I had died.
Sometimes death is only the beginning…
Even after the bad day she’s had, Cassy is still surprised to find herself shot, an innocent bystander in a drive by shooting. Bleeding to death in an empty parking lot, she knows she is going die.
What she doesn’t expect, is the arrival of a strange, and unnaturally handsome, man who tells her he can keep her from passing on in return for being his forever. In desperation, she agrees but afterwards she is beyond dismayed to discover she has died.
To make matters worse, the stranger has disappeared, leaving her spirit to wander through a series of worlds unknown to her. Her existence is one of fear and loneliness, until she meets another like her and discovers she’s not a ghost at all but something much more.
Or something, considering I stood staring at myself.
With blood covered fingers, I rubbed my temples and tried to wrap my mind around everything. I’d died, but I was here. Lowering my hands, I stared at them. Although they weren’t blurry, I vaguely saw through them.
“Sonuvabitch.” I whirled, searching for the man. “What did you do?”
He didn’t answer, leaving me angry and frustrated because I didn’t understand. Clearly he wanted, or needed, to do whatever he did to me. Why had he left me like this?
I turned at the sound of sirens, and hesitantly wandered toward the sidewalk. No one acknowledged my existence. They weren’t ignoring me. You couldn’t ignore someone covered in blood. Not if you could see them.
They couldn’t, which didn’t make me happy either.
I’d become a ghost. Or something.
Numbly, I watched the police discover my body. I watched the paramedics declare me dead. In silence, I watched them take my body away.
I didn’t follow. I didn’t see much point.
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