The Burning Shadow (Origin 2)

That was how I felt.

I was the shadow and not the person.

God.

That was a depressing thought and a bit overdramatic.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I exhaled roughly. I needed to get my life together. Seriously. I was alive. It could be way worse. Like, I could be dead.

I started to flip past the pictures of that day when something weird caught my attention. “What the hell?” I whispered.

The last picture was of a small group. One of them was Andy. God. My chest twisted. There was an unreal quality about seeing a picture of someone days before they died and thinking about how they had no idea their days were numbered, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was who was standing next to him.

April Collins, and there was something wrong with her picture.

Frowning, I zoomed in. It was like there were two Aprils. One was normal—well, as normal as April could be. Tall. Slender. Long blond hair pulled back in a high ponytail. And then one standing directly behind her like a shadowy overlay. I flipped back through the pictures and saw nothing like that in any other photos I’d taken that day, and that was beyond weird.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a picture like this of her. Clicking back to the picture I’d snapped of her in the park, I stared down at the picture of April by the swings, with her little sister.

Same thing. It looked like a shadow stood behind her.

“So weird,” I muttered, flipping back to the picture at school. I remembered that I had taken another photograph of her, when she’d been protesting in the parking lot.

Hurrying through the photos, I found the picture. There was April, hair pulled back, face twisted, as I’d caught her in the middle of yelling something. The anger practically vibrated through the photograph. Her anger wasn’t the only thing I’d captured.

The weird shadow, almost like an overlay, was also visible.

This was freaking bizarre.

I thought about what I’d seen outside of Coop’s party, right before I’d found Andy’s ruined body, and what I’d seen when Lore appeared outside the club. Arum were like shadows—shadows that burned, a darkness that was threaded with light. Everyone else was convinced I’d seen Micah the night I’d found Andy or had mistaken what I’d seen, but …

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Is April an … Arum?”

I swallowed a rather nervous laugh. I knew it sounded ridiculous, but April hated the Luxen. And she was kind of evil incarnate.

I blew a strand of hair out of my face as I stared at the weird image of April. There were a lot of holes in my theory, though. If April was an Arum, wouldn’t Zoe sense that? The other Luxen? Also, I’d thought Emery had said that Arum didn’t often mingle with the human populace, that they kept their distance.

But if it wasn’t just some random, weird photo fail, then what could this be?* * *An idea sparked somewhere between English and chem the next morning, while I was doing my best not to stress over the whole argument with Luc or obsess over what Zoe had said. Which meant I was in a super-weird mood, but a somewhat productive one.

I needed another picture of April, one preferably taken inside to see if there was that weird overlay effect, and I knew exactly where to find one.

Yearbooks.

I had no idea if I’d actually bought one last year, but the school library had a metric crap ton of them.

At lunch, I made a detour. Making my way into the cold and musky-scented library, I headed to the left, near the main desk, to where all the annual yearbooks were kept.

In the back of my mind, I knew my sudden obsession with April had more to do with me than with her. That tiny, annoying voice in the back of my head told me that I was focusing on her because it was so much easier than focusing on everything else.

But whatever.

Thumbing through the glossy pictures, I quickly found where April’s picture would’ve been squeezed in between Janelle Cole and Denny Collinsworth.

There was no picture of April in our junior year.

Closing the yearbook, I shoved it back in place and then picked up the one from our sophomore year. A few seconds later, I was staring down at a picture of April, taken almost two years ago, and it was definitely her. Her name was under the picture. Her blond hair was pulled back extremely tightly, and the familiar red lips curved into a wide smile.

That photograph of April was normal. No weird shadow effect. Then I checked our freshman year and found another normal one.

Two normal photographs and then a missing one. Did that mean anything? I really had no idea, but I knew enough about photography to know that the weird effect only happening on pictures of April was super-bizarre.