Hey! This is kind of like a time capsule for me, because as I am writing this I have no intentions of posting it soon. I am still writing the Nerd Brigade, but I couldn't pass up this idea. So, I have no idea what to say really, because things could change so easily before this is posted, but I am still not going to change this author's note. It's really weird, writing a story out before you begin publishing it. I just can't tell if it's good weird or bad weird. Either way, sorry to any of you who were looking forward to the spy school story that I keep pushing farther and farther back. I don't even know if it's ever going to happen at this point. I still have the ideas, but better ones keep coming around. Oh well. Welcome to my new story! And of you know my writing, you know what I am going to say next. Enjoy!

Clary:

I walk down the street, letting you electric glow the city at night wash over me.

Drunk college students stumbled out of clubs, waiting on Uber drivers and taxis to get them home. Men came out of bars, their face is Red from drinking and the voice is loud and arguing. I would bet one of them dies tonight, my inner voice said.

"Shut up," I whisper to myself. It wasn't allowed to rear its ugly head yet, not until the dawn.

I continued walking, turning my music louder and pushing my ear plugs and farther. I dug my hands into the pockets of my warm leather jacket.

I still had a few hours before the sun peeked over the horizon.

My boots stumped as I walked along to the sound of Panic!At the Disco singing "Don't Threaten Me With a Good Time".

I passed neon signs highlighting beers and lottery jackpots. I passed many women wearing their hand over garbage buyers. I scared away a late-night graffiti artist and I tried to watch him paint.

I walked all the streets of the city, seeing every piece of nightlife there was, from the Stoners blown away their lungs, to the prostitutes fishing for customers on the Broad Street.

I catalog it all by watching, letting my music too loud to hear anything else going on, including my sleepy and your voice

Finally, my music shut off and my alarm went off. The someone's beginning to come up.

I turned and ran home, leaving the nightlife behind. I ducked into my house just as the sun came up and my head began splitting. The man didn't make it. The girl in the sparkly dress tried driving herself home and died. That boy you passed outside the Jade wolf hung himself twenty minutes ago. The homeless women on the corner of 13th and Broad was dead as you walked by. That prostitute in Times Square was raped to death by her last client the night. The college girl you walked by outside of pandemonium was shot trying to get more drugs. The voice inside my head spit out the information it had collected over the night, trying to break me down with the pointlessness of the deaths I hadn't been able to do anything about.

Then the ones that I would be able stop. The Uber driver who drove. The owner of the convenience store you pass will be robbed at gunpoint and shot. The homeless man over the trash can fires will die from the cold tonight. The girl you noticed in the second hand music shop is planning on jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge soon. A child in the tenement complex is going to be drowned by their mother The Prostitute from 17th Street is going to die trying to get another hit of heroin.

I cover my ears, trying to stop it. I couldn't. I never could.

"The young girl," I ground out over the screaming inside my own head.

I hated daytime. I hated having to play judge, jury, and executioner for people I had never met, and would never get the chance to meet. But I had too.

I would go out every night, the only time the voice was silent, and I would watch. When the sun came up, the voice would wake up with it, telling me who I had seen or passed that was already dead, and then it would tell me who was going to die.

The voice made me pick. One person to save, the rest would die. Or I picked no one, and someone I loved would die along with everyone the voice listed for me.

I had learned that the hard way.

I had picked the young girl who would be drowned. She had the longest life left to live hopefully.

That wasn't the only time I had to choose though either.

During the day at some points, the voice would give me a list of people who would die that day, in some small way, and had had to pick one person to die, or else they all would.

I hadn't known what would happen at first, until I saw the young boy I had chosen to kill in a hit and run show up in the paper the next morning.

I hadn't known any of it. But the voice knew all of it. And if I went out during the day, it would tell me everyone who would die that day, and it would make me either kill them or divert their death to someone else. It was cruel this way, never giving me a break from the constant death around me.

So I didn't go out during the day. I went out at night, and I stayed out, until the dawn came.

The one person who I would mind to die, and yet never had, was my father. Somehow, the voice never told me that he was going to die.

Valentine clomped down the stairs of our ramshackle condo and saw me. His lips curled into a frown of hatred and disgust.

He put his beer bottle down and took his belt off. He walked over to where I was standing. He brought the belt down on my back, on my chest, on my thighs. Anywhere that would be covered with clothing. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

He whipped me eight times. Eight, for the number of times someone he loved had died because of me.

Everyone, meet my father, Valentine Morgenstern. Yeah, he wasn't winning any awards.

And by the way, I had loved all of them too.

First had come my cousin. Then my uncle. Then my Grandpa. Then another cousin. Next my Aunt. Then Sebastian, my brother, and my father's favorite. Then mother, the kindest soul you will never get to meet now. And finally, my other brother, Jonathan, who I loved more than the world itself. More than myself. More than life itself, however fleeting it could be.

I had killed them all. I couldn't choose, so they paid the price. Most of them hadn't even known about the voice. They had been innocents. And it was all my fault they were now dead.

Jonathan had been on purpose. A fire had started in a primary school where the two of us were volunteering. A bunch of kinds inside were dying. My voice was having a field day. I couldn't choose just one person to save. Jonathan knew about the voices though, so he told me to save them all. I listened to him, trusting my big brother. And then I had watched him go up in flames for my decision, or lack of it.

But Valentine never died. I think it was because I didn't love him. I could never do that, make myself love a man like him. I was just waiting for the day when the voice would tell me: Valentine might die of alcohol abuse. That day hadn't come yet.

"I've got good news for you, Clarissa," my father growled, wobbling back over to the couch. "You're going to school."

I must have looked like a ghost, I became so pale. No. I couldn't. Too many people who might die. Too much choosing or transferring deaths. Too many lives lost.

I tried protesting, but my father shoved me out the door and practically into the bus that had just pulled up in our small driveway. He threw a backpack at me and grinned as the bus pulled away. The smile didn't reach his eyes.

I wanted to die. Better me than someone else here.

My pockets. I reached into them and pulled out a long list I kept for emergencies. It was a list of all the guilty people serving life in prison in the entire city. It was for me to transfer deaths if I needed to. I wasn't ideal, and it didn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon any less, but it was something that was better than shoving death on innocents.

I clutched the paper tight, my lifeline. I was going to need it after all if I couldn't get out of this school thing.

The boy in front of you is going to choke on his sandwich.

I choked back a sob and opened the small book that held the list. Theresa Villers. I thought about the name and transferred the death. I crossed the name out with a dark red pen that I kept with the book, to remind me of the blood I was shedding. The blood I was stopping from circulating.

The bus driver will have a stroke.

I quickly transferred the death, not feeling as bad about it this time. One guilty man's death instead of a bus full of innocent kids? Not that hard of a decision, even if it still ripped at my soul.

But I was going to have to get a lot more stone cold if I wanted to make it through each day here.

And I was going to need a lot more names in my book.

I watched the kids around me, the cheerleaders in their uniforms, gossiping about everything. The football players behind them ,trying to look down their uniforms. The nerds and geeks in the front, comparing Dungeons and Dragons strategies.

I thought about all of them, and all the ways each of them could die, and I wished the voice would just say my name already. I wouldn't transfer my death. I was guilty enough.

The bus stopped in front of school. I opened the book with it's binding starting to tear out.

372 names. 3,000 something kids in my new school.

Shit.

Well, I hope you all liked it, and I hope I actually end up publishing this. Drop a review! Till next time! Bye!