The secretary was new. Everyone swore they'd never seen him before, but he had an official ID and walked around like he knew what he was doing. No one questioned it too much—there were at least a hundred employees in the building at any given time, so someone must've hired him. Someone everyone anyone. People had a tendency to remove themselves far away from the situation and use other words. Someone everyone anyone. No one questioned it because no one cared enough, but also because why else would he be here? What possible reason could a random person have to parade as an employee at a life-sucking job?

The name on his shiny but unusually small badge was John Flynn. Bright blue eyes, charming smile, very tall. Didn't really look like the type who'd settle for being a secretary, not at this age—he'd be more fitting sitting at the table with the executives, but no one said it out loud for fear of sounding superficial. The world judged by looks; make all the inspirational you be you and that's perfect! posters you want, but the world judged by looks and that was the truth. The secretary looked interesting, was all.

John Flynn spent his first and only day at Delorney Co. destroying the CEO's office.

Delorney was a small, moderately-renowned company—with trash security—that specialized in evading EPA regulations and bribing officials (and chemical synthesis—that was their 'official' business). They specialized in destroying the ozone and blaming other countries' factories for it, and they were run by an egotistical CEO who'd paid good money to have his assault charges brushed under the rug. Now, he was even considering running for president. The nerve.

And because John Flynn had absolutely nothing to lose, he went straight up to the CEO's empty office on the topmost floor and smashed a potted plant into the giant, narcissistic portrait that had been photoshopped to perfection. Once there were enough cracks in the glass frame so that the CEO's devil smile couldn't be seen, John moved on and broke the expensive-looking swivel chair tucked neatly under a desk. Then he grabbed all the pencils and pens from the holder and walked around the room, plucking them one at a time from his fist and throwing them in the air like he was playing darts.

If there were actual darts, he would've thrown them at the picture.

Ethical questions arose in his head. Sure, he's a douche, but do I have any right to vandalize his office? No, not really, but ethics didn't care about him and so he didn't care about ethics—at least not when it came to people like this.

John Flynn left the building in a good mood; his smile was contagious, and the others obliviously smiled back at him as he went through the revolving door, never to be seen again. They had his face on camera, but that was never and would never be a problem for him. He drove to the nearest gas station with a lockable bathroom and shut himself inside, running the water as cold and as loud as it could go.

He watched himself in the mirror as he shortened to his actual height, five-eleven. His eyes darkened from blue to brown. His face changed—small, subtle details at a time so as to not look like some quick, horrific transformation. His clothes altered and shrunk to fit him. He took the fake ID, burned it with a lighter, ripped it into pieces as the hot plastic scorched his fingers, and tossed the whole mess into the overflowing garbage can. He blew a kiss at it as if saying goodbye.

His name was Jack Parker, and he was a shapeshifter, among other things.

Jack sighed at the sight of his real, sleep-deprived face. His eyes were bloodshot, and he rubbed cold water over them, knowing it wouldn't help. Shapeshifting into a different person almost every day, being constantly on the move, it was a decent way to pass the time but only a distraction that got more tiresome by the day. He should leave soon—people like him couldn't risk staying in one place for too long, especially not after the stunt he just pulled. Opportunities like that were rare and far between, and he took them as often as he could, regardless of the red flags it would raise...

...because there was the cult that would never stop looking for him and Death who would never stop asking him the same question over and over again, and both of them were terrifying and to be avoided at all costs.

Jack was halfway to San Francisco, cautiously wondering if it wouldn't happen today, when he felt it. The tingling sensation that numbed his fingers now started to spread all over until the only thing he felt was the forward motion of being in a moving vehicle. He knew it was coming and was upset because it had happened last night, too, and his throat hadn't recovered yet. All the cough drops and medicine in the world wouldn't stop it from getting sore over and over again, and lately his voice was constantly hoarse, sounding like it was on the verge of cracking as if he were a teenage boy. He didn't want it to stay that way.

With an exasperated sigh, he pulled over onto the dirt. The car shook and bounced as it traveled into a dense thicket of trees, the branches scraping against the windows like long, slender fingers. Once he felt like he'd gone deep enough, he shut the car off and leaned the back of his head against the headrest, waiting. It took only half a minute from there—he felt his eyes involuntarily roll back into his head, his vision going pitch-black then grey then hot-white.

And then he was shaking and screaming at the top of his lungs. His spine went stiff, head craned up as if he were looking up to the heavens and not just at the roof of a car. Bright light spilled out of his eyes, scaring away a deer that had been prancing nearby.

He was Jack Parker, the most powerful Gifted in the entire world. There was a reason that Death kept proposing to him an offer he adamantly refused, and there was a reason he was at the top of the cult's hit list.

Hundreds of miles away, sitting in the window seat of a bus, Maya Park clamped her hands over her ears.

The light went out, and he immediately slumped against his seat, taking a deep breath. Was it getting worse? He'd gotten good at predicting when it would happen and had managed not to get himself in trouble yet, but that wouldn't always be the case. He was still young, only twenty-nine. Would he be able to run when he was forty? Fifty? Sixty? Would he even last that long?

Sure hope not, he thought.

He lit a cigarette before backing up into the road. His hands shook and his eyes hurt, not from lack of sleep and an overabundance of caffeine but from the power that liked to explode inside him every once in a while like a mini supernova. The nicotine was gross, but he smoked anyway out of hope that it would kill him. Give him cancer or heart disease or destroy his lungs until they didn't work anymore and he died of suffocation, but so far, no dice. He knew there was a problem when, after ten years of smoking, nothing changed: no yellow teeth, no coughing, no dry tongue, no cravings, even. A whole decade and not a single effect. He kept at it anyway, out of hope, because maybe he was being damaged and simply couldn't tell.

Jack rolled down the window for fresh air. The road was desolate and quiet; his was the only car in the two-way, four-lane track. There was a subtle whisper in the back of his mind, but he couldn't figure out what it was. A warning, maybe? An apparition begging to be heard? Whatever it was, he wasn't in the mood to give it any of his attention. All he cared about was getting to San Francisco, preferably before three in the morning.

______________________

There was something on the ceiling, and Jack, sprawled on the bed in a dark room illuminated only by the four o'clock moonlight that filtered through the shades, squinted at it and tried to figure out if it was a spider or a stain. Either he'd be staring at it all night or it would start moving and he'd have to kill it to be able to sleep peacefully.

But most plans never go as planned.

He fell asleep quickly. At one point, he wasn't sure exactly when, he realized that the motel was haunted.

He woke up with one goal: leave now. But the thought fled his mind the way dreams do once you've woken up: now that your eyes are open, you can't remember what happened when they were closed.

The mystery spot was gone; in its place was a white ball that hung a few inches from the ceiling by a thready string. It cracked open as he was sitting up, and out came dozens of tiny little spiders. Instead of crawling up the thread and spreading all over the ceiling, they dropped, all together in one large congregation, right onto his face.

Jack should be used to things like this by now, but he screamed and scrambled to his feet, running his hands all over his face, fingernails scratching skin. He remembered too late that half the time when things like this happened, he was only hallucinating. It felt so real—the hundreds of little legs crawling over his face, the squishy, crunchy sound they made when he stepped all over the ones that had fallen to the ground—but that didn't make it real. He shut his eyes tight, focusing on breathing calmly until he could no longer feel the spiders.

Jack opened his eyes tentatively, one at a time. There were no spiders anywhere, not on him or his hands or the floor. He forced himself to go over to the mirror and look at what he'd done to himself. Bright, pink lines were dug all over his face, the result of his panicked, useless scratching. It looked like he'd been attacked by a cat.

A vacuum turned on outside his room. It was five in the morning, and someone thought it would be a good idea to vacuum the hallway. Jack found himself reaching for the door, but what did he plan on doing? Leaving right away? Asking if they could clean at literally any other time? He wasn't sure, but he pulled the door open anyway and stepped out into a void.

A void.

All he could see was black. There was no vacuum, no person, no hallway, no doors—only black that stretched out as far as he could (or couldn't) see. Jack nearly rolled his eyes—he was dreaming. Maybe he'd wake up and there wouldn't be any scratches on his face, after all.

Jack looked to the left. It was definitely a dream—despite the blackness which should mean a total lack of light, he could see the woman standing there clearly. He'd been alone just a second ago. She had red hair and was looking down at the slice of cake she was holding, twisting the vulture ring on her pointer finger with the hand that wasn't holding the plate. She was facing the side and he couldn't see her face very well, but she still didn't seem like the usual apparition that haunted his dreams—then again, maybe she'd split right down the middle and let out a hideous, wrinkly-skinned monster with rows of razor-sharp teeth.

But she didn't. Instead, she disappeared into thin air, blinking out of existence. There one moment and gone the next. It was a premonition, maybe, of someone he'd meet soon.

Jack looked in the other direction and paled. Now that was what he was used to: a ten-foot-tall, one-toothed monster with a rotting blob of a body running toward him on four freakish legs and emitting an ear-splitting shriek. He whirled around and shut himself in his room just in time, locking the door as the monster banged against it from the other side, splintering the wood at the edges.

"It's just a dream," Jack said softly, running his hands through his hair and backing up until the backs of his legs hit the edge of the bed.

There was a shrill laugh on the other side that seemed to mock him. The door bounced to a rhythm that matched his pounding heartbeat, the hinges creaking and on the verge of failure.

"Wake up," he said to himself, sitting down and gripping the sheets with tight fingers. "Just wake up."

Another shrill laugh. One hinge popped, and Jack flinched as a fleshy hand wrapped around the door, flakes of wood curling under the long, sharp fingernails. It was always like this, without fail. Either he had nightmares or didn't dream at all. Either he woke up feeling nothing or woke up just in time to escape a terrible end...no, that was wrong.

Because sometimes, he didn't get to wake up on time. Sometimes he had the joyous experience of being shredded to pieces or impaled through the head or mutilated until there was more blood outside his body than inside it, and sometimes these nightmares left real scars on his skin.

"Wake up!" he screamed, flinching with every splinter of wood. "Wake the hell up!"

The dream shattered just as the door burst open. Jack sat up and immediately felt his face; it was smooth. No cat-attack like bumps. Good. Someone was actually pounding on the door, but this time it was only a human, disgruntled at being woken up.

"Hey bud," the voice growled, thick with sleep. "Quit screaming! We're trying to rest!"

Jack glanced at the clock. The bright-red numbers read 4:15. He'd been asleep for only an hour.

The man was still knocking; he wanted a response, maybe an apology. Jack was annoyed—mostly by the dream, but since he had no one to take it out on except this man (whose head was easy to get into), he was going for it. It was four-fifteen in the morning in a small, beat-down motel, and no one would think twice about anything freaky. He turned one eye bright magenta and the other a dark brown—a combination that, even in the rarest of genetic codes, wasn't possible.

The man nearly fell inside when the door opened, and his complaints died in his mouth as he backed up.

"Sorry for waking you up," Jack said with a big smile, talking like an automated voice caller. If twenty-nine years of constant fear taught him anything, it was how to be scary. "It won't happen again, Jeremy."

The man nodded, gaze flicking back and forth between the magenta and the brown. "Sure. Sure. Whatever."

It was only when the door was already shut in his face that Jeremy realized he had never given his name.

At five in the morning, just as the sky was beginning to turn orange at the edges, Jack Parker finished packing his car and turned to look down the road. Something subtle was crying out. There was something that wanted him to wait, that was hoping he would stay. Jack pushed it to the back of his mind and started driving toward Portland, Oregon.

A few hundred miles east, Maya Park realized that the man she was looking for was getting farther and farther away. In a moment of frustration, she rolled her eyes.

Jack wasn't sure why, but he suddenly felt like someone was mad at him for something. He ignored it and lit a cigarette.