PIECES OF YOU
SNEAK PEEK
Book Three in The Soulbound Series
(Can be read as a prequel or standalone)
Death, or Something Like It
‘I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.’
- Carl Jung
May 1996
The world is a blur of metal and pain, my body screaming in a language I don’t understand. For a moment, I drift between nothingness and life, until sensation drags me back, and my eyes snap open. My left arm is bent at an impossible angle above my head.
“Fuck!” I scream.
A jab of agony lances my chest, forcing me to look down.
“No, no, no!”
A metal bar spears through my side, pinning me to the asphalt. Every breath drags like sandpaper through my lungs. Blood floods my mouth, thick and metallic. I swallow carefully, but it surges back anyway. The air smells of gasoline and smoke. Burnt rubber. Heat rising off the road.
“Emily!” my voice fractures.
The radio is still playing somewhere inside the wreck. A warped, skipping echo of whatever was on the mixtape. We were laughing two minutes ago. Talking about New York. About jobs. About how we made it.
I try to move, but my legs don’t answer. Salty tears slip into the cuts on my face and sting like acid. Panic claws up my throat, wild and animal.
“Emily. Where are you? Emily! Answer me!”
“You can’t help her.” A voice calls out to me from the shadows beyond the headlights.
“No,” I rasp immediately. “No. She had her belt on.”
My mind scrambles, trying to rewind the last ten seconds. Screeching tires. Her hand grabbing mine. The oak tree rushing at us.
“She has to be okay. Emily!”
I try to push up. White explodes behind my eyes. The bar in my side shifts a fraction and agony detonates through me.
“Don’t,” the stranger says quietly.
“Help me up,” I choke. “I need to see her. I can crawl. I just—”
The car is only a few feet away, wrapped around the tree like crushed foil. Glass glitters across the road like ice under the streetlamp.
“Call an ambulance,” I beg, trying once more to get up, but it’s no use.
“They’re coming,” the man tells me. “I can hear them. But they won’t get here in time.”
My pulse stutters, uneven, slipping in and out like a faulty engine. Each beat feels weaker than the last.
I am going to die.
The realisation doesn’t hit all at once. It seeps in. Cold. Certain.
Because if she’s gone, then I want to go too.
“What’s your name, buddy?”
The man steps forward into the streetlight, dark hair and skin. Not old, but too young to have eyes so calm and knowing. Shadows cling to him like they know him.
“My name is Jer-Jeremy,” I splutter.
He nods once. “Nice to meet you, Jeremy. I’m here to help you.”
“Are you a doctor?” my voice breaks. “Help her first. Please. She’s my… she’s everything.”
“No,” he the man replies, kneeling beside me. His movements are unhurried. Controlled. “I’m something else.”
Something else.
I let out a broken half-laugh, but it turns into a cough, blood spilling down my chin.
“I can stop the pain,” he continues. “But it comes at a cost.”
“Help. Her.” The words scrape raw. “Anything. Just, check her pulse. She’s all alone.”
He looks toward the car. Then back at me. “She doesn’t need me,” he says gently.
Something in his tone makes my stomach drop harder than the crash did.
“Jeremy,” he says, voice grounding, closer now. “Look at me.”
I force my eyes to focus on his. My vision is swimming. Time is stretching and warping.
“My name is Jay. I can save you, but you have to choose it. And if you do, there’s no going back.”
The sirens are louder now. Closer. But not close enough.
“Ever?” I whisper.
“No. You won’t be the same. You won’t see your family the way you used to. You won’t grow old. The life you had planned will be gone.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “That life ends here.”
My chest spasms. The world flickers.
“You just graduated?” he asks suddenly.
I nod, instantly regretting it as pain ricochets through my skull like coins in a jar.
“What was your major?” Jay says, as if we are old friends making idle conversation.
“Business. Finance.” The words feel ridiculous now. Pointless.
“That’s good,” Jay murmurs. “You seem smart.”
“Is this real?” I choke out. “Am I actually dying?”
“Yes,” he says without hesitation. “You are.”
Another heartbeat.
“But Emily…” My throat fills again. “She had her seatbelt on. I didn’t. I should’ve…” my voice fractures. “Please don’t let her be alone right now.”
Jay’s hand comes to my shoulder, “she isn’t.”
The darkness presses closer now. Heavy. Thick. My fingers are numb. My legs are gone. The sirens are almost here, but I am fading rapidly.
Jay’s voice somehow threads through the chaos. “Tell me, what did you want to do with your life after college?”
I blink through the blood and darkness, focusing on his kind, almond-shaped eyes.
“I… I wanted to work on Wall Street. I wanted to set up a business to help… kids with special educational needs,” I cough up blood, tasting copper on my tongue. “My sister… Camilla. She has autism.”
Camilla’s bright eyes and laugh flood back to me. Other than Emily, she’s my whole world.
What will she think when she finds out that I’ve died? Will she understand that her Jemmy is never coming back?
My heart thumps, defiant, sending another gush of blood up my throat. I clamp my eyes shut, swallow, and anchor myself to Jay’s voice. I’ve always hated the sight of blood.
“That’s good, Jeremy. That’s a worthwhile goal.” Jay tilts my head to keep me from choking, then examines my neck. “If I save you… if I make you like me, will you promise to do great things with your life?”
I nod, but the movement feels massive. I feel heavy, glued to the ground. I crack open my eyes just as I see Jay removing his brown suede jacket.
“I really won’t be able to see my family again? Like… ever?”
“No,” Jay replies. “But you can still take care of them, from afar. You can still do good... be good.” He rolls up his sleeves, calm, methodical, like he’s about to perform surgery.
“Why? What are you going to do? I thought you said you weren’t a doctor?” My voice is barely a whisper. Childlike and alien to my own ears.
“I’m not a doctor,” Jay chuckles. “Me? Ha! Isaac would love that one.”
“Isaac?”
“Yes. My friend. Full disclosure, I’m much less impressive than him. He’s an actual doctor, and I wish he were here. But… here goes.”
I dig my palms into the asphalt and brace. “What… are you?”
Jay sighs, then rolls his shoulders. “I’m a vampire, son. And you will be too.”
Vampire.
The word lodges in my chest, thudding louder than my own heartbeat. My lips part, but no sound comes. I can’t believe I just heard it. I shouldn’t believe it. My thoughts jolt and splinter. Every rational part of me screams that this is impossible, absurd. And yet… I’ve lost everything already. There’s nothing left to fight for. Nothing else to cling to. The weight of my injuries drags me toward unconsciousness. Pain melts into ice. I feel light, like I am floating above the wet asphalt, the darkness calling to me, whispering to let go.
“Jeremy,” Jay says, urgency threading through his calm for the first time. “Choose.”
The cold rushes in.
“Do it,” I whisper and close my eyes, picturing Emily in her graduation dress, barefoot on the grass earlier tonight, laughing under a string of lights.
Her hand in mine.
Her wide, mischievous smile.
The colour of her hair, like leaves in the fall.
The shape of her lips and the taste of her mouth.
I hold onto it all, breathe her name one last time, then let the darkness swallow me.
