Warm Up (Villains, #0.5)

by V.E. Schwab

Gotta capture the moment, Jackson had said, snapping a shot. Memories fade. So do pictures, David had thought, but he’d smiled and posed anyways.

Everything got quiet. Even the sound of his own body falling forward to the street seemed far away. He felt the cold then, not blistering as it had been beneath the snow, but steady, spreading through him as he lay there.

Warm up, he thought, but his hands rested uselessly against the pavement. Warm up, he willed, but only the cold was there to meet him. The cold and the quiet. They took hold and dragged him down,

And then the darkness came, and buried David Lane in a blanket of ash.