Daphne and I are silent all the way to the end of the walk, streetlights gilding the darkness, and I can’t help trying to see if I can sense a vampire. Only, I feel nothing but the crisp bite of March air on my face. Either the ability doesn’t work that way, or there are no vampires present—or I have no abilities and no idea what’s going on.

After we’ve driven a few blocks, my tutor finally reaches over and thumps my shoulder with a fist. “So what’s going on in there, Auggie? Where’ve you been all night?”

I shrug, having no clue how to reply. A vampire tried to convince me that the world is coming to an end, and I keep going into freaky trances, and, oh yeah, I was kind of attacked last night. I don’t know how to begin, so I skip to the end instead.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Reincarnation,” Daphne repeats carefully. “You mean like … past lives and stuff?”

“Yeah.” I shift in my seat. The car is freezing. “When we die, do we come back?”

“Well, when some people die, they come back as vampires, so…” She gives me a wry smile, but the look falls off her face when she sees how serious I am. “Jeez, Auggie, I guess I don’t really know. You’re talking about souls passing on in one form and returning in another?” When I nod, Daphne just offers up a baffled shrug.

“But do you think it’s possible?” I press. The thing is, I’m becoming less and less convinced that this is some cosmic hand-me-down package of superpowers forwarded to me from a previously known address so I can pick up the torch where the last Chosen One dropped it. I’m not so sure anymore that my dreams of “people from historical periods I don’t recognize” are about me tapping into some common frequency shared by those of us who’ve possessed the same gift.

They’re starting to seem like real memories.

It’s not like I’ve never had nightmares before, but lately, they’ve been getting more intense and more frequent. Just last week, the night before my first episode of lost time, one of the deaths I dreamed about was of being burned at the stake. And I still can’t shake the feeling I had while staring at the twisted corpse on the pyre—that I was looking at someone that used to be me.