Chapter One

My name is Hope Faith.

Such an ironic name when you think about it.

There’s nothing about me that’s hopeful or gives a person faith, not a thing.

Nobody knows my secret.

And I wouldn’t dare tell anyone.

Telling is killing.

Some secrets are dangerous, and never meant to be known by anyone other than the person who can’t escape the secret no matter how hard they try.

I have a secret that is so much more than others.

My secret is dangerous beyond words.

If you know my secret…then it kills you.

But, no matter how hard I try, my secret is the only thing keeping my alive.

When I told my grandma my secret after I was in a near-death experience and didn’t die, she said that it might be keeping me alive because it has plans for me. That there might be some goal I am to accomplish or some person I must help.

Two days after she spoke those words; she died from a heart attack in her sleep.

I was six years old at the time.

My parents, who still had no clue, said her death wasn’t my fault. It was no one’s fault. It was just her time to go. They tried to comfort me when they found me lying awake at night, crying.

I knew better, though.

My grandma was the first person to know of my secret.

In fact, my grandma was the one who gave me my secret, in a way.

She had a friend dear to her that didn’t have much time left. Her friend wanted to give something to my grandma as a parting gift. Her friend said to give it to her newborn grandchild. She accepted, of course.

When I came home from the hospital, they put the gift around my neck. It was a necklace, and what hung from it was a pendant with the Yin/Yang symbol. Only…it was different. The whole pendant was black, unlike regular ones that are white and black. The markings on it, the squiggly line in the middle and the two circles opposite each other on either side were all white. It was quite a unique Yin/Yang pendant, possibly one of a kind.

As weird as it may seem, my pendant was what killed my grandma.

It was angry at me for telling her my most precious secret.

Someone died because of me, and I felt like a murderer. And because of the pendant, there would be many more murders to come that I was the cause of.

I had a connection with the pendant. It was like it was alive. It had thoughts of its own, and powers. Only I could hear the thoughts, though. It was a small voice in my head that sounded misty. The pendant could hear my thoughts as well, and feel my emotions.

We were connected.

At the age of eight, I got suspended from my private school because I got in trouble. I had accidentally put a kid in the nurse’s office with a broken nose and a broken arm.

When my parents asked why I fought with the kid, I told them the truth. Well, part of the truth. I told them that a voice told me to fight with the kid.

You see, the pendant didn’t like the kid because he was always picking on me and calling me names. It told me that I should deal punishment and payback to the kid for him hurting me. And so I listened.

My parents freaked out. They asked if the voice I heard was in my head.

I answered yes.

The next morning I was put into therapy…therapy at age eight. My parents never told anyone that though. They probably thought it was embarrassing and shameful that such a young child was such a troublemaker and had…well…‘mental issues.’

Two weeks after my first therapy session, my parents told me that my therapist coincidentally died in a car accident.

Coincidentally my butt.

My pendant told me the reasoning for that later on. It said that the therapist was troublesome and that she would have found out sooner or later what my secret was.

I believed it.

When I was nine years old, I was playing down by a creek.

I had stopped seeing a therapist after my first one had died.

That was when my dad ran down to me from our house by the creek. When I stopped hearing his footsteps, I looked back to see he was staring at me wide eyed and with his mouth agape.

I turned to where he was looking exactly and my vision followed his…to my hand. It was manipulating the water in thin air.

I tore my vision away from my hand and hung my head low, shutting my eyes.

This was part of my secret. And I knew now that my own father had to die.

Kill him. The voice told me. If you don’t, he’ll kill you. It is kill or be killed.

I, of course, listened.

My pendant was practically my best friend, because with it, I was never really alone.

I stood and walked toward my dad with shaky feet, the water circling around my hand.

He was still standing there and in that same position, like an idiot.

I looked up at him with watery eyes and he looked down into my face.

Before he could even blink, the water I had been manipulating was around his neck, tightening ever so quickly.

The water fell to the ground along with my dad.

Blood dripped down from the huge cut all around his neck that had been made as he laid there motionless.

I walked over toward him with unruly breaths and kneeled down beside him.

I looked into his face and covered my mouth when I saw his eyes wide open. They were starting to turn purple and roll into the back of his head.

I closed his eyes with my index and middle fingers and stood.

I drug my dad’s body into the creek and let the water drag him away.

I walked back to my house and told my mom a lie.

My dad had supposedly drowned when he fell into the water, his pant leg caught on a stick at the bottom.

The creek was very deep, so she believed it.

The next week we held a funeral for my dead dad whose body was floating into the ocean by now, to be eaten by some sea creature soon.

When I was eleven, my mom remarried and got pregnant.

I was neglected and ignored by her.

My step dad was terrible to me. He beat me and cursed at me.

When he got drunk he would leave bruises on me for days. They healed quicker than they would have if I didn’t have my pendant, which accelerated the healing.

But my mom never noticed or paid any mind to them.

I killed my step dad out of my own free will.

How, you may ask?

The pendant’s influence was starting to take over my judgment, even when it wasn’t telling me to do things.

I burned the man to death. He was dead before I burned him though. I wasn’t ready yet to burn someone alive.

When my mom found out, even though she was pregnant, she became selfish.

I didn’t have to kill her, she killed herself.

She died by strangling herself. And with her, her unborn child died as well.

Now I was only left with my older brother.

We got sent off to a private boarding school for kids in the countryside because he wasn’t old enough to become my legal guardian.

At age thirteen, the principle mysteriously disappeared after he had hit my brother so hard that he got a huge and ugly bruise.

Both my pendant and I agreed that something had to be done about the principle.

And that was the last murder I had committed.

My brother, Chance, and I stayed at the private boarding school.

There we made friends and started a new life.

A life where no one had to know my past or my secret.

Now I was fifteen and my brother was seventeen.

But then…something happened.

It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t necessarily bad either.

My school got a new student. He was fifteen as well and in my grade.

His name was Zane and he looked at me more than he did the other girls.