Sleep of Death

by Aprilynne Pike

  “You have a supernatural existence. Remember how I told you that only someone else with powers can accompany you into your supernatural plane?”

  I nod. My supernatural plane; a place I can go when I sleep and see every possible future. It’s also the aspect of being an Oracle that Sierra has been the most open about. Possibly because Smith damaged mine. Badly.

  “Something similar happens with a Sorceress. Involving other supernaturals will allow them to see the manipulation of time, and remember both tracks. That doesn’t mean you’re immune to her powers,” Sierra adds in a warning tone. “You still go back in time along with everyone else. But unlike them, you’ll remember. Which means they can’t play tricks on you or directly interfere in your life without your knowledge.”

  I know Sierra well enough now to take her meaning: You’ll know about it, but they can still mess with your life. Someone who can “take back” mistakes could take back successes, too. Would it be better to know that you failed, than to know success was taken from you by powers beyond your control? Knowing is often worse than not knowing. As an Oracle, I already know all too well the pain that comes from knowing the world could have been better than it is. It’s one way I can sympathize with the Sisterhood’s rules, even though I think they go too far.

  “You’ll have to be very careful around her,” Sierra warns. “And it may not be possible to hide what you are but—”

  “She already knows,” I blurt.

  “Charlotte!” Sierra’s voice drips with disappointment and I feel like I’m six years old again.

  “I didn’t tell her,” I shoot back defensively. Then take a breath. No reason to turn this into a fight. Sierra and I have been quite volatile the last few weeks—both of us treading new, uncharted territory. It keeps us pretty high strung, and we’ve had a few rather epic fights. Always conducted in hissing whispers and cold shoulders, thanks to my mother’s presence in the house, but epic nevertheless.

  I start again, moderating my tone. “I—I had a vision in art class.”

  I don’t offer to tell Sierra what I saw in the vision. Not because I can’t trust her, but because we have differing opinions about visions these days. The unspoken terms of our truce seem to have settled on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Sierra’s duty-bound to tell the Sisters her secrets. But as long as I keep my secrets to myself, they aren’t hers to tell—and while I know that doesn’t completely satisfy her conscience, it seems to have worked with the Sisterhood, one way or another.

  I’m not sure what exactly Sierra told them about Jason-also-known-as-Smith re-entering her life—or meeting his death. But after (as she told my mom) “an important conference call with her publishing team” during which I frequently wandered over to Sierra’s office door, not eavesdropping but desperately wanting to, she had reported simply that “the Sisters are satisfied.” Neither of us has brought it up since, but the Sisters haven’t shown up at my door with stern looks, ready to drag me off to whatever the Oracle version of Brat Camp is either.

  “That’ll do it,” Sierra says at last, sighing and reaching out to brush my hand in apology. “I guess it would have happened eventually; you spend nearly a third of your life in that school. And visions do come, don’t they?”

  “I didn’t know what to think at first, but she came and found me at lunch.” I pause, scrunching my eyebrows together. “She asked me if I was a Witch.”

  Sierra laughs and even though it’s a welcome sound, I still don’t get the joke. “There are a lot of Witches,” she explains at my blank look. “And being a Witch isn’t like being an Oracle. Their gifts have grown so diluted that many can only sense supernatural abilities in others. And that only barely. Probably one woman in ten has a bit of Witches’ blood in them, and most of them have no idea. Women’s intuition—it’s a real thing. What people don’t realize is that it’s latent paranormal ability. But they don’t really register as supernatural themselves; they often can’t enter a supernatural plane or sense a shift in time. Anyway, yes, lots of Witches. So it’s a logical assumption.”

  I tell her what happened when Sophie asked straight out if I was an Oracle and Sierra purses her lips, but nods. “So she knows for sure.”

  “Why did she apologize?”

  “I doubt she knows much about Oracles except that we’re rare, secretive, and try very hard to never use our powers. We’re also the only supernaturals with a united, central governing organization. We’re simply too powerful to run amok. People could use us—you know that better than most.”

  I nod grimly.

  “It’s just easier if we stay under the radar. Everyone’s radar—other supernaturals included. But they know about us. No way to prevent that, unfortunately. And they often associate with one another, which is likely why she approached you, thinking you might be a kindred spirit. But when she found out what you are, she probably thought she’d accidentally embarrassed you, or maybe even gotten you into trouble.”

  “Am I in trouble?” I’m confident that Sierra knows I mean with the Sisterhood.

  “No,” Sierra says, but she stretches the word out like she might actually mean yes. “In a town this size—and a school as small as William Tell—she would’ve found out eventually. But just because she knows doesn’t mean she’s like you, or that you should even be friends. Not that I’m saying you can’t be her friend,” Sierra tacks on.

  I raise my eyebrows. Has she decided that I do things because I’m not supposed to?

  Well, maybe I do, sometimes. I’m working on it.

  Sort of.

  “But, you’re not the same as her. And you certainly don’t live by the same rules; even the rules you have chosen to live by,” she adds, quietly. “You’ll have to be as careful with her as you would with anyone else. Maybe more careful. Here,” she says, rising to her feet. She walks to one of the bookshelves and pulls out a thick volume bound in supple crimson leather. After flipping through it, she marks a spot with a bookmark and then hands the huge tome to me. “Read that section. It should prepare you for most eventualities.”

  “Thank you,” I say, still loving the fact that Sierra will let me touch—much less read—her books. I take note of which shelf it came from and decide to check that section out next. So many books, so little time. “Oh, Sierra, one more thing. She looks … sick.”

  Sierra nods. “Sorceresses, probably more than anyone else, tend to enmesh themselves in the world. They get wrapped up in grand gestures of heroism—even though they often make things worse instead of better. But doing what they do requires a lot of supernatural energy and once their reserves are gone, they have to … recover, so to speak. Build it back up. And it takes a toll on them physically.”

  I think of how wrung out I feel after a vision. “But she seriously looks bad. I don’t think it’s like us.”

  “Oh, it’s not like us at all,” Sierra agrees. She twists the throw blanket from her chair around her fingers, thinking. “Let’s say you’re driving down a straight road, and you see a roadblock ahead. How much effort does it take for you to see that roadblock, and stop before hitting it?”

  “Not much, I guess.”

  “Now let’s say you crashed into that roadblock. How much effort would it take to put everything back the way it was, before you hit the roadblock?”

  “A lot,” I say, wondering how it would even be possible, before realizing that of course it wouldn’t be possible without supernatural power. “But Sophie made it sound like my vision arrived as a huge bolt of energy. This sounds like the opposite—like my visions are little, and her powers are big.”

  “Well, part of the difference is that Oracles don’t just see one obstacle down the road—we see all the obstacles, down all the forks, down all the roads. It’s also a question of perspective, because your powers are different. What Sophie sensed was how much power it would take for her to change what you were seeing. But of course she could only change it after it happened. And if the vision was simply too strong to res
ist—” Sierra pauses significantly here, working in a not-so-subtle reminder that there’s only one kind of vision she really thinks it’s okay to have, “—it was probably the sort of past she would have a hard time changing, assuming she could change it at all. A Sorceress who uses her powers to change something really significant might require several months or even years to ‘recharge,’ so to speak. Assuming the ill-advised effort didn’t kill her outright.”

  Which explains why Sophie said she wasn’t available. She assumed I might be looking for someone to help with … supernatural stuff. But she looks sick because she just did something big. Averted a disaster, is what she said.

  She’s been using her powers.

  Kinda like me.

  A smile ticks up the sides of my mouth as I sit on the couch in Sierra’s room and dig into the chapter on Sorceresses. Despite what Sierra said about Sophie not being the same as me, I can’t help but suspect we have plenty in common.

  Chapter Four

  “I think we’re done here,” Sierra says, dusting off her hands. “How does it feel?”

  I look around at the endless dome surrounding me, filled with images of the future. Possible futures. Endless versions of possible futures. After months of visiting it, it’s still hard to wrap my brain around. “I’m not sure how it’s supposed to feel,” I admit. “The first time I came here, the door was already in place.”

  Sierra and I have been coming to my supernatural plane nearly every night since the creature I’ve taken to calling “Jason Smith” died. Even though it’s no longer difficult to get here, I still have to use my focus stone. Sierra—once we used the necklace together to grant her entrance the first time—can get here by herself, without any help at all. It’s a daily reminder that while I spent weeks with Smith and, in spite of everything else, learned so much about my abilities, she was with “Jason” for years. I wonder if there’s any Oracle in the world more powerful than my aunt—and after the tone of near-reverence Sophie used on me today, I wonder if that makes her the most powerful person in the world.

  Certainly Sierra has been displaying incredible power here, and not the kind you use to spot a roadblock and stop your car; she’s been helping me repair the havoc that Jason Smith wreaked on my supernatural plane, my own personal bubble of future possibilities. When she told me two months ago that she’d help me clean up, I figured she meant helping me … I don’t know, cleanse it with some kind of magical-spell-thing. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting: a séance, maybe, or something involving a cauldron. But seriously grabbing sledgehammers, smashing his parasitic world to pieces, and dragging out the debris wasn’t what precisely what I had in mind. For an activity consisting entirely of mind and magic, it feels remarkably like manual labor.

  So it’s a good thing we can come to the plane nightly without tiring our physical selves, because we’ve been working on tearing Jason Smith’s dome apart for eight weeks.

  But even though it doesn’t affect me physically, I’m discovering firsthand how much sleep is about taking a mental rest too. I once knew a girl who had vivid nightmares and would comment how tired they always made her. I was only ten and figured that meant she would wake up at night and be tired for want of sleep. Now I’m not so sure.

  After Christmas break I was lethargic and had total brain-fuzz in class for a while before I got used to it. I even resorted to taking naps in the afternoon to give my brain some true rest. Fortunately, like training for an endurance sport, things have slowly gotten better.

  But I won’t lie; I’ll be happy when we’re finished and I can tuck the necklace away for a while and just sleep—really sleep. We’re almost there. We finished emptying Smith’s dome last week. Since then, we’ve been patching the hole where the door used to be. The process is quite fascinating. After ripping them out, we dragged pieces of his world through his doorway and threw them over the edge of my mirrored floor—the edge that looked down into an eternal black hole. Two days ago, there wasn’t an edge anymore. We started piling the pieces in a heap instead, and the next night the pile would be gone. It’s bizarre to see that we’ve returned eternity to my dome. It defies reason.

  But then, so does the dome itself.

  I look at the wall where Jason Smith’s door was, and although you can tell it was once disturbed—Sierra told me the dome will always bear something akin to a scar—I think we’ve done well. The image projected on top of that spot is a little blurry, a touch distorted, but it’s easy to tell what it is.

  “It looks great to me, Sierra,” I say.

  “How does it feel?”

  I look around and suck in a deep breath and try to decide if it feels different at all. It anything, I would say it feels … “Clean.”

  Sierra smiles. “Good. That’s how it’s supposed to feel.” She places her hands on her hips and looks up at my dome. Her hair reaches almost to her waist with her head thrown back like that. It’s always pure strawberry blond here, like it used to be. Even without her “teaching me,” I’ve picked up a few tricks from simply watching her work here. Like the fact that I can change my appearance at will.

  I probably took too much advantage of that trick when I first learned it. The next thing I discovered is that it doesn’t make me feel very confident when I wake up in my real life and look like my normal, imperfect self. So I’ve stopped. I do learn, sometimes.

  “Does your dome look different than mine?” I ask as Sierra surveys the rounded walls.

  “Not really. Mine tends more toward blues than greens, but I suspect that’s simply our color preferences.” She smiles, a soft, sad smile. “But my plane feels like home to me. Yours doesn’t.”

  “Do you—do you ever visit yours?”

  “Most nights.”

  I try to hide how shocked I am. Most nights? “I thought you didn’t believe in doing stuff like that.” She’s always shied away from pretty much anything having to do with our powers.

  But she waves my concerns away. “Not on purpose. After going so often with … with Jason, I travel to my own dome naturally when I sleep. I don’t know that I could stop myself.” She brushes her hair back from her face. “Besides, I don’t do anything there—I just am. An observer. Possible futures are much less tempting than more certain ones, anyway.”

  This sounds terribly lonely to me. And exhausting. “So you never just … sleep?”

  She shakes her head, but the way she stands, the tension in her neck, tells me she’d rather sleep. “Not since Jason.”

  I think of how tired I’ve been lately, and it’s only been two months for me. Sierra’s been spending most of her nights with no mental rest for more than fifteen years. The very idea makes me tired. And also makes me realize just how much there is to this woman I always considered myself so close to, that I simply don’t know. How much more is there to know? How much will I never know?

  Part of me wants to ask what she does with her long, empty hours there, but the moment of sharing secrets somehow passes and she smiles and says, “Ready to call it done?”

  “I think so, yes. But I’m going to stay for a while.”

  “Makes sense—new, fresh dome, all fixed and whole. You’ll like it better here now.” She takes a long breath and meets my eyes. Her eyes always look brighter here too. Maybe she doesn’t mind waking up and looking duller in the morning. “I won’t come back. Not after tonight.”

  A tingle of insecurity rushes through me. “But you … you could get back if you wanted to, right? Now that I’ve let you in?”

  “That’s right,” she says with a curt nod, confirming my understanding. I haven’t insulted her, exactly, but I’ve come close. “But I won’t. I give you my word. Not unless you ask me to come again.”

  “Forever?”

  “The rest of my life.”

  I nod, but then I realize it’s actually an especially serious promise from her. I remember that there’s an Oracle somewhere in the leadership of the Sisters of Delphi who has access to Sierra’s d
ome. The woman who helped Sierra clean up after her own experiences with Jason Smith. That’s how Sierra knew what to do for me.

  I want to ask how Sierra knows that woman has kept her promise—if there’s a way to be sure no one has come in while you weren’t looking—but I can’t ask without making her think I don’t trust her. Or that I feel like I need a way to check up on her.

  And I do trust her. Like so many other aspects of life as an Oracle, I just want to know. But I won’t ask tonight. Not after Sierra has spent so many weeks helping me clean up the remains of Jason Smith, who was her nightmare even before he was mine.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then,” Sierra says, touching my shoulder. “It won’t be much longer. It’s wee hours already.”

  “How can you tell?” My dome always feels timeless. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but always on its own timeline, completely separate from reality.

  “I just can,” she says with a tight smile. I wait for her to assure me that I will too, but she doesn’t say anything else at all. Not even goodbye. She walks away, down the mirrored floor into a reflective eternity, at some indiscernible point vanishing entirely. I’ve watched her do the exact same thing many times before, but tonight it’s forever.

  Once she’s gone I crumple onto the mirrored floor. I lie on my back, staring straight up; for the first time, I let myself really think about the vision I had today. Analyze it. I’ve spent the night distracting my thoughts, flitting from one subject to the next, never landing very long on anything. Keeping the dome bathed in the light of green, growing things.

  Now that Sierra has gone, my secret world takes on a distinctly red hue as my thoughts turn toward the possible future consequences of an impending murder. I spent the whole night fearful that Sierra would look up and find herself surrounded by screens filled with reenactments of the gruesome murder in that pastel-colored master suite.