by Clara Kensie
Heart pounding, I showed my phone to Melanie. “Is this the building in your vision?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” she exclaimed.
I couldn’t help it: I threw my arms around her and squeezed her tight. Jillian and Logan were in Woodmoor, North Dakota, this very moment.
Melanie Brunswick had found my brother and sister.
Chapter Thirty-One
Six hours later, I shivered beneath a blue North Dakota sky as I stood next to a dented red garbage can, behind the abandoned building that used to be Lako Coin-Op Laundry. Unlike the Google Earth image on my phone, icy wind blew snow across the cracked asphalt parking lot.
Inside the garbage can, the ashes of my Anne of Green Gables book were cold.
After Melanie gave me Jillian and Logan’s location, instead of going to Spanish, I’d slipped out of school. Took a cab to the Lilybrook airfield. Hired a charter plane—the same plane Tristan and I had taken to Tennessee, not the APR’s plane, of course—to an airfield a few miles outside Woodmoor, North Dakota. The disinterested pilot had asked no questions. Then I took another cab here, to 56 Boynes Street. Lako Coin-Op Laundry.
To pay for all of this, I’d swiped the cash Tristan kept in his desk. He would forgive me when I returned to Lilybrook with Jillian and Logan.
If I didn’t bleed to death inside a little silver-walled house first.
But I was not inside a little house with silver walls. I was outside, in an empty parking lot, behind an abandoned laundromat. No house. No silver. Just asphalt, brick and concrete.
And the Nightmare Eyes. They had accompanied me the whole way here. I couldn’t escape them. No matter how far away I went, I’d never escape the guilt and shame of being Killers’ Spawn.
But soon I’d have Jillian and Logan back. I was only six hours behind them. Now I just had to follow their path.
I glanced at the cab driver, who waited for me in his dirty white cab. He was lighting a cigarette and watching me from under his ungroomed eyebrows. He’d asked why I wanted to go to this place, and I’d told him I’d lost something here. True. I’d lost my brother and sister.
I took a breath, preparing myself to lift the fog. Should I do this without Tristan? I’d left my phone in my locker at school, on purpose, because I didn’t want him to call and find out I’d left Lilybrook. But maybe that was a mistake. His premonitions were working again, but without my phone, he wouldn’t be able to warn me before I lifted the fog too high, or brought it in too low.
Didn’t matter. I’d come out here, risking bleeding to death inside a little house with silver walls, to find them. I could certainly risk lifting the fog to find them.
Clutching Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music for strength, I steeled myself against the wind. Steeled myself against chickening out. Steeled myself against passing out.
Took a breath. Held it.
Concentrated.
Raised the fog.
Just a half inch.
I only had to lift it a teeny bit more before I saw Jillian and Logan.
It was easy. Not many people had ever been to this isolated parking lot behind this deserted building. Wisps of long-gone customers carrying baskets of laundry. A flurry of skateboarding kids doing tricks, one of whom fell and got a concussion. A runaway dog.
And two lonely and frightened teenagers, standing over a dented red garbage can, burning their dead sister’s favorite book.
* * *
“Logan! What are you doing? Give it back!”
“I can’t believe you’ve been carrying this book around this whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We have nothing of Mom and Dad’s. We burned everything else of Tessa’s after Tennessee. I just want one thing to remember her by. She loved this book.”
“We have to burn the book too. We can’t take any more chances. Dennis Connelly keeps finding us.”
“Don’t you dare, Logan. This book is all we have left of her. And what if another psychic can sense something from it?”
“Lady Elke couldn’t sense anything from it. She said Tessa was in art class drawing nightmare eyes. What does that even mean? Tessa’s dead.”
“That psychic was obviously a fake. We’ll find one who’s legitimate.”
“Did you ever even open this book?”
“No. I don’t need to read it. I just want to keep it.”
“Look. Right here, inside the cover. This book was a gift from Tristan Walker. He signed a dedication to her. To Sarah, and rainy days.—Tristan.”
“Oh my God.”
“That dedication is completely insincere. He was tricking her the whole time. He knew her real name was Tessa all along. She’s dead because of Tristan Walker. Do you want to keep something he gave her?”
“No. Get rid of it. Destroy it. Set it on fire. Burn it to ashes.”
“Give me the lighter.”
* * *
The vision shattered when someone grabbed me from behind and growled into my ear, “Did you really think you’d get away with this?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Strong, warm sturdy arms. Clean, fresh soapy scent.
But I knew it was Tristan by his low, angry voice.
Was I relieved or disappointed?
Both. Relieved because I knew that this was not the start of Deirdre’s dream, that I was safe.
Disappointed because I knew he would force me to go back to Lilybrook, before I found Jillian and Logan. “Let me go, Tristan.” I struggled, but he crushed me tight against his chest. He didn’t hold me in a desperate hug. He held me so I wouldn’t run away again.
“How could you?” he said. “How could leave Lilybrook and come here all by yourself?”
“Because you would have stopped me.”
“Yes, I would have stopped you. I would have come out here myself, so you could stay home, where it’s safe.”
I pushed out of his arms and threw my own arms wide. “Look around, Tristan. Do you see a little house with silver walls anywhere?”
“No. But you still shouldn’t have come,” he said, fuming.
I crossed my arms, shielding myself from the wind. Next to my cab was a blue car with a Woodmoor Auto Rental sticker in the window. “How did you find me so fast?” I’d only been here, behind the Coin-Op, for twenty minutes, tops. He must have been only twenty minutes behind me the whole time.
“I asked Ember to keep an eye on you at school, to make sure you were safe and to make sure Nathan wasn’t bothering you. When she didn’t see you before your Spanish class, she texted me. I tried calling you, but you didn’t answer your phone.” He took my hoodie between his fingers. “This sweatshirt,” he said, “is technically mine. So the next person I called was Melanie, to ask her to find it. And she told me that just a few minutes prior to that, she found your Anne of Green Gables book for you, but it was burning. I figured it out from there.”
Something shuffled in the shadows, then stepped out. Melanie, shaking like a baby bird, her black hair spilling out from under her knit beret. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you told me not to say anything to Tristan, but when he asked...I just can’t lie to him.”
I, clearly, was very good at lying to Tristan. Another strike against me; another reason he should be with Melanie.
What had they talked about during the flight out here? Or had she straddled his lap and kissed him the whole time, the same way I had kissed him when we flew to Tennessee?
“You didn’t have to bring her with you,” I muttered.
“Yes, I did,” Tristan said. The anger still hadn’t left his tone. “I couldn’t risk her telling her uncle. Kellan would be out here in a second.”
Melanie shuffled in her Doc Martens, then sniffled. Her eyes were wet. Was she crying? Sh
e gave me a resentful glance through her tears.
Tristan seized my arm. “I’m taking you home. Let’s go.”
Perking up, Melanie nodded eagerly.
“We can’t go back,” I said. “I have a new lead. The best one yet.”
With a dubious raise of his eyebrows, he said, “What is it?”
“Before they came here, they saw a psychic named Lady Elke. They gave her my book and she told them I was alive, that I was drawing—” I stopped myself before I said Nightmare Eyes. I didn’t want Melanie to know my secret shame and grief had manifested itself into Nightmare Eyes that I never remembered drawing. I didn’t want her to know the Nightmare Eyes were an almost constant presence, burning down on me, crushing me from all sides.
“She told them I was in art class,” I said. “They didn’t believe her, so they left and burned my book. But I was in art class. She knew exactly where I was this morning. She’ll know where they are now.”
Tristan raked his hands through his hair, then gave a long, reluctant sigh. “Then we’d better find this Lady Elke.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
See, Tristan? I flashed to him. No silver walls here.
I was squeezed between Tristan and Melanie, pressed shoulder to shoulder, on a dirty love seat inside a run-down house. Its walls were covered with torn wallpaper and a cracked, dusty mirror. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like fog, clogging my lungs. But there was not a silver thing in sight.
We’d found the psychic who’d told Jillian and Logan that I was alive and drawing Nightmare Eyes, and we were sitting in her house. Tristan didn’t have her in his database, and an internet search on our cell phones had revealed nothing. We’d found a listing for her in an old Yellow Pages in a decades-old diner with wooden paneling, located across the street from the Lako Coin-Op Laundry. Lady Elke lived the next town over in Aldana, a town even smaller than Woodmoor. Her advertisement in the Yellow Pages included a sketch of a beautiful young woman wearing a jeweled turban and gazing dreamily into a crystal ball that looked amazingly similar to the one Brinda Lakhani had drawn.
Lady Elke in person was nothing like the sketch. She was in her fifties, and despite the cold February weather, she wore cutoff jeans and a yellowed tank top, both of which were several sizes too small. Her right eyelid was sunken and closed, as if she was missing her eye, and a thin white scar ran from her right cheekbone, over her eyelid, and disappeared into her scalp. Her remaining eye was the color of moss, and was bloodshot. Dark roots belied her frizzy, overprocessed blond hair. She sat across from us in a threadbare easy chair that at one time might have been white. Now it was just a dingy gray.
In addition to the crystal ball, Brinda had drawn a picture of a four-legged animal with one eye. I’d thought it was a deer. One of the psychics Tristan contacted had said it was a horse. Now I knew it was an elk. For Lady Elke.
Lady Elke had so far ignored Tristan and Melanie. She stared at me as her single eye gradually narrowed. Her lip curled up a little, like she smelled something bad. Her hands shook as she drew a puff from her cigarette, then released the smoke from the side of her mouth.
She used her cigarette to point to me. “You’re the girl who was in that art class this morning,” she said, like she was accusing me of something.
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. In contrast to Lady Elke’s low, gravelly voice, mine seemed high and squeaky. I gave her a smile, but she didn’t smile back.
“I told them two kids that you was alive. I told them, but they didn’t believe me.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Lady Elke frowned. “You three is like me,” she said. “You see things. Visions.”
I glanced at Tristan. He nodded cautiously, so Melanie and I did too.
“What do you need me for, then?” she asked. Her single eye darted back and forth between us.
“We need you because you can see things that we can’t.” I pulled Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music from my bag.
Lady Elke curled her lip again. She didn’t seem to mind Tristan and Melanie; her looks of disgust were clearly directed at me. She’d look at me, then her eyes would flick up at the ceiling, then down to me again. The back of my neck started to burn, to prickle.
“I’ll do it for fifty bucks,” Lady Elke said. “No. Seventy-five.”
Tristan reached into his wallet, withdrew a bill and placed on the table. She saw the bill was a hundred, and her face softened into a smile. “Let me get you some tea,” she said, her voice now pleasant and sweet. She tucked the hundred inside her tank top, then swayed out of the room.
That woman does not like me, I flashed to Tristan.
I don’t like her either, he said. Out loud, he called to her. “We’re in a hurry.”
“It won’t take long,” she chimed from the kitchen. “It’s all part of the service.”
Lady Elke had left the room, but her abhorrence for me lingered behind.
A vision appeared through the fog, one that instantly made me forgive Lady Elke’s crude attitude. “Her ex-husband beat her,” I whispered. “With a wrench. Right here in this room. That’s how she lost her eye.”
“Oh.” Tristan shuddered. “Now I just feel bad for her,” he said. Melanie and I nodded in agreement.
Melanie kept looking across me, setting her wide violet gaze on Tristan. He sat straight up, face tight, keeping his hands on his lap instead of putting his arm around me like he usually did. Was he sitting like that so he wouldn’t make Melanie jealous? Or because he was still mad at me for leaving Lilybrook?
We were sitting on the same couch that Jillian and Logan had sat upon just a few hours ago. I could feel their presence, and I wanted more. I could just lift the fog to have a vision of them, but I didn’t want to make Tristan even angrier at me than he already was. “Tristan,” I asked, “do you see anything happening if I lift the fog right now?”
He stiffened. “No. But be careful. Not too high. If I tell you to bring it back in, do it.”
I touched his arm. “I will.”
He didn’t put his arm around me, but he didn’t shrink from my touch. “Go ahead. Lift the fog.”
I took a breath, then lifted the fog. And there they were, right there, as if they were sitting next to me. Jillian and Logan, as easy as that. Jillian’s hair was dyed brown again and cut to the length of her chin. Her gray eyes were duller than I remembered. Logan was wearing a black ski cap pulled down low over his forehead. With his gaunt features and distrusting glances, he looked almost menacing.
Show me, I instructed the visions.
* * *
She and Logan sit in a dusty living room on a couch that perhaps was once white with metallic gold flowers, but is now gray with dirt. The smoky, dusty air clogs her throat.
Lady Elke had offered them hot tea, and she is in the kitchen boiling the water. Logan mutters, “This is the worst place yet, Jillian.”
“Be nice,” she says. “Maybe she can help us.”
Logan scoffed. “I don’t see how.”
“We can’t keep running from place to place anymore,” she says. “It’s too dangerous. Maybe that’s why Dennis Connelly keeps figuring out where we are. We’re too exposed. We need to stop and find a place to stay.”
“You want to stay here?”
“Maybe. It’s remote. I don’t care where we stay as long as it’s safe. Please, Logan. Just give her a chance. If she does anything suspicious, we’ll run. Or fight.”
Logan pursed his lips, then nodded. “Fine.”
Lady Elke returns with two mugs. They each take one, and she tries not to grimace at the dirty-dishwater taste.
Lady Elke takes a long drag on her cigarette and studies them. “You have a secret,” she says.
Her heart flip-flops. They have many s
ecrets. Their entire existence is a secret. Does Lady Elke know they are hiding? Does she know about their psychic abilities? Does she know their family was murdered? Does she know they pushed that guy off the cliff?
“You lost your family,” Lady Elke says.
Another flip-flop. Logan puts his hand on her arm to remind her: don’t confirm or deny anything. Trust no one.
So she says nothing. She swallows her tea with a gulp.
“Do you have something of theirs?” Lady Elke asks. “I can contact them.”
Logan rolls his eyes. “We don’t have anything.”
“Wait.” She reaches into her getaway bag and pulls out Tessa’s book. “We have this.”
Logan frowns. “Why do you still have that?”
“I just do.”
Lady Elke takes the book and holds it to her chest. She twists her lips and looks up to the water-stained ceiling like she’s thinking hard.
“This girl ain’t dead,” she declares. “She’s in art class. She’s drawing nightmare eyes.”
Her heart stops flip-flopping and plummets into her stomach. Lady Elke is a fake, just like all the other so-called psychics they’ve seen. She avoids Logan’s “told-ya-so” expression.
“She’s looking for you,” Lady Elke continues. “She needs to find you first.”
“Okay,” she sighs. “Thank you for your time.” She reaches for the book, but Lady Elke grips it tightly in both hands.
“But there’s more,” she says. “Everything you think you know is wrong.”
“We’re done,” Logan says, and stands up. He tosses some money on the dirty coffee table.
She snatches the book from Lady Elke, and they walk out the door.
* * *
I rose from my space between Tristan and Melanie, following the images of Jillian and Logan outside. Ignoring the cold wind, I stood on Lady Elke’s rickety, cluttered front porch. Distantly, I felt Tristan behind me, on alert.
His blue rental car sat on the gravel driveway, and as I lifted the fog, it was replaced by a small white RV. Jillian and Logan were leaning against it, hunched over. Tired. Defeated. Crestfallen.
