I froze, Cherry Coke fizzing a few inches from my mouth. “What?”
“Headache?”
I took a long drink of cool, bubbly goodness, then set my glass down. “Uh . . . yeah. I’ve had it for a few days now.”
Lex frowned. “Hmmm . . .”
I looked around the table, suddenly self-conscious. All adult eyes were on me. “What? It’s just a headache.”
Garth frowned. “Isn’t that unusual . . . for a Nejeret, I mean? We’re not supposed to get sick and stuff, right?” He was still getting used to the rules of his new immortality, but he wasn’t wrong. Our kind’s hyper-regenerative abilities kept practically all illnesses and maladies at bay, our bodies healing before we ever felt a symptom signaling that something was wrong.
“Correct.” Mari set her book down, thumb holding her place, and studied my face like it was a specimen on a slide being viewed through one of her microscopes. “How long did you say you’ve had a headache?”
I raised and lowered my shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe three days. Why?”
“Hmmm . . .”
My eyes widened, and I looked from her to Lex and back. “Stop hmmm-ing. It’s just a headache.”
“Maybe it has something to do with what happened back at my folks’ place,” Garth suggested. “I mean, you did die.”
I snapped my fingers. “There it is. That’s gotta be it—I’m having post-death pains. Mystery solved. Now, can we please stop talking about my stupid head?”
“There’s a bottle of Advil in the medicine cabinet in the powder room,” Lex said, pushing her chair back to stand, presumably to retrieve the pain meds.
I held out a hand. “Sit,” I said. “Eat. I’ll take some before I head upstairs.” I offered her a grateful smile; painkillers sounded like exactly what I needed. “Thanks, though.”
She nodded a you’re welcome.
One of the doors from the back patio opened, and Nik and Mei walked into the living room. Nik was carrying my sword.
I stiffened, meeting Nik’s eyes for a fraction of a second before glancing down at Mercy, then looking away. Cheeks burning, I focused on the news anchor I could just barely see on the TV instead of the surging panic making my heart beat double time.
. . . isn’t your usual news story. Something strange is going on at a high school in Bellevue, Washington. Both students and faculty at Bellevue’s prestigious Newport High School have reported unusual, sometimes frightening activity during and after school hours.
I was painfully aware of Nik setting Mercy on the countertop of the kitchen island before moving out of view to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. I could practically feel his eyes burning a hole into the back of my throbbing skull.
Gritting my teeth, I took a deep breath, reached for my glass, and redoubled my focus on the TV. Any second now, the flashbacks would start. I would be sitting here, but I would also be lying on that gravel driveway. I would be having lunch with my family but also floating around in Duat, listening to Isfet tell me I had to find a way to do the impossible before some unknown pending disaster destroyed the universe. I would be alive and dead at the same time, and the anticipation was killing me.
Cold spots, objects moving on their own, disembodied voices—all normal fare in your standard horror movie about ghosts and hauntings. So why have there been dozens of reports of similar occurrences in a high school over this past week? Let’s go to Sandra O’Neil, on site at Newport High School, right now.
I started in my seat when Nik pulled out the empty chair on my left and sat. He leaned toward me a couple inches and said something, but I was so focused on not paying attention to him, on not having a panic attack, that I missed his words.
I leaned away, looking at him sidelong. “What?”
“Can you pass the fries?” he repeated, glancing at the serving bowl on the far side of the platter of sandwiches.
“Oh, um . . .” I cleared my throat, but it still felt like my heart was in it, clogging the way. “Sure.” I released my apparent death grip on my glass and reached for the bowl, then handed it to Nik. I just hoped he hadn’t noticed how badly my hand was shaking.
“Thanks.” His gaze lingered on my face too long. He wasn’t smirking, which was rare. In fact, his expression was serious, concerned even. He must’ve picked up on my racing heartbeat. At this point, I figured everyone sitting around the table must have noticed.
I looked away—from him, from all of them—once again focusing on the TV, guiding my lungs through deep, even breaths. It only took a few seconds for my attention to go from forced to genuinely captured by the news story. First my dreams of a high school which included talk of ghosts, then this story about a haunted high school. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than just a freak coincidence.
The reporter on site at the school was interviewing a teacher in the school parking lot. More specifically the teacher I’d seen in my dream—Ms. C., a woman I’d never met before and had, up until this moment, believed to be a figment of my unconscious mind.
“Is that the school in Crossroads?” Lex asked. “The one with all the gang problems?” She was from Eastern Washington originally and had spent most of her time in the western half of the state, either in Seattle or here on Bainbridge Island. She didn’t know the layout of Western Washington nearly as well as I did.
I shook my head. “Newport’s in Factoria.” Kimi, the overachieving UW undergrad who managed my shop, had gone to Newport. It was about as good of a school as there was in the public school system, and Kimi credited her high school with getting her into the prestigious University of Washington business school on her first attempt.
“Oh,” Lex said, then made some commentary that I didn’t hear because I was so engrossed in the news story.
I pushed my chair back and stood, then walked around the table and into the living room, eyes locked on the TV. I licked my lips and moved closer to the screen, barely able to believe what I was seeing. How could Ms. C. be there, on the screen, talking to the news anchor? How could she be real?
“Kat?” It was Lex again. “What are you doing? Do you know that woman?”
I held up a hand in her direction, index finger raised. “Hang on.”
I hadn’t been to Newport High School for at least two decades. I was pretty certain the last time I was there was my sophomore year. I’d gone to cheer on a couple of my friends and their volleyball team at the district championship tournament. Clearly, some major renovations had been done between then and now. That must’ve been why I hadn’t recognized the school from my dreams right away. But the high school campus spread out behind Ms. C. was most definitely the same school I’d been dreaming about. All put together, it was way too much of a coincidence to be, well, a coincidence.
What is a dream called when it’s more than a dream? Some people might call such things visions or prophecies. But my people—we call them echoes. Years ago, we used to be able to ascend to a higher plane and view pretty much any echo of our choosing, giving us access to all events, past and present, whenever we pleased. Some Nejerets, the most powerful, had even been able to view the many possible paths the future could take. But just before Susie and Syris headed out to the Netjer home universe to learn how to be good little gods, they closed the echoes off from us, right along with Mei’s ability to travel through time. Nobody had viewed an echo of the past, present, or future since. At least not that I’d heard of.
A hand touched my shoulder, and my thoughts stilled. Until I glanced over my shoulder and saw who was standing there. Nik.
I took a small sidestep away, turning to face him, then backed up another step. My eyelids were opened about as wide as they’d go. I must’ve looked wild, frightened, even.
Nik held his hands up, palms out, but didn’t move other than that. “What’s going on, Kitty Kat? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I forced a laugh, and it came out too high and loud and stopped too suddenly. “That’s funny, because the
news is talking about a haunted high school.”
Nik narrowed his eyes, studying my face. Those pale blue irises lured me in. He took a small step closer, and I didn’t move away. I was frozen, petrified by his presence. I couldn’t look away. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Sounding like she was miles away, Lex said my name. It was just enough to break the spell of Nik’s stare.
“I, um—” I tore my gaze from Nik’s face and looked at my half-sister, standing near the table, brow etched with concern. “There’s this thing . . . I just remembered.” I edged around Nik, avoiding looking at him as I moved between a coffee table and a sofa, heading for the hallway that would take me out of there. Away from him and whatever the hell happened when I looked at him. “I have to go,” I said.
Once past Nik, I rushed to the kitchen island to grab my sword, then fled into the hallway to the front of the house.
“Don’t forget the Advil,” Lex called after me, but I raced straight past the door to the powder room, painkillers no longer a priority.
Maybe it was because I wanted nothing more than to put some distance between myself and Nik. Or maybe it was because the possibility that my dreams were really echoes had distracted me from the pain.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was because my headache was finally gone.
Chapter Four
I paced from one side of my bedroom to the other, index finger tapping my lips. “You’re sure you haven’t heard anything about people being able to view echoes again?” I asked Dom.
“Yes, I am certain.”
Thoughts racing, I turned to face him—or, rather, to face the silvery image of him in the standing mirror in the corner of my bedroom—crossing one arm over my middle and pinching my bottom lip with the hand of the other. I sucked in a breath and pulled my hand away from my mouth, index finger raised, then shook my head and went back to the lip-pinching.
“If you truly believe you have seen an echo in your dreams,” Dom said, “perhaps you should consult the cards. That may be the only place you can find the answers you seek.”
I rolled my eyes in an unspoken “duh.” But before I reached out to the universe via my charmed deck of hand-drawn tarot cards, I wanted to think through the implications of echoes suddenly downloading to my sleeping mind. Specifically, the echo of me attending high school—apparently Newport High School—during a supposed haunting outbreak. The conversation I’d witnessed between Ms. C. and Blake had been strange, so I didn’t doubt that something really was going on there, but ghosts?
Yeah, not so much. Ghosts can’t exist, not really. When humans die, their souls pass immediately into another plane of existence—Duat, the same place where I’d gone when I died. Nejerets pass right on through to Duat to Aaru, a mysterious place built to contain immortal beings like Nejerets, Netjers, and, apparently, the consciousness of the universe itself. I’d have scooted right on through Duat and been sucked into Aaru—and been trapped there until the end of time—if not for Isfet making a disembodied appearance through the soul-energy and rescuing me from that particular fate. But human souls don’t linger on the physical plane. They move on. They always move on.
I moved to the window, staring out at the view of the woods behind the house and the choppy waters of the Puget Sound beyond.
So, if the “haunting” was real, then that meant something was going majorly haywire in Duat. At least so far as I understood the layout of the multidimensional universe. Maybe something was up with the barrier between here and the literal land of the dead and soul-energy was leaking out, unintentionally wreaking havoc at an earthly high school.
Possible, I supposed, but highly unlikely. There were just too many hows and whys to that explanation. How could the soul-energy have left Duat? Why would it come here, to the physical realm? Why would a high school be the center of this supposed dimensional leak? And why would the soul-energy be acting malicious, when it had always been so lovely and helpful when I interacted with it? The Duat–soul-energy explanation just didn’t add up.
Or—I frowned—maybe there was a crack in the barrier surrounding Aaru, and that containment realm was no longer an impenetrable prison. Maybe the bas of deceased Nejerets were escaping . . .
. . . and wreaking havoc at an earthly high school.
I had a feeling that that last bit would trip up any and every theory. I couldn’t get caught up on the fact that this was happening at a high school. It just was, plain and simple.
So I moved on.
Say something otherworldly was wreaking havoc at the school—why was I the one receiving warning bells in my dreams? Was it the At and anti-At marbling my ba? Did my special connection to the universe allow me to override the echo lockout and view the flow of time once more? Or maybe dying, going to Duat, and coming back, had freed me from the twins’ ban on messing with the flow of time? Since Susie and Syris—this universe’s designated Netjer caretakers, were still traveling abroad—did the universe expect me to do something about whatever was going on at the school?
Or were the dreams coming from Isfet? Did whatever was happening at the school have something to do with her and the whole prison-break quest?
Hope had me leaning into the distant possibility that there was a thinning between realms—specifically between this dimension and Aaru. These echo-dreams could be Isfet’s way of communicating with me, of guiding me onto the right path. It sure as hell would make the task of freeing her a whole lot easier, because I had no clue how I was supposed to do that.
I narrowed my eyes, staring out the window at the gloomy sky. It was darker now, though it was only half past one in the afternoon. A storm was coming.
Regardless of the source, if the dreams really were echoes of the future—or of a possible future—then did that mean I was supposed to focus on figuring out what was happening at the high school instead of figuring out how to set Isfet free? Or would doing one lead to the other? There were just too many questions.
I threw my hands up. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked the sky, like Isfet might appear in the rolling clouds just as she’d appeared in the swirling soul-energy. “Am I supposed to help you or them?”
“She speaks,” Dom murmured, “but her words are nonsense.”
I glanced at the standing mirror, slowly lowering my arms. I’d forgotten Dom was there.
“Who are you speaking to, little sister?” he asked, dark gaze glinting.
I looked away.
“Does this have to do with what happened to you when you were dead?”
I shot him a sideways glance.
“I see.” He was quiet for a moment. “Did you have another encounter with Anapa?” he finally asked. “One you have yet to share with the rest of us?”
After I woke from my record-breaking post-death regenerative sleep, I’d shared some of the details of my interaction with the powerful Netjer, Anapa, including a bit about Duat, Aaru, and the soul-energy—the others needed to understand where my new, ever-evolving powers came from—but I’d yet to mention Isfet or the mission she’d tasked me with. I’d thought about it, many times. But I just couldn’t.
Inhale. Exhale.
I couldn’t look away from Dom. I was a deer in headlights. Jump and run away, or confront head on. Those were my only two choices.
Inhale. Exhale.
I had to tell somebody—everybody—eventually. They deserved to know the truth about the universe and what the Netjers did to it. What they did to Isfet. The universe wasn’t just some place to be lived in, to be used. It had a soul, a mind. It was alive. And it had been pieced apart, its mind trapped in a place it would never escape from, unless I could do something about it.
I needed help. And to ask someone for help, I first had to explain the situation. But even as I could feel myself giving in to the need to confide in Dom, to finally share my death story with the person I trusted most in the world, my heart rate spiked. My lungs seized up. My vision spotted over, the edges closing in until there was only a
n ever-narrowing tunnel to see through. I clawed at my chest and gasped for breath.
“Little sister, what is it?” Dom said, his voice far away even though it was right there in my head. “Kat!”
“I—” I strained against the invisible bindings tightening around my chest. “I can’t—” This made the panic I so often felt around Nik seem like a kiddie pool compared to the ocean I was now drowning in.
I dropped to my knees, then slumped over onto my side. I rolled onto my back, writhing in search of the oxygen that was suddenly so limited in my bloodstream.
“I’ll get Aset and Neffe,” Dom said. “Just hold on.”
I stopped fighting and just lay there on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as I gasped for breath, tears streaking across my temples. The sound of my own blood rushing through my veins was deafening. The struggle to remain conscious became all-encompassing, and I forgot about Isfet and Dom and everything else.
And ever so slowly, the constriction around my chest lessened, and breathing became easier.
At the sound of the bedroom door creaking open, I angled my face toward the doorway, expecting to see Lex flanked by the two greatest Nejeret healers alive, Aset and Neffe. But it wasn’t her. It wasn’t any of them.
Mei stood in the doorway, smiling kindly. Stride graceful, she entered the room, kneeling on the floor beside me and placing a hand on my shoulder. Her caramel eyes were a whirlpool of wisdom and secrets. Of the things she’d seen of the future but refused to share with the rest of us. She knew so much about what could happen, but not what would. Hers was a burden I didn’t envy.
“You poor child,” she said, brushing a few stray strands of hair out of my face with gentle fingertips. “You cannot tell anybody of your terrible burden.”
The Kat Dubois Chronicles: The Complete Series (Echo World Book 2) Page 57
