Deception So Dark

by Clara Kensie

  Our kisses tamed as our heart rates slowed and our breathing returned to normal. Reluctantly, we slipped back into our tops and jackets. He lounged against the snowbank and I put my head against his chest. As I snuggled into him, I rested my casted arm on his stomach and watched it rise and sink as he breathed in and out.

  I need you, Tristan. I do.

  Amy cut off my cast a few days later. I’d only had to wear it for a short while, a much shorter time than a neutral without access to a psionic healer, but I was relieved, just the same. Every time I saw it, or felt its weight when I moved my arm, I was reminded how my own father had broken my wrist. I still felt the burn of the rage in his eyes. But now the cast was gone, and I could paint my mural again. And best of all, I could run both palms all over Tristan’s chest, and cup his face in both my hands, and bring him to me for a kiss.

  The very next day after school, I went to paint my mural. Mr. Vargas was almost as delighted by my return as I was. He helped set up my supplies in the cafeteria, then went back to the art room, leaving me to my work. The mural was about seventy percent finished; I had only the strawberry and the grapes left to do. The apple and the blueberry needed some touching up, I decided. More highlights and shadows. I would do those first, and then I could probably finish most of the strawberry before it was time to stop for the day.

  I squeezed some paint on my palette, adjusted the fog to keep the visions away, then sank into the mural, the fresh smell of the paint, the strokes of the brush. A group of students passed through the cafeteria, their footsteps and chatter echoing through the fog. I lowered it to block them out.

  A grunt shot through the fog like a bullet. Spawn, it sounded like. I glanced behind me only to see wisps of auburn hair and blond dreadlocks disappear around the corner. Winter and Nathan. Had they been standing there watching me, or had they just been walking by?

  Didn’t matter. They were gone now. I lowered the fog as far as I dared and resumed painting the shadow on the underside of the apple, and tried to ignore the way my blood burned through my veins, tried to ignore the Nightmare Eyes that glowered at me from above.

  “Tessa, what are you doing?” Mr. Vargas asked a few minutes later, startling me.

  “Painting my mural,” I said. I glanced out the window. The sun was low in the sky. I’d been painting longer than I’d thought.

  “Yes, but why are you painting that?” He pointed at the wall.

  Two big black circles.

  Oh, no.

  “You know I love what you’ve done so far,” Mr. Vargas said, brows knit, “and I would like to give you free rein, but I can’t let you paint these eyes on this mural.”

  I climbed down the ladder. Took a few steps back. Looked up at the wall.

  Black, bottomless. Angry and accusing. Unlike the rest of my mural, which was playful and whimsical, the eyes were so detailed they looked real. Lifelike. Pupils solid, sinister, eternal black, surrounded by sparkling silver irises. They stared at me, glowering with shame and grief and fury, dark as a starless night and black as a cavern of coal.

  My Nightmare Eyes.

  Their gaze locked onto mine. Held me prisoner. I couldn’t turn away.

  “You painted them over some of your completed work,” Mr. Vargas said from far away. “I don’t understand.”

  “I…” I stammered. “I don’t…” My breath started coming in quick gasps. I tried to force my shaking hands up to my face, to cover my eyes, to sever the connection, to break the spell the giant black eyes had cast over me. But I was frozen.

  He brought a finger to one of the black eyes and touched it, fascinated. “What compelled you to paint these?”

  “Cover them,” I said. “Please.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid we’ll have to,” he said with a sigh.

  “I can’t do it. I can’t touch them.” If I touched the Nightmare Eyes, I would lose myself. I knew it. The fog would disappear, it would be sucked up in a vacuum, and the visions would overpower me. I would never recover.

  “Oh, don’t be upset,” Mr. Vargas said. “The eyes are…well, beautiful isn’t the right word, although you did a beautiful job painting them. They’re haunting. They make me feel …shame. Loss. Anger. Betrayal. Pain.”

  He shuddered. “Art should give people strong reactions. But I doubt anyone could eat with those hateful things staring at them. I’d love for you to paint them again, just not on a cafeteria wall.”

  “Cover them,” I said again. I backed up, still unable to tear my gaze away. I stumbled over a chair and caught myself before I fell. That seemed to break the hold the eyes had over me, and I was able to look away.

  Mr. Vargas frowned. “Are you okay?”

  I turned and fled. I ran to the girls’ bathroom and stood, shaking, over the sink. My hands were covered in black paint, and when I looked in the mirror, I saw that I had smeared some of that paint on my face. I looked ghoulish. Haunted. I ran water over a fistful of paper towels, and scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed.

  The next afternoon after school, Mr. Vargas helped me carry my painting supplies into the cafeteria. The giant eyes were gone. In their place was a fresh coat of bright white paint. Mr. Vargas must have painted over the eyes after I left yesterday.

  Half of my mural was gone, but that was okay. As long as the eyes were gone too.

  Instead of going back to the art room as he had always done before, this time he sat at one of the tables, sketching with colored pencils.

  I approached the spot on the wall where I had painted the eyes yesterday. I lifted the fog and tentatively touched the spot.

  A slight jolt—shame-guilt-despair-tarnished-blood-tainted-blood—but it was a remnant of my own fog-laden thoughts from yesterday. It was stupid to let those painted eyes affect me so much.

  Over the next few days I repainted the portion of the mural that I’d ruined by painting the eyes over it, then completed the strawberry and grapes. It took a lot longer than it used to; I had a harder time keeping the fog balanced because I was afraid to sink too deeply into it. I battled visions, and I was much slower now, but I was still able to paint.

  A week later, Mr. Vargas told me to invite all of my friends to the cafeteria after school so they could watch as I put the finishing touches on the mural. He brought in a sheet cake, big enough to feed at least twenty people.

  Four. That’s how many people came. Tristan, Dennis, Deirdre, and Ember.

  Four wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  Dennis and Deirdre wouldn’t stop exclaiming over how wonderful the mural was, or how proud they were of me. I didn’t try to stop their compliments. My mural was good. Bright and whimsical. The colors and shapes were perfectly balanced. My cheeks hurt from smiling.

  “Stand in front of it,” Deirdre said, pulling a camera from her purse. I posed and preened as she snapped a dozen pictures.

  The only thing missing was my brother and sister. Their absence was like a hole in my heart.

  Tristan picked me up and whirled me around, not caring that I was all paint-y and would ruin his clothes. “Now you need to sign it,” he said.

  I dipped a thin brush into silver paint and scrawled Tessa, very small, in the bottom right corner.

  “You forgot your last name,” Mr. Vargas said.

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t forget.”

  I hadn’t signed my last name on purpose. The Lab Brats wouldn’t want the name Carson forever painted on the cafeteria wall.

  Mr. Vargas asked a week later if I wanted to paint another mural, this one in the field house. I told him not today; I loved painting, but there was something else I needed to do. Tristan and Aaron, though working ceaselessly to find Jillian and Logan, had made no headway in weeks. It was time to do something about it. So after school, instead of painting a mural, instead of going back to the Connellys’ house, I went to visit Brinda Lakhani.

  I brushed my hand on her sticker-covered door. She peeked out and I wiggled my fingers at her, then she flung open the door, gave
me a hug, and even kissed my cheek. Her father waved me in. Smiling, in silence, the three of us drank our invisible tea.

  When I thought Brinda was ready, I placed Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music on the table. I had nothing else to show her. I just had to hope that she would see something new.

  We continued drinking our tea. Brinda’s gaze flitted to the shoe and paper occasionally, but never landed on them. Finally, her olive-brown eyes turned unfocused, and Mr. Lakhani held up her bucket of crayons. She reached inside, shuffled around, and pulled out a brown crayon.

  On a plain sheet of paper, she drew a large triangle. Next, she took a gold crayon and drew a small circle in the middle of the triangle.

  Then, she slid the paper to me, her eyes clear.

  That was it. No more predictions. This one drawing would have to be enough.

  To thank her, I gave her a rainbow sticker, which she promptly stuck to the window frame. After gathering everything—the drawing, Jillian’s ballet shoe, and Logan’s sheet music—into my bag, I waved goodbye to Brinda and her father and went back downstairs. A gold circle in a brown triangle wasn’t much to go on, but at least Tristan and I had another drawing to find a match for.

  On the way out, I passed the Lab. From the entrance, I could see the Technokinetics office.

  Hmm. Maybe Aaron would like to see the drawing too.

  Aaron jumped when I knocked on the door frame, but his fingers didn’t slow as they flew between two keyboards, and his eyes didn’t stop as they scanned six monitors stacked on his desk, all of them flashing random faces so quickly that my brain couldn’t decipher them. How was he keeping up with it all? He had Jillian and Logan’s photos taped to the side of one monitor, and they reflected in his overly large glasses.

  “I have a new clue.” I showed him Brinda’s drawing, which he glanced at for a millisecond before returning to the monitors.

  I leaned against his desk, studying the drawing. “The brown triangle could be a mountain. And the gold circle might be a ring. What do you think?”

  No response.

  “Try looking at places in the mountains,” I said. “Maybe they’ll drive by a jewelry store. Or a gold mine.”

  His fingers blurred over the keyboards, but still he said nothing.

  “You’re having no luck scanning traffic cams and surveillance videos,” I said. “I know this drawing is a long shot, but at least it’s a new direction.”

  He didn’t respond, just continued to scan the monitors. For a length of a heartbeat, his gaze rested on Jillian’s photo and his fingers slowed, then he resumed his usual breakneck pace.

  “I’m sure Jillian will be grateful for your help,” I said.

  His face turned red. “Brown triangle. Gold circle. I’ll look.”

  “You’ll call me when you find them?”

  But he had sunk into his search again, and his answer was only a grunt. So I left, not sure he’d remember that I had been there.

  ❀

  A few mornings later, a series of rapid, high-pitched beeps woke me from my dream of silver knives and Nightmare Eyes. I jolted awake, heart in my throat, instincts telling me to run: Dennis Connelly found us again.

  No. I was safe. No more running. Dennis Connelly was a friend, and my parents were the villains. The Nightmare Eyes weren’t real. Marmalade was curled up next to me, Mac was lying on the floor, and Tristan was across the hall.

  I was safe.

  My heart rate revved up again when I recognized the beeping as the ringtone I’d assigned to Aaron Jacobs. Bolting upright, I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and scrambled to answer it. “Aaron! Do you have a lead?”

  Marmalade mewed next to me as my door pushed open, and Tristan rushed in, on alert.

  “I found her,” Aaron said. “Them. I found them.”

  Joy, elation, euphoria shot into every cell of my body, lighting me up, making me weightless, and I flew out of bed. “Where are they?”

  “In Colorado. A mountain town called Ringgold.”

  “That’s Brinda’s drawing,” I exclaimed. Oh beautiful, glorious Brinda.

  Ringgold, Colorado, I flashed to Tristan, who whirled around and ran to his room to dress.

  “You did it, Aaron. You did it.” Holding the phone to my ear with my shoulder, I shed my pajama pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “I-I concentrated on places in the mountains, like you told me to,” Aaron said. “Yesterday I thought I s-saw them on a security cam at a used car lot in Colorado. They bought a blue 2006 Camry. From there I followed them on traffic cams until they stopped for the night at a motel.” With each word, his voice became bolder, more confident.

  “Why didn’t you call me yesterday?”

  “I wasn’t sure it was them. But now I have visual confirmation. It’s them. Her hair is red now. L-light red.”

  “What’s the name of the motel?” I said. We’d have to get out there right away. I was shaking, so excited that I almost dropped the phone.

  “They left it already,” he said, “But I picked up their trail again. I’m driving up a mountain, a few cars behind them.”

  “Wait.” This time I did drop my phone, then scrambled to hold it to my ear again. “You’re already in Colorado? You went there without me?”

  “I flew out last night while they were at the motel. D-don’t be mad. I just…I…I want…”

  My legs folded like they were made of paper and I sank to the bed. “You want to bring Jillian back here yourself,” I said. “You want to be her hero.”

  For a long time, the only sound coming through my phone was the hum of the engine of Aaron’s car. Then: “Yeah.”

  I could understand that. Tristan would do the same thing to be my hero. “I’m not mad,” I half-lied. “But Aaron, Jillian and Logan won’t trust anyone but me, so I’m flying out there. Don’t let them notice you until I get there. I’ll tell Jillian, first thing, that you were the one who found her, okay? I’ll tell her how smart and nice and amazing you are.”

  “O-okay,” he said.

  “Once we land, I’ll call you and you’ll tell us exactly where you are. We’ll catch up to you, and then we’ll bring them home.”

  “All right.”

  “Aaron,” I said. “Don’t let them out of your sight.”

  “I won’t.”

  I disconnected, then darted to Tristan’s room. He was sitting at his computer, looking at a map of Ringgold. “Can we get that charter plane again? That’ll be fastest,” I said.

  He slowly swiveled in his chair to face me. “Tessa, you can’t go. You can’t leave Lilybrook.”

  “What do you mean? Aaron’s already in Colorado. He’s driving right behind them. We have to go get them.”

  “You can’t leave Lilybrook,” he said, scraping his hand through his hair. “My mother’s dream, remember?”

  “But Jillian and Logan have already been found,” I said. “They’re on a road on a mountain. There won’t be a silver room.”

  “We don’t know that.” His expression was stone.

  “Is this because Aaron found them and you didn’t?”

  The stone crumbled, just a little, then recomposed itself. “No. This is because I need to keep you safe.”

  Anger swept through my body, setting my nerves ablaze. I wanted to throw my phone at him, but it was the only way I had to get ahold of Aaron. “I just want my brother and sister,” I snapped. “I don’t care who finds them.”

  “It’s okay. I figured out what to do.” He rose and walked over to me, slowly, the way a patient parent would approach a child throwing a tantrum. “I’ll call Aaron back and tell him there’s been a change of plans. Once Jillian and Logan stop somewhere, Aaron will set his phone to video chat and show it to them. Then you will video chat with them so they know you’re alive and safe, and you can tell them it’s okay to come back here with Aaron.”

  Usually my blood burned with shame, but this time it boiled wit
h rage. “That’s ridiculous, Tristan! I need to get out there. Right now.”

  “No. Not when I can’t depend on my premonitions to keep you safe. It’s too risky.”

  “I’m not risking anything,” I said.

  “You’re risking your life.” He opened his arms for me. “Just stay here. By the end of the day today, they will be here with you, and we won’t have to worry about my mother’s dream anymore.”

  I pushed his arms away, then stomped back to the guest room, slamming my door on him when he tried to follow me in.

  I sat on my bed with Marmalade, phone in my hands, and waited for Aaron to call.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  I left my room only to brush my teeth and do my hair, so when I did video chat with Jillian and Logan, they would believe me that I was safe and happy.

  Well, that I was safe. I was not happy. Especially not with my overprotective boyfriend who had more faith in his mother’s defunct dream than he had in me.

  I waited some more.

  Hours later, a phone rang, but it wasn’t mine. It was only the Connellys’ landline.

  After a minute, someone knocked on my door. “Tessa? It’s Dennis. That was John Kellan on the phone,” he said. “Honey, something’s happened. We have to get to the APR.”

  In the APR’s boardroom, Kellan leaned on the glossy table and glowered at me as I shivered in a chair across from him. Tristan sat next to me, as close as he could get. Dennis paced the room, stroking his chin, looking more and more devastated as he listened in on Kellan’s thoughts. Various investigators, guards, and Lab employees crowded into the room, rumbling with shock and distress.

  The Nightmare Eyes had returned, burning into me from above, and on the table, a letter opener glittered and glimmered, sparkled and glowed.

  “Please,” I begged. “What happened? Are Jillian and Logan okay? Is Aaron okay?”