The sound pierced my brain painfully. I covered my ears and cringed.
In the distance, another wolf answered the call.
They were hunting.
Hunting Blackwell.
Had Beau been the bait?
I whirled around to look back at Blackwell as the wolves gathered their hind legs and leaped as one toward him. But he’d seen the predators. He was ready for them.
He threw a mass of his black-colored light at the wolves just as they passed over me.
It hit them in their chests and faces, their bodies still extended in anticipation of landing.
All three fell howling and writhing to the pavement. They snapped and scratched at Blackwell’s black light as it twined around them like smoky rope.
Not black light. Magic.
Blackwell was gone. Just gone, as if he’d never been in the parking lot.
Beau was dead, only steps away from me. I reached for him.
The vision washed out of my mind in a blazing fury of white light.
I opened my eyes, not realizing I’d closed them.
I was back in Desmond’s living room.
Beau was pinned to the ground in front of the windows by Audrey and Lara.
“Take your hands off him,” I said. I’d never heard my voice sound so nasty.
Audrey and Lara looked over to Desmond, who I could see standing off to my left without turning my head from Beau. The alpha nodded. They loosened their hold and stepped away.
Beau straightened his back, but kept kneeling and holding my gaze. He started to speak but couldn’t seem to vocalize any words. He swallowed, then tried again. “What did you see?”
I shook my head, denying the vision.
“She’s going to need to draw,” Beau said as he rose to his feet. “Her sketchbook is in the bedroom.”
“It wasn’t real,” I said, but even I could hear the lie in my voice.
I’d seen Beau dead at Blackwell’s feet.
“You’ll draw.” Beau was speaking but I wasn’t listening. “You’ll feel better.”
I was looking for Jade. She was off to the side, leaning against the stone of the wide fireplace behind and to my left. Her arms were crossed and her eyes downcast. I stepped toward her and she flinched.
She flinched. All that power, all the electric magic I could feel rolling off her, and I made her flinch.
I stopped and waited.
She lifted her indigo eyes to mine, offering me a sad twist of her mouth as a smile.
“Who did you see me kill?” she asked. “Everyone?”
Kandy moaned. Desmond cleared his throat.
“No one,” I answered.
Jade nodded, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.
“Can you …” I faltered on the thought. Was I actually thinking this was all real? I could feel the painful urge to draw. It had started as an itch in the palm of my left hand, but now my fingers were convulsing with it. I clenched a fist and fought the feeling. “Do you believe in fate then? If I see it, is it fated to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Jade answered. “That’s a big question.”
“Tell us what you saw, fledging,” Desmond said. “And we’ll try to help you sort it out.”
I pressed my aching hand to my chest.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Beau said. “She needs to draw.”
“What I know,” Jade said, “is that I’ve only seen fate thwarted once. And maybe it’s only been delayed. Maybe it’s still to come.”
Delayed. I’d take delayed.
“By who?” My question was a tense whisper of pain. The itch to draw was crawling up my left arm now.
“By one who sees everything.”
“Like me?”
“No. Maybe. Maybe you with a thousand years of experience.”
“What did he change?”
“Me,” Jade answered. “He stopped me from … going back. Why, Rochelle?”
“I don’t believe in fate or destiny.”
Jade laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound. “It believes in you.”
I shook my head as I stepped by Jade to follow Beau back toward the bedroom.
“Who dies?” Jade asked.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t acknowledge what I’d seen. Not until I figured out what to do about it, and maybe not even then.
“Me?” Jade called out. “Desmond?”
“Eventually, I imagine,” I answered.
“Well, it can’t be that bad,” Kandy said. “If she’s flippant about it.”
“We need a plan,” Audrey said.
“We’ll wait until she shares the drawings Beau is talking about,” Jade said. “Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”
I turned the corner into the hall. Though I could still hear them talking in the living room, I could no longer make out distinct words.
Beau reached back and twined his fingers through mine. His hand was warm, and so, so real. But all I could see was my necklace laced through his limp fingers, and his hand lying so terribly still on the gray, cracked concrete of the sidewalk.
“They’re discussing setting a trap for Blackwell,” he said. As we continued down the hall, Beau’s head was canted as if he was still listening to their conversation. I couldn’t hear anything now.
“With you as bait,” I murmured.
“Well, I won’t let them use you.”
The fact that the others were even discussing the possibility of using Beau to draw out Blackwell only confirmed that what I’d seen was the future, perhaps the immediate future.
I stopped at the half-open door to the bedroom, turning toward Beau. The pain in my chest was entirely different now. It quite literally felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart with a dull knife.
I stared at his neck, focusing on the zippered opening of his hoodie and the edge of his faded T-shirt. I struggled to absorb this feeling, to move through it.
I couldn’t bring myself to look up at him.
“Oh,” he gasped. “Your hair.” He reached out and separated a hank of my hair, pulling it delicately from the side of my head into my peripheral vision. By the slight tugging I could feel as Beau held it, I knew it was from the left side of my middle part. It was white. Not just streaked white or faded black, as if my hair dye had suddenly washed out. Beau held a full inch of white hair.
I shook my head. I couldn’t deal with my hair right now. I didn’t want to deal with it.
I reached out and clutched at Beau’s hoodie. Then I literally climbed, one fistful of fabric after another, up his body to wrap my hands around the back of his neck. I pressed the length of my body against his and gazed up at him. He still towered over me. This close, he filled almost every last bit of my peripheral vision. His size and strength comforted me, even when it should terrify me.
I should have run the first time I laid eyes on him.
Instead, I’d wanted to lick the raindrops off his neck.
“What are you thinking?” he whispered. “The vision?”
I shook my head. The pain emanating from my left hand intensified, continuing to flood up my arm, over my shoulder, and into my neck.
He was so beautiful, so real to me. And he was going to be really, really dead.
I stretched up on my toes, pulling him down for a long, lingering kiss. He obliged me by wrapping his hands around my hips and lifting me the last couple of inches.
Then I said, “I need to be alone.”
Beau nodded. “I’ll be right out here.”
“Okay.”
He set me on my feet. I turned and walked into the bedroom, feeling like I was physically tearing myself away from him. It was like I had painful Velcro all over my body.
I pulled my sketchbook out of my bag and found a piece of charcoal. Then I stood by the bed and looked back at Beau out in the hall. He grinned at me, then started to pu
ll the door closed.
“I’m thinking of a tiger paw.” I said.
He paused, surprised. “You mean for a new tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“In the barbed wire?”
“No.”
His grin widened. My aching heart thumped once, twice, against my breastbone.
“So you … believe?” he asked.
“I believe.”
He laughed huskily. Then he shut the door between us. The latch clicked.
I stared at the closed door, feeling the smooth paper of my sketchbook and dusty charcoal in my fingers. Feeling that I’d left my heart in the hall on the other side.
Then, propelled by a force I couldn’t deny any longer — that I couldn’t hope to control — I sat on the bed to draw.
Right now, that was all I could do. But later, I was going to thwart destiny.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I drew and drew and drew.
I ran out of charcoal and found another piece buried in the bottom of my bag.
I ran out of paper and almost started marking up the walls. But instead, I stopped myself and went back to the beginning.
I flipped through everything I’d drawn. I shaded and smudged. I rounded and edged. I honed the black and white images until they matched the pictures in my head. I released the vision into the paper. I contained it there, bound in charcoal.
And still, I didn’t know what I could do to stop it. I didn’t know when it would happen. I didn’t rationally know if it would ever happen. But I felt it, in my gut — a cold certainty as the vision unfolded, reappeared underneath my fingers. A certainty I’d never felt before. I’d seen a glimpse of the future. A future that wasn’t within my power to create or control, because I was looking at sketches of a vision … not a hallucination constructed by my broken brain.
I went back to the beginning, again and again and again.
The abandoned barbershop.
The cracked sidewalk.
The frosted weeds.
The drops of blood that formed a trail of pain even when rendered in black and white.
Drops leading to Beau’s hand.
My necklace tangled in his limp fingers.
The necklace I swore I would now never remove. They’d have to kill me to get it off. And by ‘they,’ I meant everyone in this house. Everyone way, way stronger, faster, and smarter than I was — better educated in the ways of this magical world. They’d have to kill me to get the necklace, to place that necklace in Beau’s hand, and to set a trap for Blackwell.
I looked at the images a third time, reliving the reconstructed vision as I flipped the pages of my sketchbook. Again, I paused on each one, refining the shadows, sharpening the edges, but there wasn’t much left to do.
I was exhausted. Bone weary, as I always was after an incident. Except it wasn’t the pills making me drowsy. It was the outpouring of magic.
My magic.
I believed. I believed every line, every curve.
I believed everything laid out before me in black and white. No color anywhere on the page. No color to confuse or beguile my senses. No color to soften the message, or to soothe the pain.
In black and white, I saw the emptiness of Beau’s eyes … and the regret in Blackwell’s. Yes, regret. Just a hint, but it was there. What did that mean?
A cool heart and level head would tell me that evidence was circumstantial at best — the sorcerer’s presence in the parking lot, the pool of dark magic in his hand, Beau lying at his feet — but I believed that Blackwell had killed Beau. But had it been an accident? Had Beau attacked the sorcerer first? As he’d done in the restaurant?
I slowly flipped through the sketches again, now interpreting them and mining them for clues.
The frost on the weeds told me this might happen today or tomorrow, but in this part of the world, I didn’t think it could be a month from now. It would be too warm for frost during the day then. The presence of the wolves – I was willing to wager that two of the three were Audrey and Lara – told me the scene was in or near Portland.
And Beau had been wearing the hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans he had on right now. True, Beau didn’t have many changes of clothes, not that I’d seen. But I knew he couldn’t wear this exact outfit for many more weeks without it falling apart at the seams.
I’d once worn a hoodie until it shredded at the elbows. An expensive dark gray wool hoodie with a soft, lighter gray cotton jersey lining, which had been a Christmas gift from my last foster family. I’d clumsily patched the elbows, and then worn it until it had holes in the pockets and underneath the arms. My social worker had pulled me aside moments before I interviewed for the room at the Residence. She’d forced an ugly, scratchy, pink-and-brown-striped sweater from the lost-and-found on me and taken the hoodie. It wasn’t until after the interview that I found out she’d thrown it in the dumpster. I refused to climb in with the rest of the garbage to retrieve it. I refused to give it such significance. But I threw the pink-striped sweater in after it, and walked home wearing only a thin T-shirt.
It had been a comfy hoodie. That was all. I could buy a dozen like it. And I had, once I was on my own and earning money from my Etsy shop. It had taken two more interviews to secure the room at the Residence, and I was completely certain that what I’d worn for the first didn’t make a lick of difference.
I was never handing over something precious to another person for safekeeping. No matter how trustworthy they seemed, or should be. Never, ever again.
Yes, I believed.
But I believed in me. I wasn’t going to trust that anyone else would do what I would do to keep Beau safe.
I believed I could change the vision. That I could change the moment laid out in my sketchbook in black and white. I just needed to change one thing.
One little thing.
I needed to be the one in the parking lot.
Time lines and all that — according to any TV show or movie that I’d ever seen — were either supposed to be a delicate balance that could splinter off into infinite possibilities or a major, unalterable fixed point, right? I guessed there was physics involved, but I wasn’t a scientist or a mathematician.
I saw the future. Well, I was pretty sure I saw the future.
And why would I have visions of the future if I couldn’t change what I saw? That wouldn’t be logical at all. Magic had to have some logic, right? It was some sort of energy, captured and used by certain people with certain genetic abilities … right?
Jade had witnessed the future being thwarted — or delayed — so why couldn’t I do the same?
It had to be me in the parking lot, not Beau.
That was the only thing that was within my power to change.
Because I couldn’t change what Blackwell wanted.
He wanted me.
Or rather, he wanted what was in my head. He wanted what he thought I’d seen, and wanted it so much that he would risk the wrath of the pack. Either that or he thought he was capable of eluding them.
So, if I gave Blackwell what he wanted, then there’d be no logical reason for the vision to manifest.
I couldn’t change the presence of the necklace, because I wore it. Because I obviously needed it. The lack of pain when the vision hit — along with the clarity I felt now — told me I desperately needed the necklace to retain my grip on this reality.
I was guessing at the actions and decisions that must have preceded this vision. Actions that I also couldn’t change. I could surmise that Desmond had used Beau as bait — which they’d been discussing doing as I left the living room — because Beau carried my necklace. And I could surmise that the sorcerer had somehow been drawn to the necklace by noting the disappointed way Blackwell looked at the chain after he lifted it from Beau’s hand. Maybe thinking its magic was mine? Hoyt had tracked my movement down the coast somehow. Maybe Blackwell could track the necklace in the same, or a similar, way?
All that added up for me to one thing. It needed to be me in the parking lot, not Beau. That was the simplest, most logical, way that I could approach the problem. I couldn’t trust anyone else to place Beau’s safety above their own desires, least of all him. I couldn’t trust that Blackwell would be satisfied with anything but my presence.
I flipped back through the remainder of the sketchbook, which contained about six months of work. Nothing refined, though. I went to a larger medium when I really worked up a vision.
Yes, I’d had a vision. Not a hallucination. The thought was mind-boggling, and far too complicated to tackle right now. I couldn’t think about anything other than Beau’s life being in danger.
I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in fate. Not even now. Not even after meeting Beau and the way I felt about him. Not even with the sketches of a vision I believed to be a glimpse of the future captured in my sketchbook. No force controlled what I chose to do or not do. Or what had happened to me in the past. I refused to believe that my actions were predetermined.
I was willing to do anything to alter the vision I’d collected and contained within my sketchbook.
Anything.
Even if that meant facing Blackwell on my own again. Even if that meant I sacrificed my freedom — or even my life — to give the sorcerer what he wanted.
Beau had found me in that diner. He bought me a piece of apple pie and rescued me from the living hell of my broken brain.
I’d believed I was broken.
For Beau, I’d act like I was whole.
I wouldn’t live in this world — real or not — without him.
∞
Beau was asleep in the hall.
By the clock on my cell phone it was only 3:27 p.m. The day had already felt epically longer than that, and I was pretty sure it was nowhere near finished.
I’d packed my sketchbook in my bag, double-checking that Blackwell’s business card and my cell phone were both still there. I tucked my necklace behind the zipper of my hoodie, put my mittens in my pockets, and made sure my shoelaces were tightly tied.
Then I tried to climb out the window.
A window that was easily a twenty-foot drop, then a long roll down a steep, rocky hill.
Right. Beau had already ruled out that escape route.
I See Me (Oracle Book 1) Page 19