“Okay. I guess you’re going to have to make her fight him off, or run. Get her to take her phone out right before he comes. Maybe she can get a call off to the cops. Or someone else and have them hear her get attacked so they can call the cops.”
I breathe a small sigh. “That’s a great idea. And the cops will be out in force after this morning anyway, I’m sure.”
“Pray hard that they are,” Smith says. “Call me if you need anything else, okay? Do you want me to go to the tunnel in real life? Just to watch over her? Clara,” he adds.
“Maybe, but . . . won’t that change things?”
“It might. What if I got there early?”
“I don’t know, Smith. I don’t want to screw this up.”
“All right. I’ll stay home. Text me when it’s done.”
I’ve got three hours before it actually happens. We got lucky with the location. The train station has clocks posted all over the place along with routes and updates and such—that’s how I knew it would be tonight.
I think Smith’s got a good idea about the phone thing. But if the killer hears her talking on the phone, will he still attack? I feel like everything’s balanced on a knife’s edge. One imperfect move and it’ll all go wrong; she’ll die, or we’ll miss the opportunity entirely. I’m not sure which would be worse. Who knows how many more people will die if I don’t do this?
When I come out of my bedroom, Mom’s banging pans around the kitchen in her classic tell that she’s angry. Hopefully not at me.
“You okay, Mom?” I ask from the doorway of the kitchen. I draw in a quick breath as I see her standing; standing on her own two feet and bending over to pick up a canister she would have had to reach up for in her wheelchair. My mouth is dry and I can hardly believe my eyes.
I blink.
And she’s back in her chair. Too fast to have moved there. What just happened?
Mom looks over at me and then sets down the frying pan she was banging around. “I guess.” She gestures vaguely down the hall. “Sierra went out.”
“Tonight?” I ask.
“What is she thinking?” my mom mutters, and I’m dismayed to see angry tears running down her cheeks. I want to tell her that no one’s after Sierra—that it’s going to be another teenager—but I can’t.
“It’ll be okay, Mom,” I instantly assure her, though there’s no way for me to tell her why. “She’s smart,” I add, like that means anything. “And . . . the wrong age,” I tack on.
“So far,” my mom mutters. “But who knows what this psycho will do next?”
I step tentatively to where she’s gathering ingredients for something I don’t yet recognize; she’s an angry cooker. “Can I help with anything?” I offer, my mind screaming at her to say no.
She pauses midreach and really looks at me for the first time since I walked in. For a moment, I’m afraid she’s going to say yes—that this is about to turn into a mother-daughter night. And that Clara’s going to die because of it.
But she turns away and grabs the canister she was reaching for. The same one she was bending down to get a few minutes ago. No, no that can’t be right. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been.
“I’m okay,” Mom says. “I just need to beat some dough for a while. If it’s still fit to eat when I’m done, we’ll have pizza tonight.”
“Sounds great,” I say, then I back out of the room and try not to make a sound as I head down the hall.
To Sierra’s door.
I look both ways before holding my breath and turning the knob.
Locked.
Frustrated tears work their way to the surface and I have to take a few deep breaths before I manage to stop them. This is the first time I’ve seen her leave the house since I got the pictures of Repairing the Fractured Future. I wonder briefly if I could get a screwdriver and take the whole knob off. If Sierra took the time to tell Mom she was leaving, it’s probably more than a coffee run. Surely she’ll be gone for at least an hour.
Clara or the book? I slowly withdraw my hand.
I believe in omens; it goes hand in hand with being an Oracle. Sierra being out of the house is the perfect scenario to either break into her office or change the vision. But I have to choose.
What is the universe trying to tell me? Do I need that book? If I let Clara die tonight but I get the resources I need to save the next person, is that worth it?
But what if there isn’t anything useful in the rest of the text? What if I’m wrong? Then an innocent girl is dead and I’m back at square one.
I walk back to my bedroom. Tonight I go with the sure path.
After giving the hallway a quick listen, I sprawl down on my stomach and grab the pendant from its hiding place inside the box spring of my bed. Then I sit cross-legged on the floor and brace myself with pillows. I hold the necklace in my hands and fix my eyes on it. It sparkles with glints of red, blue, and purple and, as I continue to stare, yellow and orange make appearances too.
Then I’m in the tunnel. So easily it’s almost jolting. I’m convinced that somehow, we Oracles are supposed to do this kind of thing. It’s too easy for it not to be our natural path. It’s like a part of me awakened the first time Smith showed me how to enter my visions, and now I’m ready to fulfill its potential.
But Clara first.
I walk forward and it’s like climbing uphill, but not nearly as difficult as it was before. As I approach the murder site, I begin reversing the scene in my head. The first thing I have to do is find out what the hell Clara Daniels is doing out alone, at night, the very same day a murder was discovered.
I watch as emotionlessly as I can while the brutal murder plays out in reverse. I was right about the weapon; the masked killer wields what looks like a short bat with sickening efficiency and soon we reach the point where they’re both alive.
I’m both relieved and surprised when Clara walks backward through the night by herself a few seconds later. He really did just see her and swoop in. Or he will in a few hours. But what could possibly make her walk away on her own? In the dark. With a murderer on the loose.
I trail her, growing more and more puzzled as she walks in reverse through the train station, right down the middle of the seediest neighborhood in Coldwater, and then up around some designer condo development. From there, we continue on to a nice middle-class neighborhood. I don’t know much about Clara outside of school but after the vision, I figured she lived near the train yard and maybe her parents didn’t have a car. Because then it would make sense for her to be walking there.
But as I follow she walks up the steps of a nice two-story home a good half mile from the murder site, and when I slip through the door behind her, she sheds her coat and walks backward to settle herself on a couch.
Now I’ll see something, I tell myself. A fight with her parents, a weird text or phone call.
But I see nothing.
She just reads. Panicked about time—who knows how long it’ll be before my mom calls me for dinner—I go ahead and let the scene play forward. But watching it in real time doesn’t give me any more answers than fast in reverse. If anything, it gives me more questions. She’s reading a book—a novel, not even schoolwork or anything—and then, very abruptly, she looks up, tilts her head to one side, and rises from the couch.
It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. She says nothing. Just slips into her coat and goes out the front door. Again, we walk side by side, as though we’re friends on a stroll, all the way back down toward the tunnel. Twice Clara stops and looks back the way we came, but each time she turns forward, and starts walking again.
We’re nearly to the train yard when I realize I’ve been watching her so carefully that I’ve almost missed my cue. I don’t know who her friends are, so as I walk alongside her I say, “Call your mom. Right now. Get your phone out and call your mom.”
Her steps slow and she looks confused, but she doesn’t reach for her phone.
“Call your dad then,” I shout
. “Call someone, right now!”
She pauses this time, and I nearly die of relief when she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.
And then just looks at it.
Why is this so hard? I can walk, I could probably push her over if I really tried, but she’s not following my commands. I shout step-by-step instructions at her—willing her with every fiber of my being to follow them—until finally she hits SEND and raises the phone to her ear. As soon as she does, she continues walking, as though pulled by an invisible string. She says nothing and I measure the remaining steps with my eyes hoping someone will answer before it’s too late.
Her head clicks up in an unnatural motion and she says, “Hi, Dad, I . . . I’m . . .” She pauses and her whole face crumples in confusion. “I don’t know what I—”
And then he’s there. I manage to shove Clara very slightly out of the way so the first blow that was supposed to be straight to the head wings her shoulder instead. She lets out a piercing scream of agony, and guilt shatters me from the inside out. It would have been so easy to divert her. To save her.
But I can’t think about that now. I’ve got to keep her alive until the cops come. That scream was so loud surely her dad is calling 911 right now. I shove her around as fast as I can, though even colossal effort on my part leads only to tiny changes in Clara’s movements. Her screams continue as she gets hit over and over—her arms, her legs—but I’m managing to protect her head.
Until the killer gets smart and takes out both legs with one low swoop I can’t block.
He stands over her and while I can’t see his face, I know from the sick, low chuckle that emanates from his throat that he must be grinning.
No! I agonize as I watch him raise his bat to deliver what will surely be the deadly blow. I can’t have done all of this for nothing.
But I can’t do anything. I can’t affect the world physically—Smith said so.
Even so, as the bat comes down, I throw myself over Clara’s crumpled, sobbing body, and raise my hand to block the blow.
It slams into my arm with a force that jars my shoulder and radiates all the way to my spine, the pain exploding within me.
He was wrong, I realize in wonder as the killer pauses to look down at his bat in confusion. Smith was wrong! I can save her! I cover Clara’s body and absorb the next hard blow as well, a scream tearing itself from my throat as pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before spreads across my back from the savage strike.
Two more blows across my back, and then the scene is wavering. It’s too much. I’m losing the mental strength to stay in it. Once more the bat strikes me, at the back of the head this time, and in the last moments before I lose consciousness I look up and see a dark figure in a familiar peacoat running toward me.
Smith, I realize. He’s coming to save me. No, to save her.
And as the vision fades, I hear the most beautiful sound in the entire world.
Sirens.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
TWENTY-TWO
I come to with a whimper in my own bedroom. Everything hurts.
Wait. That’s not quite right. It’s a weird kind of pain that’s slowly receding like the waves on a shoreline. I’m lying on my floor and my face is wet with tears, but I’m here. I’m out of the vision.
Was I kicked out because I lost consciousness or because I couldn’t hold on any longer? I’m not actually sure which one came first.
A deep ache throbs in the arm that took the brunt of that first hard blow and I move it gingerly. In my vision, I was sure the unforgiving bat had shattered the bone, but it’s whole and straight and doesn’t hurt as I move it this way and that.
The rest of my aches are slowly fading too. Like phantom pain. “It was all in my head,” I whisper in wonder. I’ve never, ever felt anything like that and I was sure I was going to die with Clara.
But I didn’t. I may have saved her. I’m not sure how much good it did though. I was right there with her and I didn’t see a single distinguishing characteristic in the killer.
But the sirens. The sirens were coming.
I curl up and pull my knees to my chest, trying to process everything that happened. I blocked his bat. And the killer knew it! I remember so clearly the way he paused, everything in his posture indicating surprise, when the blow he aimed at her head connected with something, but it wasn’t her.
I affected the physical world. That means that next time I can rip his mask off. It’s possible I could even hold him until the police arrive. Maybe call in an anonymous tip to make sure they come.
This changes everything.
The fact is they might catch the bastard tonight. But if they don’t—if he slips away—then I can end it next time. I glance up at the clock. There’s probably an hour before Clara leaves her house. Part of me wants to go hide and see the vision play out—but I didn’t see myself there. I can’t risk changing even the tiniest detail. Better stay here.
Wait, I think, searching my fuzzy memory. I did see someone else.
“I saw Smith,” I whisper aloud.
I chuckle and shake my head. He said he trusted me to do it on my own, but of course he wouldn’t be able to just let it happen. He’s too much of a control freak. I should have known he’d go check on me.
Even if he doesn’t know it yet.
Amused at knowing something he doesn’t, I grab my phone and call his number. “It’s done,” I whisper when he answers.
“Tell me exactly what happens,” Smith says. “From the beginning.”
“It was weird,” I say, still whispering. “I followed Clara back all the way to her house and there was seriously no reason for her to have left. She was sitting on the couch reading and then she got up and walked out the door. It was like . . .” I pause, hating the comparison. “It was kind of like what we’ve been doing. Like someone was talking to her in her head and telling her to go, and then she did. A couple of times she even stopped and looked back and seemed really confused, but she kept going.”
“Charlotte? Are you sure there are no other Oracles in Coldwater? Or anywhere near Coldwater?”
“There aren’t. I asked my aunt a couple weeks ago. The Sisters of Delphi follow the bloodlines so closely, it’s almost impossible for someone to be missed.”
“What about your aunt?”
I snort. “Oh, please.”
“It’s not uncommon for Oracles to snap and go crazy after fighting their entire lives. Shelby’s great-grandmother went totally insane when she was seventy and eventually the Sisters. . . . They put her down for lack of a friendlier term. Because she was hurting people.”
“That’s not funny, Smith.”
“No, it’s not,” he replies. “But what you described sounds like another Oracle steering someone from their second sight.”
“I’m not saying there can’t be another Oracle involved. I’m just saying it’s not my aunt. Maybe there’s someone off Delphi’s radar. Or they’re not from here. Did you ever think of that?”
“Where is your aunt?” Smith says softly.
I refuse to admit to him that she’s not here. After all, if she were doing something with her own second sight—which is completely and utterly ludicrous—she could do it from her bedroom.
“I have more to tell you. Clara walked to the tunnel at the train yard and I got her to call her dad and he answered right before the killer attacked. It was perfect!”
“Excellent,” Smith says. “Then what?”
“He hit her with a bat and I kept shoving her around, trying to avoid, like, death hits, I guess you could call them. But he was too strong and he got her feet out from under her and he lifted his bat to finish her off and I stopped him!”
“What do you mean, you ‘stopped him’?”
“I put out my hand and the bat hit me instead. I affected him physically, Smith!” r />
“Did you save her?”
“Are you listening?” I press. “I did what you said I couldn’t do. This changes everything!”
“Did you save her?”
“I . . . I don’t know for sure. I think so,” I say softly. “I took a lot of hits for her and then I heard sirens.”
“You heard them?”
“Just before I blacked out. I’m pretty sure that’s what pushed me out of the vision. I was lying on top of her and I’m hoping I helped block maybe another hit or two after I lost consciousness, but I—” Guilt floods through me. “I don’t actually know.”
“Did you see anything else?” Smith presses. “Anything else that could be helpful?”
I think about seeing him running into the scene. Should I tell him? Maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t want to make him change the future by deciding not to go and then ruining everything I worked for. “No, nothing else.” I can practically hear his thoughts right now. She’s not sure she saved her—I’d better go watch just to be safe. Truth is, there’s a chance that Smith running in at the last moment will save her.
So I don’t tell him. This one thing I will simply let play out.
“I know her,” I say when the silence gets heavy. “She was in four of my classes last semester.”
“Are you guys friends?” Smith asks, sounding confused as to why I’m telling him this.
“No, not really. But if I . . . if I weren’t, you know, me, I think we would be. It’s something I’ve thought a lot the last year or so, actually, since we keep having classes together. We like the same things, we’re both advanced juniors, I think we’d get along really well.”
“Was there a point to this?”
I hesitate, not sure I’m ready to voice something that’s been bothering me since I first saw Clara’s face in the vision. “I know all of these victims. Well, Bethany I barely knew, but other than that, all of them—even the ones we saved—have played a part in my life. And that’s saying something since I don’t have much of a life.”