Sleep of Death

  Or is there something sinister at work? After all, the last mysterious stranger who inserted himself into my supernatural life turned out to be a serial killer, so I have a bit of a track record to consider. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—well. I’m already afraid that the blood of four innocent people is on my hands. Fool me twice, and I might as well be the one holding the knife.

  On the other hand, if Sophie is thinking about murdering people in their sleep, maybe allowing her into my life will put me in a position to stop her.

  And if she’s not?

  Am I seriously more afraid that Sophie might not be a killer? Surely not. Surely I’m not that crazy.

  But I stand there, still as stone, feeling the flow of the crowd as it routes around me. Sophie’s right. Even as people sidestep me, they don’t really see me. I don’t want her to be right about that. Because then she must be right about some of those other things she said.

  So what’s holding me back? I don’t think she’s going to spill my secret. And it’s way too late to try to just hide it. Even if I haven’t told her, she knows. What difference does it make if I confirm her suspicions? My heart feels so hollow after my encounter with Linden that all I can think is how much I don’t want to spend the rest of the day—much less the rest of my life—feeling this empty.

  It takes me a few minutes to find Sophie, but I finally spot her sitting at one of the round tables, alone. She doesn’t seem like the type to sit by herself. Honestly, she seems a lot more like the kind of girl who has effortless grace and poise and attracts friends like a magnet. I’ve never understood that kind of natural easiness; I’ve stumbled through the social obstacle course of life for as long as I can remember and my highest hopes are typically just to get through a day without a disaster—never mind social victories or making actual friends.

  But Sophie would understand the things about me that I can’t explain to anyone else.

  Not even Linden.

  Especially not Linden.

  I scrunch my nose up and berate myself for dwelling on him; that line of thought is only going to make me miserable. Instead I clench my fists for a little bravery and walk toward Sophie’s table. As I draw nearer she looks up and gives me an encouraging smile a second before someone walks between us and sets a lunch tray down on the table beside her.

  I freeze, confidence splintering.

  She wasn’t smiling at me at all. My face flushes red and the only reason I don’t turn around and walk away is that I’m frozen to the ground in humiliation.

  Sophie reaches out and squeezes the girl’s hand, but gestures toward me and tilts her head to the side with a few words to the other girl. Clearly some kind of apology. I barely keep my mouth from dropping open when the girl nods, picks up her tray, eyes me, and walks away. Sophie pats the spot beside her and smiles.

  I stand stock-still.

  No one’s ever done anything like that for me. And in that moment, I realize Sophie’s right. I’m so used to being alone—being ignored—that I don’t have any idea what to do when someone actually wants me to come join them. Everything inside me is screaming that I should look over my shoulder to see the person Sophie’s really gesturing for.

  I think maybe I need this. Need to have a connection to someone my own age. Someone like me.

  And even though it’s terrifying, I reach out and grab it.

  Putting one foot in front of the other feels downright momentous as I draw closer to Sophie’s table, and I feel like I’ve run a marathon by the time I drop onto the bench beside her.

  “There,” Sophie says wryly. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “You have no idea,” I grumble, more to my lunch than Sophie.

  She tilts her head back and forth. “I guess maybe it was. I should give credit where it’s due. Good job.”

  We eat in silence for the first ten minutes before I start to feel calmer. The food helps. At least now I’m not tense and hungry.

  “So what was that, the other day?” Sophie asks, finally breaking the silence. She hesitates, then swirls a hand at me. “If you don’t mind my asking, of course.”

  I swallow hard and cough, and to her credit Sophie hides her eye roll fairly well.

  “I—I don’t mind you asking, I just don’t know what you mean.” I hope I’m being truthful. Not the part about what she means. But I kind of do mind her asking. It’s the sort of thing I’ve been trained to never ask about, to never tell about, and certainly not over lunch in the school cafeteria. And I still haven’t figured out how to dispel my suspicions.

  But I find myself wanting to; wanting a reason to really trust her, and I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.

  “On Friday, in art. Something happened near the end of class and this … enormous surge of energy like, exploded out of you.” The look on her face is hungry, and not for food.

  “Oh. That. It was, um, a vision.” It feels strange to say it out loud. To anyone. I don’t even tell Sierra about the visions I don’t fight.

  “Just a regular vision? Like, of the future?” She’s leaning on the table now in rapt attention, and I feel like I’m telling some kid a bedtime story.

  “Yeah.”

  Another long pause. “Are they always like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “That much energy. I mean, the amount that was coming out of you would have refilled like, all of my reserves in one shot.” She wraps the fingers of her right hand around her thin left wrist, fingertips overlapping, in a gesture I suspect is mostly unconscious.

  I think about the way some visions are easy to fight and some are impossible. “That one was more … intense, I guess, than usual.”

  She nods sagely. “What was it about?”

  I don’t say anything and Sophie lets me sit in silence, though her eyes are boring into me the entire time I’m considering how to respond. “I don’t know if I should tell you. Going for honesty here.”

  She closes her mouth and considers that. “Because I’m not an Oracle?”

  “No. It’s just that … the future is complicated. And making the choice whether or not to act on what you see is kind of a huge responsibility.”

  “I don’t see why,” Sophie says. “If it’s bad, you try to fix it. If it’s good, you let it be. I mean, is there really anything else to do?”

  I think about my parents. Of Sierra. Stopping Smith saved a lot of lives in the end, but Smith’s victims aren’t the only blood on my hands. My father was killed and my mother was paralyzed because I had a vision of Sierra’s death and acted to change that. “What if you make things worse?”

  Sophie shrugs, as though I’d asked what would happen if you wore the wrong color, or ate your dessert before dinner. “Well, at least you’d know you tried. That has to be better than sitting around doing nothing, doesn’t it?”

  I can’t answer her. It’s strange to realize that even though Sophie has lived a life of embracing her supernatural abilities, I’m the one who’s really had the experiences.

  I’m the one who understands the consequences.

  Chapter Seven

  “What did you do before you moved here?” I ask, desperate to change the subject. “Not every day, I mean,” I mumble. “That big thing you told me about.”

  She looks at me in that way that a parent might look at a child who declares that two plus three equals twenty-seven. “Don’t you understand that’s exactly what I did every day?”

  I say nothing.

  She exhales dramatically and drops her face into her hands. “I’m sorry. You worked up the guts to come over here and I’m snapping at you.” She looks up at me again and even though the smile is strained, at least it’s there. “I’m not dealing very well with the fact that I’m in enforced recovery right now. But it’s not your fault.” She takes a deep breath, but not a frustrated one. This one seems to be cleansing. Strength-gathering.

  Her eyes dart to both sides and it’s the first sign of caution I’ve seen in her s
ince we met. I lean in as she does.

  “Serial rapist. Well, would have been. I kept going back and doing what I could to get him caught. And I did!” she says emphatically. But I can see her fingers trembling. “But it took eight tries.”

  “You saw it eight times.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement. It’s a moment.

  Because with those trembling fingers I realize that what binds us together isn’t the fact that we have secret lives and special abilities. All that is practically an afterthought. What knits us together is that we’ve seen horrors. The worst of humanity, unbearable tragedies, accidents, attacks, evil. We’ve seen them.

  And fought them.

  She can’t be the killer from my vision. She just can’t.

  “It never really happened,” Sophie whispers. “Not actually. Those girls, they never … they never had to experience it. I fixed it.”

  “But it took too much … energy.”

  Sophie nods. “The eighth jump would have put me in the hospital if my mom weren’t … who she is—she’s a nurse and trained to handle supernatural disasters—but I in the end I nailed the bastard.” Pride lights up her weary, painfully thin features. “It was worth it.”

  I nod because there’s nothing else to do. Or say.

  “What about you?” Sophie says, her smile wobbly. “Everyone says Oracles just ignore the world. Do you?”

  The plan was to skirt around the actual secrets, but after hearing what Sophie did I want to say something to prove to her that … that I’m good enough, I guess. It doesn’t matter that three days ago she was the one in awe of me; all the power in the world means nothing if you do nothing with it. Isn’t that what I’ve spent the last few months deciding?

  “I—” But my voice sticks in my throat. What I want to say is that I saved the town’s teens from a serial killer.

  But I didn’t, did I? I only saved some of them.

  And on top of that, Smith was only here because of me. The reason any of the teens in our town died at all was because of me. Disaster control, maybe? I probably saved more lives than I lost, in the long run. All while having my supernatural dome invaded and my powers almost stolen, to be used for unspeakable evil.

  That doesn’t sound nearly as heroic. “I’m still learning,” I say to my half-eaten lunch.

  Sophie looks at me hard and I know she’s angry that she spilled her secret and I’m holding back.

  “It’s complicated,” I offer, and Sophie’s expression goes from offended to merely skeptical. It’s terrifying to say anything, but I swallow a bite and make myself speak. Start with public knowledge. “You heard about the murders we had here a couple months ago, right?”

  Sophie nods, fiddling with her straw. “Yeah, perverse, but that’s actually one of the reasons we moved here. Statistically, since you just had a disaster, nothing like that is likely to happen again for years. Mom figured it would be a good place for me to recover without temptation.”

  “Because your powers can kill you?” Sierra mentioned that, but Sophie takes it as a question.

  “You mean can I reverse-time myself to death? Yeah. But you just changed the subject.” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised and I can’t help but smile. When I’m talking to Sierra, she just knows everything and it’s rather daunting to try to absorb all that information. With Sophie, she clearly has experience and knowledge I simply lack—but it’s a two-way street. I also know things she doesn’t know; I’ve had experiences she’s never had. I’ve never had a conversation about the supernatural with anyone, not even Smith, where I felt like we were on even footing. I kind of like it.

  But I still have to get through this conversation. “The—the murderer wasn’t after them. He was after me. He killed four people just to get my attention.”

  Sophie stares at me, mirroring the horrified expression I wore upon hearing her story.

  A soft smile crosses my face as I can tell she just had the same realization. And for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m a part of something important. But more than that, like maybe my abilities aren’t a curse I was born to deal with, but a gift. Maybe I just need Sophie to make it all work. I have all the power and none of the skills.

  But first I have to know.

  “Do you … do you think you might be able to help me figure out what to do about the vision I had last week without actually using your abilities?” I ask.

  “It’s still in the future, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then there’s nothing I could do anyway is there?” She’s arched one eyebrow wryly, but I can feel her excitement, a palpable undercurrent.

  “I guess not. It’s just that—” I scoot a little closer. “I don’t think I’m very good at figuring out how to change things. How to really change them effectively, anyway. Looking back, I think I could have handled the whole thing with Ja—with the killer better.” That’s such an understatement. But it’s not only that hindsight is 20/20. Even without knowing Smith’s nature, if I were more practiced I probably could have done a better job of altering things, saved more of his victims.

  Clara at the every least. I grit my teeth and try not to think too hard about her. She was transferred two weeks after the attack, still in a coma. I’ve done my best to not seek out any news about her.

  And Nate …

  It’s hard to keep my lunch in my stomach when I think about him. When I wonder if his blood was on my hands literally as well as metaphorically. If I was the one holding the knife that stabbed him, over and over, growing red as his blood flowed freely from the wounds. As his life drained out of him.

  I’ll never know. Jason Smith took that secret to his grave, and most of my self-confidence with it. I can’t change it now, and even if it was possible to jump back so far, Sophie’s obviously in no shape to do it.

  “The killer was clever, and I wasn’t prepared,” I say after a long pause. “He showed up in my life out of nowhere, he knew things about the supernatural world that I didn’t, and he offered to help me solve the crimes he was committing.”

  Understanding dawns in Sophie’s eyes. “And you had a really big vision the very first day you met me.” Her eyes widen further. “Was I in—”

  “No,” I say simply. “But one lesson I learned last time was that even I can’t see everything.”

  “But you want me to help anyway.”

  I nod. Because I do want her to help. I don’t want her to be the killer; I honestly don’t believe she’s the killer. At some level, I guess, I need her to be the hero she seems to be. Because then, maybe, I could start to believe that I’m not alone in the world.

  A strange expression covers Sophie’s face and I don’t understand it until she speaks. “I’d love to. I want … no, I need to be doing something.” She gives a little self-deprecating bark of laughter, and her eyes slide away from mine. “I’m going crazy doing nothing. This town is so tiny I don’t even have little things to do. Accidents to save kids from, car accident fatalities to prevent, thefts to call the cops early about, that kind of thing. Nothing happens here.”

  I want to argue. To tell her about Mr. Richards, about my parents, about … about Linden. But the truth is, Sierra and I have done so well here because it is quiet and, well, boring.

  “Someone’s going to die,” I say before I can lose my nerve.

  Sophie’s entire demeanor changes. She puts her chin in her hands and leans closer, eyes glittering with determination. Determination, I think, to see wrongs righted—and relief, maybe, that she no longer has to sit on the sidelines. I realize that this is a girl—a girl just my age—who’s spent her entire life being the heroine I always begged my aunt to let me be. But it’s so normal to Sophie that it’s what defines her. She is her heroic acts.

  And I’m insanely jealous.

  But it makes her someone I can trust. I just know it. And so I tell her what I saw in my vision on Friday. She doesn’t shy away from the gory, bloody details; she asks questions about minutiae
I hadn’t considered, and my head starts to ache as I struggle to remember. Not that I mind. We’re so wrapped up in pulling as many details as possible from my one-minute vision that when the bell rings we both jump, then laugh at each other.

  “So what should we do?” I ask as we gather our things, shivering pleasantly at my use of the word we.

  “You don’t know the house?”

  I shake my head.

  “Are you sure it’s around here, then?”

  “Please. Town’s not so small that I know every house.”

  “Feels like it,” Sophie grumbles.

  I roll my eyes. “Doesn’t matter. There’s a range. Visions are almost always super local.”

  “I guess the first thing we have to do is figure out precisely where. Because we’d need to go there to change something to derail the—what you saw,” she says, lowering her voice as people stream around us.

  “That’s right.”

  She purses her lips. “Maybe a long appointment with GoogleMaps Street View?”

  An idea wriggles its way into my head and even though it scares me, I think it’s time. “What if I can figure out where it is by the end of the day?”

  “The school day?” she asks, wide-eyed. “Like in two hours?”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak, fear winding icy fingers around my heart.

  Sophie halts in the middle of the milling crowd, staring at me and sensing that there’s something I’m not telling her. “Can you?”

  I swallow hard, but whisper, “I think so.”

  “You gonna ditch?”

  “Sort of.”

  She waits. And I know she’s hoping I’ll tell her more. But I can’t. Not just yet. Because it’s kind of Sierra’s secret too, and even though I’ve taken control of my own life, I don’t have the right to try to control my aunt’s. “I’ll tell you what I can if it works,” I say, and I hope terror isn’t shining in my eyes.

  Chapter Eight

  It’s easy enough to get myself excused from Calculus with a migraine—I haven’t pulled that trick in almost two months. Harder to find a good place to hide, but restroom stalls are a decent short-term bet. Though I could wish for nicer seating.