I See Me (24 page)

“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 pull 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.

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 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.

So I slipped out into the hall instead. I was planning to use the excuse of needing the bathroom, while hoping that Beau forgot that the bedroom came with an en suite. I found him propped up against the wall opposite the door, asleep. Even sleeping, he looked exhausted.

All I had to do was get across the hall and into any room on the other side of the house. At least, that was the plan.

I very, very carefully closed the bedroom door behind me until I heard the latch click. Maybe they’d think I was still inside. Maybe I’d get just enough of a head start. I only needed to set foot in the parking lot. To see Blackwell see me. Once Blackwell had seen me, the vision had to change. It just had to. No matter how childish and ignorant my logic sounded to my own ears.
 

No matter that — according to Beau and my visions — the house was full of powerful people who supposedly knew what they were doing.

I couldn’t show them the sketches. Because if I went to anyone, all they’d see was what they wanted. They wanted Blackwell. They wanted Blackwell so badly they were willing to be in the same room as each other, despite whatever circumstances had led to the rift between them. If I had the time, I could probably piece together those circumstances from the sketches in my book and the sketches waiting for me to finish them in my portfolio.