Sleep of Death (Charlotte Westing Chronicles) (6 page)

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 equal
s 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 since 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 w
as 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?”

“Ple
ase. 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 no
d, not trusting myself to speak, fear winding icy fingers around my heart.

Sophie halt
s 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.

If I learned anything of value from Jason Smith, it’s that sometimes the only way to prevent a disaster is to act quickly and decisively. Every night I delay is one more night I might have failed to stop a murder. Fortuna
tely, Smith also provided me with a tool that allows me to do just that.

Not that I’ve used it—not to revisit a vision, anyway. Just to let Sierra into my dome. The focus stone isn’t evil, but I know better than to underestimate the damage it can do if I fail to use it properly. I wear it on a chain around my neck, a chain that feels surprisingly hot as I remove it and hold it out in front of me. It dangles from the silver necklace, glinting in the fluorescent lighting.
The stone is colorless today, as though asleep.

Time to wake it up.
Carefully ensconced in the stall, I cradle the stone in my hands, then balance my arms on my lap, staring into the stone’s cloudy depths.  Then I will the darkness at the edges of my vision to veil my physical sight and let my second sight peer into the stone instead.

With almost no effort at all,
I’m standing in the foyer of a beautiful house.

My chest is tight and
though I breathe deeply, I can’t quite seem to fill my lungs. Even within the vision I have to lean over and brace my arms on my knees for a few seconds to calm down. Despite my head spinning I can dimly sense my physical body, still in the bathroom, balanced rather ungracefully on the toilet, and I tuck that sensation into the back of my mind where I can reach out and remember it—a security blanket of sorts.

“I’m not actually here,” I remind myself. “This hasn’t happened yet. I can change it.”

And then I move.

I expect it to be hard. The first time I entered
a vision with Smith it was like I had fifty-pound weights attached to each ankle. Just moving around took Herculean effort.

But he also told me that visiting my dome at night would increase my abilities.
Apparently he wasn’t kidding. It takes focus—filtered through the stone, just the way he taught me—but at worst, moving feels a bit like trudging through sand dunes as I stride purposefully up the stairs.

Breathing evenly is at the forefront of my mind as I approach the doorway to the master suite. I know what’s in there this time
, which is both a help and a hindrance. I edge around the double doors that sit open, beckoning my entrance. With as much detachment as I can muster, I stare at the carnage, trying to take it all in while remembering the kinds of details Sophie asked about during lunch.

Th
e faces of the two bodies, though slashed with stripes of blood, aren’t mangled; if I knew who they were, I’d be able to identify them. That’s something. If I do manage to find them, I’ll know it.

The pools of blood are the hardest to look at
, simply because there’s so much of it. It reminds me of Nicole, or at least my vision of her, hacked to pieces in her parents’ shed. But in that case, there was only one rather petite teenager. This is two full-grown adults, bleeding out through a dozen stab wounds each.

I make myself stare;
inure myself to the horror before me. Then, when I’m certain I’m entirely in control, I will time to flow in reverse. Again, it’s almost effortless, and I can’t help but think about the years my aunt spent doing this kind of thing. I was amazed by her ability to mark the passage of time in the dome; how easy it must be for her to manipulate her visions after clocking years upon years in her supernatural plane? The power she has at her fingertips; power she refuses to exercise. It’s incredible.

With a shake to clear my head, I focus on controlling the scene here and now
, pushing it further back. Crimson pools shrink and soon blood is pulsing weakly into the bodies, as if they were human sponges, re-absorbing life. I suppress a gag and continue to rewind. We’re getting close to the actual attack. The bodies begin to jerk in sickening twitches and I know I’m seeing the moment of their deaths in reverse.

The entire scene crashes to a halt and I stagger to the side in shock
; I feel like someone just shoved me, hard, into a wall. With one hand on a—mercifully blood-free—dressing stool I steady myself and, once I gather my wits, resume pushing the scene backward.

But it crashes again.

What the hell
?

I push harder, more like when I first started manipulating visions with Smith. I brace myself
, with my legs shoulder-width apart, and use the hand movement that worked so well in the beginning—essentially as training wheels—and try to
force
the scene backward.

Nothing.
It’s like trying to push over a skyscraper with my bare hands. The scene simply won’t rewind for me.

“The hell?”
I yell at the vision. And that feels kind of good, but accomplishes no more than my pushing did. I keep trying to move the scene because I don’t know what else to do, but it’s as effective as banging my head against a wall, and results in a similar headache. I only give up when my entire body feels sore.

Still
, I’m reluctant to leave. There must be something I can do! I slump down into to the plush carpet and breathe steadily for a few minutes, reclaiming my focus. The moment of calm helps center me. Where am I?
That
is what I came here to figure out in the first place.

Well, that’s what I told Sophie. My number one priority was to
learn the killer’s identity. But second was to figure out the location of the house. I push to my feet and turn away from the scene of carnage. I wish I could say I won’t have to see it again, but I have a feeling that before Sophie and I are done, we’re going to see a lot of blood.

My hand slides along the smooth banister as I make my way downstairs and to the front door
s. At the very least I should be able to get an address. I hesitate with my hand on the knob. My instinct is that I can’t affect the physical world from a vision.

Funny how
one of Smith’s earliest lies has lodged so deeply into my mind. It was one of the first lessons he taught me … and the first I discovered to be false. A way to manipulate me and prevent me from finding out what he really was, from fulfilling my true potential. My potential to destroy
him
. So it’s with a definite glow of satisfaction that I turn the brass knob and push the heavy glass door open with no special effort whatsoever.

It’s cold. The temperature still touches me in visions, though it’s not as extreme as actually being outside in Oklahoma.
It’s …
informational
: this scene is hot, this scene is cold. So though goose bumps raise on my arms, and my first breath of outside air is bracing, I’m not shivering when I turn and look at the front of the house, searching for a number.

6486.

Well, that isn’t nearly as helpful as I’d hoped, but it’s a pretty solid start.

I turn and put up one hand to block the sun while scanning the yard in front of me. And it’s way more than a yard. This house is situated on some serious property and I don’t actually see any other houses. Spindly, leafless trees line the edges of
a smooth expanse of snow that I assume covers a grassy lawn. The front walk is shoveled, as is a path to the garage, but I don’t see anything else to help me figure out where I am.

The sound of a car zooming by, way faster than a typical residential street, pulls my attention to the left of the house. It’s early morning—the sun barely up over the Eastern hills
. Beginning of the morning commute, or as much of a commute as Coldwater can claim.

Even though the most direct path toward t
he sound of vehicles is across the unmarred blanket of snow, I let my feet carry me down the path to the garage instead. Something about knowing that I
can
affect the physical world—and contemplating the consequences of mysterious broken snow at a crime scene—makes me, I think understandably, wary. I’ll go the long way.

Turns out the house isn’t
actually that far from the road, but the wind break of aspens is super effective. I step off the long driveway and my heart sinks when I realize it’s not a road; it’s the
highway
. On the one hand, that means I can trudge no more than one mile in either direction, find a mile marker sign, and know
exactly
where I have to go. On the other hand, it means borrowing my mom’s car to find the house in real life.

Which means lying to my mom.
And either being totally weird and not letting Sophie come home with me, or hiding her from Sierra.

Being close enough to walk to these people’s house would have been so much more convenient.

But it also would have brought the killer closer. Geographically, anyway.

As I shuffle along the gray snow banks at the side of the highway I think about how changed Coldwater is after
last year’s murders. There’s a wariness in people’s eyes that wasn’t there before. The kids from school tend to hang out in clumps; it’s rare to see anyone high-school-aged walking around town by themselves anymore. Kind of like I am at this moment. Even now it feels weird, even though it’s not real. Maybe it’s better that this murder will be slightly out of town.

Which prompts an entirely new round of self-lecturing.
It’s not
going
to happen! The whole point of all of this is to
prevent
the murder. But deep in my heart I don’t expect everything to happen as planned. After all, nothing has
ever
happened as planned when I tried to change my visions. In fact, I have a pretty sucky record.

But I have Sophie this time
, I remind myself.
She knows what she’s doing—it’ll be different
.

Assuming she’s not the killer.

Which I
do
assume.

Just … some confirmation would be nice, that’s all.

It’s getting harder to walk now and I don’t think it’s because the vision doesn’t want me to figure out where the murder is. I think it’s very simply because I’m getting too far from the murder scene. The original location of the vision. The sensation of walking in deep sand is back and within a few steps it’s joined by the feeling of climbing a steep hill.

A little farther
, I think, cheering myself on as I struggle to get five more steps so I can see over that little rise up there.

Four, three, two, one
.

I can’t move another inch, but I c
an see the small green sign! 146. I’m not sure if that’s coming or going, but a little driving around will solve that easily. The most important part is that I
know
I can find the house again.

There’s no reason to trek all the way back to the house;
I pull myself out of the vision.

I’m sitting on the toilet again, slumped against the wall of the bathroom stall, but I feel fine. A quick glance at my phone tells me that the whole thing took fifteen minutes—
I’d have guessed half an hour at least. One of these days I’ll figure out how to judge the differences in time, but evidently, today is not that day