I See You (Oracle 2) Read online

  “Rochelle?” Tess whispered. I hadn’t heard her return to the RV. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” I got the word out politely enough, but I couldn’t pretend to be completely okay. I didn’t know the RV well enough to wander around it as if I wasn’t blind. I was glad I was still wearing my sunglasses, not that I was sure Tess would be able to see anything weirder than my eyes normally were.

  “I was just grabbing beers for Kandy and Beau,” Tess said. Her tone was completely normal, as if I wasn’t standing there staring straight ahead like a moron and holding myself upright. The mist rolled around in my mind’s eye but didn’t resolve into anything. I loosened my left hand and fished my necklace out of my tank top.

  Tess stepped up next to me, brushing her shoulder lightly against mine as she retrieved the glass I dropped, then turned on the water.

  I gripped the raw diamond of my necklace so tightly in my palm that it hurt. Then I just tried to relax into whatever my magic was attempting to manifest. Chi Wen had said I could use the diamond as a focal point, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to accomplish that feat. Thankfully, the mist started lessening rather than increasing.

  Tess touched the top of my right hand, loosening my grip on the counter and passing me the full glass of water. “Drink,” she murmured. Then she stepped away to open the fridge.

  I lifted the cool water to my mouth. My hand was steady as I drank. The mist clouding my sight cleared further, until I could see the interior of the RV again. The kitchen window faced the neighbor’s RV pad. They had three kids, close in age, and a golden retriever.

  “I’m okay,” I finally said, though without looking away from the comforting reality before me. “It’s just the edge of a migraine.”

  “I know,” Tess said. “Drink another glass, then join us. Gary and Beau are building a fire on the beach. We’ll have s’mores for dessert.”

  “Okay.”

  Tess left with the beers. I poured another glass of water, noting that Tess had dried off the glass before she’d filled it for me. My hand started to shake. I hadn’t had to cover for the visions for over a year. I was out of practice. But Tess hadn’t cared. I pressed the glass onto the counter to still my shaking hand.

  I’d been completely weird and Tess hadn’t cared. I would have heard it in her voice. She was the kind of person who was open like that.

  I drank the second glass of water, poured a third, and then wandered outside to watch Beau and Gary joke around while they barbecued our dinner. I wasn’t the only one who Tess and Gary had accepted, no questions asked. I wasn’t the only one who secretly wanted to be accepted like that.

  That was why we came for dinner whenever we were invited. Or answered emails and text messages, even if Gary was just sharing RVing articles or Tess was sending vegan recipes I was never going to try to cook.

  I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Gary and Tess wanted from us long term. It was pretty obvious with them being childless and all. What was weird was that Beau and I had just accepted the older couple in our lives without question as well.

  ∞

  So even I had to admit that making s’mores by a bonfire as the sun set over a crashing surf only steps away was pretty fun. And Tess had bought vegan marshmallows for me. Yeah, she was extremely cool like that.

  During dinner, Gary happily tossed two more steaks on the grill when Beau and Kandy attempted to eat their combined weight in red meat. Tess split a bottle of red wine with Kandy — some fancy Pinot Noir she and Gary had picked up from a winery on their way down to the coast. Then they discussed the bouquet and taste profile of the wine as the sun dipped in the horizon.

  All and all it was a pretty weird dinner, almost … homey, and a seriously stark contrast to my vision of the dead girl.

  While I sat by the fire, Kandy and Beau wandered away down the beach to train and Gary puttered around cleaning the barbecue. Next to me, Tess was knitting a sock with double-pointed knitting needles that looked deadly enough to take someone’s eye out.

  I dug my toes into the sand and burned my final few marshmallows layer by layer. I would peel off a layer after it bubbled, eat it, then return the skinless, skewered marshmallow to the fire to repeat the process.

  Kandy flipped Beau over her head. He landed on his back in the sand, laughing.

  Worried about this display of strength, I glanced over at Tess.

  She smiled at me and kept knitting. “They’ve known each other for a while?”

  “Friends of friends, I guess.”

  “What kind of martial arts is that?”

  “Mixed.”

  “I keep asking Gary to take tai chi with me.”

  “But Gary thinks he’ll just fall asleep upright,” Gary said with a chuckle. He sidled up behind us to dangle a half-full glass of wine over Tess’s head. “Going once …”

  Tess sighed as if she was terribly put upon, but she set her knitting aside to take the wine. She twirled the ruby liquid in the glass until it looked molten in the firelight … like molten blood …

  The vision hit without warning or mist. One second I was watching Tess’s glass of wine and burning the roof of my mouth on a too-hot marshmallow. The next, I was watching dark crimson blood spread out from underneath a young woman’s head.

  I cried out before I could stop myself. I clamped my mouth shut, turned my head away from Tess, and started frantically digging around for my sunglasses in the pockets of the sweater I’d borrowed from her.

  “What is it, Rochelle?” Tess asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  I shook my head, unable to focus on answering her as the vision reset. Or maybe it was restarting from a beginning I hadn’t yet seen.

  In my mind, the back of the blond girl’s head smashed onto the asphalt, somehow denting it. Then her head lolled to the side, her murky brown eyes staring out at nothing. Blood seeped slowly out from underneath her hair to form a pool on the ground.

  And repeat.

  I moaned, squeezing my eyes shut and abandoning my search for my sunglasses.

  “What is it?” Gary murmured, moving closer behind Tess.

  “Will you get Rochelle a glass of water?” Tess asked. “Oh! And her satchel from the chair there. Do you want Beau? Should I call for Beau?”

  I managed to shake my head as the vision repeated a third time. Becoming numb to the sudden violence, I saw more detail. Or perhaps I was just starting to understand what I was seeing.

  The blond falling … her head and shoulders hitting the ground at the same time. The angle suggested she was falling from a height, rather than just tripping or being knocked down.

  The asphalt denting underneath her head indicated that it was hot where she was dying, or going to die. Hot enough to soften the blacktop. I’d seen that only once, on an August day when I was seven or eight in a newly paved area of East Vancouver. It rarely got that hot on the West Coast, but I assumed the phenomenon wasn’t that unusual.

  Yeah, whatever magic wanted me to see, I saw. Now, following Chi Wen’s guidance, I just tried to not let it overwhelm me.

  “Beau said you might need your sketchbook.” Tess was pressing my satchel into my hands. Or she was trying to, at least. I released my hold on my necklace to take the bag from her.

  The vision stopped repeating, leaving me staring down at the dead blond as if I were crouched beside her. Except I wouldn’t be crouched there, not when this actually happened, because the visions were never about me.

  “Thank you,” I managed to mumble to Tess, even as I was wondering what exactly Beau had told her about my need for a sketchbook.

  “Gary has water as well. Will you drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Firelight kissed the paling-with-death cheeks of the dead woman, and for a moment, I thought the vision was expanding. Instead, it dissolved until I was once again staring at the bonfire before me. “Thank you,” I muttered again, already digging in my satchel for charcoal.

  Tess brus
hed her fingers across my shoulder, then stood and started tidying up the dinner with Gary. How they weren’t hounding me with questions or staring at me as if I was insane, I had no idea. And I didn’t have any time to dwell on it, because my left hand was itching like mad. Itching to draw what I’d seen, to capture the image on the page and hold it there.

  Why? I had no idea.

  I just did what it told me to do.

  I started with the woman’s eyes. Hunched over my lap, I found a fresh page and pressed the charcoal to form the arch of her eyebrow and the curve beneath her eyelid. I’d feather and smudge the lines later. Now, I simply sketched out the skeleton of her face.

  I wasn’t sure how much time I’d spent drawing, but it wasn’t terribly long before Beau threw himself down beside me in the still-warm sand. He was winded. Kandy circled around behind us and chatted with Gary, but I couldn’t hear their words.

  “Vision?” Beau asked. His tone was hushed and confused. “You should have called me.”

  “It’s okay.” I didn’t lift my head from my task. Beau brushed his fingers against my bare foot, just lightly enough for me to feel it.

  “You’re too cold.” He rolled to his feet and padded away.

  Again, I could hear conversation behind me, but I was more concerned with the blond’s face. I just couldn’t capture the look in her eyes … the nothingness of her eyes. I was on my third attempt, and frustratingly, the vision was fading. As if by committing it to the page, I was erasing it from my mind.

  Beau dropped a fleece blanket over my shoulders. Then he stilled, looking over my head.

  “Should you be touching her?” Kandy asked quietly. I hadn’t heard her approach.

  “Doesn’t seem to affect the magic,” Beau murmured. “That’s the blond woman, Rochelle? The dead girl?”

  Kandy glanced back over her shoulder warily, but I was fairly certain Gary and Tess had gone inside their RV.

  “It’s not finished,” I said stubbornly, hunching my body farther over the sketch to block it from his sight.

  “You know her?” Kandy asked.

  Beau didn’t answer, but his hands tensed on my shoulders.

  Kandy swore, loosing a vicious string of words under her breath.

  Adrenaline flushed through my system as I turned to look up at Beau. His eyes were the green of his shapeshifter magic as he gazed down at me.

  “You know her, Beau?” I asked.

  He nodded, looking away from the sketch and out across the fire toward the dark ocean. “I bought her the lip stud for her seventeenth birthday. Two days before I left,” he said.

  I wanted to jump to my feet suddenly. I wanted to race across the darkening beach, to flee the truth spilling from Beau’s lips. The truth brought forth by the vision. A vision of death. A vision I was suddenly and irrationally sure was going to tear us apart.

  But I didn’t. I reached up and touched my cold fingers to the back of Beau’s warm hand on my shoulder.

  He shook his head as if clearing it. “She’s my sister. My half-sister. Ettie.”

  “Ah, shit,” Kandy said. Then she stomped off.

  Beau crouched down next to me. I closed the sketchbook and lifted my charcoal-covered hand to touch his face.

  “She’s dead, then?” he asked.

  “Or going to die.” My voice caught in my throat, but I couldn’t lie to him or soften the blow in any way.

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I dropped my hand, placing it on the closed sketchbook balanced on my bent knees. “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Not our problem.”

  “But if I’m seeing it …”

  He shrugged and looked back out at the dark ocean. “The far seer said you’d pick up things from the Adepts you spend the most time with.”

  I abruptly felt as if I couldn’t really see him, though he was fully lit by the fire before us. I couldn’t really hear him with the surf roaring in my ears. It was as if a dark, thick veil had dropped between us. I wanted to reach up and rip this barrier away, but I didn’t know how to do so.

  “You could call,” I said, instead of confronting the slow dread that was hunkering down in my belly for the long haul.

  “Yeah, I could.” Beau straightened, reaching his hands down for me. “Let’s say goodnight and go to bed.”

  I tucked my sketchbook in my satchel, then let him lift me to my feet. Beau’s family wasn’t my business. He never even spoke of them. But something about his reaction scared me, as if a yawning pit of silence and secrets had opened between us. A pit that might swallow us up …

  I brushed away the silly thought as Beau laid his arm across my shoulders and tugged me closer.

  “Kandy’s not bunking with us, is she?”

  Beau laughed. “Overleaf Lodge.”

  A flash of murky brown eyes tugged my attention back to the vision. I opened my mouth to ask Beau about his sister, but then Tess poked her head out of the RV.

  “Heading home?” she asked, smiling.

  “Thank you for dinner. It was great as always.” Beau stepped forward and hugged Tess. Their heights perfectly matched while she was standing on the middle step of the RV. She laughed.

  A splash of green caught my eye. I glanced toward the back of the RV to see Kandy shoving her cellphone back in her pocket as she crossed toward us. Her unfocused gaze slid across me, as if she didn’t want to look too closely. She plastered on a smile as she stepped up to shake Tess’s hand.

  I was still surprised that the werewolf had joined us for dinner, and even more so that she had managed to chat amicably throughout the evening with nonmagical people. Maybe I was the judgemental one.

  “Thanks for the marshmallows,” I said to Tess as Beau stepped aside. I glanced behind her to see Gary washing dishes deeper within the brightly lit RV.

  “We’re here for another week, Rochelle.” Tess’s gaze was fixed over my head as she watched Beau and Kandy saunter back toward the visitors’ parking. “If you need us.”

  “Okay.” I scuffled my feet on the mix of sand and dried fir needles that salted the ground everywhere in Yachats, then stopped. It was odd for Beau to wander off without me. And I wasn’t sure why I was just hanging out there in the comforting glow from the RV’s lights with Tess standing on the steps, almost looming over me.

  “You’ll text me?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, wait.” Tess stepped back into the RV and retrieved the Tupperware I’d brought the salad in. She stepped all the way down the steps to pass it to me. It was heavier than it had been when it was full of salad. Suspicious, I peered through the side and saw what appeared to be cookie-like shapes inside.

  I looked up at Tess to protest.

  She grinned, cutting me off before I could speak. “If I don’t send them home with you, Gary will just eat them all. And we both know he doesn’t need more cookies.”

  “I heard that, Tess,” Gary mock-grumbled. His hands were deep in soap suds.

  I laughed, an involuntary sound that made it out of my mouth before I could edit it.

  Tess chuckled and managed to squeeze a brief hug around my shoulders while my hands were occupied with the Tupperware. I didn’t twist away from the embrace.

  “Goodnight, Gary,” I called over Tess’s shoulder.

  “See you two next Friday?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I stepped back from Tess and she let her arms fall to her sides. “Goodnight, Tess.”

  “Sleep well,” she murmured. Then she turned back to climb the steps of the RV.

  I walked into the darkness between the RV-occupied concrete pads, clutching the cookies to my stomach and feeling utterly unsettled. Torn between two moments, two lives. It was as if I’d built up an unaccustomed sense of security, and with the return of the visions, it was slipping away.

  Beau had found me, saved me from myself, and showed me who I really was. But then, the visions had ceased and life had been … idyllic.

  And now I was seeing his sister dead
or dying.

  What if trying to save Ettie meant losing Beau?

  Again, I shook the idiotic thought off. I simply wasn’t accustomed to being content. I was sabotaging myself, based on nothing but a fleeting hint of reticence I’d picked up from Beau the moment after he figured out the dead girl was his sister. Who wouldn’t be thrown by that revelation?

  Anyone. Everyone.

  A werewolf and a shapeshifter were waiting for me in the deep of the night, my visions had returned with a vengeance, and I was going to do what I was supposed to do … try to trust the magic and go where it led.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “If you’re nervous and your hands are sweaty, then expect your grip to be compromised. Your strike will be less effective due to the pen slipping.” Beau folded my fingers around the tactical pen to demonstrate the grip, then stepped back and lifted his arms like he was going to grab me again.

  I tucked the pen back in my satchel, from which I was supposed to grab it when attacked. I adjusted the satchel strap across my chest as I glanced up to see a curtain twitch in Old Ms. McNally’s back bedroom window. At least I assumed it was a bedroom, if the antique-white lace curtains were reliable evidence. It also had the best view of the backyard where Beau and I were doing our usual morning training session. She usually ignored us, except when Beau paid her rent every Sunday. Though I was currently trying to stab him with an odd-looking pen, so maybe that was intriguing.

  “My hands don’t sweat,” I sneered, laying on the bravado.

  Beau grinned, then wagged his fingers at me to attack.

  I lunged forward, pulling the pen out of my bag in the same motion. He grabbed for me.

  I tried to feint but tripped in the dead grass instead. I went down, managing to roll over onto my back in line with Beau’s right sneaker. Then, as if I’d meant to fall, I halfheartedly jabbed him in the thigh with the pen.

  He collapsed beside me in a fit of laughter.

  I twirled the pen in my hand with a flourish, as if it were a magic wand. Beau laughed harder and I giggled.