I See You (Oracle 2) (8 page)

Magic wanted it so, didn’t it? Otherwise, why show me the vision?

Except I wasn’t too sure magic was something to be trusted implicitly.

∞

After exchanging a series of text messages with Beau, Kandy met us out front of the garage in almost the exact spot she’d parked the night before. Only for this trip, I’d be driving the Brave. Yeah, it might have been quicker to blast over to Mississippi in Kandy’s SUV, but it would be way more comfortable in the RV. Plus, I wasn’t sure I could leave it behind. It was literally my whole world.

Beau had finished the tune-up on the pickup truck he’d been working on, then had driven it back to its owner while I looked up routes to Mississippi. We’d left a note for Ms. McNally, estimating when we’d be back, and texted Tess that we’d probably miss dinner next Friday.

I rolled down the window of the Brave as I pulled even with Kandy, who was leaning against the SUV and squinting madly in the sun.

“You’ll follow?” I asked.

Kandy shrugged. “Maybe.”

“But you’re coming?”

“I said I was.”

I glanced over at Beau in the passenger seat beside me. He shrugged as well. I shook my head and looked back at Kandy.

“The far seer said we’d survive,” I said.

“All of us?” Kandy asked. “Because he told me I really, really wouldn’t like what was coming next.”

“Great,” Beau groused, though he was grinning.

Kandy returned the grin, her smile more maniacal than Beau’s. Shapeshifters loved being in the shit. Werewolves most of all. Given his magical heritage, and after a year and a half of Audrey ‘check-ins,’ I was constantly surprised Beau was so even keeled.

“I’ll follow,” Kandy said as she turned to climb into the SUV. “But we’re going to need to stop for lunch within the hour.”

I opened my mouth to mention we had food, but Kandy cut me off.

“And not that veggie shit you keep feeding him. He needs real food. Beau’s a predator, not a kitty cat.”

I snapped my mouth shut, then started to roll up my window. I wasn’t going to get bitchy. The best way to win an argument with a werewolf was to ignore her.

“My treat,” Kandy yelled through the glass.

“I know you’re not a kitty cat,” I snapped to Beau. “You eat plenty of meat.”

He snickered. “You know werewolves. The bigger you are, the stronger you can be.”

“Well, you’re plenty big.”

“Oh, yeah?” Beau wagged his eyebrows at me.

I laughed. “We have the craziest conversations.”

Beau instantly sobered. “We’re just getting started.”

He leaned across the orange-carpeted hump that divided our seats and clipped something onto my necklace. I glanced down to see a tiny red vial hanging off the gold link nearest to my diamond. No, not red. Clear glass with a stopper, with something red inside it.

I looked up at Beau.
 

“My blood. For tracking.”

“I … I can’t …”

“It’s not for you to use. And you won’t need to have anyone else use it unless … unless you think I’m in serious trouble. After you’ve run, like you promised.”

I just stared at him.

“Like you promised, Rochelle,” Beau repeated.

I nodded.

He reached over to take my hand, inhaling deeply as he pressed a kiss to my palm. “I’ll be able to track you anywhere,” he murmured, his magic tingling against my fingers. “I just thought you’d feel better with the same option.”

My stomach did that weird flip it did when I wanted Beau. But since having a sexual reaction to him giving me a vial of blood was pretty creepy, I refrained from climbing into his lap like I wanted to.

Beau smirked. He knew exactly what I was thinking.

I laughed, then yelped when Kandy laid on her horn behind us.

Beau snorted, dropping my hand so I could focus on the road as I carefully pulled away from the curb and drove the two blocks to the stop sign before the interstate.

“You’re not going to need it,” Beau said. “I’d never leave your side voluntarily.”

“Yeah? Me neither.” Keeping my tone light, I wrapped my hand around the vial and the diamond as about a dozen other RVs rolled by on the highway in front of us. “Except you keep demanding that I make all these promises to the contrary.”

“Options,” Beau corrected. “I’m just making sure you have options.”

I looked over at him, but he was looking away out the window at the oncoming traffic. “I don’t need options, Beau.”

“You might.”

I was suddenly terrified that we were having a completely different conversation than the one we’d started. One that somehow involved me leaving him.

I gripped the steering wheel. “Not going to happen,” I said, as fiercely as I could. Then I hit the gas and turned north onto the interstate. I’d drive us to Waldport, then connect to US-34E to head east.

Beau leaned forward and turned the radio on quietly, brushing his fingers against my knee as he withdrew his hand.

I glanced at him and he flashed me a sad smile.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “Our version of okay, at least.”

“I know,” he answered, though I could sense that he didn’t believe himself any more than he believed me.

More than anything else he’d said or done so far, that alone told me that Beau’s family might not be worth the trip. I seriously hoped I hadn’t made a huge mistake pushing him to act on the vision.

But, as always, all I could control was myself and my reactions. And I knew — absolutely unequivocally — that I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything come between Beau and me.

∞

The trip to Southaven took us east through Oregon and into Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, then just across the border into Mississippi. And that was the short route, according to Google Maps. The drive was supposed to take thirty-six hours, but even shapeshifters needed some sleep.

We dry-docked at a rest stop in Utah the first night, where Kandy slept in the SUV. For the second and third nights, the werewolf insisted on a campsite and occupying the bed that the Brave’s dinette converted into.

The vision hit me again after a late dinner somewhere in the middle of the sweltering heat of Kansas. Near Wichita, according to the interstate signage that had become a blur for me after driving for too long. Kandy and Beau had gone off to train in the nearby wooded area, which I thought might be a national park but didn’t bother looking up. I was updating my Etsy shop while we had free — though frustratingly slow — Wi-Fi with our RV pad rental. The campsite had only one spot left when we pulled in, near the showers and the dumpsters, though that didn’t bother us. We were only there to sleep — and to run, in Beau’s and Kandy’s case.

Even before the vision swamped my mind, my head was already pounding. Beau had been right about me not liking the heat. I was padding around the curtained RV in black panties and a black cotton tank top while wishing desperately we’d thought to bring the standing fan from the garage. I’d even gathered my hair into silly pigtails, because it was too short and thin to twist back into a bun without it continually falling down. Beau thought the combination of panties and pigtails was adorable. And I seriously hoped my headache would ease before he got back and wanted a cool shower.

The vision floored me. Literally. It flooded through my mind so quickly that I lost all sense of where I was in the Brave, and had to simply hunker down where I’d been standing.

In my mind, I was standing in a mist-shrouded alley … or maybe a passageway between two buildings. The mist was slowly dissolving, leaving behind a blisteringly hot day, a blazingly blue sky, and barely a hint of shadow anywhere. It must have been midday, then? With the sun directly overhead.

I was learning to gather and interpret clues in the visions as quickly as I spotted them. Yet I still felt like a newbie, constantly behind and struggling to catch up to the point of it all.

Glass shattered somewhere above my head. I threw my arms up across my face and pressed back against one building even as I reminded myself that I was watching a vision from the safe zone of the Brave. Nothing bad could happen to me.

Something thumped sickeningly to the ground before me. I forced myself to lower my arms. I forced myself to see.

Though nothing bad could happen to my physical self within a vision, my mind wasn’t always so lucky.

Beau’s sister Ettie was lying on the ground before me. Her head was canted to one side, her murky brown eyes staring sightlessly. She was wearing a white sundress with blue printed flowers on it. Forget-me-nots, I decided, even as the irony made me sick. She was tanned, though her skin was rapidly paling as blood seeped from the back of her head. For the first time, the expanded parameters of the vision let me see that she was bigger than me. Taller and heavier. Which made sense, because even though she and Beau were only half-siblings, he was tall enough that he might well have inherited that trait from both his mother and father.

I forced myself to relax into the vision, and to ease my grip on my necklace. I’d grabbed it instinctively. I needed to see. I needed to collect information — and to resist the urge to try to thwart the magic channeling into my mind.
 

But I knew I couldn’t stop it even if I’d tried. Only acknowledging the moment, then immortalizing it in charcoal would make the vision stop haunting me. It might have been over a year since I’d suffered a full-blown episode, but I still knew that much.

I stepped forward, quickly glancing around the passageway in an attempt to absorb as much of the image as I could before the vision ceased. The newly constructed buildings had an industrial look from the sides. I couldn’t see any traffic or people nearby, though the vision might not show me such things. In fact, I was fairly certain that my visions showed me only things that were magic in some way. As such, the area might be full of terrified nonmagicals and I wouldn’t know it.

The shattered glass appeared to have come from a window on the second floor. I expected it to crunch underneath my feet, but it didn’t because I wasn’t actually there. Which was good, because I’d forgotten I was currently barefoot.

I couldn’t see any street or business signs. Ettie didn’t appear to have any marks on her or to be carrying anything, but it wasn’t like I could look through her pockets.

Had she jumped? Or had she been thrown through the window?

I stepped around her, thinking I might be able to see more of the building. It was funny how quickly I could accustom myself to stepping around a dead body. I blamed TV for my insensitivity.

But as I stepped away, the mist of the oracle magic flooded my mind’s eye, taking my sight with it once again.

I was back in the Brave. Not that I could see anything yet.

I was shaking, vibrating with energy that didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I was still hunkered down. I stretched my legs out before me, just able to press my toes against the edge of the bench seat of the dinette and my upper back against the kitchen cabinets.

My trembling gradually eased in this position. Or, rather, it fled the rest of my body as it focused down my left arm, then accumulated in my hand. Well, that was new. Or maybe this was the first time I’d been calm enough after a vision to notice.

I was still mist-blind as I rolled forward onto the balls of my feet, then climbed onto the dinette bench seat. I pushed my laptop carefully out of the way and tugged my sketchbook toward me.

My left hand felt as though it was on fire as I found a piece of charcoal in my satchel, then applied it to what felt like a blank page in my sketchbook. Just the act of pressing the charcoal to the page eased the energy burning in my palm.

I wondered when my sight would come back, but then the thought disappeared as I began to capture the vision on paper. Pressing the charcoal to the page was enough to release the magic that had flooded my body and mind. I didn’t need to see.
 

I sketched Ettie, the shattered glass, and what I’d seen of the building and the window through which Beau’s sister had fallen. Or been pushed … or thrown.

My sight cleared.

The Brave was dark. I reached for and turned on the nearest light without lifting the fingers of my left hand from the page before me. I was working on a close-up of Ettie’s face, smudging carefully to define her skeletal structure. I’d go back and refine the other sketches over the next couple of days.

I still couldn’t get her eyes right. Perhaps I shouldn’t worry about it, but I felt as if I was missing something.

Ettie was dead. So maybe I couldn’t get her eyes right because she no longer existed behind them, filling those murky brown orbs with energy.

Maybe such thoughts were way over my pay grade right now. According to Chi Wen, I was a function of magic, but not simply a tool or a recorder. I was an interpreter.

Still just a cog in the wheel of fate, though.

But how could I believe in fate, in Chi Wen, and even in my otherworldly love for Beau yet not believe — or, rather, not submit — to the notion of my life being controlled or even dictated by a higher power?

What was missing from Ettie’s eyes? Her soul? Was I so arrogant to believe that I could see such a thing? That when I sketched Blackwell and Jade, I could capture the pure essence that fueled them?

I was exhausted. I wasn’t going to solve such huge questions — questions that had plagued humanity since … well, forever — with scrawled lines on paper.

I placed the charcoal I still clutched in my left hand down on the lime-green Formica of the table. Every edge of the remaining nub was smooth and rounded.

The door swung open and the Brave dipped to the right.

I flipped the sketchbook closed. Though with both of my hands covered in charcoal from smudging and shading, it would be completely obvious I’d been sketching.

I lifted my gaze as Beau entered the Brave. He was smiling, obviously content from his run. His white teeth were a stark contrast against his smooth mocha skin.

I wasn’t going to be able to hide the sketchbook from him. I shouldn’t want to hide it from him … except it was now filled with pictures of his dead sister.