Sleep No More

TWENTY-FIVE

I awake the next morning from a dreamless sleep.

No, this is wrong, I think groggily as I try to shake the cobwebs from my thoughts. I should have gone to my second sight last night; I was wearing the necklace. I needed to practice!

My hands fly to the pendant—maybe it fell off. But no, it’s still there. Around my neck. Why is it wet? I look down and a scream rips out of my throat.

I’m covered with blood. So much blood it’s not a bright, garish red, but a deep maroon. It puddles in my lap, soaking onto my bed and spreading across the sheets. I struggle for air as my hand brushes something cold and my hands curl around the handle of a knife.

The blade is caked with blood that has already dried in crooked rivulets. Flinging the knife from me I tumble off the bed and onto the floor where my right hand makes a perfect red handprint in the beige carpet.

“Charlotte! Are you okay?” I hear my mom’s voice from down the hallway and Sierra’s running footsteps.

I jump to my feet and lunge for the door, hoping to lock it before they can reach me, but my legs are tangled in my bedding and even as I stand, it trips me and I sprawl across the floor, spreading the blood even more. The door flies open, barely missing my head, and Mom and Sierra look down at me with wide eyes.

“I can explain!” I blurt, even though I know I can’t.

They just stare at me. At the room. Until Mom finally asks, “Did you fall off your bed?” with a hint of laughter in her tone.

I’m rigidly still, wide-eyed in confusion, and then I chance a look down at myself.

The blood is gone.

I glance behind me at the bedding strewn all over the floor. Clean. What just happened? I know I saw it. I felt the knife. It wasn’t a dream—it wasn’t a vision. What the hell is going on?

“Yeah, I kinda did,” I finally choke. The emotional roller coaster finally gets the better of me and tears of relief are streaming down my face. A maniacal giggle wants to escape my throat, but I know better than that. “Bad dream,” I settle on.

“Oh, Charlotte,” my mom says softly. “Of course you’re having bad dreams.” She leans down and pulls me to my knees and wraps her arms around me. She holds me for a long time as I try to stop hiccup-crying and pretend I’m upset for the reason she thinks I am.

I glance up and Sierra is still there. I squirm a little under her intense gaze.

“Charlotte?” my mom says in a hesitant voice, and my whole body feels instantly chilled. “I know you’re already upset, but I should tell you before you see it; there’s been another murder. A boy. They said he’s a teen, but his name hasn’t been released. I just . . . I think after a nightmare like this it’s probably best you hear it from me rather than the news. Or even Linden.”

“Linden!” I shriek.

“I took the liberty of calling his mother. It wasn’t him.”

I can’t move. Can’t breathe. “When?” I gasp.

“They think in the middle of the night. No one knows why he was out.”

“How did he die?” The question terrifies me more than anything that has happened to me so far, but I have to ask.

“What do you mean, how?”

“What . . . what did the killer use? What kind of weapon?”

My mom strokes my hair. “Sweetie, I don’t want you to be so upset. Maybe we should just turn off the news for the day and—”

“A knife,” my aunt interrupts.

“Sierra!” my mother scolds.

“She asked the question; she deserves the answer,” my aunt says evenly.

My mom’s silence as well as the firm press of her fingers on my back tells me she doesn’t agree, but it’s too late to take the words back.

I’m numb. A knife. What’s happening? Is this a different kind of vision? Or are my reality and my second sight blending? Maybe I’ve gone too far. Maybe I’ve messed with my abilities so much they’re . . . malfunctioning?

I look back up at my aunt and my mom, the two women who make up most of my world, and feel so very alone. The filtered morning light illuminates them with murky brightness and I realize how early it is.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Honestly, now that I’ve calmed down, I think I’d like to just go back to bed.” I make myself smile, though I know it must look forced at best. “It’s New Year’s Eve tonight. I don’t want to fall asleep before midnight.” I don’t want to fall asleep again ever.

My mom looks at me funny, but nods, and turns her wheelchair down the hallway toward the kitchen. My aunt doesn’t leave. After a glance at my mom—her sister, I often forget; the person she’s been hiding her secrets from her entire life—she says, “A vision?”

I don’t know what to say, so I nod. It was a vision, technically. It just wasn’t the kind of vision she’s referring to.

“You knew about the knife,” she says, and it’s not a question. “Did the vision overwhelm you?”

“It was a different kind of vision,” I burst out, needing to tell someone. Needing to tell her—the woman who has been my confidante for as long as I can remember. “There was no warning, no blacking out, just—seeing it!” I know she thinks I mean seeing the murder—not myself covered in blood—but I can’t confess more than that.

I’m afraid to.

She stands looking at me with her lips pursed. Then her face softens and she says, “Everything, everything, gets harder in times of crisis.” She lays her hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “You’re not always going to win, but keep fighting.”

“It’s so hard,” I whisper.

“I know—they’ve been battering me too.”

“Really?” I don’t know why I’m surprised; of course Sierra would be getting visions similar to mine. Oracles always get visions about the most relevant happenings of their community. And this is her home too.

But she’s strong enough. Even if I were trying to fight the visions, I’m not. They beat me.

“It’s so important to close your mind, Charlotte. Even though we don’t use it, you second sight is vulnerable and more powerful than you could ever imagine.”

My tears cease at her words and for a second I wonder if she’ll continue.

But she just runs a hand across my forehead, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Be vigilant, Charlotte. Fight.”

Then she leaves and I remain kneeling in the middle of my floor feeling like the world’s biggest failure. I feel the tears build again, and for once, I do exactly what I said I was going to. I push my door shut, grab my bedding from the floor pull it over my head, and slip back into a dreamless sleep.

I stare at Smith’s name glowing on my phone’s screen for a long time while I decide whether or not to answer his call. I don’t like the niggling suspicions I have about him. That he lied to me about what I can and can’t do on the supernatural plane and in my visions. He seems to know so much. How could he not have known what I can do there?

Either he lied, or he’s not as knowledgeable as he pretends. Regardless, it makes me question him.

And I don’t like the doubts he planted in my mind about my aunt.

I wish that I would have a vision about him.

Taking a deep breath, I decide to go with both bravery and honesty. I slide the bar to answer the phone and say, “I’m not actually convinced I want to talk to you.”

Silence. I’ve shocked him.

“What is it that you think I’ve done?” he asks quietly.

“I’m not sure,” I say in a whisper.

“I am so tired of justifying myself to you when I’ve only tried to help. Don’t let this monster make you paranoid. You need to be able to think clearly.”

“To do what?” I hiss. “Not only did I not have a vision of this latest murder, when I woke up, I had no memory of being on the supernatural plane at all. Even though I slept with the stone on. And then—” I cut off before I can say anything else. I don’t want to tell him about the blood. About the knife. I don’t want to tell anyone, but at that moment I especially don’t want to tell him. “Smith,” I say instead. “He’s better than us. We can’t do this anymore. We’re hurting people.”

“We’re saving people!” he snaps. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about Jesse and Nicole, but I haven’t. Can you really sit back and let people die?”

“They’re dying anyway. Or worse—look at Clara. We did that!”

“What happened to Clara is awful; I’m not going to lie to you about that. But it’s never going to stop if you don’t help.”

I don’t know what to think. What to do. The hopes and plans I had last night seem a million miles past impossible right now. How am I supposed to catch a brilliant serial killer who might, somehow, have an Oracle on his side? I don’t think I should even dream myself into my second sight anymore. I can’t risk it. Someone is controlling me there. I’ll have to find another way.

That reminds me. “Smith?” I say tentatively. I’m not sure I want to trust him, but I have no one else to ask. “Did you ever go to the supernatural plane with Shelby while she was sleeping?”

“No. She could only invite me into her visions when she was awake.”

“But did she tell you about it?”

“Often.”

“What did hers look like?”

He hesitates, then seems to realize this is a test—he gives, I give. “An eternal room with a glass floor,” he says. “And an infinite dome overhead. A vast horizon holding every future in the world. I always wanted to go there.”

“There . . . there’s a door in mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“At the very edge of my dome—of my floor maybe—there’s a door.”

“One you can go through, like the scenarios you can step into?”

“No. I can’t get through it. It’s locked.” I don’t know why I’m so focused on this door, but both the text from Repairing the Fractured Future and Smith describe the supernatural plane the same way.

And neither of them mention a door.

It doesn’t fit, and anything that doesn’t fit is suspect in my mind.

He’s silent for several long seconds. “Then it’s probably a place you’re not supposed to go and your mind is telling you that.”

“Did Shelby have a door?”

“Shelby never saw a door.”

I wait, letting a full minute go by as I try to sort through my thoughts. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask, desperation winning over my stubbornness.

“We wait for another vision and try again. It’s all we’ve got.”

“But what about the murder last night?”

“It’s in the past, Charlotte, and you are a master of the future.” Frustrated, I hang up without saying good-bye.

Master of the future, I think cynically as I stare at my phone. Some master.

I realize I’m still wearing the pendant and thank the universe that Sierra didn’t notice. When I crouch down to put it back in its hiding place, my hand brushes something cold. I grab for it and pull back with a hiss when it bites into my skin. Putting my sliced finger in my mouth I kneel beside the bed and reach more carefully this time.

It’s the knife.

It’s clean now, but it is definitely the same knife I flung away from me when I woke up covered in blood this morning.

What the hell was I doing last night?