Skye
“Run!”
I open my eyes to my office, to glittering starlight shimmering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. My hand is resting around… a rock. The kyanite, right. I curl my fingers around it and lift it out, but my hand trembles like the small stone weighs a ton.
I’m still trapped between the realms–the real world and the land of visions driven by the same stars I’ve been studying for years.
I feel weak, like I’ve expended most of my magic. It happens so quickly for me.
I close my eyes and take several deep breaths to ground myself but bite back a gasp when someone moves, their shadow stretching across the floor.
Alex.
His eyes are narrowed to slits. He scans my face, posturing defensively, his shoulders squared and spine tight–ready to lunge, if he must.
What did he see?
“What the fuck was that?” he asks sternly, in a whisper, glancing at the door behind me, which is, thankfully, closed. “Skye? What the fuck–”
“I’m a mystic,” I whisper back.
He blinks at me, his brow furrowed tightly. “A what?”
“A mystic. A seer. Whatever–whatever you want to call it.”
“I don’t know what that is.” His hands, tightly curled into fists, relax. He comes to stand in front of me and leans down close enough to inspect my eyes, and with a cringe, I notice the shadows falling over the planes of his chiseled cheekbones have a faint violet glow to them.
“Your eyes are insane right now. Are you on drugs?”
“What? No–” I snap back to reality with a gasp. “Alex!”
He grabs my face, pinching my cheeks between his thumb and forefinger, and turns my head from side to side slowly, inspecting me like a specimen he just pulled from the ice, or however that works. I let him. I sink into his touch because it’s been so long, I think, since anyone other than Abby has come this close to me, and those voices are still humming, still knocking me sideways, still haunting the darkest, deepest recesses of my mind, and I start to slip back… into it….
“What’s happening to you?” Alex’s voice, deeply flavored with concern, pulls me back to reality. He’s gripping my shoulders now, and we’re nearly nose to nose in the quiet, private sanctuary of my office. I reach up with arms like lead but can’t bring myself to grip his forearms for the support I desperately need as my body regenerates the magic I depleted.
“My bracelet,” I murmur as new, fresh voices screech through my head in warning. Another vision funnels into view, splitting my mind into fractals. I groan and double over, but Alex presses against my shoulders, holding me upright.
“Skye, I want to take you to the clinic. Something's not right.”
“My… bracelet. It’s in the box. P-please. Please.”
“Why–”
“Please?” My vision goes black. I’m suddenly back on the ice, but the landscape is far more detailed than it was before. I’m closer to the city of Aurorium this time, lingering in the vision long enough to make out the hazy fluorescent glow of the buildings in the distance. The smell of copper is so thick I choke on it. Mist rises around my legs like white snakes, and below, the ice is stained red. A thick, bloody, crimson red that melts the ice. Fresh and hot–
“Skye! Skye, Gods, look at me–”
There’s another body on the ice. A young woman, I think, judging by the thickness and length of her hair, but I can’t make out the color because of the blood. It’s everywhere. There’s so much of it.
“Is this what you’re talking about? Your bracelet?”
A shadow rises over the body–cloaked in black. Red eyes meet mine and hold.
“Skye?”
“Run.”
Cool metal wraps around my wrist, and I’m yanked back to reality in a split second, the vision fading into pockets of icy haze that dissipate as my office rolls back into startling focus. I’m on my knees. Alex kneels in front of me, gripping my fingers, his eyes holding mine a vivid, almost unreal blue against a wash of gray plaster–a far cry from the glowing, violent red I’d just witnessed.
“How many attacks have there been in Aurorium? Just one?” I ask, dizzy and breathless.
“Skye, what happened?” He looks down at my wrist and pulls my hand up between us to inspect the charms. They glow violet, just like my eyes, the little alchemy derived gems swirling with my magic as the excess drains into the magical storage bins that Posey created with her magic.
“My magic just got a little intense. I don’t practice very often.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you were a shifter?”
“I am, but I’m more–more than that. My dad–just give me a second.”
He lets go of my hands. I bring them to my face, closing my eyes against the room and trying to piece together what I saw.
“Why did you ask about the attack in Aurorium?” he asks, his voice cool and steady but tinged with concern I can taste. I feel bad for him. Mystics are rare outside of Moonrise–at least, well-developed, trained mystics like myself. But even then, only witches with specific powers or shifters with acute senses of smell would be able to pick them out of a crowd. I’m different. I’m something else in the same magical class. There’re only three of us that we know of. Me, my dad, and my grandma Sarah. My great-grandpa Isaac and Grandpa Sydney do have the power of sight, but it’s not like me and Dad. How can I possibly explain all of this to Alex?
“Skye? Step out of your head for a second and talk to me, please.”
“I’m sorry I scared you.”
“You fucking did,” he admits, his teeth bared when I peek through my fingers. “Explain.”
“I see things. Visions. It’s–Goddess, I don’t even know where to begin, but ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had an uncanny ability to see into people’s minds and into the future, if I willed it. I’m trained—well. My father is like me, but far more powerful, and he…” I lick my lips. “I can see the future. I get visions from the stars–prophecies. I can look into and manipulate people's minds.” I finally look at him. “I’m very good at it.”
He just stares at me with his lips slightly parted.
“I wear this charm bracelet because it keeps a good bit of my powers contained, so I’m not flooded with images and sounds all the time. I can still use my powers, but this prevents what just happened. It was an accident.”
He’s still staring at me, not even blinking.
“And I had a vision.”
“Okay…” he says slowly, not leaving my gaze. “About?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I saw your eyes turn bright purple and roll back in your head, Skye. I’ll believe anything.”
I swallow hard. “I had a vision of someone dying. Someone being murdered near Aurorium.” I reach for the details, but they’re already hazy, falling away. “Out on the ice.”
He nods, chewing his lower lip in thought, and I notice, not for the first time, his longer than normal incisors. They glint in the dimmed fluorescent glow of the lights dotted across my office ceiling. “There was an attack in the subway terminal and another one, out on the ice. My lab, like I said, has been creating a genetic profile on the victim because–”
“It was a woman,” I rush out, holding his perplexed gaze. “It was a woman, for sure.”
“We know that. But we only found traces of her genetic profile. If her attacker, person or beast, left any traces–”
“It wasn’t a beast. It was a man. His eyes were–were red.” I wince as the last details fade out of focus entirely and dissolve into pieces I can no longer use.
Alex goes so still, I’m not sure he’s breathing. “Did you say red eyes?”
I nod. He narrows his eyes to slits.
“You’re sure?”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“It’s not. Thank you for telling me.” His tone is suddenly gruff and clipped. He rises and extends a hand to me to help me up, and I accept it.
But we stand for a moment facing each other in silence. He’s looking at a blank spot on the wall above my head, deep in thought.
“Red eyes aren’t naturally occurring, so this is probably a clue, right?” I offer.
“I’m not investigating anything. I’m just giving the Beta insight on the person who died so they can fully identify her,” he says in a murmur like he’s not totally aware he’s speaking.
“Um, perhaps the attacker is someone like you?”
He looks down at me, his expression hard, damn-near chilled. “Like me?”
My entire body aches to take a step away from him, those same fight-or-flight feelings driving my wolf, as weak and as happy being dormant as she is, into restlessness. “Um, a wizard?”
He blinks, and it’s the first time he’s moved since rising. “A wizard?”
“You told me you weren’t a shifter, so I assumed–”
“I see.” He runs his hand through his hair, and his expression softens. “Maybe you’re right.” He seems to come back to focus then, tucking his hands in his pockets and examining my face closely. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine. I just feel stupid.”
“Why?”
I shake my head, giving him an incredulous smile. “Because I should have more control. I should have been able to rein myself in. I could have hurt someone. Hurt you, had I touched you.”
“I was touching you,” he says, and the air between us thins. My heart leaps for no reason other than I’m imaging it–him standing here, watching me go insane, all violet light and unfathomable power… and he held me through it without a thought for his own safety or wellbeing, without knowing what was happening to me, and what I could have inadvertently done to him. “Innocently, of course,” he adds, and his cheeks color–going ruddy, but in a deeper, almost blue-hued way that I’m not anticipating.
I should ask him about wizards. Maybe not now. Now doesn’t seem like an appropriate time to get nosey about his powers, but one day. One day I’ll ask.
“I have to be the one who wants to cause harm. I can touch you like this.” I grab his arm. He doesn’t even flinch. “Or like this.” I let him go and reach up, sliding my fingertips over his forehead to tuck a lock of his thick, black hair behind his ear. He’s cold, and no wonder. I probably scared the daylight out of him. “I have to will my magic to do my bidding. I can’t hurt you unless–”
“Unless you want to?” There’s that wry smile again, and I feel so, so much better.
I let my hand fall to my side and step back to the desk, to the box of rocks. “I’m sorry for scaring you. I’ll ensure it won’t happen again.”
“You mentioned you can see the future? Do your powers have any bearing on your reasonings for becoming an astrophysicist?"
I pick up a few of the crystals and set them on my desk. “Of course. I want to know why I am the way I am and… make sense of it. Like I said, my dad had, and still has, a hell of a time with his gifts, and they’re so similar to mine. Worse, I think, to handle. He’s never had a special bracelet to keep them in check.” He just pushed everyone away. I didn’t know he was my dad until I was seven years old, and even then, I had only weeks with him before he tore himself away for a while.
I close my eyes against that terrible summer from my childhood memories and reach blindly into the box again, careful of my bracelet this time, but less careful about my skin.
A jagged geode edge slices through my thumb. “Oh, shit!”
I draw my hand back and curl it into a fist, turning to Alex with a wobbly smile, but he’s completely across the room all of a sudden, his back flat against the wall.
“Alex?”
“I have to go,” he says under his breath. Then, he yanks the door open so violently it nearly comes off its hinges, and darts away.
“Alex?” I call out as blood drips between my fingers.