Skye
Abby crunches into a candy bar while I dump copious amounts of salt into a bowl. “Why salt water?”
“It needs to mimic the water the mystics use in Moonrise to scry, but I don’t have access to the water sources that run between Maatua, Veiled Valley, and Moonrise here, so I’m going to try this instead. I’ve read that salt acts as a conduit for energy and might keep bad things from interfering in the connection.” I glance at her, and she grimaces, stuffing the rest of the chocolate into her mouth.
I’m grimacing, too, because for whatever reason, the smell of chocolate and peanut butter is making my head spin in a bad way. I shove my sudden nausea aside, chalk it up to nerves, and pour a pitcher of tap water into the bowl.
“Can I ask you something before we get started?”
“Of course.” I mix the concoction briskly until every salt crystal dissolves.
“Why do you study astrophysics when you can just, I don’t know, see everything anyway?”
I get what she means. It’s a good question, but I have an answer. “I get visions. That’s part of being a mystic. Mystics are trained to read the stars through an orrery, or like this, by scrying, but having the power to do so doesn’t mean it’s accurate. I can pull prophecies from the stars but only if I can see the stars, and the positioning is correct, and there’s a lot of factors at play–time of year, light, weather, the moon cycle, which means prophecies are never totally accurate. So I study the sky. I’ve made maps that the witches and mystics now use in their magic, and it’s been successful. If a witch, like your mother, used lunar magic, she would need an accurate sense of the stars’ positions and an exact reading on the moon cycle for spells to be foolproof. Before, that was nearly impossible–an act of sheer luck–but now, I have maps and formulas available because I did the work.” I rest my hands on either side of the bowl. “Scrying is entirely different, though.”
“How so?”
“I have to have something to latch onto–a memory or a physical object–something tangible.” I take a deep breath. “That’s why I need you.”
“Because you still haven’t told Alex you’re doing this?”
I close my eyes for a moment. “He’s dealing with so much already. We don’t know where this other vampire is, and the university effectively covered up the tampering in the lab that caused the collapse and the dean’s death.”
She rolls her eyes. “Good riddance.”
“Anyway,” I push on, bracing my elbows on the counter. “I just want to be sure Kai is gone and not a problem anymore. For Alex’s sake, so we can all move on.”
“Is this going to hurt?” she asks, skeptically.
I grit my teeth, glancing at her. “Maybe a little?”
“Skye, I only agreed to this because you said I could handle it.”
“You can because you’re a hybrid. Witches are a lot heartier when it comes to being used for magical purposes like this.” I reach across the counter and take her hand. “Are you ready?”
She doesn’t even have time to nod before I dive into her head. Abby is easy to maneuver through. She doesn’t have secrets to guard and wears her opinions and thoughts on her sleeve, so when I travel back to the day of the collapse, it’s all there for me to pick through in startling focus. She was in the main part of the lab the entire time. I only catch glimpses of Alex before he went into the tunnels with Toby. I bypass hours of relative calm, and the lab begins to shatter. Abby herded everyone in the main room out through the elevator and went back for her laptop, where the data, she noticed, was off in a way that made her wonder if the collapse wasn’t natural–and then her thoughts get tangled because she was confused. Then, Toby was there, and Alex wasn’t.
I see the moment Toby guides her into the elevator and tries to go back for Alex. Another man in a dark parka like Alex wears in the lab hurries onto the elevator with them, which is cramped with other researchers. Toby looks relieved because… he thinks it’s Alex.
But it wasn’t.
“I have him,” I whisper and let go of her hand while wrapping my powers around that one specific moment where she glanced at the stranger before looking away.
Abby gasps and grabs her head, but I’m already gripping the bowl. I lower my face to the water, which ripples against a current of my own design. The tip of my nose touches the surface, and the water illuminates with violet light speckled with stars, and I open my eyes.
The room fades. I’m ripped into a void of darkness. Images flash in tangles of color that remind me of being in Alex’s head, and right now, I wish I’d practiced on him, just once, because now I have to fight to turn these streaks of memories into images instead of color.
My powers thrum through my veins in a way I’ve never experienced before. I feel hot and heavy as I push and shove against the streaks of color and light, but finally, like bursting a bubble, I’m through. Images expand in rapid succession. Memories of Aurorium, of seeing me, of wondering what type of exotic creature I am. Memories of slaying a man in the terminal out of sheer bloodlust and nearly getting caught. Memories of catching sight of Alex for the first time after a decade of hunting him.
My heart beats out of rhythm while the memories flip like pages in a novel.
Kai took the train to campus the night I met him in the terminal with Abby. He watched me until the train sped out of sight. He remembered my scent, kept note of it, while he snuck around campus for days undetected. He watched me and Alex in the library. He saw Alex kiss me.
He saw that Alex had something that couldn’t be replaced.
He watched Alex like a hawk then, following him on and off campus while forming a plan that would hurt him the most, noticing that Alex’s vampiric senses had weakened after being out of use for so long. But, he couldn’t access the lab, which he believed would be exactly where he could make the biggest mess and fuck with Alex’s head the most, so he did the next best thing.
He killed a local wolf–a woman–outside of Aurorium out of need. He wanted to be strong to enact his plan. He snuck back onto campus and watched Alex and Laney conversing in Alex’s office. He watched me walk in, and followed Laney, making a mental map of her routine.
Then, he made his move and cornered her in the clinic. He made it messy. Made it hurt. Told her it was Alex’s fault she was dying this way. He almost decided to turn her, but he was starving after so long on the ice and killed her almost by accident.
And then he–
An image cuts through his memories. My body jerks, and somewhere in the aether, I hear Abby calling out my name, panicked.
I’m in an ice cave, somewhere deep on the ice field, miles away from Aurorium. I’m in his head. I can feel new thoughts. This is the present in his mind. I’m seeing through his eyes.
Abby calls out my name again, but it’s lost in the groan of an unforgiving wind beating down on the only shelter Kai could find, and he’s spent weeks here, starving.
He got hurt that day in the lab when he finally gained access with the help of the dean, whom he killed in the tunnel after tampering with a drill that should have been offline. The drill went haywire, cracking a pocket that sent tremors through the lab, causing the collapse. The dean fought back when he was killing him, though. He stabbed Kai several times, and without blood and adequate shelter, on top of the unforgiving cold, healing has been slow.
But there’s something with him in the cave. Something dark and bloody. An animal, perhaps. Dead and small. Not enough, but it will do for now.
“I can feel you in my head, witch,” he rasps.
I’m yanked free of his mind against my will by a vision that clouds everything else. Abby screams my name, but my body hits the floor, and I have a brief moment of clarity, my eyes on the ceiling of Alex’s kitchen, before I’m dragged into the vision. The stars scream in warning. My powers stretch to their limit, and then, it’s quiet.
The glare of the lights in Aurorium distorts the vision. Alex is talking to a man I don’t recognize at first, but I realize I’m intimately familiar with now.
“You’ve lost me everything. My kingdom. My armies. I should kill you now, but I’m enjoying this game.”
“Stay away from her.”
“I will make you a deal, bastard prince. Her life for yours–for eternity.”
“SKYE!” Abby grabs my cheeks, slapping me for several seconds. The vision, however, doesn’t let up, but shifts, and I’m in… Maatua? But a part of Maatua I’ve never seen. It’s paradise, but in a strangely unnerving way.
Fallon grabs the hand of a man with dark hair and sun-tanned skin. They’re fighting–passionately, and he pulls her into a grand, almost Gothic estate, slamming the door behind them. The vision pans out like I’m airborne, giving me a glimpse of a wide swath of islands and coves–and then, a heavy, crushing sensation embraces me–squeezing the life out of me.
“Wake up! This is freaking me out!” Abby cries, shaking me violently.
I open my eyes, panting, and look wildly around before she comes into focus.
“What the fuck? What the actual fuck, Skye?” she screeches, pulling me upright. “Your nose and ears are bleeding! Are you okay? Is that supposed to happen?”
“I think–it got a little out of hand,” I admit, but a wave of nausea rips through me. I throw up directly onto the floor beside us. Abby grabs my hair while I retch, shivering, unable to stop.
“Is that supposed to happen?” she asks.
“No,” I reply weakly, dizzy, feeling like I haven’t slept in weeks for some reason. “I haven’t been feeling well. It’s been stressful–but I found him. He’s out on the ice but coming back to Aurorium. He’ll intercept Alex and try to force him to make a deal….”
“Are you sick? Can I take you to the clinic, please?”
“I’m fine,” I choke out, but I feel like I’m going to throw up again. This time, I make it to the bathroom, at least, but Abby babies me into bed, where she sits beside me and fiddles with my fingers.
“Can I ask you something again?” she asks nervously, and I nod, my head throbbing. “Are you fucking pregnant, Skye?”
“No–no, of course not, Abby. That’s–Alex said it’s really rare–”
“Have you been doing anything to stop it from happening?”
“Uh… I don’t think so? I can’t have this conversation right now. I just pushed myself too far, and my powers hurt–”
“You smell pregnant,” she hisses, clutching my hand.
I sit up and look into her eyes. “What?”
“I can smell it on you. My mom’s a midwife, remember? I practically grew up in her practice. I’d recognize this scent anywhere. Shifters can sense that. Hell, I bet if Alex were a shifter, he would have noticed this right away.”
“I am not pregnant.”
“You are,” she says sternly, looking suddenly panicked. “I’d bet my life on it.”