ABOVE
Persephone stood on the bare mountaintop, her ruffled ivory dress whipping around her legs, her masses of white-blond curls streaming behind her. She was gauzy, immaterial, something blown between these boulders and caught upon one of them. The wind was fierce up here with no trees to block it. The world below was gloriously autumnal.
Adam Parrish stood beside her with his hands shoved into the pockets of his grease-stained cargo pants. He looked tired, but his eyes were clear, better than when she’d seen him last. Because Persephone was only interested in important things, she hadn’t considered her own age in a long time, but it struck her as she looked at him that he was quite new. That raw expression, that youthful hunch of his shoulders, the frantic sprawl of the energy inside him.
What a good day it is for this, she thought. It was cool and overcast, with no interference from the sun’s force or the lunar schedule or nearby road construction.
“This is the corpse road,” she said, aligning her body with the invisible path. As she did, she could feel something inside her begin to hum agreeably, a sensation very much like the satisfaction that came from aligning book spines on a shelf.
“The ley line,” Adam clarified.
She nodded serenely. “Find it for yourself.”
He stepped onto the line immediately, his face turning to gaze along its length as naturally as a flower looking into the sun. It had taken Persephone rather longer to master this skill, but then, unlike her youthful pupil, she had not made any bargains with supernatural forests. She was not much for bargains. Group projects, in general, were not her thing.
“What do you see?” she asked.
His eyes fluttered, his dusty lashes resting on his cheeks. Because she was Persephone, and because it was a good day for this, she could see what he was seeing. It was not anything related to the ley line. It was a confusion of shattered figurines on the floor of a lovely mansion. An official letter printed on county stationery. A friend convulsing at his feet.
“Outside of you,” Persephone reminded him mildly. She herself saw so many events and possibilities along the corpse road that no single one stood out. She was a far better psychic when she had her two friends Calla and Maura with her: Calla to sort through her impressions and Maura to put them in context.
Adam seemed to have potential in this department, though he was too new to replace Maura — no, that was a ridiculous way to put it, Persephone told herself, you don’t replace friends. She struggled to think of the proper word. Not replace.
Rescue. Yes, of course, that was what you did with your friends. Did Maura need rescuing?
If Maura had been there on the mountain, Persephone might have been able to say. But if Maura had been there on the mountain, Persephone wouldn’t need to say.
She sighed deeply.
She sighed a lot.
“I see things.” Adam’s eyebrows formed either concentration or uncertainty. “More than one thing. It’s like — like the animals at the Barns. I see things … sleeping.”
“Dreaming,” Persephone agreed.
As soon as he’d called her attention to the sleepers, they came to the forefront of her consciousness.
“Three,” she added.
“Three what?”
“Three in particular,” she murmured. “To be woken. Oh, no. No. Two. One should not be woken.”
Persephone had never been very handy with the concept of right and wrong. But in this case, the third sleeper was definitely wrong.
For a few minutes, she and the boy — Adam, she reminded herself; it was so difficult to find birth-given names important — both stood there, feeling the ley line course beneath their feet. Persephone gently and unsuccessfully attempted to find the bright strand of Maura’s existence in the tangled threads of energy.
Beside her, Adam was once again retreating inside himself, most interested, as always, in the thing that remained unknowable to him: his own mind.
“Outside,” Persephone reminded him.
Adam didn’t open his eyes. His words were so soft that the wind nearly destroyed them. “I don’t mean to be rude, ma’am, but I don’t know why this is worth learning.”
Persephone wasn’t sure how he thought such a reasonable question could be impolite. “When you were a baby, what made learning to talk worth it?”
“Who am I learning to communicate with?”
She was pleased that he immediately grasped the concept.
She replied, “Everything.”
BETWEEN
Calla was overwhelmed by how much shit Maura had in her room at 300 Fox Way, and she told Blue this.
Blue didn’t answer. She sorted through papers by the window, head tilted in consideration. From this angle, she looked exactly like her mother, compact and athletic and hard to tip over. She was weirdly lovely, even though she had unevenly clipped her dark hair all over her head and wore a shirt she’d attacked with a rototiller. Or perhaps because of these things. When had she gotten so pretty and so grown-up? Without getting any taller? This was probably what happened to girls when they lived on only yogurt.
Blue asked, “Have you seen these? They’re really good.”
Calla wasn’t sure what Blue was looking at, but she believed her. Blue wasn’t the sort of girl to hand out false compliments, even to her mother. Although she was kind, she wasn’t nice. Good thing, too, because nice people made Calla irritable.
“Your mother is a woman of many talents,” she growled. The mess was taking years from her life. Calla liked things you could rely on: filing systems, months with thirty-one days, purple lipstick. Maura liked chaos. “Such as aggravating me.”
Calla picked up Maura’s pillow. Sensations assaulted her. She felt all at once where the pillow had been procured, how Maura balled it up under her neck, the number of tears applied to the pillowcase, and the contents of five years of dreams.
The psychic hotline rang in the room next door. Calla’s concentration fluttered away.
“Damn it,” she said.
She was psychometric — just her touch could often reveal both an object’s origin and the owner’s feelings. But this pillow had been handled so often that it contained too many memories to sort through. If Maura had been there, Calla would have been able to easily isolate the useful ones.
But if Maura had been there, she wouldn’t have needed to.
“Blue, get over here.”
Blue theatrically clapped a hand on Calla’s shoulder. Immediately, her natural amplifying talent sharpened Calla’s ability. She saw Maura’s hopefulness keeping her awake. Felt the impression of Mr. Gray’s shadowed jaw on the pillowcase. Saw the contents of Maura’s final dream: a mirrored lake and a distantly familiar man.
Calla sneered.
Artemus. Maura’s long-gone ex-lover.
“Anything?” Blue asked.
“Nothing useful.”
Blue snatched away her hand then, aware that Calla was able to pick up as many feelings from girls as from pillows. But Calla didn’t need psychic powers to guess that Blue’s sensible, pleasant expression was at odds with the fire that burned furiously inside. School was imminent, love was in the air, and Blue’s mother had vanished on some mysterious personal quest more than a month before, leaving behind her newly acquired assassin beau. Blue was a hurricane lurking just offshore.