The bell rang, and fog still raised, vaguely aware of Miss Bennett telling me to pay more attention next time, I shoved everything into my book bag and walked out of the classroom. If Jillian had connected to me via mobile eye, she would be seeing everything I was seeing and hearing everything I was hearing right now.
“Jillian,” I murmured, holding a textbook in front of my mouth so no one would think I was talking to myself, “can you hear me? It’s me, Tessa. I’m alive. I’m trying to find you.”
The halls were so crowded. Was there an assembly or something? If Jillian was watching through me right now, she’d see that I was in a high school, not locked away in a gray cell somewhere. As I pushed through the students, I saw a blue flyer taped to the wall:
I let my gaze linger on it. “See that, Jillian? I’m in Lilybrook, Wisconsin,” I murmured behind my textbook. “Come to Lilybrook. It’s safe here.”
It was becoming hard to concentrate. Everyone was on their way to that pep rally, all walking and talking. So loud. The mass grew bigger and denser by the second, everyone chattering. Brian Edes plodded along. Susie Berkowitz and Tamara Yonkers rushed past him. Girls in acid-washed jeans, boys in brown leather jackets. Junie Lyons. Ben Guntherson.
The bell rang but the hall wasn’t emptying. Girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes passed by, intermingling with scruffy boys in flannel shirts.
Poodle skirts.
That wasn’t right.
The students in the hall weren’t really there. They used to be there, but they weren’t now. Now they were visions.
The pep rally flyer wasn’t there either.
The fog. I’d lifted it too high.
Dizzy, woozy, I stumbled to the row of shiny lockers, leaning against them for support. Big mistake—the wall forced more visions into me.
Rochelle Mellon in bell-bottoms and sporting big, feathered hair.
Darren Szostak wearing a royal blue T-shirt that boasted LILYBROOK HIGH CLASS OF ’88.
Tristan Connelly, in a hockey sweater and walking with a worshipful Melanie Brunswick to his left and a short-haired, laughing Nathan Gallagher to his right, just two years ago.
The visions of Tristan and Melanie continued past, but Nathan’s stopped. Stayed. Stared.
“N-Nathan?” Was he real?
No—just a vision. He disappeared, swallowed up by other visions, more and more visions, crowding the hallways, shoving and clamoring.
I tottered away from the lockers. But the visions were still there, multiplying, growing denser and louder.
I had to bring in the fog. I had to bring it in now, before I lost control and the visions became solid, and I started spiraling into nothingness.
I pulled it in, but it wasn’t enough.
I pulled it in lower. Thicker. Lower and thicker again.
The visions were gone, but I could see nothing but fog. I breathed in fog. My muscles turned into fog.
No sight. No air. No strength.
Why didn’t Tristan call? He didn’t call to warn me—
Then everything disappeared.
* * *
Blackness. Absolute and all-encompassing.
But even in the blackness, there was something. Something gleeful and threatening.
My Nightmare Eyes, darker than even the black fog surrounding me. Watching me. Dark as a starless night and black as a cavern of coal.
I could not move. The eyes kept me paralyzed. Their rage burned through me. They wanted to keep me in the black fog forever.
Something twinkled. Something silver.
~killers’ spawn
I heard the words, booming through my subconscious, low and rumbling, as if they were spoken aloud, or perhaps whispered in my ear. I struggled to escape from the hateful words, from the eyes’ hateful glare.
A knife. Long and sharp and silver. Its blade glittered and glimmered, sparkled and glowed.
I had to get away. I had to get away from the ominous eyes, from the glimmering silver.
I had nowhere else to go except deeper into the fog. With a desperate heave, I pulled the fog in closer, darker, thicker. It came, quick and solid, and it consumed the glimmering, glittering silver, it consumed the Nightmare Eyes, and it consumed me.
* * *
I found out, after I woke up in the APR’s clinic with Tristan holding my hand and begging me to come back to him, that a security guard had found me. Unconscious, alone and crumpled on the floor of the school’s hallway. The school nurse had called Dennis, who’d rushed me to the APR.
I also found out that Tristan never called because he hadn’t gotten a warning premonition about it. He never got a warning premonition of the visions overwhelming me. He never got a warning premonition of the fog overpowering me.
I also found out that it was the next day. While the Nightmare Eyes had me pinned under their hateful gaze, the sun had set, and risen again.
* * *
Dr. Sheldon, the kind, warm physician who had taken care of me in the Underground, placed one hand behind my neck and her other on my forehead as I sat on the curtained-off cot in the clinic. “Don’t move,” she said. Closing her eyes, she bowed her head.
She’d kept me here overnight while I was lost in the fog. Deirdre and Dennis had stayed until about midnight, and Tristan had stayed the entire night with me, holding my hand. Now he hovered close as Dr. Sheldon determined if I was ready to go back to the Connellys’ house.
“So much fog,” she muttered as she looked into my mind. “But there’s something else...something dark. A starless night. A cavern of coal.” She shuddered, then opened her eyes. “Any idea what that means?”
“That’s just my nightmare,” I said.
Tristan took my hand back. “She gets them every night.” His hair was messy and his button-down shirt was wrinkled from sleeping in it overnight, sitting up in a chair next to my cot.
“I can certainly understand why you have nightmares,” Dr. Sheldon said, “but that darkness is terrifying. It felt...hateful.”
Terrifying. Hateful. Shameful. It all burned through my blood. “It’s just a nightmare,” I muttered.
With a sigh, Dr. Sheldon made a note on her chart. “Well, you’re back in control of that fog of yours, and nightmares are no reason to keep you here.”
“So she can go home?” Tristan asked.
“Yes, she can.” Dr. Sheldon slipped her pen into her white doctor’s coat. Before she left, she put a warm hand on my shoulder. “Be careful with the fog, sweetheart. We don’t want that to happen again.”
“I will.” Relieved I could get out of here, I slipped from the cot. Tristan held out a hand for me to hold in case I was shaky, but I wasn’t. I changed from the blue cotton hospital gown and into the clothes Tristan brought for me—my usual jeans and one of his hoodies.
“I don’t understand why I didn’t get a premonition about you fainting,” Tristan said as we left the facility. A thin layer of snow had fallen while I was unconscious, and