Natalie's Legacy [sequel to Natalie's Diary]

[1] Two of Swords

TWO OF SWORDS

Rhys

Morse code tapped into the inside of my head and all it said to me was danger.

This wordless language was only punctuated by another: ink black and featureless, placeless, timeless. A hand in the pane of glass. There was nothing past it. No matter how hard I looked, there was just the hand, backlit in the blazing twin beams of two headlights.

A scream broke. My breath caught in my throat and I twisted.

My vision clouded, a symptom of suddenly sitting upright in a room just bright enough to make everything seem like it was washed a monochromatic blue.

Instinctively, my fingers curled, searching for Jane, seized by a fear so sharp it wasn't so much a feeling as it was a state of my existence. She was right there under my fingertips, but the certainty she wouldn't be there, that this time she would be gone, persisted. Her pulse thrummed in her wrist, contradicting it in an even rhythm. 

Why was waking up such a shock? My body remembered how to occupy reality again, still slower than I needed. I forced myself up, the floor cold on my feet, grappling for the landscape of a room that wasn't mine.

The blinds crackled against my hand, too impatient for drawstrings. Beyond it, there was nothing but the view into the parking lot. Tungsten orange jumping off shallow puddles, reflecting streetlights like tiny portals into mirror worlds.

"Rhys." Jane sat up in bed, pushing her hair out of her face. Even in the dark, her concern was practically a tangible thing. If I reached out, I might have felt the denseness of it in the air between us.

My heart still in my throat, I let the blinds snap back into place. Only thin bands of outside light striped the floor.

Jane drew herself up and out of bed, reaching for my arm.

"Tell me what happened," she whispered.

The thing about Jane was that she didn't see the quality Natalie saw. It could have been that her entire life, people had always been compelled to trust her. Even Natalie, silent and powerful in her own way, unraveled her secrets for Jane. A twisted genius did not put all her faith in one girl for no reason.

Something about her pulled all the darkness out into the open, begged you to tell her your secrets.

I couldn't be one more person piling my anxiety onto hers.

She stood on her toes, running her fingers through my hair. Her eyes were soft, looking up at me from beneath thick dark lashes. 

Jane wasn't cute. She was never incidental enough to just be cute. That would imply a preciousness Jane lacked because she was always in the middle of deciding what to do next. She was enrapturing. 

"There was a tapping, like somebody was there and wanted you to know it," I said in spite of myself.

There was nobody there now. All I succeeded in was waking Jane from hard-won sleep. It only took months of trial and error to find a medication that wouldn't leave her sitting in a lukewarm bath full clothed. It took seconds for me to jar her from peace.

"It was a dream," she said, a phrase notably absent of the word just.

"It didn't feel like a dream."

It never did. I could never expect it to if I remembered anything about Natalie. Where did dreams stop and reality begin? That was one question among many for a psychic who could not answer.