Odin's Murder (13 page)

My brother sits back down in his chair. Faye twists the sleeves of her sweater. My hand is still warm from the heat of Ethan’s body. I’d felt his heart beating hard, and my fingers throb with the memory.

*

I spend the evening with Jeremy in a gazebo by the lake.  I don’t want to think about crows, or projects or Sonja and her creepy house. I don’t want to feel the rawness of revealing impossible secrets. I let myself get caught up in the roughness of the scratchy stubble on his chin and the way his palms curve around my shoulders. I’m halfway in his lap when he eases me back, fingers lingering on the sides of my breasts.

“Wow,” he breathes. “You are... wow.”

I lean in again but he holds me at bay. I give my best hurt eyes, and bite my bottom lip.

“You trying to get me fired, sweetheart?”

The nickname irritates me. “No, I’m trying to have some fun.”

“You’re doing a great job, but we’re in public out here, and you are a student, after all. I’m pretty sure it was in my contract to keep my hands off you.”

“Section three, bullet point five.” I kiss his jaw anyway. “No romantic or intimate relationships between students and staff.”

“Huh?”

“I read your contract online.”

He laughs, impressed, and that earns him another kiss. I pull back the collar of his shirt to find the smooth skin of his collarbone and trace the mark there. “What’s this?”

“Oh,” he says, reaching a hand up. “Er. It’s a henna tattoo. It’ll wash off, eventually. Some of us partied the first night. I hardly remember it.”

“Too much to drink?” I touch the mark with my fingertips.

“Something like that. Teacher initiation, I guess. Zoe and some of the others have them too.”

“I like it.”

“You would.” He kisses me between words, soft, no white-hot explosions in my brain. And despite his protests, his fingers drift higher, hands cupping. “You sign up for anything tonight?”

“Not tonight. Poetry tomorrow.”

He laughs, warm breath down my cleavage, thumbs searching. “I can’t see you reciting angry femme poems.”

“My roommate is performing.” I shake my head at the idea of tiny Faye perched on a stool in the student lounge. “Should be interesting. You never know what’s going to come out of that girl’s mouth.”

“She’s the little hobo girl, right? You think she’ll be bad?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. She can be outrageous. Like she’ll wear some fertility goddess phallic necklace thing under her dress and ugh, those awful sweaters. I’ve seen her changing, though, she’s got a killer body hiding in all that frumpy mess.”

Jeremy tilts his head, openly ogling. He wets his lips and says, “I doubt it’s as killer as all this.”

I raise an eyebrow, and open another button on my dress. “It’s hard to top perfection.”

13.

Extraordinary

After dinner, I’ve a couple hours to kill until I’m required in the kitchen. I spend a nice thirty minutes of that with Danielle, who brings me her dessert. She doesn’t require me to talk, or think about things I don’t want to, or risk a parole violation.  Her lips are soft and taste of the peach cobbler, and smile beneath mine when I untie the pink strings of the bathing suit top that’s hidden under her t-shirt.

“This way,” she whispers, linking her fingers through mine, pulling me toward the lake, but when we get near the gazebo, she stops and pouts. “Crap. Someone beat us to it.”

Low laughter slides between the shadows and the crickets. I recognize both voices.

“Ow, easy,” Danielle unlaces her fingers from my fist. “C’mon. Let’s go to the little church. Where you took my picture the other night.”

“Um,” I stall, looking toward the dorms, and then the opposite direction, to the copse of trees that shade the chapel. “I don’t have—”

I stop, because I don’t know how far she wants to go, and girls get mad when a guy assumes too much, but protection wasn’t on the list of what-to-bring-to-SHP, and Mary hadn’t added a box of condoms to the dopp kit that contained soap, sunscreen, and to my surprise, a razor. I doubt Julian has any, either, and I sure as hell am not going to ask Jeremy.

“Oh, did you sign up for an EA?” Danielle misunderstands my pause. “Bummer. I hoped I could be your evening activity.”

“Didn’t you sign up for something?”

“My group is organizing the poetry reading tomorrow, but I was going to bail on them. If you weren’t busy.”

I want to be busy. With her and that barely-there bikini, but I’ve got kitchen duty and I’m pretty sure Constance has a low tolerance for being stood up for work detail. “Yeah, I signed up with my team, too.” The lie comes easily.

She fumbles inside her shirt and pulls the pink strings through the collar. I tie them in place, and then loosen them when she squeaks.

I walk her to the quad, force a chuckle when she murmurs “Maybe tomorrow?” hot in my ear, and head back to the dorms, all kinds of irritated.

*

Julian is at his desk, muttering at his laptop. He’s got books and notebooks all around him, on the bed and on the floor. He grunts a “Hey.” without looking up.

“Hey.” I keep my tone easy, testing the mood, but his silence seems due to the book he’s absorbed in, rather than our earlier argument.

I change out of my dishwater-soaked shirt, and sit cross-legged on my bed, grabbing the military surplus bag that the pawnshop guy threw in to sweeten the deal when I bought my camera. The yellow envelope from Sonja’s house gets stuck in the strap, and slides out into my lap.

The package has some weight to it, and jingles a little when I shake it. I stare at the writing on the front.

“This is weird,” Julian mutters.

“What is?” I watch the back of his head as I speak, flip the envelope over, coax the self adhesive flap open.

“This book Dr. A. gave us. I’ve seen it before, or at least parts of it.”

“Well, you do read a lot, dude.”

A tangle of silver spills into my hand. It’s one of those bracelets women wear with the miniature things hanging off; Mary has several of them. This one has stars and a little wire nest with pearl eggs, and a half inch cage with a bird swinging inside. The chain is solid, sturdy links of antiqued metal, and in between the charms lay five black birds, with a tiny metal disk attached to each tail. The flat pendants are old, precious metal glowing under tarnish. I’ve seen them before somewhere, or ones like them; they’re etched with jagged letters I can’t read.

The one in the center gleams at me, its symbol an arrow pointing up. I rub my thumb over the surface, and the patina wears away, leaving mirror-shine silver. With no pressure at all, the rune slips from its link, and the arrow winks at me from my palm.

“This is can’t be right,” Julian says.

“What isn’t?” I slide the bracelet back in the envelope, seal it back, and drop it in my bag. The bit of metal goes in my shirt pocket.

My roommate crouches on the floor, and starts dragging milk crates out from under the bed. “S through V, no, G through L, no, here we are. A.” He fumbles through notebooks and loose leaf binders, and digs out three.

“Dude, you really have six crates of books under your bed?” I ask him.

“Eight.” He flips one open and thumbs through the pages.

“You need a girlfriend, man. Seriously.”

Julian looks up, startled, then shrugs, and grins. “Nah, they’d cut into reading time.”

He
really
needs a girlfriend. I turn my camera over in my hands, looking for damage to the body, but nothing is broken. I remove the lens and then dust it and the zoom with the little brush attached to the rubber squeezy bulb that blows air. I sight through both lenses, a wide pan view of the room, books stacked on every flat surface, and then zoom in on Julian’s ear.

No mysterious sofas.

I change the batteries in the camera, take out the memory card, check the camera settings then put the card back in. The shots are all there. No extras.

I pull out my portfolio. I flip through the prints, checking against what, I don’t know, but needing the reassurance that nothing weird had popped up there, either. I lift my camera again, trying to think back, to figure out how I could have seen what was going on a block and a half away. Faye and Memory were already there, at that point. Cherry had grabbed my hand, pulled me after her, excited but fearless—

My vision shifts. A quick shutter view of blond hair, yellow stubble on a sunburned neck, pale stripe where a lanyard sits. But Jeremy is nowhere near our dorm room. He’s in the gazebo, making out with—

“So how long have you noticed them?” Julian’s voice cuts through the chaos in my head.

“Noticed what?”

Memory’s legs? Her skirt wrenched high, light tanned skin draped all over my bed like she belonged there, when I walked into the room? No, even before that, walking along the sidewalk, not on it, on the way to the cafeteria—

“The crows,” her brother says.

Oh. Right.

“After my father, after he died, I guess.” I stand, restless, looking in the mirror, though I don’t want to, at the features that show very little of my mother’s too-delicate bone structure. Julian is watching me in the reflection. I rub my palm over my scalp. The hair is now long enough to move with the friction.

“And the pictures?” he asks. “When did you start taking them?”

“I got the camera three years ago.” I smile down at the one possession I truly owned, bought with cash I’d earned myself. He wants to ask more, I can tell by the way his eyes are darting around, but he just nods. “It’s just a few photos, dude.” I tell him. “I don’t have a personal flock that follows me from country to country, and my dreams are normal dreams, not visions through someone else’s eyes—”

Oh, hell.
My hair is only half an inch long, but every strand stands straight up. I step backward. Sit down on the bed.

“Tell me.” I rub my forearms with my palms. “Tell me how it works. With your sister.”

“We don’t know how it works.” Julian kicks a milk crate out of his way, sits down on his own bed. “We’ve studied everything. Medical journals, new-age self-help books, Freud, Jung, everything.”

“What do you see?” My voice is tight in my throat.

“I see what she dreams.”

“Through her eyes?” I ask. “Or are you in the dream beside her?”

“I see what she sees. I’m in her head.” He glances at the journal on his desk. “Or she’s in mine.”

“Can you hear her thoughts? Can you talk to each other?”

“No.” He shakes his head. He’s perched on the edge of the mattress, arms wrapped around his knees. His profile is the same as his sister’s, with thinner lips, now pressed tight.

“What about during the day, when you’re awake? Can you see through her eyes then?” When he only shakes his head, I push. “Not even like flashes? Like if you’re looking through something?”

“No. What are you getting at?” He sits up straight again. “This isn’t a joke.”

“I know. I believe you.” I look away, hold up the Nikon. “My camera. It went weird, today. Like when I looked through it, I saw stuff that wasn’t there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw stuff I shouldn’t have seen. Like things I wasn’t close enough to see.” I breathe deep, already feeling stupid for what I’m about to say. “I saw what the girls were looking at.”

“Through their eyes?”

I don’t say,
no, just your sister’s.
“I saw the sofa in Sonja’s house. When I was two blocks away.”

“Let me see.” He reaches for the camera.

“They didn’t show up. They didn’t save to the data stick.”

“So it was all in your head?” But when I nod, he doesn’t call me a liar. “Next time, write it down, or draw it, and document the time,” he says. His eyes are sharp on mine. “What is she doing now?”

“Jeremy.”

He makes a face. “What about Faye?”

I pick up the camera, and then put it down. “Dude, this is creepy. Like a total invasion. What if she’s in the shower or something?”

His jaw drops open. “Um. Yeah, okay, no.”

But I won’t see Faye in my camera, no matter how hard I look, I know. This is about Memory and me, and our lightning kiss.

“Is this the first time it’s happened?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

I don’t look away from his stare until he flops back on the bed, and faces the ceiling. “I wonder if it’s us, or this place?”

“What do you mean?”

“Her dreams have been getting worse. Darker, lonelier. Less flying, more bird skulls. But the last one? It was too vivid. Like a Technicolor 3D horror movie, start to finish. And it hurt.”

“But it’s just dreams, right? They don’t mean anything.”

“You don’t get it.” He toes off his sneakers, kicks them to the floor.

“So tell me.”

“You ever have nightmares?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Everyone does.”

“How much of them do you remember? A second of terror as you fall from nowhere? The old crone with the teeth; you know she’s horrid, but you’ve forgotten what her face looks like. You wake up freaking out after seeing the monster in the closet, but he’s gone by the time you eat your breakfast toast, right?

“Sure.”

“My sister doesn’t forget. Every second of every paralyzing terror, since we were old enough to dream. And she gets mine, too.”

I reach into my pocket, pull out the tiny silver pendant, pinch it between my thumb and forefinger until they’re both numb. When I put it back in my pocket, and rub my fingertips together, I can still feel it, indented in my skin.

A whirr and a bleep of his laptop powering down are the only noises in the room. Outside, a door closes on a feminine giggle.

“What about girls?” I ask, struck tactless with the thought. “Does she see you dreaming of girls?”

“Don’t ask me that, dude.” He covers his face with an elbow.

“Does
she
? Dream about guys? Does she sketch that, too?!”

“No!” His voice is muffled. “And I told you, I don’t fucking remember, okay?”

I try not to laugh at him, and mostly succeed, because that would suck, your own sister knowing your darkest kink, the things you won’t even let your self-conscious see awake. An image slides beneath my eyelids, a girl, all legs and lips, covered in stolen diamond jewelry, draped over her skin, her hips. I jerk my eyes open, blink twice.