Phantom Eyes (Witch Eyes) (24 page)

thirty-one

Trey didn’t ask any questions when I directed him to get in his truck and start driving. We picked Jade up on the way, and she’d dressed for something more clandestine than I had planned. A black turtleneck, black skinny jeans, and knee-high leather boots. I let the siblings take the seats in the front, and I squeezed myself into the space in the back. I needed to focus on other things anyway.

“Okay, now that Jade’s here, will you
please
tell me what we’re doing? I’ve only got half a tank. At least tell me if I need to fill it up,” Trey asked, having clamped down on his curiosity for an admirable twenty minutes.

“First, we need to get a big group of people together. Do you think we can throw together some sort of benefit at the Harbor Club by tomorrow night?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jade tapped the clock on the console. “It’s almost one in the morning. And you want to throw a dinner party in eighteen hours? It’s not possible.” Even though the radio was on the lowest volume it co
uld be on and still be considered “on,” Jade kept fiddling with the station. “What do you need a big group for, anyway?”

“The next part of the plan. The more people we can get together, the better.”

“Well,” she said, pursing her lips in the mirror. “There’s always the dance. Winter formal’s tomorrow night. That work? Or do you need adult-type people?”

The winter formal? Seriously? It was like a sign from the deities behind every high school rom-com I’d watched growing up. “No, that’ll work.”

“Braden!” Trey’s voice was sharp. “Explaining. Now.”

I huffed. Of course Trey would run right over talk about the dance. “Riley told me about a weakness of Lucien’s that I can exploit,” I said, because it was as simple as I could boil it down.

“Aren’t you scared that he’s going to see what you’re planning?” Trey asked, watching me from the rearview mirror.

I shook my head. “And that brings me to what Grace told me. The more people that know about her, the more likely it is that Lucien finds out. So she’s been hiding all of us from his abilities.” I nodded towards Jade. “That was how Lucien knew about us leaving together. He read it in your future. But she fixed her oversight after that.”

Jade turned around in her seat. “What do you mean ‘her oversight’?”

I shifted in my seat, and smoothed out the creases in my pants. “That thing you wanted to talk to Drew about,” I said evenly, despite the fact that I had no business knowing about it. “Lucien had something else in mind for you.”
And that’s probably the reason that Drew had to die, because there was going to be an Armstrong to replace him.
The thought made the bile churn in my stomach.

“Oh,” Jade said quietly, sitting back in her seat.

The hurt in her voice got Trey’s attention, and he wouldn’t let it go. “What’s he talking about? What thing? You and Drew were talking? You promised me that was over.”

“And you promised Mom that you wouldn’t see Braden anymore,” Jade said, sounding exhausted. “We tell people what they want to hear. It’s what we do.”

“Wait, you told your mom you wouldn’t see me anymore?” I asked, forgetting anything about concentration or focus. I leaned forward in my seat, like proximity to Trey would somehow make this clearer.

“It was a while ago,” he said, evading an honest answer. “Before anything seriously started to happen with us. She was just worried that you were going to screw up her timeline of my life.”

“You could have always told her no,” Jade said. “She got used to controlling you because you let her. It’s not her fault you flipped the script once Braden came to town.”

“Are you seriously defending her?” he demanded. “Do we really need to go over this again?”

“I’m not defending her,” Jade said, raising her voice. “I’m just saying you were the perfect son until one day you weren’t. No wonder she went over the top.”

“I can’t believe you’re seriously doing this right now.” The
car started to accelerate as Trey took his worsening mood out on the roads. I’d been in a car with him once before when he’d lost his temper. It hadn’t ended well. I hoped we could avoid a repeat performance. “Unbelievable.” Trey’s seething frustration was a tangible thing, it pressed into every inch of space inside the truck, stinking like ashtrays and muddy water.

“Stop here,” I said calmly. When Trey didn’t stop fast enough, I reached out with my magic and cut the feed of gas to the engine and eased the brake pedal down. Trey spun around in his seat, fixing me with a dark look. I didn’t say anything, just pushed him towards the door. Reluctantly, he got out, and I climbed out over his seat and followed.

We were in the middle of town, equidistant from the Lansing and Thorpe homes that marked the western- and easternmost points of Belle Dam. It was a residential street like any other, only this one was important. At least for tonight.

I knew I needed a big gesture, but there were also things I could set into motion tonight that would play out almost immediately. When Jade got out, I held out my hand and she gave me the blank greeting card and a pen. I scrawled a quick message (“She knows about the money”), shoved it in the envelope, and tucked it into the first mailbox on the left side of the street.

The Lansing siblings looked at me with a mixture of annoyance and expectation. Their fight might have ended unceremoniously, but it was clear they’d both turn on me if I didn’t start explaining myself.

“Lucien sees futures, which are shaped like tree branches. They all split off from somewhere. If you can get down to the root of something, though, and cut it out completely, it wipes out a whole line of futures.”

I nodded towards the darkened house. “He forgot the mail last night. He’ll wake up in the morning, remember, and see my note. He’ll confess the gambling to his wife, she’ll force him to get help, and he’ll never end up going to Jason for help paying the mortgage. Because he doesn’t get indebted to Jason, he doesn’t take the promotion that Jason gets him, which means he doesn’t move. And if he doesn’t move, his grandson never inherits the house where something integral happens when he’s sixteen.” I shrugged. “A lot of futures change based on what happens in that house. Now they don’t.”

Both of them stared at me blankly.

“Come on,” I said. “Three more things to do before we can stop for the night. Next I need a St. Christopher medallion, two dollars in quarters, and a pocketknife. Then we can go to the preschool.”

Their blank looks got even blanker.

“I’m kidding,” I said with an annoyed sigh. “Seriously, you guys are no fun.”

thirty-two

Three more stops took the rest of the night and well into the next morning. We stumbled into Jason’s house a few hours before noon and down the hallway to my room. Jade walked right into one of the guest rooms, while Trey hesitated outside my door.

I pulled him into my room. Not that it mattered much, because less than a minute later he’d fallen asleep on my side of the bed, his shoes and jacket still on. I huffed out a breath, sat down next to him, and finished what he should have, pulling the shoes off his feet, and his arms out of the jacket. Then I pulled the comforter out from under him and wrapped him up in it.

I left him there and wandered down to the library. Even though my body was exhausted (when was the last time I’d actually
slept
?) my mind still charged ahead like business as usual. I couldn’t waste any time with sleep. Not when I didn’t know how things would turn out.

Jason had left the chess sets where I’d abandoned them weeks before, but the pieces had all been shifted. Games that I’d been playing had their fortunes reversed, and now the losers were winning and the winners were in retreat. Was it his way of telling me that things would be okay? Or maybe his hope that life would follow the chess analogy closer than usual?

The dance was ideal for what I wanted to do next. Luring Lucien out into public was integral, and thinning the future pool would help with that. When thousands of threads disappeared, leaving gaps in the mosaic, Lucien would notice. Be curious. And at the dance, I was going to make him have a full-blown panic attack.

Or I’d die trying.

Before I knew it, it was time to get ready for the dance. I wasn’t sure where the afternoon went, but I had a sneaking suspicion that my exhaustion was a bandit hiding in the blind spots in my vision, snatching out bites of time for moments of total blackout. More than once, I started working my mind through something only to suddenly realize my thoughts had been disrupted and my neck muscles were unusually stiff.

It was impressive with how little effort Jade put into the formal. She’d brought a dress along at some point, and I meant to ask if she’d just moved into the house entirely, but I figured it was best if I didn’t raise the subject. Trey was gone when I went back to my room, the bed made and no sign of him.

“You should talk to your brother,” I said, after coming back from a shower that had seared the skin right off my body.

“About?” Jade lay on my bed, her hair tossed casually above her.

“You know what,” I said. Just because we kept skirting the issue didn’t mean I wouldn’t force it. If Jade really was pregnant, she was going to need
someone
to look out for her.

I headed into the closet, grumbling at the size. It was bigger than the bedroom I’d had growing up. Maybe even bigger than my room and John’s combined.

“What are you going to wear?” Jade asked, which was code for
We’re not talking about it.
Which was fine. I probably wasn’t the best sounding board at the moment anyway.

I slogged my way to the back of the closets where the suits were. Jason really must have assumed I would be the junior version of him, because there were a dozen identical black suits lined up one next to the other. But I didn’t want black. Black was Jason’s color, the same way that white was Catherine’s. I was somewhere in between, and so it was fitting that I pulled the only gray suit off the rack. It wasn’t one solid color, but made up of slightly different shades of gray.

Jade sat up in surprise when I walked out of the closet with a suit in one hand, as well as some of the sunglasses she was always pressing me to wear.

“Shirt?” she asked, eyeing me critically.

I handed her the suit, then walked back into the closet, emerging a few seconds later with a button-up that was a slightly brighter shade of gray. Jade frowned until I reached inside the suit and pulled a dark burgundy tie out that matched the suit’s material perfectly. Setting the shirt inside, and putting the tie on top showed the ensemble and the way the patterns played off each other.

She raised an eyebrow slowly. “After all this time, you suddenly have a keener fashion sense than me?” She looked annoyed. Jade looked down at her phone, sitting on the edge of the bed, her frown intensifying. “I texted my brother almost an hour ago, and he hasn’t responded yet.”

Panic start scurrying up my spine until I saw the smirk that she was trying desperately to hide. “What did you text him?” I asked, putting a clamp down on my emotions.

“I just asked him what color his dress was going to be,” she said innocently. “You have to get a corsage that matches, right?”

Jade raised, and then summarily dismissed, the problem of tickets. “You were supposed to buy them weeks ago. They collect them at the door.” Jade tapped her nails against the hood of her car. “But they’ll probably let us in anyway,” she mused, ducking down to check her makeup. “I can’t think of anyone that would want to piss my mom off. Jason either.”

But to her credit, riding in the car with Jade wasn’t the white-knuckled nightmare it had been in the past. If anything, it was making a case that Jade had been replaced by a body snatcher. She obeyed the speed limit, barely talked, and focused on the road.

I think it was the closest that either one of us had come to ackn
owledging the baby elephant in the room. Jade herself looked amazing. Her honey-colored hair was pinned back in a way that I still couldn’t figure out. It didn’t look like hair product, it was too short for a tie or a clip, but all the same it swept up and back, and looked fantastic on her. She wore a sa
pphire-blue dress, darker than the aura I’d learned to channel recently, but easily just as beautiful. She’d even paired them with real sapphires in her ears and around her neck.

If there was any sort of “Best Dressed” award at this thing and we didn’t win, then the city deserved whatever it got in the future.

The hall was on the south side of town, far from the shore and downtown. It wasn’t anything special, just a flat, rectangular building with some hedges for landscaping. Colorful dresses abou
nded as many of the other kids attending straggled in as well. The weather was warmer than it had been, the leftover snow and ice melting overnight while we’d been busy driving all over Belle Dam.

No one stopped us as Jade walked right past the teachers at the door, with me in her wake. If anything, the teachers who saw us started whispering amongst themselves more than any of the students.

The hall itself was a far cry from the mediocrity of the building’s exterior. Someone had rigged up tiny spotlights, pastel shades of blue, purple, and green. The spotlights moved every few seconds, just slightly, but it was the effect they created that was so impressive. Someone had hung probably a thousand prism crystals, and the light beaming through them created a shimmering landscape on the ceiling.

I laughed at the sight of it because it was a rare moment of unexpected beauty. That someone had thought this up, and brought their version of a winter wonderland to life was impressive, to say the least. Round tables done up in blues and whites, along with matching centerpieces, lined one side of the hall. Everything had been considered, and it was exactly like walking into the kind of school dance that I’d only ever seen on television before.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Jade said on my arm, trying to sound bored but looking impressed all the same.

“Are the dances always like this?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I think so. The school always goes all out. I think the dances were really important to … ” she stumbled over her words, and then forced herself to continue, “to Catherine when she was in high school, and that never seemed to go away.”

Just another way Catherine’s influenced the high school.
But something like this wasn’t Catherine’s usual brand of awful. Why couldn’t they do more things like this, and less with the trying to ritually murder each other?

We walked further into the hall, and I led her towards one of the corners, one with a good vantage point of both the way we’d come in and the hall itself. There were about a hundred students here. I guessed that there were five to six hundred kids enrolled at the high school. I leaned closer, to be heard over the sound of the music. “How many people do you think are going to be here tonight?” I asked her.

Jade’s eyes narrowed in thought. “A lot of the seniors, probably. Last winter formal and all. A lot of underclassmen, too, because it’s the last dance of the year that’s open to all students. Prom’s for juniors and seniors only.” She did some quick math in her head and said, “Maybe about three hundred all together?”

Three hundred would work. I licked my lips, pulled the sunglasses from my pocket and slid them on. “That’s perfect,” I said, smiling wide.

“Do you know the only thing worse than a Thorpe and a Lansing going to the dance together?” A voice interjected loudly, over the music. “When two Lansings fight over which one is really his date.”

Trey stood there, looking amused. He’d gone the traditional route, wearing a black suit with the jacket unbuttoned, a black vest visible underneath, hiding a gray tie. He looked …

“Wow,” I said, forcing my eyes up to his face. My own suit felt a little tight around the shoulders, but Trey’s looked …

“Hi,” he said softly, with a warm smile.

“No, that’s fine, I spent hours getting dolled up to be the dateless girl,” Jade said with a sigh, stepping away from us. Trey’s eyes drifted towards her, and his expression tightened, but she pressed her hand against his arm. “I won’t go far,” she promised. “I know Braden didn’t decide to come to the dance because he didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday night. Something’s happening.”

“Something’s always happening,” Trey muttered. He didn’t like his sister getting involved in the goings on in Belle Dam, but none of us could pretend like it wasn’t happening. Jade wasn’t stupid. She was actually more astute then most of us gave her credit for. Mostly because she was smart to stay out of things as much as possible. She knew this wasn’t her fight.

Jade seemed to realize that we’d exhausted this particular topic of conversation, at least as far as it could happen in public. “Save me a dance,” she said to me, squeezing my arm even as she looked over my shoulder for someone’s date to snag. Her neck craned as she scoured above the heads and shoulders of most of the student body, and it took me a moment to realize what she was doing. Looking for Drew.

I blanched and looked away.

“Come on,” Trey said a few moments later, nodding towards the dance floor. One of his hands reached up and carefully pulled the sunglasses off of my face. Having them back on had been nice: a barrier against everything that was going on. I could hide behind them, and no one could see what I was thinking. “I want to see who I’m dancing with,” he said, tucking them into my pocket.

I pulled up short, shaking my head. “I don’t dance. And besides, I’m not here to have a good time. You
know
that.”

He had an easy smile on his face. “One dance won’t set the world on fire.”

“I kind of hate you,” I whispered, even as I let him lead me out into the middle of the dance floor. His timing was impeccable, of course, because the moment he stopped and turned around to face me, the music changed and a slow song started. Of course. Trey’s smile erupted into a full-blown laugh, and his arms slid easily around my waist, tightening the gap between us. I slid my arms around his neck, and ducked his head so we were eye to eye.

“Coincidence?” I asked, as one of his hands shifted, sliding under the bottom of my jacket.

“Maybe,” he agreed, dragging his mouth closer to mine, and I couldn’t look away from his lips. I bit the inside of my cheek, and looked up into his eyes. We swayed and moved to the beat of the song, and even though I’d never slow danced before, Trey kept control of both of us, setting a pace that I could just follow.

It wasn’t until the song hit the refrain that I really started to laugh and loosen up. “You had this planned,” I accused.

“Maybe,” he said, noncommittal. I only knew the song because Uncle John had listened to it a lot when I was growing up. “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel.

“You are a nerd,” I told him seriously. “Did you scour through every song that had ‘eyes’ in it somewhere so that there’d be a
moment
?”

The humor dropped off his face, and Trey pulled away enough to look over my shoulder. His mouth had settled into a sharp line.
Oh.
He had. And here I was, being an asshole about it.

“
Sorry, I don’t do well with romantic gestures,” I said, leaning closer into him. “My first kiss was while I was on the run from some hellhounds. Did I ever tell you that story?” Trey finally looked down at me, and though he tried to stay stony and cranky
looking, a smile was threatening to break out. “That guy was a good kisser,” I sighed. “I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“Chased away, I imagine,” Trey said seriously. “You
have
heard of breath mints, haven’t you?”