Sleep of Death (Charlotte Westing Chronicles) (4 page)

Sierra nods. “Sorceresses, probably more than anyone else,
tend to enmesh themselves in the world. They get wrapped up in grand gestures of heroism—even though they often make things worse instead of better. But doing what they do requires a lot of supernatural energy and once their reserves are gone, they have to … recover, so to speak. Build it back up. And it takes a toll on them physically.”

I think of how wrung out I feel after a vision. “But she seriously looks bad. I don’t think it’s like us.”

“Oh, it’s not like us at all,” Sierra agrees. She twists the throw blanket from her chair around her fingers, thinking. “Let’s say you’re driving down a straight road, and you see a roadblock ahead. How much effort does it take for you to see that roadblock, and stop before hitting it?”

“Not much, I guess.”

“Now let’s say you crashed into that roadblock. How much effort would it take to put everything back the way it was,
before
you hit the roadblock?”

“A lot,” I say, wondering how it would even be possible
, before realizing that of course it
wouldn’t
be possible without supernatural power. “But Sophie made it sound like my vision arrived as a huge bolt of energy. This sounds like the opposite—like my visions are little, and her powers are big.”

“
Well, part of the difference is that Oracles don’t just see one obstacle down the road—we see all the obstacles, down all the forks, down
all
the roads. It’s also a question of perspective, because your powers are
different
. What Sophie sensed was how much power it would take for
her
to change what
you
were seeing. But of course she could only change it after it happened. And if the vision was simply too strong to resist—” Sierra pauses significantly here, working in a not-so-subtle reminder that there’s only one kind of vision she really thinks it’s okay to have, “—it was probably the sort of past she would have a hard time changing, assuming she could change it at all. A Sorceress who uses her powers to change something really significant might require several months or even years to ‘recharge,’ so to speak. Assuming the ill-advised effort didn’t kill her outright.”

Which explains why
Sophie said she
wasn’t available
. She assumed I might be looking for someone to help with … supernatural stuff. But she looks sick because she just did something big.
Averted a disaster
, is what she said.

She’s been using her powers.

Kinda like me.

A smile ticks up the sides of my mouth as I sit on the couch in Sierra’s room and
dig into the chapter on Sorceresses. Despite what Sierra said about Sophie not being the same as me, I can’t help but suspect we have plenty in common.

Chapter Four

“I think we’re done here,” Sierra says, dusting
off her hands. “How does it feel?”

I look around at the endless dome surrounding me, filled with images of the future.
Possible
futures. Endless versions of possible futures. After months of visiting it, it’s still hard to wrap my brain around. “I’m not sure how it’s supposed to feel,” I admit. “The first time I came here, the door was already in place.”

Sierra and I have been coming to my supernatural plane nearly every night since
the creature I’ve taken to calling “Jason Smith” died. Even though it’s no longer difficult to get here, I still have to use my focus stone. Sierra—once we used the necklace together to grant her entrance the first time—can get here by herself, without any help at all. It’s a daily reminder that while I spent weeks with Smith and, in spite of everything else, learned so much about my abilities, she was with “Jason” for
years
. I wonder if there’s any Oracle in the world more powerful than my aunt—and after the tone of near-reverence Sophie used on
me
today, I wonder if that makes her the most powerful person in the world.

Certainly Sierra
has been displaying incredible power here, and not the kind you use to spot a roadblock and stop your car; she’s been helping me repair the havoc that Jason Smith wreaked on my supernatural plane, my own personal bubble of future possibilities. When she told me two months ago that she’d help me clean up, I figured she meant helping me … I don’t know,
cleanse
it with some kind of magical-spell-thing. I don’t know exactly
what
I was expecting: a séance, maybe, or something involving a cauldron. But seriously grabbing sledgehammers, smashing his parasitic world to pieces, and dragging out the debris wasn’t what precisely what I had in mind. For an activity consisting entirely of mind and magic, it feels remarkably like manual labor.

So it’s
a good thing we can come to the plane nightly without tiring our physical selves, because we’ve been working on tearing Jason Smith’s dome apart for eight weeks.

But even though i
t doesn’t affect me physically, I’m discovering firsthand how much sleep is about taking a mental rest too. I once knew a girl who had vivid nightmares and would comment how tired they always made her. I was only ten and figured that meant she would wake up at night and be tired for want of sleep. Now I’m not so sure.

After Christmas break
I was lethargic and had total brain-fuzz in class for a while before I got used to it. I even resorted to taking naps in the afternoon to give my brain some true rest. Fortunately, like training for an endurance sport, things have slowly gotten better.

But I won’t lie;
I’ll be happy when we’re finished and I can tuck the necklace away for a while and just sleep—
really
sleep. We’re almost there. We finished emptying Smith’s dome last week. Since then, we’ve been patching the hole where the door used to be. The process is quite fascinating. After ripping them out, we dragged pieces of his world through his doorway and threw them over the edge of my mirrored floor—the edge that looked down into an eternal black hole. Two days ago, there wasn’t an edge anymore. We started piling the pieces in a heap instead, and the next night the pile would be gone. It’s bizarre to see that we’ve returned
eternity
to my dome. It defies reason.

But then, so does the dome itself.

I look at the wall where Jason Smith’s door was, and although you can tell it was once disturbed—Sierra told me the dome will always bear something akin to a scar—I think we’ve done well. The image projected on top of that spot is a little blurry, a touch distorted, but it’s easy to tell what it is.

“It looks great to me, Sierra,” I say.

“How does it
feel
?”

I look around and suck in a deep breath and try to decide if
it feels different at all. It anything, I would say it feels … “Clean.”

Sierra smiles.
“Good. That’s how it’s supposed to feel.” She places her hands on her hips and looks up at my dome. Her hair reaches almost to her waist with her head thrown back like that. It’s always pure strawberry blond here, like it used to be. Even without her “teaching me,” I’ve picked up a few tricks from simply watching her work here. Like the fact that I can change my appearance at will.

I probably took
too much advantage of that trick when I first learned it. The next thing I discovered is that it doesn’t make me feel very confident when I wake up in my real life and look like my normal, imperfect self. So I’ve stopped. I do learn, sometimes.

“Does your dome look different than mine?” I ask
as Sierra surveys the rounded walls.

“Not really. Mine tends
more toward blues than greens, but I suspect that’s simply our color preferences.” She smiles, a soft, sad smile. “But my plane feels like home to me. Yours doesn’t.”

“Do you—do you ever visit yours?”

“Most nights.”

I try to hide how shocked I am.
Most
nights? “I thought you didn’t believe in doing stuff like that.” She’s always shied away from pretty much
anything
having to do with our powers.

But she waves my concerns away. “Not on purpose. After going so often with … with Jason, I travel to my own dome naturally when I sleep. I don’t know that I
could
stop myself.” She brushes her hair back from her face. “Besides, I don’t do anything there—I just
am
. An observer. Possible futures are much less tempting than more certain ones, anyway.”

This
sounds terribly lonely to me. And exhausting. “So you never just … sleep?”

She shakes her head, but the way she stands, the tension in her neck, tells me she’d
rather
sleep. “Not since Jason.”

I think of how tired I’ve been lately, and it’s only been two months for me. Sierra’s been spending most of her nights with no mental rest for
more than fifteen years. The very
idea
makes me tired. And also makes me realize just how much there is to this woman I always considered myself so close to, that I simply don’t know. How much more is there to know? How much will I
never
know?

Part of me
wants to ask what she does with her long, empty hours there, but the moment of sharing secrets somehow passes and she smiles and says, “Ready to call it done?”

“I think so, yes. But I’m going to stay for a while.”

“Makes sense—new, fresh dome, all fixed and whole. You’ll like it better here now.” She takes a long breath and meets my eyes. Her eyes always look brighter here too. Maybe she doesn’t mind waking up and looking duller in the morning. “I won’t come back. Not after tonight.”

A tingle of insecurity rushes through me. “But you … you
could
get back if you wanted to, right? Now that I’ve let you in?”

“That’s right,” she says with a curt nod
, confirming my understanding. I haven’t insulted her, exactly, but I’ve come close. “But I won’t. I give you my word. Not unless you
ask
me to come again.”

“Forever?”

“The rest of my life.”

I nod, but then I realize it’s actually an especially serious promise from her. I remember that there’s an Oracle somewhere in the leadership of the Sisters of Delphi who has access to Sierra’s dome. The woman who helped Sierra
clean up after her own experiences with Jason Smith. That’s how Sierra knew what to do for me.

I want to ask how Sierra
knows that woman has kept her promise—if there’s a way to be sure no one has come in while you weren’t looking—but I can’t ask without making her think I don’t trust her. Or that I feel like I need a way to check up on her.

And I
do
trust her. Like so many other aspects of life as an Oracle, I just want to
know
. But I won’t ask tonight. Not after Sierra has spent so many weeks helping me clean up the remains of Jason Smith, who was
her
nightmare even before he was mine.

“I’ll see you in the morning
, then,” Sierra says, touching my shoulder. “It won’t be much longer. It’s wee hours already.”

“How can you tell?” My dome always feels timeless.
Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but always on its own timeline, completely separate from reality.

“I just can,” she says with a tight smile. I wait for her to assure me that I will too, but she doesn’t say anything else at all. Not even goodbye. She walks away, down the mirrored floor into a reflective eternity,
at some indiscernible point vanishing entirely. I’ve watched her do the exact same thing many times before, but tonight it’s forever.

Once she’s gone I crumple onto the mirrored floor
. I lie on my back, staring straight up; for the first time, I let myself really think about the vision I had today. Analyze it. I’ve spent the night distracting my thoughts, flitting from one subject to the next, never landing very long on anything. Keeping the dome bathed in the light of green, growing things.

Now that
Sierra has gone, my secret world takes on a distinctly red hue as my thoughts turn toward the possible future consequences of an impending murder. I spent the whole night fearful that Sierra would look up and find herself surrounded by screens filled with reenactments of the gruesome murder in that pastel-colored master suite.

But now that I’m alone
, I let my thoughts go to the one place they’ve wanted to go all night.

No—“wanted”
is the wrong word. I
don’t
want to see it again. Although, I have to admit, part of me has hardened to the sight of death in my visions. Seeing so many murders will do that to a person. Not that I’d say I’m
used to it
—just that I don’t melt into a sobbing mess anymore.

Is that a good thing? It feels dehumanizing. But then, I am something
beyond
human. So maybe it’s fitting.

Shaking my head
against the dismal thoughts, I close my eyes, focus, and soon I feel a sludgy darkness surround me. It’s similar to what I felt when I tried to picture Jason Smith months ago—though I didn’t know it was him at the time. Similar, but not identical. Darkness, yes. Desperation, yes. But not the aura of unnatural evil that accompanied Jason Smith. I shiver, remembering that icy, oily blackness. I guess it’s better that I’m not dealing with someone—some
thing
—as insidious as him. But a murderer nonetheless.
Don’t forget that
, I remind myself.

I open my eyes and the blood is everywhere.
Pools of it.
Twice as much as usual
, I realize ruefully,
because there are two victims
. Obvious and horrifying at the same time. I stare at the numberless potential futures around me. In some, the woman awakens as the man is being stabbed and tries to fight the killer off.

Succeeds.

If it’s in my dome, it’s
possible
. I squelch the surge of hope inside me and focus.

There’s another; this time the woman is first and the man continues to sleep, unharmed.

Also possible.

Each time I consider a different possibility, I see it. In one possible future, t
he victims sleep peacefully—safely—through the night. I focus on that one and the dome rolls, bringing it toward me. When it draws near I step into it, trying to figure out a way to make
this
future real. To cancel out the vision entirely. I remind myself that my dome—unlike Jason Smith’s—shows only
possible
futures. This future
can
happen.

But how do I
make
it happen? Exploring the future in my dome doesn’t yield any long-term consequences, but twice before, I’ve stepped into my own role—played the part of myself in a possible future and … then that future is the one that came to be.

Mayb
e it’s the illusion of control, but it’s a damn powerful illusion if that’s the case. Like when I saw my date with Linden in January, the night before it actually occurred, and then it happened that way, word-for-word. Creepy, almost. Or would have been if there weren’t so much kissing involved.

Did
I
do that, or did Smith? I hate that everything having to do with him is possibly contaminated. And even taking Jason Smith into consideration, every time I’ve
possibly
used the dome to change something, it’s involved
me
stepping into my own role.

I’m not in this future. I don’t think I can ev
en nudge things around in the dome.

I grit my teeth, wondering if I can only control
my own
future from here—if controlling others’ destinies here on my supernatural plane is more power than an Oracle is allowed to have. I know that I can do more when I revisit the visions with the focus stone—that I can influence other people’s choices. Maybe that’s what the visions are—a way of seeing the things I’ve been given the power to change, provided I have the stone. That actually rather makes sense to me. At the very least, it would be a
reason
for having visions that’s much more satisfying than simply
knowing
. I mean, what’s the point of seeing the future at all, if not to change it?