Insomnia sucked. It was even worse with a pulsing headache. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
All right, I had a lot on my mind as well. I had my powers back, but I couldn’t help but worry that Edie was more vulnerable now that she had less of them. I had to respect her decision, though. As much as I disliked it, I understood it.
Then there was the Tessa thing. The police and press had remained quiet about what had happened to her, and Tessa seemed more interested in pestering Edie than sharing useful information with her. Which meant she continued to annoy Edie when she was trying to concentrate in class. It wouldn’t be long until her grades suffered as a result. No one could withstand that level of annoying forever.
Not wanting to waste reading time on tossing and turning, I sat up. Tilly, disturbed by my movement, opened one eye and glared at me. I smiled at her. She rolled over and fell back to sleep on her side, with her head hanging off the end of the bed. She always had loved sleeping at weird angles.
The house seemed different now that Edie was back. But in a good way. It had more life in it again. The energy had changed.
It was quiet, though.
That was why I’d chosen the house. It was a quiet area, where, when the wind blew a certain way, I could hear the motorway in the distance, humming like a lullaby.
It wasn’t the motorway I heard this time, though. It was whistling.
Was Tilly snoring?
I reached over to lift her head and help her back on the bed, but as she woke up, I realised it wasn’t her breathing. It was coming from outside. And it was getting louder, too.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, but this time, it seemed closer.
There was no particular tune or pattern to it. It was just enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
The more frequently I heard it, the harder it became to dismiss it as a dream or auditory hallucination. Seeing Tilly react to it proved to me it wasn’t just in my head.
I rubbed at my ears, in the hopes I was actually hearing things, but the noise was still there when I stopped.
Tilly stood, looking around. Her back arched. If she could hear it, there was no way I was dreaming it. But what was it?
We occasionally got drunken people talking or arguing or whistling as they walked past on their way home from the pub. But something about this felt different. Unnerving. Paranormal. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but it gave me goosebumps.
I picked up my phone and called Ben. It seemed silly, but I needed to speak to a grown up right then. Even if it was three in the morning.
‘Niamh? What’s wrong?’ He sounded alert.
‘Can you hear it?’ I held the phone out. The whistling continued.
‘Hear what?’
‘The whistling!’ I whispered. ‘Someone’s whistling and it’s getting closer.’
‘I don’t hear anything except our voices and Fadil snoring,’ said Ben.
Great so I’d woken him up for nothing. ‘Are you sure? It sounds supernatural.’
‘What makes a whistle sound supernatural?’
‘Like…it’s close but not. High but low. No particular tune, but haunting.’
‘You were probably just imaging it in your sleep,’ he suggested, making me feel even more paranoid.
‘Tilly heard it too!’
She was now sitting on the edge of my bed, her head cocked to one side, as if she was listening for the noise.
‘I wish you were here right now,’ I said. Even though he couldn’t do anything, and I might’ve dreamt it, his presence would’ve reassured me and made it easier for me to fall back to sleep. Not because he was a male who needed to protect me, but because he was Ben. My Ben.
‘Me too,’ said Ben.
*
‘Did you hear weird noises last night?’ I asked Edie as we sat down to breakfast. The breakfast news played in the background, talking about nothing particularly interesting. Tilly lay at our feet, underneath the breakfast bar, hoping for a scrap. It never happened, but she continued to dream.
Edie sliced into her fried egg on toast. ‘What kind of noises?’
‘Whistling, I guess.’
I still wasn’t totally sure what I’d heard. But whistling was the only word I could think of to describe it. And, despite what Ben insisted, I hadn’t dreamt it.
‘At first I thought it was Tilly snoring, but then she seemed to react to it as well.’
Edie shook her head, causing her freshly dyed brown hair to fall into her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear. ‘No. But I slept pretty heavily last night. Was it loud?’
‘Not really. But Tilly only settled down when it faded away. Ben couldn’t hear it either.’ I shifted in my seat, feeling uncomfortable that I’d mentioned him because of how much I’d wanted him to be there and convince me I was sane.
Edie looked up from her plate. ‘Ben was here?’
‘No. I rang him.’
‘In the middle of the night?’ She didn’t try to hide her surprise, making me feel worse for waking him up over something seemingly stupid. But then, she seemed to switch tones: ‘Maybe he was too far away to hear it.’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’ Although the phone hadn’t picked it up, either, so I wasn’t totally convinced. I pushed a bit of toast around my plate, nervous to bring up what I really wanted to ask her. ‘Would you mind if he did stay over? Like, just in general. Not just when stuff is going on.’
Edie shrugged. ‘Doesn’t bother me. So long as I can still get to college on time.’ She shoved a forkful of egg and toast into her mouth as if the topic was no big deal.
I sipped my coffee to hide my grin. ‘Given how much you both love learning, I think he’d be the last person to hold you up.’
‘That’s true.’ Edie’s gaze turned to the TV. She grabbed the TV remote and turned it up. It had switched to the local news. Another body had been found. Not far from where we lived.
‘Oh my god.’
‘Do you think it’s related?’ Edie asked me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The whistling and the death. Maybe it was the murderer you heard,’ suggested Edie.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t make sense. Why would a serial killer draw attention to himself like that? How many whistling serial killers have you heard of?’
I was starting to wonder, though. I’d heard the same tune the night Tessa was murdered and the night before we’d visited Bianca at the hair salon. The nights leading up to it usually had a different, but just as jarring and sleep-disrupting, tune. Was there something weird going on with what I was hearing?
Edie sipped her tea. ‘They have to kill at least three people at different times to qualify as a serial killer. This guy just hit number three.’
Of course she’d know that.
‘Still. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. It’s probably just a bunch of coincidences. I was probably hearing things and the murders aren’t related. I mean, they all have different backgrounds, genders, races, jobs. There’s nothing tying any of them together. The odds of a murderer targeting the three of them when they have nothing in common is pretty slim. It doesn’t make sense.’
Edie smirked. ‘So you do pay attention when we watch true crime documentaries.’
That was what she’d got from everything I’d just said? Sigh.
‘Some of it has to go in,’ I said. She made me watch enough of them. ‘Let’s just focus on getting you through these exams, yeah? Let the police worry about who’s trying to kill people.’
‘You don’t think we’re in danger?’ said Edie.
‘We’re both better protected than your average person, don’t you think?’