Chapter 12

“What’s wrong, Lace?” he asked me softly.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I answered.

We were standing on the street in front of my house, looking down the sweep of the mountain at the shining lights below. I was nervous and he knew it. What was going on between us still wasn’t clear, but the warmth of his smile reminded me why I always felt safe with him.

“Come here,” he mumbled good-naturedly, holding out one tanned, muscular arm.

It was an invitation I was incapable of refusing. Relief flooded through me as I returned his smile and began to move toward him.

That was when he changed color. His hair, his eyes, and his clothing all blurred into a haze of sepia tones. Oranges, reds, and browns swirled where blue and green should have been. His beautiful eyes turned lifeless. His face was pale, sickly red, then brown, then normal again.

I felt like my own lifeblood was draining out of me onto the pavement. I rocked on my feet.

“Lace!” Matt cried, jumping toward me. In a flash he had an arm around my waist, steadying me. His eyes were baby blue again. The freak show was over.

I leaned into his side, knowing that I would fall over otherwise. My legs felt like jelly. My knees banged together like a rag doll. The rest of me was numb.

It couldn’t be.

It was a trick of the streetlights. Overexcitement maybe, or dehydration. I’d even go for hallucinogenic ketchup on the burger. Anything but The Warning.

“Are you all right?” Matt asked worriedly.

“Yeah,” I lied, holding on to him as I tried to make my knees lock. It wasn’t working.

“Lace,” he protested again, scooping me off my feet. “What the heck? Don’t pass out on me!”

He swung my limp body up against his chest, and my head lolled on his shoulder. How embarrassing. “I’m all right,” I insisted, fighting to lift my chin a bit. “I just… felt light-headed for a second, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” he protested hotly, still holding me. “You almost drowned three days ago! You should never have gone surfing today. It was obviously too much for you!”

“No it wasn’t,” I argued lamely. I knew I should be struggling to get down. I really wasn’t the damsel in distress type, and under ordinary circumstances I would be chiding him for acting like a caveman. But these were not ordinary circumstances. My whole body was trembling. A wave of nausea rolled over me.

No. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t!

“Your mom’s home, isn’t she?” Matt asked, carrying me to the gate without waiting for an answer. He shifted my weight, reached out and punched in our security code — which I didn’t know he had memorized — and busted through the gate and into the side yard. “Mrs. Chambliss!” he called, rapping on our private entrance with his knuckles.

I tried to explain again that I was fine, but truthfully, I was about to throw up. The sepia tones… it was all exactly like before…

“Matt, my goodness, what’s wrong?” my mother said calmly as she opened the door. My mother was always calm. I could have had my throat slit and blood dripping on his shoes and Kate Chambliss’s soft voice would have sounded exactly the same. It didn’t mean she wasn’t upset. My parents just don’t do emotion.

“I don’t know,” Matt answered, whisking me inside. “But she nearly passed out on me. I think maybe she should go back to the ER.”

“No!” I cried as he laid me on the couch. I didn’t want him to let go of me and I didn’t want to go to the ER, either. What was wrong with me, no doctor could fix. I rallied my floppy limbs and tried to sit up. Nausea hit me hard and my eyes measured the distance to the bathroom. “Please,” I said in what I hoped was a more normal-sounding voice. “I promise I’m all right. I just need to sit here a minute.”

“What happened, honey?” my mother asked, sitting down beside me.

“Nothing happened,” I insisted, even as I tried to think up an alternative explanation that made sense. I couldn’t tell either of them the truth. They couldn’t deal with it.

Who was I kidding? I couldn’t deal with it!

“I…” My brain searched for a plausible excuse. I really did feel like I was going to throw up. “I think it was something I ate,” I stammered. The words had barely left my mouth before another wave of sickening heat spread through my insides.

The sepia tones. Matt!

“Excuse me!” My limbs figured out how to work again. They jerked into action and propelled me off the couch, into the bathroom, and over the sink.

Five minutes passed. Excuse me if I don’t narrate them.

When I came back out of the bathroom, Matt and my mother were both standing right there, waiting for me, staring at me with anxious expressions. I don’t need to tell you how fantastic I looked.

“I’m better now,” I lied. “I’m sure that’s all it was.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” my mother said with a smile. She turned to Matt. “Maybe you’d best call it a night? Lacey looks like she could use some rest. Thank you for taking care of her.”

“You mean poisoning her,” Matt said miserably.

“No!” I lied again, making crap up as I went along. “I don’t think it was anything I ate at the restaurant. Or at your house, Matt. I had some leftovers earlier that were pretty questionable, though. I should have known better.”

My mother arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. We frequently grazed on whatever dishes Makoto happened to leave in the Zhaos’ fridge. But we did so at his encouragement, and the chef would impale himself on a dull potato peeler before allowing any foodstuff to spoil on his watch.

“I’m sorry to wreck the evening,” I apologized to Matt, not moving from the bathroom doorway. There was no question of a goodnight kiss now. I didn’t want him within three feet of me. I was a mess.

“Stop it,” he insisted, trying to sound cheerful. “You didn’t plan to get sick.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Text me when you feel better. Maybe we can get together tomorrow?”

I clutched the doorframe. My knees were feeling weak again. He was smiling at me, looking so sweet, so… hopeful. Right now all the colors of his face were normal. If I tried really hard, maybe I could forget—

No. I couldn’t forget.

It was The Warning.

“Definitely,” I answered, faking a smile back.

Matt’s own smile broadened, and he turned to leave. He couldn’t tell that I was lying about feeling better.

My mom showed him out. I leaned against the doorframe, hoping no one would notice that I was totally using it to keep from sliding to the floor, and waved goodbye to him. As soon as he was gone, my mom turned to me with a frown. “What’s really going on with you, Lacey?”

I weighed my options. I knew that my mother loved me dearly, but I also knew that no matter what I said when it came to The Warnings, she wouldn’t believe there was anything to worry about. Which meant she would be no more helpful to me now than either of my parents had been in the past.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I answered weakly. “I think I’ll just wash up and go to bed.”

She fetched the discharge papers from my ER visit and scanned through them. “You’re not having any trouble breathing, are you?”

“No,” I assured her. “I just got sick to my stomach, and now I’m tired.” I smiled to appease her, then attempted to move. Slowly and cautiously, I washed up and changed, said goodnight, and then crawled into bed with my phone.

There was no way I could sleep. As soon as I heard white noise coming from the main room, I knew that my mother had pulled out the sofa bed and turned in. She would be out within minutes, and I could safely make a call. Which was good, because I desperately needed to talk to someone.

But who? My dad would react the same way as my mom. My brother and I hadn’t talked about The Warnings since we were little. He hadn’t believed me then either, and we weren’t close now. What I needed was a friend. A calm, rational friend. Just not so rational they would think I was crazy, which was, after all, the most rational thing to think.

Crap. Madison was good in a crisis, but she had two sisters and a brother and there was nowhere she could talk on the phone at her house without being overheard. I couldn’t risk either of her sisters eavesdropping — they were horrid gossips. Julia had her own room, but she was more likely to freak out on me, which I couldn’t handle at the moment.

Kali? I drew in a breath and clicked into my contact list. Yes. We hadn’t been friends for nearly as long, but she was definitely the level-headed type, and I trusted her. There was something weird going on with her and Zane, true, but whatever that was, maybe it could help her to accept my story. Kali did have something about her, a certain presence, which made me believe she could roll with some punches. And that was good, because as much as she also cared about Matt, my news was going to hit her like a sucker punch in the gut.

I remembered that Tara and Kylee had been due to leave for the mainland on a redeye earlier in the evening, so I figured Kali should be alone. I texted her and asked if she could talk, saying it was important. Then I buried my face in my pillow. Was I doing the right thing, or was I just being selfish, trying to share my own horror? No, I concluded. I needed help! Matt needed help.

Quite suddenly, I was nauseous again. I rolled over and grabbed my trash can just as my cell phone buzzed. I ditched the can and dove for the phone instead. There was nothing left in my stomach anyway.

“Kali?” I rasped, noticing a beat too late that what I’d answered was a video call. Holy crap. Well, at least I wouldn’t need to explain how I was feeling.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Kali said immediately. She was sitting on her own bed, which wasn’t very far away — just down the hill and around a few curves. Her forehead was creased with concern, and as she studied me in her own phone, her light gray eyes were penetrating. “Are you sick? You went out with Matt tonight, didn’t you? Are you both okay?”

I nodded, then decided that head motion was a bad idea. It occurred to me that a lot of people, seeing me in such a state at such a time, might assume the guy did something horrible to me. But Kali knew better. “I… need to take this slow,” I began haltingly, trying to ease myself into a comfortable, non-room-spinning position. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

Kali’s striking eyes stayed fixed on her screen. “Take as long as you need,” she encouraged. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I smiled in appreciation. The girl was a gem. Not only was she easy to talk to, she also wasn’t the judgmental type. The last part would be particularly important. I fought back the urge to babble out all my worst fears first and mentally planned how I would order my revelations, which for me was a challenge. But this was too important to screw up.

I took a few slow breaths, then I started talking. I decided to begin at the beginning, with the story about my grandmother. I watched Kali’s face carefully as I spoke, fearful of what I might see. I knew how easy it was to explain away the “imagination” of a grieving six-year-old, so I figured that if she was the type to poo-poo all things supernatural, she would start right in with the usual assurances that it was all in my mind. If so, I would just pretend to agree with her and then hang up.

But Kali didn’t interrupt. She let me tell the entire story, all the way up to my grandfather dying seven years later, without saying a word. She only spoke when I went quiet for a while.

“Did it happen again?” she asked. Her eyes showed empathy, but I couldn’t read much more in her face. She’d gone still as a statue. “After that?”

I nodded, and a warmish feeling of hope began to settle over my roiling middle. I told her about Amy’s dad. Then about Mr. Levin. I told her about the waiter and the surfer at Waikiki. And the whole time she sat motionless on her bed, looking at me. She asked if I’d told my parents and how they had reacted. She did break in a couple times, when my eyes watered, to tell me I had nothing to feel guilty about. But otherwise she remained so calm it was eerie.

The longer I talked and the weirder my story got, the less comforting I began to find her lack of response. I started to feel like I was paying a professional therapist whose face looked exactly the same whether she was talking to a lonely divorcee or a serial killer. Did Kali believe a word I was saying? Or was she secretly making plans to have me locked up in a padded room?

Eventually I stopped talking. So far I had told her only about The Warnings, nothing about the other premonitions, just to be on the safe side. If my mental state ever did get questioned, at least I could blame the color changes on a physical problem with my eyes.

Kali and I watched each other in silence a moment. My heart fell. “You don’t believe me, do you?” I asked.

Her perfectly shaped dark eyebrows tilted upward. “Of course I believe you! Do I look like I don’t? I’m sorry.”

My mouth hung open. She sounded genuinely upset. “It’s just…” I explained. “You’re taking this awfully well.”

Kali smiled a little then. Her gray eyes twinkled. “That’s because I’m not surprised, Lacey. Weird stuff like you’re describing… Well, it happens to me, too.”