The footsteps kept coming. Faster. Closer.
Crap.
Don’t run. Don’t react. Acting suspicious will just raise red flags.
Ten yards to my car. Five. Three.
I chirped the alarm, unlocking the doors.
A bird fluttered down from overhead, landing on the roof of my car in a swoop of wings.
I recoiled, jumping back.
A voice laughed behind me—the one I had just recorded. I whirled, staring into the face of an unknown man.
“Jumpy tonight, aren’t you? Sure sign of a guilty conscience.” He touched the side of his nose with a finger—Italian hand-talk for accusing someone of having a secret. “It’s just an owl.”
What?
I spun around and met the golden eyes of the owl perched on my car roof, peering at me with sentient intelligence.
It hooted. An omen promising visions of the dead.
Crap, crap, crap!
FOUR
Jack
The scar was growing.
I know, that sounds like an oxymoron. By definition, scars should heal. But the gash was definitely bigger than it had been last week.
I stared at the scar—a jagged five-foot slice into the fabric of our world. Reality warped slightly around it, like heat waves in the desert sun.
The ragged scar in reality hovered two feet above the floor of the enormous drawing room of Villa Maledetti. The scar extended toward the ceiling and sat at a slight angle between a games table and the back of a sofa. I first noticed the scar several weeks ago, but it had recently begun to grow.
As it did nothing more than just float around and glow on occasion, I was unsure how concerned to be.
“How did the podcast interview go in the end?” Tennyson D’Angelo asked from behind me. “What I heard sounded good.”
I turned away from the scar, watching as Tennyson—the youngest D’Angelo triplet—walked over to me, wearing his preferred track shorts and t-shirt. Though it was just past sunrise, the June weather was oppressively hot and humid, so Tennyson’s clothing choices didn’t seem too off. But I knew he found shorts easier to wear with his prosthetic leg—the result of an encounter with a roadside bomb in Afghanistan—so his clothing was hardly temperature-dependent. The titanium metal gleamed in the morning sunlight as he walked. Dark haired and lean, Tennyson exuded coiled strength.
“You seem distracted.” Tennyson moved around me, nearly passing through the scar on his way to the sofa. Like a feather in the wind, the gash reacted to his movement through space, eddying sideways, moving to the right of the room.
“It’s the scar, isn’t it?” Tennyson sat down on the couch, following my eyes even though his fully human eyesight couldn’t see the scar.
“It is situated to the right of the television.” I pointed toward it. “It has been growing.”
Tennyson’s head snapped to attention. “Really? Any other changes?”
“No. Only the growth.”
There wasn’t much else to say. The scar was a complete anomaly. Only I could see it. It didn’t do much other than float around and occasionally glow. We had spent some time researching what it might be but had turned up nothing. So, we waited.
Tennyson grunted. “Did you hear what I said before?” he asked. “The podcast interview?”
Right. I had just finished another one of those.
