Her encouragement was the last little push I needed to give in. I bid my aunts a sleepy good night and trudged my way up the stairs, following Freya’s twitching feather duster of a tail all the way to my room. As much as I wanted to fall face first into my bed fully dressed, I dragged on a pair of pajamas and brushed my teeth first. As I pulled my glasses off and my room swam out of focus, I felt a cold breeze brush over my arm, raising a row of goosebumps and making me shiver.
I looked over at my window, but it wasn’t open.
“Huh.”
I was too tired to investigate further. I curled up under my blankets, Freya tucked in the crook of my legs, and fell immediately, deeply asleep.
11
Iwoke to a sharp clinking sound.
I sat up in bed, rubbing at my sleep-crusted eyes. My first instinct was to look for Freya—she tended to be the culprit when it came to weird noises in my bedroom at night. But she was still curled up against the back of my legs, blinking up at me from heavily hooded eyes that told me she’d been just as soundly asleep as I had been, before that noise woke us up.
It came again, and this time I could tell it was coming from the direction of my bedroom window, the one right in front of my desk. I slid out of bed, my heart beginning to pound. My clock read 1:17 AM. I paused for a moment and listened for any other sounds from downstairs, but the cottage was quiet—the Conclave had departed while I slept so soundly, and from the muffled silence that lay over the house like a blanket, it seemed that my mom and my aunts had gone to bed at last. I approached the window, arms wrapped protectively around myself, listening again.
Clink.
This time I saw it as well as heard it—the noise was actually a small pebble ricocheting off one of the windowpanes. My pulse sped up. I didn’t exactly have an abundance of adoring admirers—actually, I didn’teven have one adoring admirer—so the thought that this was a moonlight tryst or some romantic gesture didn’t even cross my mind. I did, however, have a surprising number of enemies, so it was with extreme caution that I leaned forward and risked a peek down into the garden below.
Bea stood in a flower bed, her anxious little face upturned. I swore under my breath at my window as I struggled to open it—the extreme humidity of the ocean air had swollen and warped the wood. Finally, I was able to shove it wide enough to stick my head out.
“Bea? What’s going on? Is everything okay?” I called down in a whisper.
“I need to talk to you! Can you come down?” Bea hissed back.
“I’ll be right there,” I replied. I eased the window shut again and tiptoed out of my room, down the hall past my mom’s room, down the stairs and out the front door onto Lightkeep Cottage’s wide front porch. Bea was already coming around from the side of the house at a jog, and met me at the bottom of the porch steps.
“Bea, what’s happening, you’re freaking me out,” I murmured. “Is someone in trouble? Is it Eva, or?—”
“No, my family’s fine, it’s not that. But someone does need help,” Bea said. She was wringing her little hands together, and biting at her bottom lip. “Do you remember when… when I showed you some of my sketches? Before Litha?”
“Of course.”
“Well, lately it’s been… hard. To draw, I mean,” she said. “I used to see things so clearly inside my head. But now everything is… blurry.”
“Blurry?”
“Yeah. Like, I can’t… I can’t see the way I used to.”
I swallowed hard. I’d wondered if Bea might be having problems with her gift, too, since Xiomara and I were having so much trouble making progress, but Xiomara had been reluctant to ask her. Now, it seemed, I was getting the answer anyway.
“But then tonight,” Bea went on, “for the first time in a long time, I could see! It was like I…” she pointed to my glasses, “…like I’d lost a pair of glasses, and then found them again. It came through so clearly, but it wasn’t just an impression. It was a plea for help from someone.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Bea admitted.
“Okay, well, where are they?” I tried again.
“I’m not really sure about that either.”
“What do they need help with, can you tell me that?”
Bea shook her head.
I paused a moment to look at her, feeling lost. “Maybe I’d better just let you talk, then,” I said. “I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with these questions. What can you tell me?”
“Not much,” Bea said. “But I can show you.”
