That’s impossible to know from a nod and the way someone sits on a stoop.
But I know it anyway.
The same way Alex knows things. That certainty that comes from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Holy shit. Is this what Alex feels all the time?
Strange.
I keep walking, but the feeling stays with me. That awareness. That knowing.
No wonder she’s exhausted by the end of the day. If she’s picking up everyone’s energy, everyone’s intentions, constantly reading the room without even trying?—
All those times she steered me away from certain streets. Insisted we leave bars early. Knew someone was dangerous before they did anything wrong. I thought she was being paranoid. Dramatic. Too much.
She was protecting me with this. With the exact thing I’ve been calling crazy for fifteen years.
I’m almost giddy with it. This new awareness. I can’t wait to tell Alex. To explain how the sounds changed and the temperature shifted and I felt that man’s protective energy like it was a tangible thing I could touch.
She’s going to be so smug about this. So insufferably proud.
I don’t even care.
I pick up my pace. Eager to get home. To burst through the door and tell her everything. To admit she was right. To?—
I’m two blocks from home when I feel it.
Wait.
No, that’s not right.
I don’t just feel it. It hits me. Like walking into a wall in the dark. Like that moment in a horror movie when the music cuts out and you know—you know—something terrible is about to happen.
It starts at the base of my spine.
That feeling.
But this is different.
In the stairwell, there was fear, yes. But there were also... options. The stairs going down. The door to the stacks. Ways to escape if I needed them. My body was scared but it knew safety was possible.
This feels like someone stole the exits.
Like whatever’s coming, there’s no running from it.
It reminds me of being a little girl. Before Daddy died. Having to go into the basement for something—probably clean laundry—and then running up the steps like hellhounds were nipping at my feet. That primal childhood terror that something’s behind you and if you don’t movenowit’s going to get you.
It’s that feeling.
Only amplified. Adult-sized. Real.
The serpent at the base of my spine—because that’s what it is, I can feel it now, an actual serpent coiling around my vertebrae—sends a ripple outward. Up my spine. Through my limbs. Wrapping around the back of my neck like hands.
Like someone is standing behind me. Gripping my neck with meaty hands. About to squeeze.
But there’s no one there.
I spin. Check behind me.
