I awake to Calista's face.

Coffee brown eyes framed with thick black lashes. Tendrils of soft dark hair falling over my face. Dimples that appear when she notices that I opened my eyes. Her full mouth opens to form a grin over almost perfect teeth--one snaggletooth that somehow enhances her beauty rather than detracts from it. It's almost enough to make me forget that my head feels like it's been hit repeatedly by a sledgehammer.

"It worked," she exclaims.

"What worked?"

I rub my temples, feeling like I've got the worst hangover of my life. I'm not sure if she's talking about breaking into my dream or just the fact that the pills had worked in knocking me out, like before, with Lauren.

The church seems like something from long ago, a fever dream, a hallucination, which is what it most likely was.

Unless.

"I saw you," I say cautiously. "You were there, weren't you?"

She nods with what I'd almost call glee. It seems an inappropriate reaction if she's just seen what I did. A girl in a coffin? Me morphing into a hideous predator and then back into myself? Not something I'd celebrate about.

"That drug," she says. "It's more than a hallucinogen. It's a portal."

"Hold up. What exactly happened just now?"

"We were able to communicate with her! On the other side. This drug, it's something big, something they were hiding."

I sit up. The sudden motion makes me woozy. "Who's hiding it?"

"Whoever she was talking about, I guess. The ones who killed her."

So Calista was there. It takes a moment to internalize the reality of the situation. The unreality of the situation. What she's talking about, it's crazy. Something from the movies. The other side doesn't exist. But neither does psycho-whatever Calista calls it, the ability to read memories just from touching an object that someone else handled. I feel like everything has been turned upside down, everything I believed to be true. My science classes were a lie. Not everything can be explained. There is so much more out there than we can know.

And there are people out there dabbling in it, creating drugs that can help people cross over to visit the dead. No wonder they don't want people knowing about it. A drug like that, well, it's absolute power, isn't it? How much money would they make if they patented it, a way to visit loved ones who'd passed on? I can't even begin to guess how many zeros are involved.

And Lauren had access to it. Was that what she was really doing in the hospital? Scoping out possible guinea pigs? What tipped her off that I would be open to it? I remembered the night I saw the lights go off and on and everyone acted like nothing was even happening. Except Lauren. We'd exchanged glances admitting that something weird was going on. There was a connection. Is that when she knew? Was it some sort of trick?

Thinking about this is making my head hurt even more.

I wish I'd gotten just a few more seconds with her. I wanted her to explain what happened that night in my apartment. I need to know who was after her, after me.

Sighing, I slap my thigh. "Now there are just more questions."

Calista rubs my back. What is she seeing--my past, my childhood? I shake her off, not wanting her trespassing on this moment when I'm already feeling overwhelmed.

"There are more questions, yes, but now we know how to find the answers. We found Lauren once, we can find her again. And we can find her killer. Or killers."

Calista jumps to her feet and bounces to the kitchen. What has drained me of energy has given her a newfound strength. I hear her getting cups from the cabinet, opening the tin container where she keeps her tea. She calls out to me, asking what I want.

I don't answer. What I want is to crawl back into the dream and see Lauren again. I eye the plastic baggie on the coffee table. Take it into my hands and open it up. I dump the pills onto the table and count them. There are seven left. Lauren and I had each taken one, then I took another, trying to figure out what it was.

Really, I want to take another one and continue what was interrupted. It was all so sudden, it seemed as if there were some other force that snuffed out the light of the candles. Was it the killer, tracking us down with his own stash of pills? Larry? Or was it a greater force, something too big for us mere mortals to understand? Maybe some things are meant to be kept a secret, a mystery. And so mighty hands separated the two of us, the living from the dead.

Calista sticks her head out of the kitchen. "Brett? You okay?"

"Hmmm?" I mumble.

She pads back into the living room, two steaming mugs of green tea in her hands.

"I said, 'Are you okay?'" She hands me a cup and then notices the pills I've dumped onto the table. "You didn't take another one, did you?"

"No, I was just counting them. We only have so many attempts." I take a sip of my tea. It's too hot. I put it on the coffee table and then, considering the fact it might spill and ruin the pills, I scoop the tiny things back into my hand and dump them in the baggie, then seal it securely. I put the bag in my pocket. I'm not sure why. It just feels safer there.

"We'll figure it out," Calista says, full of certainty. Of course, it's easy for her to feel sure we'll solve the puzzle. She's been solving people puzzles her whole life.

There's a knock at the door.

We look at each other, panicked.

"Should I get it?" Calista whispers.

"It could be the cops," I whisper back. "They're probably looking for me. It's going to look pretty suspicious if you don't. We don't want them to think I've skipped town."

She gets to her feet, much more slowly than she did before, and approaches the door. When she opens it, just slightly, I can't see who is on the other side, but she flinches.

The door widens.

It's Larry.

He looks past Calista, at me, and then at the coffee table, where the inhaler I lifted from his bag is laying out in the open.

"Hey, Brett, buddy. Just who I was looking for."