TWO OF SWORDS

Rhys

Morse code tapped into the inside of my head and all it said to me was danger.

This wordless language was only punctuated by another: ink black and featureless, placeless, timeless. A hand in the pane of glass. There was nothing past it. No matter how hard I looked, there was just the hand, backlit in the blazing twin beams of two headlights.

A scream broke. My breath caught in my throat and I twisted.

My vision clouded, a symptom of suddenly sitting upright in a room just bright enough to make everything seem like it was washed a monochromatic blue.

Instinctively, my fingers curled, searching for Jane, seized by a fear so sharp it wasn't so much a feeling as it was a state of my existence. She was right there under my fingertips, but the certainty she wouldn't be there, that this time she would be gone, persisted. Her pulse thrummed in her wrist, contradicting it in an even rhythm. 

Why was waking up such a shock? My body remembered how to occupy reality again, still slower than I needed. I forced myself up, the floor cold on my feet, grappling for the landscape of a room that wasn't mine.

The blinds crackled against my hand, too impatient for drawstrings. Beyond it, there was nothing but the view into the parking lot. Tungsten orange jumping off shallow puddles, reflecting streetlights like tiny portals into mirror worlds.

"Rhys." Jane sat up in bed, pushing her hair out of her face. Even in the dark, her concern was practically a tangible thing. If I reached out, I might have felt the denseness of it in the air between us.

My heart still in my throat, I let the blinds snap back into place. Only thin bands of outside light striped the floor.

Jane drew herself up and out of bed, reaching for my arm.

"Tell me what happened," she whispered.

The thing about Jane was that she didn't see the quality Natalie saw. It could have been that her entire life, people had always been compelled to trust her. Even Natalie, silent and powerful in her own way, unraveled her secrets for Jane. A twisted genius did not put all her faith in one girl for no reason.

Something about her pulled all the darkness out into the open, begged you to tell her your secrets.

I couldn't be one more person piling my anxiety onto hers.

She stood on her toes, running her fingers through my hair. Her eyes were soft, looking up at me from beneath thick dark lashes. 

Jane wasn't cute. She was never incidental enough to just be cute. That would imply a preciousness Jane lacked because she was always in the middle of deciding what to do next. She was enrapturing. 

"There was a tapping, like somebody was there and wanted you to know it," I said in spite of myself.

There was nobody there now. All I succeeded in was waking Jane from hard-won sleep. It only took months of trial and error to find a medication that wouldn't leave her sitting in a lukewarm bath full clothed. It took seconds for me to jar her from peace.

"It was a dream," she said, a phrase notably absent of the word just.

"It didn't feel like a dream."

It never did. I could never expect it to if I remembered anything about Natalie. Where did dreams stop and reality begin? That was one question among many for a psychic who could not answer.

Jane's dark eyes watched me, her expression even and if I could give her reassurance, I would have. I couldn't pass on hand-outs from an empty basket.

Her biggest tell was a snarky remark that never came.

"Natalie didn't have anyone," Jane said, an excuse and a promise wrapped into one. Jane couldn't promise me she would always be there. She could only try.

"I'm not Natalie," I said. Not as good at her gig as she was, most definitely. Natalie knew the when and the where and the who. All I saw were hands on windows.

Jane nodded slowly. "But I wish she was here."

If it were Natalie instead of me, she wouldn't be so lost. The future I looked into gave me nothing but helplessness.

Jane stepped away and pulled a sweater from the back of a chair, pulling it around herself. She paused a moment at the door of her room.

"Maybe I'll make some tea or something..."

She had already committed to the idea of leaving me there, even if she didn't want to.

Alone was a thing we couldn't stand to be anymore. Getting roommates warded off the silence, but hers would be asking questions.

I took one last look out the window, looking for more ghosts. In my game of I Spy, looking for or a face or a sign or a car, all I found was night. The only thing to do was retreat to the light. 

"Nightmares again?"

The light came on in the hall, conversation carrying easily through the small apartment.

"Yeah."

Subtlety was clearly not our strong suit and neither was letting roommates sleep in peace.

I stepped out of Jane's room and down the hall to the kitchen. The kettle sat on the stove and Bia Bautista sat on the counter.

I was never exactly sure what her relationship was to Jane except they had been friends since they were kids and Bia would switch seamlessly into Tagalog to gossip in front of me.

Pigtails hung over her shoulders and her chin lifted.

"Ah, tall, dark, and handsome emerges," Bia said, "what do you even dream about?"

Her legs swung out a little from the counter like a little kid sitting in a too tall chair.

Jane whipped around to face her, a warning in her eyes. I let a long-practiced smirk slip across my face.

"Mostly about people trying to kill me. You know, par for the course after so many people tried to kill me." No need for follow-up questions. Bia was as informed as she had to be on the subjects of medically-induced comas and the shooting of Cullfield princes. Give or take some details about small town seers.

The kettle whistle pierced the air and Jane inhaled sharply, swiftly sliding it off the burner. Bia's eyebrows raised while Jane's back was turned to pull mugs and tea from the cupboard.

"Alright, stupid question." Bia shrugged. "As long as you're fine, I'm going back to bed."

She hopped down and padded softly back to her room at the end of the hall, leaving me and Jane alone.

Her back still to me, pouring hot water into cups, Jane sighed.

"Can you...can you ever tell when the dreams are from?" she asked.

Lord knew I was trying.

"Not unless there happens to be a calendar in the room."

How had Natalie decided on the chronology of events? Somehow, she could pinpoint moments so precisely her instructions came pre-written. All I got were sloppy seconds. Familiarity flashed like deja vu instead of a Wiki-how of taking down murder families.

Jane looked up, handing me a cup. I leaned against the counter, searching for what she didn't want to say in her eyes.

"You're sure it was my window in your dream? Someone outside my window?"

My heart sunk. There was all my motivation in a single statement. The fear was all mine until I let it trickle out into something Jane had to worry about.

"I live on the second floor..." I said. 

She was the one taking engineering at Boston University, but I could extrapolate one or two things from the evidence at hand.

Nothing could happen to Jane. If I lost her, there was nothing left. What would stand between me and Natalie's open window? How could I live with myself?

"But usually you just see signs on the front of buildings or...or clips of the news."

She was right. For so long, Natalie Driscoll's gift to me had been nothing but signs that I was in the right place at the right time to catch the subject of a premonition. The peace was short-lived. 

"Rhys?"

I looked into my cup of tea, wondering what I would see if I cut the bag open and let the loose tea show me the future. Would the silt form the tendrils of long, black fingers?

"You know how I kept making excuses to stay with you all week?" The twist of a wry smile made it feel less serious than it was.

"You had the dream before."

Disappointment flashed across her face and something like a following roll of thunder struck my chest. If I had, there would just be two of us on high alert for nothing. It was hard enough to fight insomnia sans psychic dread.

"Yeah."

"Any others?" Jane asked.

I swallowed.

Did I have any other dreams? Was there anything else to warn her about? A chill like cold water sent goosebumps rising across my skin. Bright lights and sign posts. Snippets of conversations.

I rubbed my shoulder.

"Yeah, but what do I do with them? I keep answering the phone to nothing, or walking by a sign post. Does Essex street jog any memories for you, Jane? Red lines across brick walls? A set of headlights? I can't make it mean something." If I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle, all I could do was pick out the edge pieces and guess the big picture. I could see the gun on the proverbial mantle, but never who picked it up.

When Jane looked at me, there was always an inkling that she was looking right through me into the worst parts. She considered pulling the loose thread of my choices and tilted her head instead.

"I just have to wait for something to happen."

That answer was nothing Jane wanted to hear. Jane was action and bravery. There was more fight in her than anybody I had ever known. More than I ever had.

"Watch and wait." She sipped her tea. "I hate that."

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a/n I've wanted to do this re-write for a long time and I'm finally getting to it. If you read the first draft of Natalie's Legacy, this chapter might seem vaguely familiar, but I realized that the story really deserved Rhys' perspective! Premonitions ahoy!