[6] NINE OF PENTACLES, REVERSED

Rhys

Watch and wait really meant Jane would intervene before I had all the answers. I asked the wrong questions and my deck never gave me the 'your girlfriend will read your half-baked notes and force your hand in clairvoyant ultimatums' card. 

I understood Natalie's unspoken guilt more than ever. For our own parts, we each played roles in death. Action and inaction. Natalie's version of responsibility didn't suit me any better than dirt under my fingernails and figurative blood on my hands.

If I had a choice in the matter, it would be Jane. It would always be Jane.

There was no point in trying to sleep if I would have to face the idea of a future without her. There wasn't one. This was too hard to do alone.

Jane's outrage was mine too. Her fear was the same: how much could we endure before we broke? Maybe Jane could do it, but I couldn't.

"The microwave's trying to tell you something," Lucas said.

I didn't even hear his bedroom door open, or him pass right by me to open and close the microwave door. Only when the beeping stopped did I notice it had been there in the first place. I almost believed it woke Lucs up, if I knew what time it even was, or thought Lucas actually slept. He somehow always looked like he just woke up, and simultaneously had been forever awake. A name like Niequest sounded like it belonged to a night owl.

I should probably not have been judging him for that anyway.

My American history notes laid open in front of me and I couldn't remember actually reading it, or writing it for that matter.

Lucas wavered at the microwave.

"So...do you need to talk or something?" he asked.

We didn't have conversations like that. Our arrangement was symbiotic in a very different fashion. I couldn't stand to be alone and Lucas couldn't afford to be. Our kitchen felt more like a lunchroom at work than a shared home.

A watched him press his mouth into a line, trying to decide if that was really a conversation he wanted to have or his question was an attempt at a perceived obligatory human compassion.

The short answer was no because it had to be. The support Lucas clumsily offered probably wasn't prepared for the truth. My girlfriend was going to die and I couldn't figure out how to stop it.

That would be a little much to ask of my roommate of two months.

"I'm good," I replied. A better translation was there was nothing wrong that Lucas could fix, unless he had power over tan cars or red lines on brick walls.

I rubbed my shoulder, feeling for something that wasn't there. A knot or a stiffness from leaning pointlessly over a notebook all night.

"Okay," Lucas said, "we could get a pizza or—"

A scream interrupted, shrill and from below. Lucas stopped mid-sentence. He froze. The sound wasn't in my head. It wasn't just dreams inching too close to reality. Lucas heard it too.

The girls. The hands. The one night I wasn't there, of course it finally happened.

I jumped up, nearly knocking over everything on the table in the process.

Lucas' expression shifted from stunned to engaged, stepping back out of my way long enough to process his own thoughts before following me out the apartment door.

I steadied myself against the railing of the stairs, gaining almost too much momentum to stop.

"Maybe it was random. Someone screwing around." I heard Bia's voice before I saw her and we collided at the foot of the staircase. Bia stumbled back immediately. Jane's hands stayed braced against my chest.

She didn't answer Bia's hushed question. Instead, she looked up at me, the only other person who knew definitely that it wasn't somebody random screwing around.

The thing about the future was I always had to catch up to it eventually.

Jane faltered, looking to Bia before she met my eyes again. She shrugged, playing it off casually with a smile.

"Black hands, never faces." The way she shook failed to convince me of her nonchalance. I pulled her in tighter, wrapping one arm around her shoulders. Her whole body vibrated in a way that hadn't quite reached into her voice yet. No matter what she learned about me in the pages of a notebook, she twisted her fingers into the hem of my t-shirt. I couldn't take it as a sign of forgiveness or acceptance, just that something neither us liked had been set into motion. I just couldn't decide if that gave me hope or made my heart sink further.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Bia's voice came out shrill. There was a sharp variation from her panic to Jane's. It was pure, proper surprise. Her fear rooted itself in the unknown and being caught off guard.

"What are you talking about?" Lucas asked, keeping subtle distance from one stair higher. It gave him an illusion of height, even looking over top my head from his vantage point.

"This tapping woke me up and I went to see if Jane heard it too so I open the door and the first thing I see is this black handprint on the window." Bia said. She focused her energy on the handrail, holding herself up by it. "Who does that?"

"I don't know," I said, a half-truth. It wasn't like I could name names. "Come on, you can stay upstairs tonight."

Bia nodded, but her gaze fixed blankly back toward their door before she pulled herself up the steps.

Jane let her hold on me slip, letting her hand slip from my waist to intertwine her fingers into mine instead.

Lucas dutifully opened the door, letting the rest of us pile straight into the kitchen.

"It is getting close to Hallowe'en," Lucas offered, shutting the door behind us.

"Maybe..." Jane mumbled.

"So you honestly think it's some kind of stupid joke?" Bia's voice threatened to crack. "What about the car? What about the car that's been following us?" She pulled herself onto the counter, her shoulders hunched forward.

Lucas leaned forward. Goosebumps rose visibly across his skin. "Someone's following you?"

"Yeah, this old car. I saw it by the pool and Jane saw it before and today on our way to class she just called the guy out." Bia brushed the heel of her hand under her eye. "Don't tell me it's just, like, kids trying to mess with us or something."

Jane opened her mouth, like an explanation would come out, but nothing did. She squeezed my hand instead.

"Jane did what?"

She swallowed, standing a little straight even while I all but glared at her. My arguments for keeping secrets from her might not have stood up in her mind, but now she could not contest that I was wrong. The second she knew something, she threw herself into the fire. Why wonder what was going on when she could just harass the threat head on?

Jane took her time choosing her response, licking her lips before taking a breath.

"I...wrote down the license plate and...may have told the driver that if I ever saw the car again, I'd call the cops," she said, "I thought it would stop it, not make it worse."

My heart dropped. I pulled back, away like I'd touched something hot.

The license plate. At least Jane could do the one thing that dreams could not.

"What's the plate number?" I asked.

"Rhys," Jane said, exasperation in her voice.

"Give me the plate number," I repeated.

Reluctantly, Jane pulled out her phone and read it off the screen. I scrawled it down on the corner of my notebook and tore it off the page.

"What are you going to do?" Bia squeaked, hopping down from the counter to trail behind me as I pulled my jacket out of the front closet.

"I'm going to make sure that stupid car isn't circling the damn apartment building," I replied.

Only Bia moved. Both Lucas and Jane seemed locked into position, too unsure what to either do or say to keep me from walking out the apartment door.

"Lucas'll find you a couple blankets and you can stay here," I said, grabbing my pack of cigarettes off the top of the microwave. Sleep sounded a lot like a pipe dream, but if Bia tried long enough, she had a chance of getting a little.

"Yeah. Right, of course." Lucas moved first, disappearing down the hall to dig some out of a closet.

"Well, okay, fine. But if we're going to be here all night I need my phone charger," Bia said, "will you walk me down to get it?"

My shoulders eased a little, having tensed when I wasn't paying attention. "Yeah, sure."

She nodded quickly, stepping out ahead of me. That left Jane. No other witnesses present, a sliver of a crack ran through her facade.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, brushing her hair behind her ear before looking up at me.

I believed her and that just made it harder.

"Me too."

I left and shut the door behind me. Bia stood, her arms wrapped around her for just a moment, long enough to make her look like somebody else, running hands up her arms. If there was a way to fix everything, the timer had just been put on.

She didn't say anything until we were halfway down the stairs.

"What did you do, Rhys?" she asked, "I don't get it. You'd do anything for her."

"Therein lies the problem," I said, shaking a cigarette out of my pack just to have something to occupy my hands.

"I love when you're cryptic."

She cast me a sidelong glance, unimpressed and worse, somehow knowing.

"I think we both know what Jane is capable of," Bia said, "so that she's scared and you are scared for her is...you know, concerning."

We reached her door, the brass 102 on the outside of it chipped.

"I don't know what to tell you," I said. I didn't know where to begin.

"You don't need to tell me anything," she said, "you just need to know that I'm on your side. Today, I watched her yell at a guy whose probably been stalking us for awhile. I'm pretty sure you're more conscious of her personal safety than she is right now."

No dreams bothered to warn me to expect Bia's confidence, but I took it either way. A tightness still took over my chest, a rope of guilt that threatened to squeeze. It was like we'd been written by Edgar Allan Poe and she was insisting on following me to her tomb.

"Go, if that's what you've got to do," she said. Bia was more or less capable of getting her own phone charger. That wasn't the reason she needed me.

I stepped back down the hall, leaving her to disappear behind the door. Should anything attempt to peer in at her, I would be on the other side to catch them, a cigarette waiting between my fingers.

October weather threatened not to hold for Hallowe'en, but the stillness was worse than any wind could have been. It forced me to move, just so something would, pacing under the street lamp glow.

Searching for the tan car was as futile as searching for answers in my dream. Violins shrieked warnings in my head, but I never knew why.

In the dark, the black handprint against Jane's window looked like a smudge. Only light from a car passing through an alley lit it up in a wave of eerie orange. So close. Too close. A wall and a few feet between Jane and the hand.

Long continued my track record of not being there when it counted.

All they left was paint and panic. No sign of the tan car of my nightmares. No more prepared to have necessary conversations than before.

I climbed into the box of my truck, in view of Jane's apartment window, and finally lit my cigarette. A pendulum swung back and forth inside me. Lucas suggested databases for Symbology or cars. A number increased my search odds from a thousand Buicks in Boston to just one with the right plate.

It was shockingly easy. Google easily supplied a plate look-up for the affordable price of a trial membership. I typed in numbers Jane supplied. One question out of a thousand ready to be answered, if I really wanted to know. Knowing was a different kind of fear than ignorance. Hitting enter meant I would have to face a reality of what we were dealing with.

Smoke didn't do much to calm my nerves, it just satisfied one clawing urge in my chest. I took a long drag before hitting a key. Loading, loading. Watching and waiting.

The results came up, telling me half of the things that I, or at least Jane, already knew. And one thing I didn't see coming.

"Fuck."

I inhaled sharply, getting a lungful of smoke I wasn't ready for. My cigarette fell into the box of the truck. I coughed into my elbow until I could breathe again.

It had to be wrong. I couldn't have started making mistakes months ago.

The registered owner of the 1994 Buick Century was Judy Niequest.

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A/N I've been driven by sudden motivation (IE, pestering by readers) to make some progress on this. Also for anyone who hasn't already seen, I've started a Discord for discussion and such. 

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