I’d come a long way since that first day at Norah’s, when I was willing to do just about anything to keep my magic on permanent lockdown. Back then, I really believed I could outrun my destiny.
Anyway, Addie was our sister. I wanted to know her, just like I wanted to know Haley. And I wanted them to knowme, too. Maybe it wouldn’t happen overnight. Maybe we’d fight and keep secrets and avoid any subjects that cut a little too close to the bone.
But magic? That was neutral territory. It was something we all had in common, and a good place to start.
“I guess you’d call it foresight,” Addie replied, and I nodded. Deirdre had mentioned as much.
“But not in the usual ways you hear about,” she went on. “I don’t literallyseethe future so much as sense it. Like, they’re not visions exactly, but I get these impressions—feelings and smells, mostly. Sometimes I’ll hear things, like a song or a voice or some other noise that helps me home in on whatever it is I’m sensing.”
“Sounds like Sophie’s gift,” I said. “She’d pick up on emotional impressions whenever she touched something. Like, a piece of furniture or jewelry or clothes. People too. I used to call her the human lie detector.”
“Haley told me about that.” Addie smiled. “But it’s not so much about touching objects for me. It’s more like… like there’s something out there, right? A force, divine intervention, an invisible time-traveling multi-dimensional being, something. It taps into my intuition, and then stuff just sort of… appears. From there, it’s up to me to put the puzzle together.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “How does that even work?”
“Let’s say I pull a Tarot card, and the message I get from it has to do with children. Six of Cups, maybe.” She tapped a small bottle against the counter, settling the powder inside before sticking a rubber stopper in it. “Once I accept that message or keyword or whatever, that’s when I open up. Suddenly I’ll smell crayons and paste, or hear kids playing outside, or taste school lunch. That tells me something is going to happen at an elementary school. So I might draw another card to try to pull in more clues—is this an emergency situation, or just something I need to know about? Does this affect someone I care about? These are really simplistic examples, though—usually I’ll get a lot more intuitive hits, all at once. I just try to stay open to whatever messages are trying to come through, and from there, I can usually piece together a prediction.”
“That’s fucking cool,” I said. “Just that you can do that. I feel like I’d get totally overwhelmed.”
“Sometimes I do. I mean, itiscool. But it’s also maddening, especially when Iknowthere’s something important trying to come through, and I can’t quite figure it out.” She reached for an empty bottle and set it up with a fresh paper cone. “Like you guys, for instance. Looking back now, I can see that I’ve been getting bits and pieces about this moment for years, but I had no context for it. I didn’t know what the hell the universe was trying to tell me.
“I grew up in North Carolina—about as far as you can get from Washington, at least in the states. I’d always assumed I’d been there. I didn’t learn about my adoption until two years ago—my mother finally told me, but she left out a lot of details. I thought my real parents had died.”
“That’s what we all thought,” I said. “I take it you don’t have any memories from before?”
“Just flashes, but nothing that ever made sense. Haley told me about our mother, about what she did to us…” Her hands stilled around the bottle, and her eyes went far away, narrowing as if she were trying to pull the memories out of the mists of time. But then she blinked and shook her head, blowing out a breath. “I don’t know if I blocked it all out, or someone altered our memories, or what.”
“Maybe a little of both.” I scraped the latest batch of chopped twigs into the big bowl in front of Haley, then dumped another batch onto my cutting board.
Altered memories. That was the theory Haley and I had come up with. Ultimately, I’d remembered that day at the creek when our mother had tried to drown us, but Haley never did, and she was the oldest—she would’ve been about four when it happened. Deirdre had told me she’d altered our mother’s memories to make her believe she’d succeeded in murdering us, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume our grandmother had “adjusted” our memories as well.
After all, she was trying to keep us apart. To keep the prophecy from coming true.
“Anyway,” Addie continued, “A couple of years ago, I started getting this massive influx of impressions—way more than at any other time in my life—and they all had to do with the west coast. Like, the wind would rustle the trees outside my house, but I’d hear the sound of the ocean instead. Or I’d be eating barbecued chicken at Mom’s Sunday dinner, but it would taste and feel like fresh crab. In bed at night, I’d feel like I was on a boat—you know, that rocking sensation, the wind in my hair, the smell of the sea. Or I’d be watching the sunset over the hills, and suddenly I’d see it setting on whitecaps instead. One morning I just woke up with this urge—a need, really—to go west. Washington, specifically. Don’t ask me why—I’d never even been here.”
“You sensed us,” I said. “Deirdre said that would happen. We were all born in the Bay—she said we’d all be drawn back to it.”
“That’s what Haley told me.” Addie sighed. “I was always a little on the impulsive side, so when it got to the point where I couldn’t sleep anymore because all I could think about was making my way west, I did it. I gave notice at work, broke my apartment lease, packed my belongings into my car and took off. My parents thought I was nuts, but they’d always encouraged me to have a sense of adventure. Mom was a witch, of course, so she knew all about intuition and feelings and signs. Well, and obviously she must’ve known that my origins were here, but she never said anything. It’s only now that I realize it.”
She got that faraway look in her eyes again, and lowered her head, her hands fidgeting with the bottle.
After a beat, I put my hand on her arm. “Addie, have you been back in touch with them since you got out of…?” I trailed off. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word prison, or cell, or crypt or torture chamber of nightmare hell, but she knew what I was asking.
Addie shook her head as a tear slid down her cheek. “The hunters… It was one of the main ways they kept us all in line. They’d show us pictures or video of our families every few days—they said they had people watching them at all times. If we disobeyed, if we tried to escape, if we tried to get in touch with anyone on the outside, they’d….”
I glanced at Haley, wondering if anyone had tried to reach out to Addie’s parents, but Haley only shook her head.
“Addie, listen to me,” I said firmly. “We leftnoone alive in that compound—not hunter, not hybrid, not fae, not a soul. Even if theydidhave someone watching, the hunters have much bigger problems now.”
“I know.” She sniffed, dashing away the tears. “That’s exactly what I’ve been telling myself. But I’m not going to risk calling them—not until we’re out of the woods. At this point, it’s almost better that they think I’m…” Addie shook her head, blowing out another breath.
“Addie,” Haley asked, putting her hand on our sister’s back, “how did you get mixed up with the hunters in the first place?”
“They nabbed me in Port Franklin about ten months ago. I was their prisoner, plaything, and medical experiment every day from that moment until you guys came busting into that crypt.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Haley coughed, doing her best to hide her own gasp of shock.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I said gently, “How did they get to you?”
