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“I do. I really do.” She smiled as she spun around and walked away. I watched her go, waiting to see if I could think of something that could change her mind, but in the end, I kept my mouth shut.
She pulled a pair of earbuds from her pocket, quickly unwinding them and shoving them in her ears. Her head was down as she walked away while looking at her phone, and I let her go. But seeing her disappear in the distance left me with an empty feeling. Like I was leaving something undone.
All at once, I knew what was bothering me. I’d come here for help, which I’d sort of gotten, but Samantha felt like a kindred sister. I was leaving her here no better off. That felt wrong.
Had I come with the intention of helping her? No. Not at all. But after meeting her, I felt like I was abandoning her. I was leaving her here alone to fight her own demons—literal and metaphorical—when maybe I could help.
She’ll be okay. I could feel him moving towards me.
Will she? Because I wasn’t so sure. Did you hear what she said?
Yes. And now she knows you have her back if she needs anything. He put an arm around my shoulders, pulling me back toward the private terminal. Let’s get on the plane. We need to start thinking up a new plan.
He was right. I knew it, but I wasn’t sure what kind of new plan we could come up with. In my visions, I’d seen a lot of new plans, and none of them had worked.
I spotted a small mini fridge under a counter in the waiting room. A spread of snacks were artfully placed on top of it. I grabbed a Diet Coke and downed it. Lucas said there was going to be food on the plane, but I needed something now. I grabbed a couple bags of trail mix and started eating.
It took about ten minutes for the personnel at the terminal to check us in and run our bags through metal detectors. We had to walk through them, too, but that was it. No long TSA lines. No fighting for seats at the gate. Before I knew it, we were getting into another SUV to drive us through the busy tarmac. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but there must’ve been plenty of early morning flights today. I watched out the window as the car stopped for planes to pass by us on their way to and from the runways.
I was quiet as we finally got on the plane. My friends moved around, talking amongst themselves as the pilots got ready. The layout of a small plane was much different than a commercial flight. There were only a few seats that were actually close together, and as much as I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I wanted Dastien close by. Hopefully my friends would sense my mood and not take the two chairs facing ours or the couch beside them.
I took the seat against the window and settled in to wait.
Just try to relax. It’s going to be okay.
I didn’t know what to say to him, so I stayed quiet. My mood was partly Astaroth’s influence, and I knew that, but I was also having trouble processing all of the visions and trying to figure out what not to do. They’d flashed by so fast that in the moment, I couldn’t absorb them, but they were catching up with me and it was making my head hurt.
I was a Were. We didn’t get headaches. Even if there were a couple extra-strength aspirins tucked away somewhere on board, Weres processed medicine so much faster than humans, I wasn’t sure they’d do any good.
I rested my head against the cool glass of the window and watched all the people rushing around on the ground. Everyone had problems. I knew that. But from where I was sitting, I envied them. It seemed nice to just be doing your job, and not have it be so life or death or end of the world.
I closed my eyes as we started to take off. I needed to find a solution before we landed. That gave me a little over three hours. I knew there had to be something that I wasn’t thinking of, but all I could come up with were things we should definitely not do. So many things. I needed a notepad to write all of them down so I could sort through them all, and start opening my mind up to other options. Other solutions.
What the hell was I going to do?
In my visions, I’d tried everything. Or at least I thought I had. But there was something I was missing. There had to be. I knew it. But what?
The pressure to find an answer was suffocating me.
Everyone had gotten quiet as we took off, but once we were in the air, the chattering started again. Louder than before. Until I couldn’t concentrate.
I held up my hands. “Stop.” I needed more time to think.
There was a second of silence before Claudia came to sit across from me. “We’re here to help, but we can’t do that if you sit there staring at nothing, trying to fix everything y
ourself. What did your visions show you? Just tell us, and maybe we can come up with some answers.”
I knew she was right, but this was on me. At least it felt like it was. I leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling of the plane. “My visions were horrible. Nothing we tried worked. I died—we died. Every. Time. I saw at least thirty versions of the next two days.”
“No,” Adrian said as he and Chris came to sit on the couch. “You were out for a minute. It couldn’t have been that many.”
“I think that’s why my head is pounding. Magical overload.”
“If you tell us what happened, then maybe we can come up with something you didn’t try,” Chris said. “We each have our own perspective. Together we can figure this out.”
He was right. “I just don’t know where to start.” It felt like I was just starting to process what I’d seen, let alone find the words to explain it all out loud. It had happened too fast, and I felt like I was getting a bird’s eye view rather than living through it. The more I thought back, examining each piece of it, the more freaked out I got.
Claudia reached across the table, grabbing my hand, but I pulled away. She looked to Lucas, but he just gave her a little nod of encouragement. “Just start at the beginning,” she said. “What was the first vision you had?”
