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She reached for her cell phone, thinking about the next phase of research, but as she did so a headache spiked into her head. She grabbed it up ready to turn the screen on, waiting for the –
Lacey and Amy were sitting together in a room. A familiar room. Lacey’s room at Laura’s apartment. Everything was as Laura had left it – the same toys on the bed, the same drawings on the walls. Nothing had changed. That meant it had to be happening soon.
The two girls were sitting together on the bed – and hugging one another, both of them looking anxiously towards the door.
“I don’t like the bad man,” Lacey whispered. “He’s scary.”
“It’s okay,” Amy said, though Laura could see she was just as scared as her slightly younger friend. “Uncle Chris will come here to get me soon. He’ll come and help.”
“And Mommy will stop the bad man,” Lacey replied. Laura’s heart was breaking. She could see that even though her little girl was saying the words, she was no longer sure that she believed them. She wanted them to be true, but she was so afraid. “That’s my Mommy’s job. She told me. She catches bad men and stops them from being bad all the time.”
Something – Laura couldn’t see or hear what – made the girls jump, and then –
Laura blinked, her mind and her lungs filling with searing white-hot panic.
“What is it?” Nate asked. “Did you see something?”
Laura couldn’t answer him. Her hands shook as she tried to open her phone’s calling menu, fumbling twice, and having to start again, finding Chris’s number and hitting dial. She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling her breathing coming sharp and quick, her heart pounding out a drumbeat she couldn’t even measure. The girls were in danger.
The girls were in danger.
“Hey, Laura,” Chris said. “You’re lucky. I was just going to bed.”
“Chris,” Laura gasped out, hanging onto the edge of the desk like it was a life raft. “Chris, where are the girls?”
“The girls?” Chris repeated, as if he didn’t understand the question. “Amy’s tucked up in bed. I’m guessing that Lacey is with Marcus.”
“She’s safe?” Laura asked. “Chris, go check on her. Go make sure she’s in bed.”
“Okay,” Chris said, his voice strange. “Alright, just give me a minute.”
The line went quiet.
“What’s going on?” Nate hissed quietly beside her.
Laura waved a hand in his direction, needing him to shut up. She couldn’t handle everything at once right now. She couldn’t.
“She’s asleep,” Chris said, his voice low as he no doubt crept away from Amy’s room, trying not to wake her. “Do you want to tell me what this is about?”
“I saw something,” Laura said, drawing in a shuddering breath. She was still shaking, unable to stop. “I saw the two of them locked up together in Lacey’s room at my place. They were afraid of something. A – a bad man that they were hoping I would protect them from. And you.”
Nate sucked in a breath beside her.
“What does that mean?” Chris asked. She could hear him pacing backward and forward, probably in the kitchen from the sound of the room. “When is this going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Laura said. She buried her head in her free hand for a moment. “I don’t know, I don’t know. And it doesn’t have to happen. If we can stop it – if we can work out what it means before it gets that far, it won’t come true.”
“Then what does it mean?” Chris asked. She could hear the tension rising in his voice as well, the panic that she felt herself.
“I don’t know,” Laura replied. She was on the verge of hyperventilating. “This aura of – of danger that I sensed around you – it’s on Nate, too. And now this thing with the girls – I think something is coming. Something that we’re all going to be involved in. Something that could put all of us in danger.”
“Except for you, right?” Chris said. “You haven’t seen anything about yourself?”
“Why would I?” Laura asked. “I can’t sense an aura around myself. And seeing the girls – they were in my place. Why would they be in my place if I wasn’t caught up in it?”
Chris took a breath. “Alright, look – you say they were together in your vision?”
“Yes,” Laura said, squeezing her eyes tight shut as she remembered how scared they had looked, how they had clutched onto one another.
