Lal

A few hours after their meeting with Professor Lal, Edie, Corrie, and Dawn met their other friends for dinner. They gathered everyone together and explained as concisely as they could what had happened and what they wanted to do. Edie didn’t talk much. Her head didn’t really hurt anymore, but it was as though she could feel the ghost of the headache, or the remnants of the barriers in her mind.

“May I check for more memory blocks?” Professor Lal asks. “If you can tell they are there, perhaps I will be able to as well.” Dawn marveled that she actually sounded concerned.

“Yes,” said Edie. “Please. If there’s anything else…” She took a deep breath. “I want to know.”

Dawn gave her an encouraging nod. Obviously she didn’t like thinking about what might be hiding under there, but she knew it might be important. Professor Lal touched Edie’s head again, and Edie first tensed, then relaxed.

“Is there anything else?” Corrie asked anxiously.

“Of course I would have,” said Edie. She smiled weakly. “I almost felt left out. You’re half werewolf, Dawn has the Sight, Roe has her visions. I felt sort of left out having nothing special about me.”

“You’d be special even if you weren’t part faerie,” Dawn said firmly, feeling guilty that Edie had ever felt left out of anything. “But it is interesting that the four of us came together, when we all have something supernaturally different about us.”

“Not all of our friends do,” said Roe. “At least, I don’t think Annie or Naomi are anything other than straightforward humans.”

Edie shook her head, but it seemed to continue into the rest of her body, in a shudder. “I’m not sure.”

Professor Lal looked up at her, frowning. “I am not entirely sure this is natural.”

“What?” Corrie gasped, looking at the professor. “You mean someone is doing this to her?”

“Perhaps.” Professor Lal stood up. “Edie, do you mind if I touch your head?”

“Will it hurt?” Edie asked in a voice so small Dawn felt a pang of fear.

Once Edie had closed the door, they all moved closer. Dawn thought it felt like a secret meeting—which of course, in a sense, it was. Professor Lal’s dim office lighting didn’t help with the mysterious feeling, either.

Thursday, December 4

Dawn showered and dressed the next morning as usual, then checked her email, as she generally did before breakfast—it hadn’t snowed after all, so classes probably weren’t canceled, but there were sometimes useful announcements before classes started. This time there was: an email from Professor Lal. It simply read “Come see me during my office hours” and had the hours for that day listed.

When she met up with her friends for breakfast, she asked them if they’d also gotten emails from Professor Lal. Corrie nodded. “She must have heard from Ever.”

Wednesday, December 3

“Wait a minute,” said Corrie. She was looking back and forth between Dawn and Professor Lal, confused by how concerned they both seemed to be. “Lots of people know Dawn works at the library. I mean, anyone who’s been there more than once must have run into her, and it’s not like it’s a secret—we’ve talked about it all over the place.”

When Corrie and the others found Professor Lal, she was happy to speak to them, and listened with quiet attention to their story of what had happened the night before and then that morning, seeming particularly interested in the differences between what had happened in Roe’s vision and what had happened in the actual situation. “I think this is a situation in which telling people about the vision changed it,” she said to Roe, who agreed.

Corrie swallowed. She wasn’t sure she liked where this was going at all. But they would be able to change it, right? Or at least be prepared for it. Roe had told them about visions before that had turned out to work differently when the actual event took place. So she bit her tongue and did not interrupt Roe with questions.

“We stopped before we got very close to the lights, though,” said Roe, and they all sighed with relief. “There was someone there I couldn’t see very well. Corrie, you spoke to her.”

“How do you know it was a her?” Corrie asked.