2. I See You Too
I See You Too
IVY
The phone sat face-down on my thigh because I couldn’t look at the screen again yet.
Four words. I see you too.
Maddox hadn’t said a word since he’d read the message over my shoulder.
At the first stop sign outside my neighborhood, I finally looked over at him, watching his face in the dashboard glow.
His jaw tightened, not the way people tighten their jaws in movies.
Just a compression. A response that happened before thought could filter it.
He photographed my screen without asking.
Then he made one call. “Jace. New contact on Ivy’s phone, unfamiliar number, four words: I see you too.
Move the timeline up.” Three sentences, clipped and factual, done before we’d cleared the intersection.
Then both hands came back to the wheel, and we kept moving.
He didn’t ask if I was sure the number was unfamiliar. Didn’t suggest I might have misread the context. Didn’t offer any of the soft professional hedging I’d learned to expect from people who were supposed to help.
He treated the message as evidence.
The absence of doubt sat strangely in my chest, taking up the space where doubt had always lived.
Two hours, he’d said. The safe house was two hours out, on roads that stopped being marked after the first forty minutes. Thirty minutes in, I gave up pretending I wasn’t watching him.
Adrenaline. That was the word I kept reaching for. A textbook stress response to a credible threat, compounded by an unreasonable amount of man in an enclosed vehicle. His shoulders took up more than their share of the car. His hands on the wheel were large and unhurried.
I told myself adrenaline three times.
The third time, the word fell apart.
Adrenaline runs hot and jittery. Fight-or-flight makes everything sharper and more urgent. This wasn’t that. This was proximity to a fire: my skin registering it before my thoughts caught up, an instinct that made me want to lean closer instead of pull away.
I stopped trying to name it and watched his hands instead.
He never gripped the wheel hard. That surprised me. A man who’d packed me out of my apartment in under eight minutes should have had white knuckles. Instead his grip was loose. Steady. He drove like driving was something his body handled on its own so the rest of him could hunt.
“Who is Elias Thorne?”
The question came out before I’d fully decided to ask it. Maddox didn’t startle, didn’t glance over. He just answered.
“Human-passing arcane tracker. Patient. Methodical. He works for the faction I told you about, the one buried inside the Veil Council. Most of the Council doesn’t know it’s carrying them.”
“How do you find out about a faction hidden inside your own government?”
“You don’t. Not officially.”
The road narrowed. The forest pressed closer on both sides, branches meeting overhead, and the shift in light gave his words a weight they wouldn’t have had in my apartment.
“The faction locates people whose gifts give them access to things they need kept invisible,” he continued. Both hands stayed on the wheel. “Three seers in four years. None of them reported it twice.”
The delivery wasn’t cold. It was respect: the respect of a man who didn’t believe you needed the truth softened in order to survive it.
I’d spent three years with Dr. Miriam Vale’s voice in my head, gentle and patient, suggesting I consider other explanations.
Suggesting it was stress. Suggesting, always suggesting, that I might be wrong.
Maddox wasn’t suggesting anything. He was stating facts.
“The agency tracks their movement through confirmed sightings,” he said. “Your vision of Thorne is the third confirmed in fourteen months. The first two were scattered. Yours puts him inside the same radius as the last one, and the gap between sightings is closing.”
Third confirmed. Not a delusion. Not stress. An intelligence report that matched what I’d seen inside my own skull tonight.
“I wasn’t the first person to see him.” It wasn’t a question.
“No.” The road curved hard. His hands moved on the wheel, unhurried, and we cleared the turn without slowing more than necessary. “But you’re the first who called it in while you could still be reached safely.”
The sentence landed somewhere below my sternum and stayed there. While you could still be reached safely. The others hadn’t called at all. Or they’d called too late. Or they’d called and no one had come.
“What makes me a seer?”
“I don’t know enough about your gift to answer that.” He paused at a junction I never would have noticed, no sign, no marker, just a gap in the trees that became a road when he turned into it. “Tara Quinn will. She’s meeting us at the house.”
Not deflection. Honesty about the limits of what he knew, with no pretending otherwise. I set it beside the way he’d written down my vision without pausing, the way he’d photographed my phone, the way his jaw had tightened by exactly one degree when he read those four words.
He was building a case. Treating everything I gave him like it mattered.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
The signal died fifteen minutes later. No bars where bars should be.
No backup plan. No calling for help if help became necessary.
Just the road and the trees and the man in the driver’s seat, checking the rearview mirror with the thoroughness of someone who understood exactly what could come up from behind.
Not anxious. That was the thing. No white knuckles, no compulsive checking. Just thorough, the same unhurried competence he’d given the steering wheel, given now to the darkness behind us.
Once, on a long straightaway, he cracked his window two inches and breathed in the cold air moving past. Not for the air. He was reading it. Then the window went back up and he said nothing, and I didn’t ask: because some part of me already understood the answer wasn’t for my comfort.
I’d spent three years being reassured. I’m sure it’s nothing, Ivy. Why don’t we schedule a follow-up?
I’d never once been watched over by someone who already knew what to look for.
The property appeared at the end of a road that required knowing where to turn. The turn wasn’t marked. Intentional, not neglected. Someone had decided the unmarked turn was safer than the alternative.
Porch. Firewood stacked in neat cords against the side wall. Warm yellow light behind curtain-filtered glass. The house was solid in a maintained way, good hinges, real weatherproofing, porch boards that didn’t creak when Maddox stepped onto them.
A weathered man in his forties opened the door before we’d finished parking. Broad hands. Rough beard. The kind of build that came from working outside, and eyes that assessed me in about two seconds, not unkind, not pretending to be friendly either.
“Noah Kell,” Maddox said.
Noah looked at me. Then at Maddox. Something passed between the two men that I didn’t have the context to read. Then he ducked back inside and returned with a steaming mug, and handed it not to me.
To Maddox.
Maddox crossed the porch and put it in my hands himself. Both of my hands wrapped around it, his fingers steadying mine for half a second longer than the transfer needed. Coffee. Hot, bitter, timed to the minute of our arrival by a man I hadn’t asked and who hadn’t offered.
“Drink,” Maddox said. Quiet. Not a request.
I drank.
I’d forgotten this kind of care existed, the kind that didn’t announce itself, didn’t wait for thanks, didn’t make itself the center of attention. Noah was already walking back into the house. Maddox stayed exactly where he was until the mug stopped trembling in my grip.
I’d been here less than two minutes. The coffee was already the most credible thing that had happened since I’d woken with blood in my mouth.
Inside, the safe house kept its exterior promise. Real furniture, chosen, kept, cared for. A kitchen that looked used instead of staged. The kettle already heating on the stove, which meant Noah had put it on before we arrived. The timing had been that tight.
I set my bag by the door, because setting it down anywhere else felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make yet. My coat stayed on. The mug stayed in my hands.
Maddox moved through the house. Windows. Latches. He stopped at the back window three seconds longer than the others, nostrils flaring once at the seam where frame met sill, and whatever he found there went away behind his eyes before he moved on.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Old caulking. Not a problem.” He didn’t turn around. “I check anyway.”
I tracked him without deciding to. Kitchen. Hallway. Back room. A body-level accounting of where he was at any given moment, the way you track a heat source in a cold room.
The wolf-stillness was more visible here than it had been in the car.
He stopped completely instead of slowing down.
When his attention landed, it landed with his whole self.
I’d spent ten years reading people for a living.
I knew how attention worked: how it scattered and refocused, how even trained listeners drift.
Maddox didn’t drift.
“You’ll take the room at the end of the hall.” He appeared in the kitchen doorway, filling the frame the way he’d filled mine, not confining. Load-bearing. Like he’d always been part of the structure. “I’ll be on the couch.”
“Why the couch? There’s a second bedroom.”
“Second bedroom doesn’t have a clear line to the front door.” He said it like a fact, not an apology. “I’ll be between you and it.”
He hadn’t needed to explain it. I’d have worked it out anyway. Hearing it said plainly still landed differently than the guessing would have.
Between me and the door.
The knowledge landed somewhere that wasn’t my mind (lower, warmer) and I didn’t examine it past the landing. I nodded. He nodded back.
Then, for exactly one breath, his eyes stayed on my face after the logistics were done. Not assessing. Not cataloguing exits or calculating timelines. Just looking at me: like something in him had snagged and he hadn’t authorized it. It was gone before I could name it. He turned away first.
The room at the end of the hall was small and clean. Narrow bed, curtains drawn, a towel folded on the dresser, soap in the tiny bathroom that smelled like pine and nothing artificial.
I set my bag on the bed and looked at the vision journal sitting on top of everything I owned now. Three years of visions. Three years of it’s probably nothing, but. Three years of Miriam’s patient face and her gentle suggestions and the slow erosion of my trust in my own knowing.
And tonight, a man I’d met three hours ago had evacuated an apartment for what I saw. Driven two hours of unmarked road in the dark for it.
I went back to the kitchen. A fresh pot sat on the counter: Noah had anticipated that too. I poured a second cup and stood at the window, looking out at the black tree line.
Safe. That was what this place was supposed to be. And against three years of training in doubt, I was starting to believe it.
Then Noah pulled Maddox into the hallway.
The shift in their bodies was casual in the way that means the opposite of casual. Their voices dropped into the register men use when a conversation isn’t supposed to carry. Below a whisper without quite being one.
I wasn’t trying to listen. But mountain houses are quiet, and the kitchen was eight feet from the hallway, and I caught exactly one phrase.
The trail is newer than the agency thought.
I set down my mug.
Newer. Which meant Elias Thorne hadn’t started moving when I called the tip line. He’d already been moving. The four words on my phone hadn’t come from a man who’d just found me.
And if the trail was newer than the agency thought, then two hours of unmarked road wasn’t a head start.
It was a countdown.