Chapter 10
wishcraft
Callie watched the pages from her sketchbook burn. Her list of outcomes was short, with all but one ending with her disappearance—not a dramatic disappearance, not a “missing person” disappearance, but the quieter kind: gone from Jess’s life, gone from the future, gone from the story. From Jess, from whatever future they would have together or apart. The list was devilishly simple, and she’d started it a half-dozen times, all with the same result.
Regardless of the outcome, Jess lives. That part never changed. Bad outcome, Callie would die, though… and the worst part wasn’t the dying. It was the strange, sick certainty that her life had been angled toward this, as if she’d been put in Jess’s orbit on purpose—chosen to meet her, earn her trust, and learn to protect her.
Held close to the burner, the paper began to brown, then blacken into a char before being entirely consumed by the flame. The edges curled like a reluctant confession. The sound of the exhaust fan did little to mask the growing noise in Callie’s head.
“If I tell Jess,” Callie reasoned, “she’ll change her choices. Changing choices will affect the outcome and changing the outcome…” Callie clenched her teeth. While she hadn’t seen past a certain point, Jess was alive. But even that was at risk if Callie spilled her secrets. One wrong move and they could both die. Or worse—Jess could live and never forgive her.
And earlier that afternoon, over at Jess’s house, Callie had made a potentially disastrous error.
Working on the story outline for her upcoming reading event, she’d made a couple of margin notes alongside the bullet points of her story idea. At the beginning of an early list, one entry was written at a slight angle to the rest of the page, like her hand had betrayed her without asking permission.
Only one of us has to know how it ends.
She’d set the notebook aside to refill her tea, and when she came around the corner of the family room, Jess had the sketchbook in her hands, wearing that particular expression Callie had learned to fear—the one that meant Jess was calm, but not convinced.
“This sounds a little dark?”
Callie stopped short. “Huh?”
Jess held out the sketchbook, and Callie could see the comment, written at a slight angle to the rest of the page. She knew what it was. “Oh…that?”
“Only one of us has to know how it ends,” Jess read out loud, then smirked as her brow arched. “How old is this group, again? Damn. That’s dramatic.”
Think fast, Cal. She can’t know. Not yet. Callie waited a beat too long. A beat in which she felt the entire future tilt. “Right? That’s for another story. It just came to me, so I wrote it down.” She swallowed. “I was giving some thought to writing short stories online. Fanfiction?” she asked, hoping, nodding her head to get Jess to go along. “If you look at my other outlines, there’s weird stuff all over the pages.”
Callie smiled as she ticked off the lies—one, two, three, four—as if counting them made them smaller. Silence about her visions wasn’t a direct lie. But now even her expression, the nod, the implication of misleading the woman she cherished more than life itself…
“Spooky stuff,” she said, then took the book from Jess’s hands. She even used the overly animated storytime voices that Jess loved so much, because a little magic elf’s tone made it so much worse, like putting glitter on a bruise.
Now she was sobbing in her apartment. Lights off, the darkness doing its best to cloak the gravity of what she had said.
“I can’t…” she cried. “I can’t hold this in anymore. I’ll blab. And ruin everything.” She lay in her bed with a blanket pulled up to her chin, a child pretending the monster can’t find her under the covers.
But this monster was no longer under the bed.
It was her.
Lying to Jess—regardless of the reason—felt like a first step toward more profound betrayals. The next one would be softened by the first. It would only get easier from here. That was the absolute horror: not that she could lie once, but that she could learn to live with it.
The moment and Jess’s accepting expression looped in her head. Then the growing list of visions paraded through her consciousness, each one a different blade, all aimed at the same place. Another sleepless night.
That morning, when Callie awoke, she got about five seconds of bliss before her brain interrupted the moment with reality. She had been warned by Solrien and then Annie. Was it a dream or a vision? She wondered, already holding back tears, desperately wanting what she had just seen to be true—even if only a part of it.
“A gimmie,” she sighed, closing her eyes to mine the last taste of what she’d dreamt. It had been so real. All the right people had survived, and she could taste bitter air on her lips—incense-and-medicine wrongness, a residue that didn’t belong in her bed. But even as she blinked into the morning haze, heart full and sore, Callie knew better.
Annie had warned her once, gently but firmly.
“Rookie Seers see what they want until they learn to want what they see.”
Even now, Callie shook her head, still sorting those words. She’d made Annie say it three times. Solrien had been less gentle.
“Sometimes your heart will be louder than your brain. That’s not vision, Callista—it’s wishcraft.”
The last “vision” had been perfect.
Callie and Jess walked hand in hand along a bridge railing. A horn sounded, deafening, making them jump—but Jess’s arm went up. She was waving, her face beaming. Callie turned, following Jess’s smile to see a Coast Guard Cutter entering the Duluth Ship Canal. Her arm went up to wave too, but she was trying to turn back, trying to find Cam. Lagging behind as usual, he had just walked around a parking barrier, but stopped and held out his hand, waiting.
Static began to interrupt the scene, and as another hand reached for Cam’s, Callie woke up.
The air had seemed like late spring. Jess had a ski jacket on. And as Callie reached to take her arm, a flash of light burst from her fingers—not pain, not heat, just a bright, startling insistence, like her body had tried to cast on instinct.
Callie sat up slowly, the blanket twisted around her knees, and the smile had already decayed into a glum, annoyed face. The only thing missing was a golden retriever. That would have made it perfect—and it had come too easily.
A mercy dream.
And mercy didn’t belong to her. Not anymore. Not if she wanted Jess to live.
With a groan, Callie stumbled to the bathroom.
Time to shower and get ready for work. And pretend she wasn’t carrying a secret that had started to smell like smoke.