“Because I can’t tell myself stuff I don’t already know?”

“Or because I was allowed to come to you as a guide, not a leader. If I start telling you too much they’ll yank my visitation privileges.”

Oh goodie. Rationalization for my craziness.

After five minutes of debating my sanity, things got weird, which is saying something when you’re sitting around arguing with your dead boyfriend. It started with a heaviness in my chest. Then my throat closed up and I couldn’t get enough air, no matter what I did. I knew the feeling - it was a panic attack, but it was ten times more severe than anything I’d experienced before.

Just about the same time Alex noticed something was wrong with me, the world ripped in two. Honestly, there is no other way to describe it. The view in front of us, the same old boring stretch of lake, tore away as if it was a giant backdrop being blown apart by the wind. Behind it lay a field that wasn’t in Western Kentucky, the trees much too tall and skinny and evergreen to be growing in Timber. A stream of sorts divided the field in half. On either side grew tall weeds, and in the tall weeds there were people covered in blood. Every eye, save those who would never see anything again, were trained on a standoff going on several feet from the carnage of what had to have been an epic fight.

The woman on the left was tiny, probably less than five feet tall, and utterly beautiful. The hair falling thickly down to her waist was the same rich black color as her eyes. Her warm brown skin was flawless, as was her petite figure. Despite her size, she radiated power.

The girl on the left was tall and looked as if all the color had been bleached from her, expect for the places where blood stained her hair and skin. I’m not sure what had happened to the other me, but I looked more than half dead. I’m not even sure how I was still standing.

Words were spoken, though I couldn’t hear what they were. Then the beautiful woman lunged forward. I didn’t see the knife until the moment before it planted into my other stomach.

I jerked up in the bed, a scream ripping from my throat.

“Scout?” I was just able to make out Talley’s face by the light of the alarm clock. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“Bad dream,” I said between pants. My lungs felt as if I’d ran a mile. “You?”

“Horrible dream.”

We sat there in silence for a moment, each of us trapped in our own heads. Once my heart slowed down enough I could do something other than attempt to catch my breath, I laid back down on the bed.

“Tal?”

“Yeah?”

“Would it be weird if we snuggled for a little while?”

She answered by latching onto my arm, squeezing it tight. As soon as she made contact, I heard her faint voice in my head. “I won’t let you die,” she said in the same sultry tone I heard during the full moon. And then I saw a flash of what happened after the knife dug into my belly. My knees folded, my body went limp as it knelt before the other woman. I would have been on the ground if she hadn’t been holding me up with the knife. “It’s not going to happen,” Talley’s voice said in my head. “I will not let you die.”

“Talley?”

“Am I squeezing too tight?” The manic grip on my arm loosened slightly.

“You’re whispering in my head.”

“I’m what?”

“Whispering in my head. Like normal Seer communication, except it’s not a full moon.”

Talley pulled back so she could see me. Her eyebrows and lips were all scrunched up. “What am I saying?”

“Basically that you’re not going to let me die, which is ironic since I just had this really awesome dream where some Indian chick stabbed me in the stomach with a knife.” I rubbed a hand over my scars. “You know, my stomach hasn’t ever done anything to anyone. I don’t know why it gets so mistreated.”

Talley pulled herself up and immediately started working her hair over with the fingers on her left hand. “You saw that? How…? Why…?” She squinched her eyes together and shook her head back and forth as if trying to rearrange its content. “Scout, that isn’t possible.”

I pulled myself up into a sitting position, dread a heavy weight in my chest. “We specialize in the impossible around here.” God, sometimes I wished I would wake up and realize this entire past year had been a dream. “So, you’ve seen the whole Scout gets stabbed in a far away field thing, too? That’s got to be good news.”

I leaned over to flip on my retro Mickey Mouse lamp and grab Guido, who had fallen onto the floor. If we were going to start delving into some crazy Shifter/Seer stuff which was most likely was going to end with me getting my guts ripped out again, I wanted to have both my sight and my sock monkey.

“Start from the beginning,” Talley said. “Have you ever had this vision before?”

I started to say no, but then realized it was a lie. It had the mental flavor of something familiar. “Maybe. I’ve been having bad dreams all summer, but haven’t been able to remember them when I wake up. I think maybe I’ve seen the people in the field and the blood before, but not the actual stabbing.” Surely I would remember that part.

“Have you ever seen it while you were awake?”

“No,” I said, dragging out the word. Was this some sort of Is Scout Crazy Test? If so, was I passing?

Talley wrapped a strand of hair around her finger, unwrapped it, and then wrapped it up again. “And when you heard my voice in your head, was there anything else?”

“I saw me falling to my knees, which was weird because I didn’t actually make it to that part in the dream.”

I could almost see a theory formulating in her head.

“Did you feel anything? Like emotions that were strange, not yours?”

“No. Just the panicky, unsettled feeling everyone has after a nightmare.” Something about her question had me concentrating on the dream. There was something there… “I had a panic attack right before the dream started. I was having my normal A… awesomely lame dreams and then, boom! A panic attack hit me out of nowhere.”

Twirl. Untwirl. Twirl. Untwirl.

“Can we try something?”

I hugged Guido a little tighter. “Sure.”

Talley reached out her hand and laid it on my forearm. Then, she closed her eyes. At first there was nothing and then Steve from Blue’s Clues popped into my head. Strange enough, but even stranger given he was wearing a Super-Girl cape and glittery tiara.