Sketchbook of a Wayward Seer: Chapter 32

Never Alone

Staring at your reflection in a window for too long does the same weird thing as staring in a mirror.

Your face stops looking like your face. It distorts, and parts of it fade and morph and twist into a monstrous echo you’re not sure you want to recognize.

I sat with the monster for a while, staring out the window, watching for movements in the darkness of the trees beyond my reflection.

A part of me liked studying her.

How had she earned her monstrous form? Had it been one horrible act or a thousand tiny transgressions?

My phone buzzed…again. I left it face down.

I didn’t have it in me to want to read the message, but the sound was enough to pull me back out of uselessly pondering how much hell a person can crawl through before there’s nothing left of them but scar tissue.

I closed my eyes, twisted my hair back up, gave myself a moment to scream internally, then went back to sorting the sketches on my desk.

Most of the pages had already been placed in three stacks—Cliff, Clara Pre-Cliff, Random.

I’d been combing through sketches, studying each image, searching for connections to Jason’s attack I might have missed.

I had a few quick sketches of Jason in the hall with the shadowy wings, but that was a vision of the future and, unless things took a winged turn tomorrow, wasn’t about our current quest.

The dead girl on the cracked concrete floor didn’t have a wound slashed across her back like Jason and Clara.

Paige’s wall of pictures could be her trying to figure out what happened to Clara once she finds out Clara’s dead, but that didn’t seem important for tomorrow.

Noah in the parking lot shouting Luka’s name…

I tried not to let myself think about all the ways people finding out Clara had been murdered could royally fuck Luka over.

Especially if Luka did kill her.

But it hadn’t seemed like Clara was fighting someone she knew.

But if he’d snapped and she couldn’t even make herself see him as Luka anymore…

But if he was innocent, this could destroy his life for nothing.

I’d be taking a torch to Violet’s and Jason’s families.

Fucking up the living for the sake of the dead.

But…

But, knowing what had happened to Clara, I had no fucking choice but to drop the torch and see what burned.

Even if the very fucking least Clara deserved wasn’t making sure Laureldale and all its aitherions knew they were vile, apathetic fucks for ignoring her disappearance, and even if the inherently moral path wasn’t doing everything I could to make sure the monster who’d killed her couldn’t hurt anyone else, I’m a fucking sybil.