Prescient

Chapter 32

It was the first time I'd been in a car since that boy's hit-and-run premonition.

I just closed my eyes and tried not to think about it.

I wasn't sure where we were, as I hadn't opened my eyes since I hopped into the car, but I suddenly opened them, knowing what I would see.

There on the road just ahead of us, was Kaylah. She was just sitting there with that bandage wrapped around her face, her hands and legs tied. I nearly reached out for Noel, to warn him to stop, but I knew she wasn't physically there.

I simply closed my eyes again.

But then I heard her in the darkness of my mind.

"Please just let me go."

Then a second voice. A female voice I knew I had heard before.

"Follow me."

I felt her breath on my skin as if she was right beside me and my entire body tingled with goosebumps from my toes to the base of my neck.

I suddenly felt as if something was hooked into my chest, trying to pull on me. Something that was trying to show me where to go.

Then the other female voice spoke in my ear again and my eyes flew open.

"Turn right just up there," I said, the first words spoken by either of us since we pulled out of Crotty Street.

"Huh, why?"

"Just take the turn, then keeping going until you get on the main street. We're taking a drive to the other side of town."

"Where?"

"I'm not sure."

"Starla—"

"Just trust me, okay. I'm not sure yet where we're going, but I know Kaylah's there. I just do."

I didn't want to tell him how I knew; that I suspected we had our very own personal guide right there in the car.

That Lillian was with us.

We pulled down a street I'd never been on before.

I saw the house as we passed it and knew it was the one, but I told Noel to pull up further down the road.

Once he stopped the car, Noel reached over into the back seat and grabbed a sports bag off the floor. It looked heavy. Placing it on his lap, he unzipped it and extracted a large shifter about the size of my forearm. He passed it to me, before taking another one out of the bag, one a bit larger.

"Just in case," he said and got out of the car.

Once we were standing in front of the house, I stopped Noel before he could open the gate because I knew if we used it, it would creak. I didn't want to make any noise.

"Jump over the fence," I said, barely audible.

It was a low brick fence so not hard to step over. Noel went first and I followed, stepping over the only space where there was a gap in the row of bushes that lined the garden just on the other side of the fence. Looking around as we went, Noel and I crept up to the front door and I tried to peer through the window beside it.

A light shone somewhere in the house, but there were curtains on the window, so I couldn't see inside. I wondered whose house this was. There was no car in sight and no garage where one could have been. That didn't mean no one was home, however. Letting myself into Donald Hayden's place had taught me that tough lesson.

I motioned for Noel to follow me and we went around the back of the property.

The ground sloped downward slightly, and the house was raised to sit level. Small stumps at the front, higher ones at the back; so the windows towards the rear of the house were too high for me to look through, but that didn't worry me much. I knew I wouldn't see anything anyway. All the windows had curtains tightly drawn.