School shoes sliding nervously across the polished linoleum, twelve-year-old Adele Warren waited beside the matron and tried not to peer around with wide eyes. For one thing, it wasn’t befitting of a young lady of her station, and for another thing, they’d picked her because they thought she was the least likely to break down in the hospital.
"Corinthia is just down this way." The hospital intern guiding them barely looked out of his teens. Adele bit her lip and tried as hard as she could to look as stiff as the matron walking beside her. "She’s been moved out of the Intensive Care Unit, so you’ll be able to visit her, of course."
The astringent smell that pervaded through everything in the hospital made Adele want to gag, or maybe that was just the fact that her classmate had been in the Intensive Care Unit at all. Dalmeiier didn’t deserve that sort of treatment. Sure, she had been stand-offish and a loner, but nobody deserved what Rachel Dumont had done to her. And if it hadn’t been Dalmeiier, it would have been somebody else. Rachel Dumont was a ticking time bomb, and Dalmeiier had nearly been her greatest casualty.
"Come along—behind here," the intern instructed, pointing Adele and the matron behind a gray-green curtain. Adele paused in her footsteps, just enough to receive a stern look for her hesitation. She could hear her classmates’ words ringing in her head as she brushed nervously at her chestnut brown hair.
"Come on, Adele, it has to be you. You’re going to be class president someday."
"Yeah—you’re the only person that’s ever even talked to the freak—"
"She’s not a freak, Meredith, she just spent two weeks in a coma. It’s not that big of a deal—"
"See? You’re the only one that thinks that way! You should go. They said somebody from our class has to go, and none of the rest of us like her. She’s weird."
And here she was, clutching a stack of cards with no feeling behind them in sweaty hands. The collar of her uniform blouse felt as though it would tighten any minute now and choke her on the spot. It was like she had lost some kind of demented lottery, and now she was facing a fallen classmate. One who probably didn’t even like her. Gathering her nerves, Adele glanced at the matron for permission to go beyond the curtain and, upon receiving a formal nod, slipped past before she could rethink her actions. She’d never spoken to somebody who’d been in a coma before. Would she look dead?
There wasn’t much behind the curtain: boxy-looking hospital appliances, a white-sheeted bed, a frosted window. The fluorescent light overhead flickered, darkening the area slightly. In an awful green hospital gown stood Dalmeiier. She was turned away from the curtain, but Adele knew that she had been heard. Dalmeiier’s shoulders were tight; the twelve-year-old stood, practically leaning against the window, dark head bent forward. "What do you want, Warren?"
"How—how’d you know it was me?" Adele stammered, clutching the cards to her chest. Dalmeiier hadn’t even looked at her. There were rumors around school that the new girl was a freak, but Adele hadn’t thought that they were true at all.
The other girl just shrugged with one shoulder and turned slowly, finally looking at Adele with a piercing quality in her gaze. Adele sucked in a gasp at the mess: a white sling clashed with the hospital gown, and the normally dark grey eyes stared at her from behind the faint traces of bruises. A nearly-healed cut traced a jagged path down the right side of her face, and Adele could see a trail of bruises along her jaw and just below her exposed collarbone, just yellowing now. "Warren?"
Adele jerked guiltily; she’d been caught staring. If the matron were here, she would be receiving a stern look for her behavior. "Is Corinthia really your name?" she blurted out, and immediately reddened straight to her hairline. She wanted to kick herself; out of all of the questions she could have asked, she had to pick that one, didn’t she? "Like your dad and mom always call you Corinthia and all?"
Dalmeiier stared for a long time. "No." She straightened, pushed her hand through her hair in very jerky movements. "Fat lot you know."
The sudden hostility made Adele take a step back. "What?"
"My parents are dead, Warren." Dalmeiier turned away, presenting a sharp-edged profile to Adele. Her nose didn’t quite fit the rest of her face—it was a snub nose, clashing with an overly-stubborn chin and hawk-like eyebrows. For some strange reason, such a fault seemed to fit her. "Don’t get all weepy about it or anything—not like I remember them, anyway."
"Um...sorry." Not sure what to say, Adele just extended the cards to her and cleared her throat. She didn’t think she had ever felt this foolish. "We all wrote these in English today. I’m supposed to give them to you."
She barely glanced at them. "Nice. Thanks." Without another look, she jerkily extended her arm and set them on the windowsill. Adele doubted that she would read them at all. She couldn’t say that she blamed her. "So—what? Did you draw the slip with the ‘X’ on it? Is that why they’re sending you?"
The reference to The Lottery made Adele raise her eyebrows. "N-no," she lied. "There were no papers with ‘X’s on them."
"You know what I meant." Dalmeiier walked slowly back to the hospital bed and sat on the edge, nothing more than a scrawny preteen. "The matron’s out there with that annoying look on her face, and Meredith, Nancy, Betty, and Jane are all waiting for your news back at school. Nobody really wanted to write those cards over there. They all did it because they have to."
"Look—Dal—Corinthia—"
"Don’t call me that."
The girl’s voice was so sharp that Adele flinched despite herself. "But it’s your name, isn’t it?"
"Look, if you want to be on a first-name basis with me, Warren, that’s fine. But don’t call me Corinthia." Dalmeiier’s expression was murderous, but she wasn’t looking at Adele. No, she was looking past the brunette, at something that Adele was quite sure wasn’t in the room. Her voice dropped to an inaudible level, but Adele still heard, "That’s what Dumont calls me."
"What should I call you then?" Adele asked shrewdly, her nervousness dissipating. Dalmeiier wasn’t going to attack her; the girl was just as frightened of Rachel Dumont as the rest of the of the Podmore Academy for Girls. For some reason, that bolstered Adele’s confidence somewhat. "You, for instance, could call me Adele or Addy. I don’t like being called Warren very much."
For the first time, she saw something crack at Dalmeiier’s stony countenance. The girl’s penetrating eyes, ringed by the dark bruises, looked so much older than twelve as she finally gazed at Adele. "Call me Crin, then. That’s what my brother calls me."
"Crin?" Well, it certainly wasn’t a normal nickname, that was for sure. "Oh—for Corinthia. I get it." Crin just snorted. Adele rolled her eyes at her. "Well, they never said I was the brightest crayon in the box. It usually takes me awhile."
"Right, Miss President." For a second, Adele saw the beginnings of a smile tease the corner’s of Crin’s mouth, although the solemn look quickly regained its place. Taking her chances, Adele sat on the edge of the bed and stared down at the polished toes of her school shoes. They made for an odd picture—Crin with her sling and her hospital gown sitting next to Adele in the starched lines of the Podmore school uniform. A horrible silence rose up between the two until Crin cleared her throat and shifted a bit. "Is Rachel Dumont still prancing around the hallways?"
Despite herself, Adele winced. Everybody had been avoiding Rachel Dumont like the plague; none of them wanted to end up like Crin Dalmeiier. "You banged her up pretty good. She spent a lot of time in the nurse’s office while—while you were, um, sleeping. They still believe that you fell down the stairs, though."
"Stairs. Hmpf. Stairs broke my collarbone, cut my face up, and gave me two black eyes. That’s a good one."
To her amazement, Adele burst out laughing at that. "They could have broken both of your legs and kicked you in the butt while they were at it."
A grin cracked through Crin’s rocky exterior. "Right. Stairs attack innocent student—details inside!" The ideas of stairs getting up and attacking somebody like a monster out of a B-rated horror movie had both girls giggling for a long time. Smart, pretty and popular Adele Warren, shoe-in for class president, giggling on a hospital cot next to quiet loner Crin Dalmeiier? Somebody had gone and rearranged the stars on them, it seemed. For now, they were just two insecure preteens on the brink of a grudging friendship. Adele had no idea what even being associated to Crin would do to her over the years…
The wind blew a small whirlwind of trash onto the front stoop of the small shop space located in one of the worse segments of New York City, but the stoop’s occupants hardly noticed. Two battered and sun-bleached lawn chairs had been chained to the posts that were (skeptically) holding a sunroof over the patio, and both, as well as the center of the top step, were occupied. The two in the lawn chairs were undeniably related—both were young women in their early twenties, short and trim from active lifestyles. Oval-shaped faces, hereditary pale skin, a constant suspicion evident in both women. The elder of the two sported dark auburn hair, the younger glossy black. Both wore sunglasses to ward off some of the sun’s unrelenting rays.
A third member was seated on the top step of the porch, leaning back casually on his hands. About the same age as the other two, he was tall and gawky, his medium brown hair not quite styled. He was more interested in the crossword puzzle book open against one knee than in his companions. Conversation was at the minimum between the three as the two women watched trash swirl around in the street.
"I swear," remarked the black-haired woman, kicking a Lays potato chips bag off of her right sneaker, "any hotter out here and the trash is just going to start boiling."
Her red-haired relative turned to look at her, amusement hidden behind the mirrored lenses of her glasses. Upon closer inspection, she had a very small scar on the right side of her jaw, barely discernible even in the bright sunlight. Even on the broiling hot day, she wore dark jeans and a navy blue tank top. "Good, then. It’ll all be disinfected and we won’t die from all of those horrible plagues they talk about on the Discovery Channel."
The young man on the porch step finally looked up from his comic book. "Why didn’t you bother to get air conditioning when you bought this place?" he demanded of the redhead. "Or, in the very least, why can’t you do a cooling spell or whatever it is you witches do?"
This earned him a cool look. "That’d be an awful waste of my power, don’t you think? And I’m not a witch. I just have access to senses that most humans don’t."
At twenty-three, Crin Dalmeiier neither weighed much, nor attracted many looks at the nightclubs she frequented occasionally. She had been reassured by Deke, who looked at her even now with exasperation, that she was quite pretty—but it wasn’t a conventional sort of pretty, like Kaye. No, he had insisted that Crin had a beauty that was evident in her self-confidence, in the mere intelligence resting behind her impassive grey eyes. Kaye, Crin’s niece that was more like a sister due to the four-year age difference, was on a general basis a great deal prettier than her only aunt, and voluptuous to boot.
"Besides, Deke," Kaye piped up now, nudging the young man’s side with her foot, "if Crin does a cooling spell now, she won’t be able to go see that show with you that she promised to see tonight." Her look at her aunt was pointed. For the past year, Kaye had been trying to push the two together, although Deke and Crin’s friendship was firmly latched to a platonic level.
Crin winced. "Actually, about that…" Both of her companions groaned, Deke even burying his face in his hands melodramatically. This inspired Crin to raise her sunglasses and give both of them the full brunt of her glare. "I can’t go. Adele’s coming into town this afternoon to visit that rather loaded fiancé of hers, and we’re going out for drinks tonight since he has to work." Her grin at Kaye was not quite feral. "However, I know that you’re not doing anything tonight, so why don’t you go with Deke? You don’t mind, do you, D?"
He tried not to look as though his birthday had come early. "I’ll take her with me if I have to," he said with a long-suffering sigh.
"I’m not sitting through a Ukrainian film or whatever it is you two go to see on your Tuesday nights off," Kaye threatened immediately, rising to a standing position and stretching. "If we’re going to see a movie, it has to have made the top ten in the box office at one point or another, understand?"
Unnoticed to the other two, Crin rose as well and slipped through the glass-paneled door labeled "Crin and Company." A few seconds later, the other two heard the phone ring, but neither was particularly surprised at her precognitive power. In fact, Deke ignored it in order to sigh dramatically, finally looking away from his crossword. "You know, that’s really sacrificing my artist’s eye," he pointed out querulously, "but for you, I’ll hang the moon."
"That’s so sweet of you." Kaye rolled her eyes at him and jumped from the porch into the street, which, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was as dead as the air drifting through Birch Lane. She began dribbling a discarded foam ball around with her shoes, having been an avid soccer player in high school. Both she and Crin loved soccer, and could get into such intense one-on-one matches that Deke sometimes felt as though he had to wince for them whenever one met the unsavory end of an elbow. They both played dirty.
Crin poked her head through the front door. "Kaye, phone for you. Sounds like one of your crazy guy friends." She passed the cordless phone to her niece, who immediately set off for the dark depths of the building that functioned as both an apartment and working quarters for the two. Instead of retreating back into the still, dark heat, Crin sat next to Deke on the front stoop. "She’ll notice you eventually, you know."
Deke didn’t look up from the crossword. "Thanks for the confidence, Boss, but I don’t really think you’re right about this one." He spared her a quick glance. "Unless, of course, your crazy powers told you about it."
An orphan at four, Crin had surely lived an interesting life, shuffled between her older half-brother’s apartment and a small cottage in Maine with her great-aunts. It had taken three very strange accidents from her childhood to convince her aunts that she had been given the Dalmeiier gift, which hadn’t been present in the family line for two generations. Nobody was quite sure what made the Dalmeiiers so special, but there she was, an honest-to-goodness example that freaks of nature did exist. The problem was that it wasn’t a solid, researchable gift. Sometimes she just knew things before others did, other times she sensed things others didn’t, sometimes she actually moved objects with her mind, or cooled or heated the air. One time, she had flung Deke through a solid sheet of plate-glass without meaning to, narrowly saving him from a bullet’s path.
"No," she admitted now. "I haven’t had any visions in a long time. I know my niece, Deke. She’s the type that has to make every wrong choice before coming to the right one."
Deke just raised an eyebrow at the puzzle on the page in front of him. "How long do I have to wait before she comes to that choice, then? And what if I’m not even the right choice?" His Boston accent, which was normally faded and unnoticeable, thickened in his effort to hide any emotion from his voice.
His association with Kaye Westminster had been going on far longer than he had ever known about Crin Dalmeiier and her amazing calling to ‘catch the bad guys and make them pay.’ He’d known Kaye his senior year of high school, when she’d been a sophomore on the soccer team, and he’d been star of the school play. She had been working backstage for extra credit, and had started calling him Deke instead of Derek—a name that had stuck so heavily that it was now a permanent nickname. Soon they were good friends, and through her he had met Crin—and had been flung through a solid wall of glass.
From that moment, Deke was hooked to help the odd aunt and niece with the bounty-hunting business that Crin ran. He called Crin "Boss" on a regular basis, and joked around with Kaye regularly. Life with the two women was never boring.
"It’s up to you," Crin told him now. "Though if you ever want to be in the game at all, you’ve got to put your cards on the table." And with that, and a reassuring squeeze of his right shoulder, she disappeared back into the building to puzzle over the case files she was working on. Her leaving made a very clear point—break time was over, and it was time for Deke to get back to work. Sighing, he brushed his pants off and followed her into the building.
