“It’s fine.” I watch as he slides the envelope across the table to me. “What is that?”
“I have a favor to ask. I know you don’t normally do the whole psychic thing—at least not if you can help it. But—”
“Nate, no.”
He holds up his hands. “I know, I know. It’s uncool of me to ask. And I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t desperately important. There’s a little girl. She’s missing.”
I want to slam my hands over my ears, to sing “la la la la la la” like a little kid who doesn’t want to hear that it’s bedtime. Because it’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s that I can’t help.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“What doesn’t?”
“My . . . gift.” I barely stop myself from blurting out the word magic. “I don’t see things that I concentrate on. I feel emotions. Pain. Violence. Fear . . .”
Death.
The truth is, I sense death and all the intense emotions that go along with it.
“Maybe if you look at her, you’ll pick something up. She’s got to be scared, right? She’s been missing for four days.” He grabs the envelope, slides a picture out of it and puts it faceup in the center of the table.
And despite my best intentions, I can’t help but look.
She’s a pretty little girl, maybe six or seven. In the photo, she’s smiling, and there’s a huge gap where her two front teeth should be. Her wide green eyes are bright and innocent and her long, brown ringlets are tied back from her face with purple ribbons that have white polka dots on them.
I stare at her for long seconds, mesmerized. I know I should close my eyes, should look away—the last thing I want is a picture of this lost little girl in my head. I can’t help her, can’t find her, no matter how much I wish I could. She’ll just be one more nightmare for me to live with when the lights go out.
When I finally manage to pull my eyes away from her sweet, happy smile, I find Nate staring at me, his blond brow furrowed with concentration. “Did you . . . ?”
“I told you. It doesn’t work that way.” I look at him curiously, doing my best to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “How did you get involved in a kidnapping case anyway?”
“It’s my neighbor’s daughter. She was playing in the front yard with two friends after school. Her mom went to the back of the house to start a load of laundry and when she went to check on her about seven minutes later, Shelby was gone. She checked with the neighbors, but it turns out their mom had called them home about five minutes before. So sometime in the space of those five minutes, Shelby disappeared. Her parents are—” He breaks off, shakes his head. “They’re a mess.”
“I can’t even imagine.” The horror of it is pressing in on me, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. Pulling at me until I can feel myself spiraling downward, though I don’t know why. It’s a sad story, a terrifying story, but it isn’t much different from a dozen others I’d heard about on the news in the last year.
Knowing I have to get away from Nate, from the picture, from the grief that seems to be closing in, I push my chair back from the table and stand up. I tell him, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you find her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Still, some instinct I don’t even recognize urges me to pick up the photo. I slide it carefully into the back pocket of my jeans. “And you don’t want my help. Because if I knew where she was, if I could find her, it would only be because she was already dead.”
Four
I can’t get the little girl out of my head. All day I think about her—while I’m running the register, while I’m mixing cookie dough, while I’m waiting tables. Her face is there every time I close my eyes, every time I pause for breath.
At first I panic, terrified that a compulsion is setting in. That the reason I’m fixated on her is because she’s dead. As the day passes and I realize that I’m not going to be pulled out of my shop by some urgent need to find her, though, the fear begins to recede. But in its place grows a determination to do something, anything, to help her.
With that thought foremost in my head, I text Declan at five o’clock, as I’m walking out the front door of Beanz—just a quick note to tell him I’m going to spend the night at my own house tonight. I know it won’t go over well, but I want to talk to Lily about Shelby. She has different magic than mine, and while she’s no better at finding lost people than I am, she reads a mean tarot. Maybe, if she concentrates, she’ll pick something up that can help Nate.