There was a great deal of energy in the room at that moment and it hit Kate like a tidal wave. Flooding her mind.
A friendly cop reveals the drug dealer's heart of gold. Beans are paid for and the time traveler makes herself a fluffy new friend. A few rewinds later and the sandy-haired hipster has nearly everything she needs, but it still doesn't seem enough. She knows she's untouchable so long as she can keep moving time at her whim. So she pushes, and questions, and baits, and compliments, and finally reveals the bracelet. She's a snoop, it's what she does best, better even than manipulating the timestream.
"No no no no..." Kate groaned and shut her eyes tight. It was too much. Too many thoughts and memories and stories at once.
The beautiful girl with the long blonde hair bends at an attractive angle for the man with the camera. She wonders idly if he's even taking the shot or not. She wonders what he would be like in bed. She assures herself that anything between her and the blue-haired punk is all in her head. He tells her to take off her top – an order, not a request. Anything for art.
Max is about the only one in the room with all her faculties still in place, so she jumped into action.
His room is dark, and she knows immediately something is wrong. No snide words on the tablet outside his door. The projector isn't running. And it's messy. Normally he loses it when there's a cup in the wrong spot, but the place is totally out of sorts. Only light coming from the hallway even lets her know that he's in there. She says his name in a voice no one else does – in a way no one else probably ever will. With loyalty and dedication and honest concern. A shadow on the bed moves.
Kate thought she was the hero, but Victoria had shown such wisdom, and Max was so quick on her feet. Her girlfriend's neck was bandaged with a torn bit of clothing.
The dog trusts her almost instinctually, meaning his owner does too. In almost no time, the honesty begins to flow as the two non-canine ones share a cup of coffee down by the beach. It helps, knowing that if she says too much she can always go back. But when she tells him what she can do, he just laughs and agrees that it's fucked up. And then he shows her what he can do. And considering she's a time traveler, she's still thoroughly impressed.
The pieces were coming together, and Kate wanted to be excited about that, but the present remained a hellhole that made no sense.
The thing is, when you die, you're still there. Call it a soul, call it a spirit, call it fucking bullshit, but you don't just disappear into nothingness. So the horror of being killed didn't stop after her brain stops functioning. She has to float and watch as the psycho slices off her arms, marveling at her wrists for the hundredth time. If only she had understood what he meant when he said he wanted her for her wrists.
"So are we gonna talk about this or...?" Max asked with regards to the ghost just standing there. It was a reasonable question.
She reaches for the light switch and he snapped. She knows he's been fraying lately, but she didn't know it'd become this bad. She asks about Rachel and the Dark Room, but it's as if he doesn't even hear her. He rants and raves. His father and the Prescott patriarchal tradition. Blood and honor. So much blood. And now that he's a man and a senior at Blackwell, it's time he joined the Brotherhood. She becomes filled with terror as fangs gleam in the dark.
The ghost gave a shrug, which was an odd thing to experience in retrospect. "Um, well, I died, and I was a butterfly for a bit. And then they found my body, and now I'm a ghost."
Even with all she'd done and seen, to see a man erupt into a beast was something frightening. She gives a shriek and the pup in her lap jolts slightly. He is no longer intelligible, but the meaning is all too clear. She is not the only freak. There are others out there, and her burden is lighter. And much to her delight, the big dog enjoys ear scritches as much as the small one. And when he is himself again – or perhaps no longer himself – they talk of Her and drugs and the Club and some prick with thick-rimmed glasses. In her mind's eye she sees the scratches on that lanky arm and she knows she has to hurry back.
"So we now have..." Max held up her hand and counted across her fingers. "A witch, a Time Lord, a ghost... And there's a good chance you're a werewolf and she's a vampire."
Was she a human dreaming she was a butterfly? Or was she a butterfly dreaming she was a ghost? Or was she a ghost of a girl who, inexplicably, became a glittery blue butterfly. Was she an aging hipster with dreams of finding the perfect model? Or had she merely been in possession of a pair of wrists that brought his creation one step closer to completion? She had nearly lost herself until she found the beacon – the earthy girl who saw her for what she really was. Her chance to Remember. Her chance to Become.
It's even stranger to see a ghost be embarrassed, but Rachel hasn't been spectral long enough to lose her humanity. "Frank infected her, no question." Perhaps there would be time later for Chloe to understand properly why that statement made her so mad.
There is a sharp pain in the neck. Of course there is. Two points. Because he is a vampire. That thought runs around her mind on a track as the blood leaves her. That was why he disappeared, that was why he hated the light. The thing that actually shocks her isn't this complete breach of normalcy, but the crying that follows as her consciousness fades. Not just sappy whimpering, full-on sobbing. He always cried like that, built it up over time until he exploded. Even now, even with his lips coated in her blood. He says the word Sorry so many times it loses all meaning, and then Something happens. And she's only Kind Of Dead.
…
…
Victoria sat up, clinging to Kate and burying her eyes in her shoulder. "It's way too bright in here... Where're my sunglasses?" The witch gave a cry of joy and hugged her tight, only finally aware that she was crying, though in fact she had been in tears as soon as the visions hit her. With fumbling hands she hunted down a pair of sunglasses and passed them to Victoria before closing the blinds and turning off all but the most essential light in the room. A vampire. Her girlfriend was a vampire. I can live with this. This is fine.
"So... We've found Rachel, albeit posthumously." Kate motioned broadly to her head. "I got a nice little headache-inducing catch-up when everyone showed up. Near as I can tell... Everything goes back to your uh... Mr. Jefferson." All of them, save Chloe, had managed to reach that conclusion through their own investigations, but no one was particularly thrilled about it. Two of his brightest students now knew the truth.
"But I still don't... get it. He... He took your arms? Is that his thing?" It wasn't like he would be the first serial killer to take a trophy or whatever. But wasn't it Rachel who had told her to find Stella? And that 'perfect creation'? "Any idea?"
"No specifics. Only that sometimes he would talk about this art project he was working on, and then he would get this shine in his eyes. But normally when that happens it's beautiful, not slightly horrifying..." Kate was learning a great deal this week. At the moment, she was discovering that ghosts could get chills. Poor Rachel, Kate had only connected to her a moment, and even that had been so awful. "When he took my arms, he was somewhere else. A room, white and bright, somewhere in Arcadia."
That phrase. White and bright. It hurt to hear it, and Kate had another moment of cosmic panic before remembering there was no reason for those words to have any meaning to her. They were just words. Kate looked back at Victoria, still needing to adjust to the paleness of her skin, the slight sunkeness of her eyes. And yet, she was still her beautiful Tori. "And Nathan...?"
"He would never admit it himself, but he's just a pawn. Ever since his d-dad..." She cut herself short, not really ready to say such a terrible thing out loud. Nathan, for all he had done, was still one of Victoria's true friends. For quite some time, they were the only ones who understood each other. The witch snuggled up to her, ignoring for now how cold she was already. "There's a lot more at work here."
Kate groaned, though it was the exasperated sound of someone who had a test they'd forgotten about rather than an entire town to save. "And the storm. We still have no clue what's up with that, except that animals keep dying and, oh yeah, apparently we got our very own eclipse! No one else but us, how very spe-" Only Victoria's hand clamping over her mouth kept her from going any further.
Max stood up, once more showing how far she'd come in just a few days, taking a kind of leadership where Kate seemingly no longer could, hard as she had tried. "Jefferson first. Stella could still be alive, and I don't like the idea of him having some big secret project that involves killing people. There's not much we can actually do about a storm, right? Do our best to warn people and get them to shelters or whatever. Besides, I have to believe it's connected. All this weird stuff happening at once? It can't be a coincidence, can it?"
"Okay, but all Rachel can remember is what the place kind of looked like," Chloe interjected. "It's not exactly much to go off of..."
Victoria was already getting back to her old self, raising her perfectly manicured hand with a smug smile. "Just because Nathan fucked up doesn't mean I didn't get what I wanted. And if my girlfriend hadn't interrupted me..." It had been a while since Kate had seen Victoria get truly mad, and she had forgotten how terrifying it was, particularly with the new inhuman edge. "His family owns a lot of properties. The kinds of places no one ever goes. The kinds of places you could do messed up shit and never be found out."
"Frank was telling me about some place way out in the boondocks Nathan had him deal at... This is getting weird..." Max hugged herself a little tighter now. No one in the room looked thrilled at the moment.
Kate rose to her feet finally and went for the bat Chloe had been admiring just the day before. Back in the simpler times when it was just Max time traveling and her having visions. "So then let's go and wreck his stuff..."
"What if he's there, genius?" Chloe shot up, half motioning in Rachel's direction as if to remind everyone how dangerous the aging hipster really was.
She hefted the bat and gave it a practice swing away from everyone else. "Then we wreck his face while we're at it." Feeling bolder now, she slung the bat up against her shoulder and looked them over. "Look, I hate to turn into some kind of young adult novel cliché here, but... Chloe, you've got the blood of a monster in you now. Even without a full moon, you could literally tear Jefferson's arms off in revenge if you wanted. Victoria, that goes double for you. Once it gets dark, you'll be basically invincible. If Max is careful, she can blink all over the place in a second. And Rachel, who even knows what it means for you to be incorporeal!"
Her little speech nearly did the job, but Victoria moved to her side and looked at her with wide eyes. "Babe... what about you? So far, all you've gotten out of this is hypersensitivity and blackouts... And don't lie to me, you told me about that stupid bat after our second date..."
Any courage she had built up was threatening to topple. But she'd come too far to flag now. Kate was in a 'go big or go home' mood. "Tori! I'm standing in a room with two mythical creatures, an actual ghost, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time! Anything is possible!" She motioned to the weapon in her hands. "For all I know, this thing actually works! It's not like I've ever actually tried before. If even half of these runes do what they're supposed to, then I'm magically protected and setting everything I hit on fire. And if not, half that bookshelf there is spellbooks and grimoires from various traditions. Something in there has to work. We can do this. I can do this!"
As if on cue, there was one more flash in Kate's mind. But there was no pain anymore. Perhaps the threshold had been passed or Kate was adapting, but it seemed to blend seamlessly into the universe she already knew. It stopped being exhausting or terrifying. She welcomed the images like a movie playing in high definition right in her own consciousness.
A fight. A photograph. Another chance. A butterfly on the hearth. Keys in the sink. The bus is so eco-friendly. Another world. A heart racing. A wheelchair. Whales. Harrison Ford. A request. A choice. And the universe corrects itself, with a little help.
Kate feels a big smile grace her lips and she looks at Max with a glimmer in her eyes. "And I think I know what to do about the storm..."