The library was open but deserted at nine o'clock Friday night. The librarian abandoned her post long ago, and firmly believed that no student would sink low enough to steal any of the books, and if they did there was the alarm that would go off when a book passed through the door.
So the three of them, Pogue, Tyler and Maddie, sat at a square table in the middle of the library piled high with books, Maddie on one side and the two boys on the other, interrogation style. No one said anything for a long time, so Madeline resorted to reading one of the books at the top of the pile. Pogue, irritated, broke the silence.
"We know there's something going on with you."
Maddie barely looked up from the book she was reading.
"It certainly seems so." She flipped a page. "Care to elaborate?"
"First of all." Tyler started nervously. "You got really scared in bio-"
"Explainable." She interrupted.
"Then you told me that I would regret going to meet Fae. Which I did."
"Again, explainable."
"Then you told us you knew about us and the Covenant."
"Do I need to repeat myself?" She looked up from her book. "You technically don't have any information whatsoever that proves whatever theory you have. At the moment I'm just paranoid, logical and curious. Which isn't that special." She returned to her reading.
"What about your classmates?" Pogue said triumphantly.
"What about them?" Maddie was barely fazed.
"Jessica Digiovani, Lorraine King, Kimberly Monta, Laura Donnelly, Laura Finlan, Jennifer Jackson, Beverly Silver and Jasmine Prince… Any of these names ring any bells?"
For the first time she looked genuinely shocked.
"Isn't there some sort of rule against looking through someone's personal files?"
"That's besides the point." Tyler continued. "The point is you correctly predicted and accurately illustrated the deaths of your classmates, and identified the murderer."
"I did?"
"Joshua Penn was arrested last week."
Her eyes widened again and a satisfied smile formed on her face.
"Was about time." She whispered.
"Pardon?" Pogue said.
"It was about time that that low-life good for nothing bastard was caught. All the pain he put those girls through. I'm surprised he didn't get the chair."
"How do you know he didn't get the chair?" Pogue said with a triumphant grin.
Maddie rolled her eyes and leaned back into her chair. She stared at the two boys long and hard for a long time.
"You aren't stupid. Figure it out." She spat out eventually. And she didn't say a word for another half hour. Pogue was fuming, his brain working hard at figuring out everything. After thirty minutes something clicked and he exclaimed:
"You're psychic!" it was more a statement than an answer.
"Nope." She continued reading. "Think harder, pretty boy, you can get this."
Another fifteen minutes passed, until Tyler finally spoke up in a small, unsure voice.
"You can see death?"
"See, I knew you weren't dumb." She flashed him a radiant smile.
"What do you mean, you can see death? Isn't that being psychic?"
"Nope." She placed the book down on the table.
"Explain it then." Tyler said, all giddy from finding the right answer, even if it creeped him out a little. Maddie took a deep breath, and started talking like she was telling a story.
"Once upon a time there lived a girl, and this girl had a peculiar if not downright bizarre trait that was unique to her and that no one else possessed or understood. The trait consisted of what they liked to call the 'second sight', although it was a lot less romantic than the name let it sound."
"Get to the point."
"Patience, Pogue. Anyways, this oddity consisted that the girl, once she had his first encounter with death, started seeing visions of the deaths of those around her. They weren't really visions since they were always dead-on, no pun intended, but you get the point."
"But how does it-"
"I said patience, Pogue. How it works is that from the moment the girl's skin comes in contact with another person's shee will see the last moments of this person's life, from the point of view of an omnipresent super-being, suspected to be God by the more religious. So this one girl that has been seeing her friends die since the tender age of eight arrives at biology class one day in high school and her hand touches the hand of another person. The odd thing is that she didn't see a thing, no vision, no death, nothing at all when she touched this boy."
"Me?"
"Yes, yes. So upon further experiments she notices that two of the three boys this one hangs out with don't have a reaction with her second sight at all. Which makes her curious, and subsequently she does a little research and finds out some dark, dark secrets that they have been hiding for quite some time. Oh, and she also saved the incriminating tape."
She dropped a tape from her pocket onto the table, marked incriminating/Magic/TylerSims with a white post it note. Pogue snatched it before Tyler could and stuffed it in his inside coat pocket.
"And they lived happily ever after." She finished. "You can ask questions now if you want."
"Ok, when did this start, where did it come from and why?"
"Don't know. For either of them."
"Why do you think you can't… um see us?" Tyler asked.
"No idea. If I knew I wouldn't have freaked out so bad." She smiled weakly. "Sorry for scaring you like that. It really wasn't you."
"Not yet at least." Pogue said seriously. "There's something going on here. Something that links the Covenant with you. And there's only one person who can figure out what it is."
"Caleb Danvers." Tyler finished.
"Caleb Danvers?" Maddie frowned. "I haven't met him, have I?"
"No. We would have introduced you when we met you a few days ago, but he's been home all this time. I guess he's feeling sick about killing Chase."
Maddie's eyes widened.
"Chase? Chase Collins?"
"The one and only" Tyler said grimly. "Good thing we killed him, he would have done some terrible shit if he knew about you."
Maddie looked down into her lap, and wrung her hands together.
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news." She said in a quiet, whisper-like voice. "But I'm afraid that Chase Collins is not dead."