Page 12 of The Second Sight
“Sorry,” I mumbled, hurrying past. I had to pee ten minutes ago.
The hallway to the bathrooms stretched before me, appearing longer than it should have been. I bumped into the wall, steadying myself with one hand. The contact sent a strange tingling up my arm, like static electricity. Everything felt slightly off-kilter, as if the world had shifted a few degrees without warning me first.
It was just the alcohol that had me seeing things. I continued down the hallway. The women’s bathroom door was directly ahead. Through the lenses, the ordinary wooden door appeared overlaid with intricate patterns that shifted and changed as I watched.
I reached for the handle. The metal handle was cool against my palm. I pushed the door open, stepping forward into what should have been a typical club bathroom. They were usually cramped, slightly dirty, and smelled of hand soap and cheap perfume.
Instead, as the door swung shut behind me. I stood still, taking in my surroundings. The entire space was bathed in a soft golden light. I looked up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the glow wasn’t coming from above me. I gazed at my reflection in the wall mirror. There was someone else in here with me. I couldn’t see them, but I felt them.
“Hello, Kasinda,” a familiar voice called to me. “I’ve been waiting for you to find me.” I turned to look for the owner of the voice but found no one in the restroom with me.
The glasses grew hot against my face, but I couldn’t move to take them off. I couldn’t move at all. When I looked back in the mirror, I saw her. All I could do was stare at the woman before me. She was the woman I’d spent six years dreaming about, grieving for, searching for. No, when I looked deeper into the mirror, it wasn’t her at all. It looked like her, but not quite.
Mama, I whispered in my head, but my voice remained silent.
She was already fading like mist. The last thing I saw before everything went dark was her sad smile and a single tear tracking down her mahogany-colored perfect face.
“Find me,” she whispered. “Find your true self first, then find me.”
Then nothing but darkness.
Oh, hell naw! Enough was enough. I needed to sleep off the alcohol. I was hallucinating. Drinking in excess was not for me.
Chapter
Five
KASI
Icrashed back to reality with a violent jolt. The vision of my mother with her glowing brown skin, her familiar yet strange face, but her hair was different. It was a trick. It wasn’t my mama. There was something off. Had I really hallucinated? Did I blackout? Was it the glasses that were still perched on the bridge of my nose?
“Find me,” she had said. “Find your true self first, then find me.”
I shook my head, trying to clear the fog. The alcohol in my system wasn’t helping, but this was more than drunkenness. What I’d seen was too real, too specific.
The bathroom was still empty. I couldn’t be the only woman who had to pee. Maybe they had another bathroom, and this one no one knew about. The mirrors above the sinks reflected my face back at me. Through the readers, everything still possessed that heightened clarity. I should’ve taken them off. Something wasn’t right about these old glasses, but my hands refused to obey my brain.
My gaze drifted across the bathroom. That’s when I noticed it, a stall door near the back, slightly ajar. A sliver of space that revealed movement inside.
Under normal circumstances, I would have ignored it. Public bathrooms deserved whatever privacy could be managed. But through these lenses, I could see something emanating from that stall. There was a pulsing crimson light that seemed to beat in rhythm with my own racing heart.
My feet carried me forward before my brain could protest. The bass from the club speakers vibrated through the walls, masking the sound of my heels as I approached the partially open door. I told myself I was checking if someone needed help. Deep down in some primitive part of me, I already knew I should be running in the opposite direction. Or at the very least peeing, because that was what I came in here to do.
I peered through the gap in the door, and the world stopped.
Inside the stall stood the handsome blonde man, the one who had been watching me all night. He wasn’t alone. A young woman was with him, her back pressed against the partition wall, her head lolled to one side like a broken doll’s. He was bent over her exposed neck. His mouth latched onto her skin like a parasite. What? What in the entire fuck?
Blood. There was blood everywhere. Crimson rivulets trailed down her pale skin, staining the neckline of her sequined top. Through the glasses, the blood seemed to glow with its own inner light, pulsing with life even as it left her body.
I let out a strangled sound that wasn’t quite a gasp but was enough to be heard. The man’s head jerked up, and our eyes met through the gap in the door. Blood, old girl’s blood, coated his lips and chin, dripping obscenely down the front of his expensive-looking black leather jacket.
The woman slumped further, sliding down the partition until she was half-seated on the toilet, unconscious or worse. He didn’t seem to care. His attention was entirely fixed on me now, his expression shifting from surprise to cold calculation in the space of a second.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered, the words barely audible even to my own ears. But he heard me.
I stumbled backward, my brain finally catching up to what my eyes were seeing.
Kasi, you were on the track team in junior high and high school. Run, dumbass. I needed to run.I told myself.
