Chapter Text
One
I heard her before I saw her.
Edythe!
That was a given, I suppose. Supernatural senses made it almost impossible for one of our kind to sneak up on another, but the telepathy always alerted me to approaching visitors even earlier.
You’re avoiding me! A high-pitched voice sing-songed through my mind.
And it was no surprise that Alice would know exactly when she’d entered my mental range, not wasting even a split second’s chance to be annoying. To be fair, I wasn’t avoiding only her, but I should have counted on my closest sibling taking my absence personally. I gritted my teeth, tossing the mountain lion’s carcass aside. Alice appeared at the edge of the clearing, her slight frame dwarfed by the cartoonishly large purse on her shoulder. She lingered in the shadows, smiling.
“Do you know what I love about this meadow, Alice?” I sighed, rolling onto my stomach in the long grass.
“I know you’re going to tell me.”
“I love how quiet it is here. How utterly and completely devoid of mental chatter it is. How I don’t have to listen to anyone else’s thoughts.”
In an instant, she flitted to my side, her skin illuminated like my own in the sunlight, throwing rainbow prisms across the trees and bushes. “You’ve had all night to be alone with your thoughts, but I saw you making yourself late if I didn’t bring you something new to wear. First period starts in twenty minutes.” She started rifling through her ludicrously capacious bag.
I waved lazily at the sky. “It’s sunny.”
You are being so annoying, she thought, scowling. Obviously, it’s not sunny down in town. Or else I wouldn’t be here. And Esme will be pissed if you cut class again so soon, she doesn’t want another call from the school. She pulled a fitted cashmere cardigan from the depths of her purse and flung it at me. “And I didn’t exactly want to spend my morning trekking up here to find you, thank you very much.” I wrinkled my nose. She knew I hated wool. No matter how many times it was cleaned, the smell of the sheep always lingered. Maybe I really had put her out.I brushed against her thoughts, but I could not find irritation in them, but a strange, erratic quality that was very much unlike her. She was jumping from thought to thought quickly, disorderedly, as if she was flustered.
“What’s going on with you?” I said. “And why did you bring me—?”
In less than a human’s heartbeat, she was on her feet. “Nothing!”
A toss of deep brown hair.
“You just look really pretty in that color!”
A skidding car in the school parking lot.
“Alice, what are you—?”
A pair of jeans hit me in the face. “Just wear those with it! And brush your hair!”
Dark, wide eyes.
And then Alice was running, leaving nothing in her wake but questions and a new outfit and a breathless cry echoing through the trees as she shouted over her shoulder:
“I’ll see you at school!”