Deja Who (Insighter #1)(27)

“Pure as newborn snow?”

“You stop mixing metaphors right now,” Cat warned. “Hate that shit.”

“—life-blind,” Leah finished.

“Hey!” Archer was pointing at her. “You can’t use that phrase, that’s our phrase. Also, it’s bullshit.”

“Mmm.” Leah had never met a rasa; now there was one right in front of her and there wasn’t much she could do for him. If Archer couldn’t see his past lives, she could not, either. “Am I the only Insighter you’ve stalked? Um, spent time with?”

He flashed her a wounded look. “My cousin’s one. She explained why she gets kind of edgy around me.”

“That’s good, but what does that have to do with Insighters?” Cat asked, grinning. “There’s gotta be lots of reasons people get edgy around you. I’m thinking of half a dozen without even trying.”

“Hilarious, Your Honor. Anyway, she told me that Insighters can’t see my past lives and it really freaks them out.”

“Life-blind, huh?” Cat was looking at him thoughtfully. “Jeez. That’s gotta be like . . . I dunno . . . missing a limb or something. Sounds wicked hard.”

“It’s actually wicked fine. Suits my personal philosophy pretty perfectly.”

Leah managed a sour smile. This was awfully close to people who weren’t alcoholics being unable to understand why alcoholics can’t control their drinking. Look at me! I just say to myself, Self, don’t have a drink tonight. And I don’t. See? Easy. Now you try.

She had another theory about this puzzling, interesting man, and it wasn’t that he was life-blind. A most-likely ridiculous theory, but this wasn’t the time to bring it up. And she was probably mistaken. But if she wasn’t . . . she’d never known someone like him before, in all of her lives (that she knew of, at least) and maybe . . .

Hmm.

“My sister saw an Insighter every month for years, and it sure as shit didn’t save her. But I never translated that to ‘my sister died anyway, ergo Insighters are useless.’ It’s like telling a cancer patient that because chemo didn’t work for so-and-so, it won’t work for them, either.”

Leah said nothing. Cat never talked about her family. Ever.

“I’m sorry,” Archer said after the awkward pause. “How did she die?”

“Drowned.”

Another pause while Leah watched Archer scan the older woman’s face. Cat seemed almost preternaturally calm, but then, she often was almost preternaturally calm. “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d it happen?”

“She was underwater too long.”

Ohhhhh, boy.

Archer went from concerned to annoyed back to concerned, shaking his head at the grinning Cat. “I figured that. God, my heart. I feel like I’m tiptoeing across land mines here. I assumed she was a little kid at the time—”

“Nope. Seventeen.”

“And?”

“Drunk.”

“Ah.”

“Also high.”

“Okay.”

“My point is, sometimes something shitty happens and it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened before.”

“Correct,” Leah said, “but sometimes it does.”





SIXTEEN


My name is Isabella Mowbray.

Mother is desperate and angry, and hides both behind tight smiles, and so it’s time for the nasty treats. Isabella doesn’t mind; she has been waiting for such things.

Isabella had eight siblings; they are dead. She had two stepsiblings. They are dead. Her grandmother is dead. Her father is dead. Her stepfather is dead.

They had weak stomachs. All her brothers and sisters and her father and her grandmother, and her stepfather and stepsiblings, who were no blood relation, which made Isabella wonder if weak stomachs were contagious, they were all cursed with weak stomachs and they are dead, and Isabella’s stomach has hurt for two weeks and she bleeds when she pees.

She doesn’t mind. It’s lonesome and nerve-racking with just Mother; her strained smiles are terrifying. So is her belly, which is bigger every month. For a while Isabella thought the family stomach weakness had finally caught her mother, too, but eventually realized what was happening and felt better. She’s growing my replacement. When I die she won’t be lonesome.

So that was all right.

Isabella knew what was happening to her more or less from the first headaches. She was only ten, but she had always been an observant child. “Owl’s eyes,” her mother teased, “always watching me.” Dreadful pounding headaches like someone was sitting on her chest and hitting her on the top of her head with a rock over and over and over. At first, her greatest fear was that the headaches would kill her, kill her and leave Mother alone. Then her greatest fear was that they would not.

Head pain, nasty poopies, and tired, all the time tired. Even thinking was exhausting; it was so much easier to lie there and wait for . . . for whatever. Her hair started to fall out, her lovely long dark hair just like Mother’s, and sometimes her body would flail and shake out of her control and that would leave her even more drained, and if she wasn’t so tired she might be scared.

It would be more frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. This would all be so terribly terribly frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. Like Father, like Daddy George, like Grandmother, like Michael and Jenny and David and Laura and John and Leah and the little ones whose names she no longer remembered.