With flowers on the wall

Rose of Jericho buried her face in her arms on her best friend's table and wept, physically unable to hold herself back any longer from an overwhelming tide of emotions. She wasn't sure why she was crying - it certainly wasn't grief alone that prompted it, because Mara's death still hadn't really sunken in to that dark internal space where she could still feel things - she only knew that tears were happening and there was no halting them no matter how terribly she wanted to. It had been a trying day, or so she told herself, so she was allowed this moment of vulnerability. A rotten voice like her father's somewhere inside criticized her for displaying this weakness. Listening to it only made her cry harder. You're not here, she told the voice. You don't matter to me anymore.

The first person to intelligently react was, of course, Aidan. He walked around the table and placed a calm hand on her back and rubbed gentle circles. She wasn't sure why he was doing it, until after a few seconds into it when she noticed she had already been reduced to sniffling. He'd worked some kind of emotional magic on her that quieted her strife nearly instantaneously.

She looked up with blurred, teary eyes at Aidan's form and sniffled. She wasn't sure, but it seemed like he smiled. There was something that twisted with it, that wrenched at her heart in an unfamiliar way which made his smile more bittersweet than welcoming. "You're allowed to cry, you know," Aidan informed her delicately. For a moment, she wondered if he was the one who was psychic.

RJ sniffled again. "I hate crying," she complained in-between sniffles. "Always stuffs up my sinuses. Ugh. Anyone got a tissue?"

"Here," Tim offered one from a box off of one of his shelves, and she took three and blew into them successively.

"Thanks oodles, T," she offered nasally after she was done and had finally calmed down enough to articulate properly.

"It's been a hell of a day," Alex summarized. "Are you, er . . .?" He trailed off uncertainly and shifted his legs in his seat. He was clearly uncomfortable and brushed his long curled hair behind his shoulder.

RJ was sure she'd never seen Alex cry. Maybe he was incapable of it, and if so, she envied him. She locked eyes with her brother from across the table and something passed between them wordlessly. She could feel Finley at the edge of her thoughts, gently attempting to gain access, but she firmly denied him. There wasn't anything in her head in that moment that she wanted him to see.

"Jeri, what's going on?" Finley dared to ask.

She sighed as the room was engulfed by silence. It was a fearful quiet, tense and unsure, unlike the sacred silence of a church or the comforting silence of solitude. Everyone's eyes were upon her, and she could feel the weight of their gazes weighing her down, measuring her, gaging her every little reaction. She twitched under the scrutiny.

RJ bent down to pull out her boot flask, took a sip, and finally decided that it was time for the truth. With a little more liquid courage in her system, she carefully confessed aloud, "So, I was there when Mom died." No one said anything. Perhaps they were too afraid to. So, she continued, uninhibited about the most secret inner truth that she had. "It was like Mara," she explained, eyes stinging with more tears she refused to shed, "but . . . They didn't know she had kids. Mom, she . . . She told me to hide. I-I can't," she realized as she attempted to stutter out an explanation, and tears pricked at her eyes. "I can't," she repeated, and nearly broke again. She pressed her hands into her eyelids and tried her hardest to breathe; her breath hitched and against her will, she wrenched out a dry sob.

Aidan's hand was at her shoulder once more, giving her his strength for the moment. She sniffled once more and blew into the tissues and took another sip of liquor from her flask. Aidan had the wherewithal to ask, "These people that were after you - do you think they have something to do with your mother's death? And Mara's?"

Jeri nodded. "I know they do. Don't ask me how I know, I just know."

For once, Aidan didn't question it, and nodded a little uncertainly. "Alright. Do you know who or where they are?"

She thought about the question. She could tell a person's history by shaking their hand, but did that mean she knew them? Or was Aidan asking in a general sense as to the nature of their identities? The people were from all different walks of life, but surely there was some purpose that united them. Some reason they had targeted her, and her mother, and Mara. Some reason for this bloody catastrophe. Some reason for all the death that had stalked her family.

"I'm not sure," she finally said. She knew the day and hour she was going to die, but she didn't know yet how or why. She could see the overall mechanics of fate, but only guess at its workings. She could feel her internal clock, ticking away until the hour of her death, but was missing the context. The future was vast, mutable, and terrifying to gaze into. She didn't want to look. She just wanted to live.

"They were cultists, of some kind - at least the ones that were at the label were," Finley cut in.

Alex turned to him. "Yes, but how do you know that?"

"I picked up a lot of . . . Ecclesiastical thoughts from their minds, before they died," Finley said carefully. "They definitely wanted to take her alive but weren't prepared when the situation got out of hand, and we resisted."

"Resisted? All we did was run away. Then they killed themselves," Alex stated bleakly. Though RJ had never specifically told Alex about her brother's . . . Talents . . . Her friend seemed to take this revelation in stride.

"They killed themselves?" Aidan was shocked.

Tim nodded. "They shot each other while we were hiding, right before the police arrived, one two three, bam. Fucked up. Just glad we made it out okay."

RJ stared at her brother as he stared down at his hands guiltily. They weren't the first victims to leave metaphorical blood on his hands, and she knew they wouldn't be the last. He didn't want credit for it, however, that much she could tell, so she kept her mouth shut. They don't need to know, she internally reasoned. They'd only fear him if they knew. She glanced up at Aidan worriedly and wondered if he would still love Finley the same way if he knew what had really happened on Magpie's roof. She hoped he would.

"I'm sorry we lied to you," she told Finley, which seemed to surprise him. "Sal and I, I mean. Dad and us, we just thought it'd be easier to tell you she died in a car accident."

"I get it," said Finley with downcast eyes. "The truth is, well, pretty horrible. And knowing that you had to . . ."

She sighed. "I saw . . . I saw everything. I was barely five, but I remember. It's one of my earliest memories. I dream about it, a lot. Alcohol helps suppress it, as do most other drugs, hence, well, you know." Alcohol also had the benefit of suppressing her 'gifts,' as Mara had called them, which made it a godsend.

No one seemed to know what to say. RJ took another sip from her flask that warmed her to her toes. She could still feel her brother at the edge of her thoughts, but he was no longer insistent; rather he was simply there, waiting until she let her guard down, a tickle in her brain. "I . . . Can try to help," Finley began, "if you let me."

She glared at him. "I don't need help. I need more bourbon." She shook her flask, which was nearing empty.

Finley rolled his eyes. "You need more bourbon like you need more cultists gunning after you. I mean I can help with the dreams, you idiot."

The dreams. Those were the worst. The thing she was most afraid of, when she closed her eyes. The thing she couldn't run from, because it was always there, inside her. The memory of all the . . . She drained a little more out of the flask and narrowed her eyes at him. "How do you mean?"

Fin paused, considering. "I'm not sure. I've never really done it before - intentionally - but I think I can help you navigate your way through it. You've been living with this my entire life, Jeri, and I had no idea that you've been suffering like this for so long. I feel like this is the least I can do to help. If you don't want my help, I understand, but believe me, I've seen worse."

"You really haven't," she warned him.

"I saw all the case details from Detective Ibarra's head," he reminded her curtly, which had the effect of sobering her instantly. "Everything he saw, I saw. And don't forget that Félix found Mara. Everything he saw, I saw too. He couldn't stop thinking about it at the funeral."

"Jesus, Finley," Aidan swore, looking guilty. "I'm sorry."

"That's some heavy shit," Tim commented.

"It's alright," Finley reassured them gently. "I can deal. I'm not the one having nightmares about it . . . Yet. The point is, whatever trauma you're still dealing with, it isn't going to be any worse than what we've already seen."

"You say that now," she sighed.

"Think of it like hypno-therapy," Aidan offered. "This way, he can pull you out of the memory if it's too difficult."

She downed the rest of her flask to give her the courage necessary. "Alright, fine," she finally assented, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable again. "You can help with my dreams or whatever. But when I say stop, we stop. Alright?"

Finley nodded. "Deal."

Alex leaned back in his chair. "I'm not sure what's happening, but I do know this room needs to be put back together," he stated blandly, and eyed the still-destroyed state of the living room. The table was askew, one of the chairs broken from when Finley fell over it, the others scattered about the room. The light overhead had burst in the night, along with all the lamps nearby, and they had been sitting in the dim din from the kitchen's light behind them.

It was short work with all five of them, and they were silent in their task. Jeri simply tossed the broken chair, with Tim's permission, outside on his patio. Alex replaced the light bulbs with a small ladder and Aidan and Finley moved the table back to where it should have been.

If she was being totally honest with herself, which she rarely was, RJ had no idea what had happened during the séance, or what had come through. Finley had told her that she had attempted to contact her mother, but according to the video and eye witness accounts, that hadn't happened exactly. Aidan had informed her that she had been uttering a repeating phrase, with the name 'Ba'el Moloch' thrown in there, but the rest had been completely unintelligible gibberish. She felt like at any moment, they were due a visit from the teleported man who would surely drop more useless advice and tell her how doomed she was. Part of her wanted it to happen, if only to rub Alex and Tim's noses in it and say, 'look, here he is, I'm not crazy at all.' Though neither of them had used the 'c' word to describe her situation yet, she sense their doubtful gazes when her back was turned.

She told herself they were only human. They'd seen her predict things before, but this was a stretch of their belief. That, and they'd just seen three people kill themselves right after watching her float and then overdose on the floor. They were allowed a healthy modicum of doubt in her faculties.

Alex, Aidan, and Tim stayed downstairs while she and Finley went to the guest room upstairs. She took off her boots and laid down on the bed, and squeezed her eyes shut, doing her best to internally squash her nervousness. She hated the idea of someone else being privy to her thoughts, especially Finley. He'd know all the ugly things that went on in the back of her mind - all the suppressed judgments, fantasies, and thoughts that she denied the existence of in her day-to-day. She didn't know how he stood it at all; how he could stay true to himself with all that noise from everyone around him. It was staggeringly baffling. How he even functioned as an adult was beyond her. She would never admit it out loud, but she was fiercely proud of him for being who he was in spite of what he'd suffered.

"I can help you fall asleep, if you let me," Finley offered as he sat down on the bed next to her. He held up one hesitant hand over her head, as if he were afraid to touch her.

"How?" She wondered, staring up into those eyes that were mirrors of her own.

"It's like flipping a switch," he described. "One that turns your subconscious on and your consciousness off. One can't be active while the other is. I can find it in your brain and flip it for you."

She thought about this; and wondered at the unflinching certainty he had in his power. Part of her was frightened by it. Could he do it to anyone without their consent? Or was consent required? Either way, she knew she would be laying there for potentially hours trying to fall asleep all on her own, restless and disturbed. The decision was ultimately easy. "Okay. Do it," she said, and let down her wall. She'd had it up for so long around him that it wasn't easy at first - it was a wall she'd erected long ago, layered bricks of will and intent that stood careful guard around her mind. In her mind's eye, she carved a door in the wall, and cracked it open for him.

Finley nodded and gently brushed the hair away from her forehead. "You won't feel a thing," he promised, and in a matter of seconds, he walked through the door, and she fell into the red-veined shadows behind her eyelids, drifting downward into dreams.

When RJ hit the bottom of the pit, Finley was there, holding her cool hand in his own and pulling her up to her feet. When she stood, she marveled at how tall he was compared to her; and when she looked down, she wondered at her own small state. Everything about her had been miniaturized - small hands, small feet, dressed in pink footed-pajamas with long dark hair in a messy halo about her head. She let go of her suddenly bigger brother's hand and tugged at her own locks, surprised to discover she could feel it. It took her a moment to realize she was now a child, as she had been and could barely remember ever being. She pinched herself on the wrist and could feel the pain as though she were awake.

"Are we . . . Asleep?" She squeaked out, looking up at Finley and started by the high pitch of her own voice.

He knelt down to her level to better address her. "In a way," he struggled to explain behind a smile. "Think of it like a lucid dream. You're in control here, not me. I can pull you out by waking you up at any time, if you want. All you have to do is say the word."

She looked around at an empty black expanse that stretched out in a fathomless void in every direction. She stared down at the blank emptiness beneath her pink flannel-covered feet, and it boggled her mind. As if by reflex, the floor solidified into grass that flowed out in every direction, reacting to her confusion. She bent down to pull up at a few leaves experimentally, and twirled them in her fingers, eventually letting them fall back to the earth.

"Good, yeah," Finley commented, and sat back on the grass. "You probably thought of 'ground' and your mind leapt to the first thing it considers solid ground. You can control what you see here, what's real and what's not."

"Could you always do this?" She wondered, half in awe, half in fear.

"You're the one doing it, Jeri," Finley reminded her carefully. "I'm just the passenger. And, no, or rather, I'm not sure. I've never tried to do this intentionally before. I've done it before, traveled into dreams I mean - once with Aidan, a few times with Teegan. And once with you," he admitted after a moment's pause. "On the airplane, you were dreaming, and I saw it. I was there with you."

"Oh." She slapped him on the knee playfully. "That's for not telling me."

"I deserve that," he consented.

"It's fine. I'm not really mad," she promised. "I don't even remember what it was about."

"Well, we were in my car," he explained, "and then we went to this house. Only it was like . . . A combination of every house you'd ever lived in. Pieces of your house, Dad's house, Mara's house . . . And we climbed up the stairs and through closets and rooms until you led me to a white room I'd never seen before."

The white room. "With flowers on the wall?" She asked, feeling even smaller than she already was.

He nodded. "Then you led us to a closet and closed us in the dark. Then, you told me to be quiet, and we woke up."

She looked away from him when he mentioned the closet that had haunted her for so long. He had no way of knowing its significance, but as it had turned out, he'd already stumbled on the thing they were looking for. Tears threatened at the edge of her eyes, and she closed her hands over her face and heaved a great, weary sigh that moved her whole small body. "C-can I wake up now?" She asked the air. "I-I don't want to go back there."

Finley pulled her fingers away from her face and held them in his own. They were tiny and cold in his warm, callused hands. He locked eyes with her, and only sincerity shone through. "If that's what you want," he said softly. "But we haven't even started. And I think . . . You need this. I think you need to remember. How else can you learn to put it aside and move on?"

Her lip trembled. She nodded. "You're right. Okay. Okay. How . . . How do I start?" She asked.

He considered this for a moment, and stood up, keeping one of her little hands in his own. "You're in control here," he reminded her. "Everything we see is a part of you. Whatever you imagine, whatever you will to be, will be. I'd start with something small."

She stared at the ground and thought of the pavement in the driveway where she'd used to draw in chalk all manner of games and silly childhood art. Out of the nothing came forth chalk in her other free hand, and hopscotch squares beneath her feet that solidified onto gray concrete. She let go of her brother's hand and in it felt the hardness of a small hackey-sack. The feelings of the moment came with it unexpectedly, and she chucked the ball in her hand in an under-handed toss that landed perfectly on one of the squares. Giggling, RJ impulsively jumped between one and two feet forward until she reached the occupied square, leapt over it, and turned back to look at her brother.

He was gaping, open mouthed, at something behind her. Frowning, she turned . . . And then too gaped openly as her mother's old house unfolded behind her with its tall red gables and latticed windows. From an open oaken door adorned with a false evergreen-and-holly wreath, her curly-haired, gap-toothed, sun-dress-wearing, beautiful brown-eyed mother smiled at her.

"Time to come inside, Rosie," called her mother gently in a voice that was the purest music to Jeri's ears.

Grinning, she ran to do the door, only to turn back halfway when she remembered the man standing in her driveway at the end of her hopscotch squares. Then, she ran back, grabbed Finley's hand in her own and dragged him toward the door. Her mother either didn't see, or chose not to acknowledge him, and let them both in the door and closed it behind them with a click.

Inside wasn't quite the house that she only half-remembered. Everything was dark, and coated in thick shadow, and as soon as the door clicked behind them her mother's form disappeared as if it were never there. Frightened, RJ rasped out, "Mommy?" And clutched Finley's hand harder.

Something pounded on the door, startling out of her skin. Suddenly her mother was dragging her by the other hand, pulling her toward the stairs and causing Finley to stumble after almost drunkenly as RJ was torn between the two of them.

"Ssssh!" Her mother hushed as she cried out. "Not a sound!" María Ravara hissed, and suddenly whipped around to bend down to Jeri's level. With the most serious look RJ had ever seen on a person, she knelt and placed her hands on Jeri's neck and shoulders and gripped them tightly. Her whiskey-brown eyes were wide and were wet with fright. "I need you to do something for me, Rosie, something important. You have to be good. You need to listen to Mommy, okay?"

"I'll be good," she promised, whispering.

"I need you to be quiet, no matter what you hear, and stay where I tell you to. You have to protect your brother and keep him safe. Okay?" Her mother urged.

She nodded once affirmatively.

María nodded back fiercely and stood, still gripping Jeri's hand, and kept dragging her up the stairs at a near-run. Impatient, María whipped around and grabbed Jeri bodily in a practiced grip and ran up the stairs. Behind her, she could see Finley at the bottom staring after them with shining eyes. He trailed after them and stood in the doorway as their mother stopped to put Jeri down when she came to a nursery room, with a white crib and blue walls painted with glow-in-the-dark stars. The sleeping baby in there was undoubtedly Finley himself, peacefully unaware of the pounding on the door downstairs and the sounds of breaking glass that now resounded from the kitchen and living room.

Hastened by the noises of break-in, María Ravara snatched the baby and held him to her chest as tightly as she dare without waking him, and with one arm held the child and with the other grabbed Rose of Jericho's hand.

She led them to the white room. It was María's bedroom, the one farthest at the end of the hallway, and quickly as if in afterthought she locked the door behind them. Their mother's eyes swiftly scanned the room around them, taking in everything in the dark, and settled on the closet. She dragged Jeri over to the white slatted doors and let go of her hand only for a moment to open them, and then knelt down to RJ's level once more.

"I need you to hold your brother, and keep him quiet, and hide," she instructed. "No matter what you hear, you're not to make a sound. You can't cry, you can't whisper, nothing. We're going to play the quiet game. You're only to come out if I say so, do you understand?"

Firmly, Jeri nodded, and extended her hands out to hold her baby brother. He fussed for one tense moment in her arms before settling back down with a yawn. María practically shoved her child into the closet, and stalked away to the door, opening it quickly and closing it behind her. RJ heard the sound of thumping, and something slammed against the bedroom door and shook it violently, causing her to startle in the dark.

She nearly cried out when the door opened again, but it was only the older version of her brother, who hushed her and closed the door behind him. He knelt down to her level and in the dark pulled her against him with one arm, and told her quietly, "Everything's going to be okay. Just say the word, and I'll pull us out."

She said nothing, knowing her mother had warned her not to make a sound and felt on an instinctive, visceral level that her mother's word was absolute law.

But then, there was the Sound.

First it started quietly. A quiet thunk, followed by several identical noises. Then, she heard the bedroom door open, and it got louder . . . And wetter. She knew the sound from hours passed in a childhood daze watching her mother cook in the kitchen. It was the sound of something being chopped - of knives hitting meat, cleavers cutting flesh. Finley's arm tightened around her; the younger version of him stirred only briefly before she thought to pull him against her chest and tighten his blanket around his ears. "Ssssh," she instinctively hushed the baby, whispering barely audibly. "Be good."

She stared through the slats into the darkness and saw figures moving through the doorway. For a moment, all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, and both Finleys. Then the sound started up again, louder than it ever was before.

RJ had no way of knowing how long it went on. It seemed to last for days, but perhaps it had been only minutes. She stared at the darkness through the slats and saw nothing, and eventually, heard nothing. Her legs began to cramp from sitting in the same position for so long, but her mother's word was law, and she did not stir.

Finally, the baby Finley began to wake up, and after a moment of fussing began to wail loudly for food. She knew she had broken the rules of the quiet game, and part of her expected her mother to open the door any second and admonish her. No admonishment came.

The baby Finley cried, and the adult Finley finally moved, and opened the closet door in front of them, sliding it to one side with his hand. The silence of the dark bedroom greeted them, and even the baby Finley paused in his crying for a moment as he was moved and adjusted in RJ's arms. She stood, arms aching from carrying her brother, and moved along the wall with one arm until she found the light switch.

It took a split second for her eyes to adjust to the sudden splash of color in that previously-white room. It took another split second to recognize that her mother was no longer in any state to tell her anything and was in pieces situated about her bedroom. Two detached arms, still wearing her mother's bangles and rings formed a circle on the bed around her mother's head, still covered in now-reddened curls with the addition of a small symbol carved into the forehead of a circle bisected by a sideways crescent. A headless, limbless torso wearing half a sun-dress was scattered along with two feet, and two legs, almost carelessly thrown compared to the deliberate placement of the head and arms. Adult Finley stepped out of the closet and stared at the walls and scene in horror and sorrow. RJ, with her wailing baby brother in her arms, just stared.

BLOOD.

It was everywhere, staining everything, dripping from the ceiling, coating the previously pristine white bed, slicking the floor, spattered over the beautiful paintings of flowers that her mother had used to decorate her bedroom.

Each night, RJ would have a nightmare. She'd always had nightmares. Each night, she'd wake in the middle of the night and go to her mother's bedroom, where her mother would invite her into her big and cozy bed for late night snuggles. Whenever she slept at her mother's side, the dreams would be kind to her.

There would never be kind nights like that again. There was only one, unending bloody nightmare that she could never wake up from.

BLOOD.

It was everywhere, staining everything, covering her hands as she closed her mother's eyelids. Though the head had been detached the body arranged in a strange, mad pattern, it felt wrong to see her mother's eyes staring open in that endless expression she could not name. It was kinder to close them.

BLOOD.

Baby Finley wailed in his hunger. "Sssh," she told him, pacing back through the sticky, gory mess on the floor in her stained once-pink pajamas to comfort her little brother. "Sssh. S'okay. Be good." He'd napped through the whole incident, blissfully unaware of the state of their mother's body or her bedroom.

Rose of Jericho was almost five years old. She understood what death was. Her goldfish had died last year, and her mother had explained the whys and the whats of it. She knew not to be afraid of it.

She wasn't afraid. She wasn't. She was empty, of everything except her mother's last instruction: to take care of Finley. To keep him safe, and quiet.

BLOOD.

She walked downstairs with her little baby brother in her arms, shushing him gently, and nearly slipped in the blood that had started to drip down them. She tracked bloody tiny footprints on the ground and took each stair one by one. Finley cried out in alarm as he nearly slipped out of her hands, but she caught him and went down the steps by sitting on them, ever so gently, ever so aware of her delicate payload. Her mother had made her promise to protect Finley, and that was what she was going to do. Her mother may be dead, but promises were promises. "Sssh," she shushed her brother. "Be good. Be good."

Adult Finley was suddenly before her, with worried eyes and a deep frown. He made sure he was down at her level. "Jeri," he said, and how he could pack so much meaning into two little syllables was beyond her.

She ignored him. She had a job to do.

She called the police on the phone. It took some doing - she had to reach up to pull the phone by the cord down to her level with one hand and balance baby Finley in the other. She could barely hear the operator over the sound of Finley wailing in her ear. "My mommy's dead," she reported when they asked her what her emergency was. "I don't know," she said when they asked her where she was. "Okay," she said when they asked her to stay on the line. She let the phone drop and tried bouncing the baby to keep him quiet. She didn't know where his milk was.

She waited patiently by the phone, rocking her little brother, until they showed up minutes later. They simply walked through her open door - it had been broken in - and objected by crying out when one of the police attempted to take her baby brother away from her. She was shuffled outside with him still in her arms and a blanket thrown over them, while a female officer that reminded her a little visually of her mother took them into her side with one arm and sat with them and talked to them. She didn't hear anything the woman said over Finley's crying.

Eventually, someone found his milk, and the officer that took care of Jeri helped her feed it to the baby. Jeri felt significantly better now that Finley wasn't wailing into her eardrums.

More men in blue uniforms with black jackets labeled and others in white suits showed up, and after a while they wheeled something covered in a black bag out of the house. RJ stared after them, still holding her little brother, still doing her best to keep her promise.

"Don't worry," the female officer next to her promised. RJ looked up at her with bleary eyes. "We'll keep you and your little brother safe. What's his name?"

". . . Finley. I'm Rose," said Jeri.

"Those are lovely names," she said.

Her bigger, still younger, adult-sized brother sat down at her other side and draped an arm over her shoulders. He said nothing, because nothing needed to be said.

"I'd like to go now," she told him quietly.

He nodded, and snapped his fingers, and everything went dark as the weight of the baby disappeared from her arms and the scene dissolved all around them, back into that blank canvas of thought they'd begun with, only this time, she was alone, and aware.

She looked down at her feet and hands and noted they were back to their actual size; she pulled at her bleached blond hair and could feel the pain. "Finley?" She called out but heard nothing. True to his word, he'd pulled her out of the memory at her command. She was wearing what she'd worn when she fell asleep.

Sighing, RJ envisioned grass again, and sat down to lay back in it. She pulled up leaves of it in her hands, playing with them between her ringed and tattooed fingers. Above her and out of the nothingness, stars began blinking themselves slowly into existence until an endless expanse of night sky stretched out before her. She stared up at those winking lights, and for the first time since she could remember, felt at peace.

Finley extracted himself from RJ's mind with a surprising amount of ease and woke next to her on the guest bed still clutching her hand in his. He let it go gently and watched as she briefly stirred only to roll on her side and start to lightly snore. A touch to her forehead affirmed for him that she was indeed in a deep sleep, and absent any nightmares. He received the brief mental image of an endless field of grass under the open stars, before he gave her mind privacy.

It took him a moment to register that they weren't alone in the room, and Aidan was sitting next to the bed with a textbook in his lap. He gazed at Finley expectantly. "How'd it go?" His best friend asked quietly.

"All good," Finley reassured him. "Well, 'good' is a stretch actually, but it went okay. A lot of things about her make sense now."

Aidan smiled. "I knew you could do it. Is she . . . ?"

"Sleeping. Peacefully," Finley reported. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and scratched at his forehead. "Hopefully it lasts."

"What happened?" Aidan wondered.

Finley internally debated how much was safe to talk about - how much of it was private? It was his sister's worst memory after all. "Similar to what happened to Mara, with a few twists," he summarized. "They broke into Mom's house at night and got her. She . . . She seemed to expect it? I'm not sure. She reacted like . . . Like she knew she was going to die. She hid Jeri and I in the closet. I was still just a baby."

"Christ, Finley, I'm sorry," Aidan apologized.

"It's not your fault," Finley said.

"I know, it's just . . . No one should have to deal with shit like this. It's awful," said Aidan bitterly.

He looked back to stare at his sister's snoozing form. "She's been dealing with it her whole life."

"I know. I wish she'd go to therapy."

Finley chuckled. "I can't even imagine her opening up to a therapist. It took her this long to open up to me, and I'm her brother."

"Maybe one day," Aidan said, "when she's less reliant on alcohol to soothe her to sleep."

"I don't blame her for it. I did the same thing after Teegan died. The dreams were the worst part of it - I would've done anything just to get rid of them, even for a little while." After Teegan's death, Finley would dream she was still there, still alive, and that everything was normal. When he'd wake up alone, he'd drink to put the thought away, following his sister's method. The Jericho-Rose Method, she called it.

Aidan reached out to grab his hand and squeezed it. "I know."

"We should let her sleep," Finley realized as RJ started to stir again, and tossed to her other side and began to mumble in her slumber. He touched the skin on her hand again to check on her, but she was fine, and so deeply unconscious that she no longer dreamed at all. "She needs it."

"Tim ordered Chinese food," Aidan reported as they closed the bedroom door behind them and headed down the stairs. "There's extra chow mein and dumplings for you."

"Thanks. I'm actually starving right now," Fin admitted.

"But first," Aidan cut in, stopping him in his tracks, and turned Finley around to face him. Without warning, Aidan drew him into a kiss. It was soft and filled with sublime affection and sent goosebumps up the back of Finley's neck before Aidan broke away.

"What was that for?" Finley asked.

"Thank you," said Aidan. "I think this is the nicest thing you've ever done for her."

"Oh. It . . . I . . ." Finley babbled.

"You don't need to say anything," Aidan told him, and kissed him again. Finley leaned into it even as he struggled to put his feelings into words, so he put them into the kiss instead. He thought back to the moment they'd shared on mushrooms, where Aidan had been able to pick up on his stray thought and focused on his feelings instead - the love and appreciation he felt for him, he translated into the kiss. Aidan seemed to know it and smiled against his lips.

When they reached the dining room, Tim was alone surrounded by platters of Chinese food, stuffing his face. He slurped up the noodles he was eating and patted his mouth with a napkin before asking, "How'd it go?"

"Well, I think," Finley reported, and looked around. "She's asleep, and miracle of miracle, no nightmares. Where's Alex?"

"He went home an hour ago," said Tim. "He'll be back tomorrow evening. I think he just needed time and space to, you know, process shit."

"Fair enough. May I?"

"Please, help yourself," Tim offered, gesturing to the food.

As Finley fixed himself a plate of food, he looked outside and noted that the sun had started to go down in the time he'd been upstairs with Jeri. "How long were we out?" He asked the room.

"About three, three and a half hours," Tim answered.

"Thanks for letting us stay here," Finley said as he sat down at the table. "I don't know if I said it before, but seriously, thanks."

"Don't mention it," Tim dismissed generously. He scratched at his hairline. "So, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot," said Fin.

"Can you do that to anybody?" Timothee wondered, his eyes wide and interested.

"Do what?" Fin asked for clarification.

"Enter their dreams, pick up on their thoughts . . . ?" There was an undercurrent to Tim's questions that set Fin ill at ease, so without Tim's permission he slipped past the drummer's mental walls and skimmed the surface of his thoughts. Tim was thinking of James, on the way Finley had redirected the situation to their benefit without saying a word. He was thinking of the cultists at Magpie, how they'd turned as one unit and fired upon each other without even blinking. Tim wasn't voicing his suspicions, but he was thinking about them. And the prevailing thought, was the fear that Finley - whom he'd known nearly his whole adult and teenage life - was potentially dangerous.

Finley knew he couldn't get away with lying this time, not when Timothee had already seen so much. So, he told him an edited version of the truth: "Dreams, I can only do with someone's permission," he lied. "Thoughts are a bit different. I can't control someone's mind against their will, if that's what you're asking." Even Finley wasn't sure if his abilities had limits, as he'd yet to discover them. "I can sort of . . . Redirect someone's thoughts though, with a lot of effort." That, at least, was the partial truth.

"Is that what you did to James?" Tim asked.

"Sort of. He was already in doubt over what he'd seen. I just fostered that doubt a bit."

"But . . . How?"

"It's like . . ." Fin struggled with an adequate explanation that wouldn't trigger a negative reaction in Tim. He knew that RJ's best friend was probably the most tolerant person on Earth, but everyone had their limits - and finding out that someone in front of you can control your mind if they wanted to is never an easy thing. "Like aiming a pool shot," he settled on. "You have to be precise, and it takes a lot of practice, but when you line it up just right, you hit the cue ball just right and it bounces your target into the pocket. It's sort of an indirect, redirection? With James, I could feel his doubts. He didn't want to believe what he was seeing, but he was a realist - he knew what his eyes had perceived. I just . . . Took his doubt and brought it back to the surface of his thoughts. I made it so he couldn't forget about it. I put it on a loop in his brain, so it was all he could think about in the moment. Then, all he wanted was to think about anything else - he felt the need to leave so he could focus on something else, anything else. He'll probably never feel comfortable around RJ again, but I don't think that's a problem for her. He didn't seem to like her in the first place."

He could feel both Aidan and Tim's eyes on him, even though he was staring at the table. He could feel Tim's doubt stirring until it finally disappeared and was replaced by something Finley knew all too well - a subtle, quiet fear. There was confusion there too, but overall an understanding of what he'd heard and what its implications were. Finley internally cursed - he didn't want to be feared, but it seemed to be his destiny.

Next to him he could sense Aidan's love and understanding, shining always like a beacon, but underneath it all was a terrible undercurrent - a hopelessness. Both of the men know in that moment something Finley had been trying to conceal - the knowledge that he could change their minds in the span of time that it took them to blink.

So, he turned to his attention to the food, and decided to eat. There was nothing to do about the rest of it. Aidan trusted him, and if Tim didn't, that was enough.

"So, what's the plan now?" Aidan wondered, changing the subject.

Fin paused around a mouthful of chow mein. Where do we go from here? He wasn't sure where the thought had come from, since it was something on all of their minds. Now that he'd seen Jeri's memory of the crime, was pressed with the need to know more. Why their mother and her sister had died. Where the authorities had taken their bodies. Why they hadn't released them. There were too many unknowns about her and Mara's cases. Though it had seemed to escape Jeri's notice in her memory of the event, Finley had taken note of the FBI label on the officers' coats as they'd wheeled out the remains of their mother into a van. "I'd like to learn more about Mom's case," Finley began slowly. "And . . . I think I need to break into the FBI building in LA to find out."

Aidan started laughing. It was reflexive, and effusive, but no one joined in with him on it because Tim realized in that second that Finley was being quite serious about his suggestion. Tim surreptitiously loaded his plate up again with food and did his best to look nonchalant, and Fin simply stared down at his half-empty plate until Aidan quieted. "Oh, fuck, you're being serious," Aidan realized a second too late.

Fin nodded. "I want to steal the records from my mother's case. And Mara's, if I can find them. How else am I going to get my hands on them? They won't just hand them to me. One of them is still an active case. We need to know more about how they died, and why they died. The police won't share - so, I say we take the information we need from the feds."

Aidan blinked, took off his glasses, wiped them, and returned them to his face. "Oh, holy shit. You're totally serious about this. Tim, are you hearing this?"

"I didn't hear shit," Tim answered cheerily.

Fin nodded again. "Tim's a good man."