Another tingle seized me, like shocks in my fingers and toes. Something silver, a necklace, with a charm in the shape of a cross against a dark background. When I came back into the room, I felt as though an hour had passed. Darkness seeped in around the edges of the blinds. I tried to track how many pages he had made it through in the book, but I was thirsty, dizzy. I couldn’t trust my eyes to see things for what they were.

I was jolted into a third vision. A hand, a woman’s hand again, but it was somewhere new, somewhere inside. The room had a reddish-yellow glow. I could hear that swish, swish, swish sound that was so familiar from other visions. Flies buzzed in my ears.

My thoughts started to race—Luis, the marsh, the glow of the room, like the neon glow of the signs. The sunset that lit up, one ray at a time. The first vision had also held something familiar. I stood as still as I could and tried to recall everything about it. The shape of the door handle. The look of the person’s hands. And then: The bracelet. Lily’s bracelet. The one I had stolen all those weeks ago, those little pearls, like dredging up a detail from a dream. Lily? Lily was in trouble?

No, I told myself. There would be a reason for those images. Those thoughts. That was the way I was going to live my life now. Logically. According to what I knew. Facts. That way I could hedge against whatever had made my mother’s brain go wrong, poisoned by her talent. I was thinking of escape, because that’s what I wanted most. A way out of my own life. There were still scraps of whatever I had seen from Luis lingering in my brain. I would learn to control those kinds of thoughts, learn to push them away.

But those women. The four—or was it five now? or more?—of them lined up together, arranged. The hungry, relentless buzz of the flies. Their blue-tinged skin.

“I have to go,” I said. “You don’t have to pay me, but I need to leave.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what the arrangement was. Remember? Total control.”

“My friend needs my help.”

A smile. For a second I saw it through his eyes, how ridiculous I was. A teenage girl with trembling legs, claiming she needed to run off and save someone. I stepped toward the door and heard the thunk of his book hitting the floor, the heaviness of his boots on the carpet. He grabbed my shoulder, pushed me into the wall, shouting insults at me—Stupid slut. Worthless whore. I curled into a ball, sweating, shaking. I didn’t know what would be worse: ignoring the visions and the possibility of something terrible happening, or invoking this man’s rage.