Free I See You (Oracle 2) by Meghan Ciana Doidge Page A

Kandy and Beau had gone off to train in the nearby wooded area, which I thought might be a national park but didn’t bother looking up. I was updating my Etsy shop while we had free — though frustratingly slow — Wi-Fi with our RV pad rental. The campsite had only one spot left when we pulled in, near the showers and the dumpsters, though that didn’t bother us. We were only there to sleep — and to run, in Beau’s and Kandy’s case.
    Even before the vision swamped my mind, my head was already pounding. Beau had been right about me not liking the heat. I was padding around the curtained RV in black panties and a black cotton tank top while wishing desperately we’d thought to bring the standing fan from the garage. I’d even gathered my hair into silly pigtails, because it was too short and thin to twist back into a bun without it continually falling down. Beau thought the combination of panties and pigtails was adorable. And I seriously hoped my headache would ease before he got back and wanted a cool shower.
    The vision floored me. Literally. It flooded through my mind so quickly that I lost all sense of where I was in the Brave, and had to simply hunker down where I’d been standing.
    In my mind, I was standing in a mist-shrouded alley … or maybe a passageway between two buildings. The mist was slowly dissolving, leaving behind a blisteringly hot day, a blazingly blue sky, and barely a hint of shadow anywhere. It must have been midday, then? With the sun directly overhead.
    I was learning to gather and interpret clues in the visions as quickly as I spotted them. Yet I still felt like a newbie, constantly behind and struggling to catch up to the point of it all.
    Glass shattered somewhere above my head. I threw my arms up across my face and pressed back against one building even as I reminded myself that I was watching a vision from the safe zone of the Brave. Nothing bad could happen to me.
    Something thumped sickeningly to the ground before me. I forced myself to lower my arms. I forced myself to see.
    Though nothing bad could happen to my physical self within a vision, my mind wasn’t always so lucky.
    Beau’s sister Ettie was lying on the ground before me. Her head was canted to one side, her murky brown eyes staring sightlessly. She was wearing a white sundress with blue printed flowers on it. Forget-me-nots, I decided, even as the irony made me sick. She was tanned, though her skin was rapidly paling as blood seeped from the back of her head. For the first time, the expanded parameters of the vision let me see that she was bigger than me. Taller and heavier. Which made sense, because even though she and Beau were only half-siblings, he was tall enough that he might well have inherited that trait from both his mother and father.
    I forced myself to relax into the vision, and to ease my grip on my necklace. I’d grabbed it instinctively. I needed to see. I needed to collect information — and to resist the urge to try to thwart the magic channeling into my mind.  
    But I knew I couldn’t stop it even if I’d tried. Only acknowledging the moment, then immortalizing it in charcoal would make the vision stop haunting me. It might have been over a year since I’d suffered a full-blown episode, but I still knew that much.
    I stepped forward, quickly glancing around the passageway in an attempt to absorb as much of the image as I could before the vision ceased. The newly constructed buildings had an industrial look from the sides. I couldn’t see any traffic or people nearby, though the vision might not show me such things. In fact, I was fairly certain that my visions showed me only things that were magic in some way. As such, the area might be full of terrified nonmagicals and I wouldn’t know it.
    The shattered glass appeared to have come from a window on the second floor. I expected it to crunch underneath my feet, but it didn’t because I wasn’t actually there. Which was good, because I’d