Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

very new werewolf wouldn’t be able to sense truth from falsehood. “Charles said that the man never did go back to walking backward, though.”
    “You have to be a boy to say, ‘Scout’s honor,’” Adam told me.
    “Nah-uh. Girl Scout leader, here.” I pointed my thumb at my breastbone. “Sort of. When my mom couldn’t do it. Anyway, you wanted to hear about my vision.”
    “Yes.”
    I opened my mouth to tell him a funny version, but what came out was different from what I’d intended.
    “One moment I was sitting alone in the middle of a forest; the next I was walking in a different place. Everything was gray, almost like a black-and-white film except there was no white or black, just odd shades of gray. There was no grass or trees, just endless mounds of sand. It felt ... empty. Like those postapocalyptic horror films, you know? Empty but scary, too.”
    I could feel it now as I had then: the tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe, the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up because I knew that there was evil lurking, watching.
    Adam pulled his hot dog out of the fire, but instead of eating it, he forced the blunt end of the fork into the ground, so it stuck up like a bizarre garden ornament. Then he pulled me against him, and my tension eased so I could breathe normally again.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect it to bother me so much.”
    “You don’t have to tell me.”
    “No,” I said. “But I want to.” It felt right. Charles had told me I’d know when it was time to share what had happened to me. Some people were required to tell their experience to every person they met, but most of us only shared with a few people.
    “So I was wandering through this desolate place. The only thing I could see besides sand were remnants of buildings. In the beginning, some of the buildings were modern—tall structures made of glass and steel. On those, the glass was cracked or broken and the steel rusted nearly through. As I continued on, the ruins started to be older buildings, houses. I clearly recall seeing what was left of an old Victorian, tipped awkwardly on its side as if it had been a giant dollhouse some child had kicked over. Then it was like something you’d see on a Western film set, but decades later. Blackened poles from adobe buildings half-buried in the sand, hitching posts and broken boardwalks, with dead weeds poking out.
    “I’m the only living thing in the place.
    “Eventually, there are only tent poles, and I am walking by them, crying, sobbing, with snot dripping from my nose—the whole wretched business though I don’t know what I am grieving for.”
    “How old were you?” Adam asked.
    “That was after Bryan died,” I answered. “Just after, I think.” Just talking about what I’d seen rattled me, my jaw vibrating as if I were cold, though Adam was warm and solid against me. He was real, but somehow that long-ago vision was real, too. “So fourteen or thereabouts.”
    Telling Adam was almost like living through it again. The emotions had been real and powerful, maybe the most real thing about the whole vision.
    “Finally, I came up to this car—an old Model T Ford buried up to its axles. It was so sad, I could feel its sorrow weighing down my heart, distracting me from whatever had caused me to cry in the first place. I put my hands on it, but there was no way to dig it out or fix it. I explained that to the car, as if it could understand what I was saying because I felt as though it could. I told it I was sorry I couldn’t do more.
    “Then, under my fingers it began to vibrate, shaking until I couldn’t hold it anymore. I had to close my eyes against the sand it stirred up, and when I opened them, I was alone in a forest.”
    I remembered how frightened I had been in the forest. My pulse picked up, and goose bumps covered my forearms. The forest should have been a relief from the dead grayness I’d been in. The forest had been my second home—but the forest of my vision had hidden watchers, dangerous watchers who didn’t approve of me.
    “It was a dark forest. Although all the trees were conifers, they’d formed a thick canopy over the top of me—like in a rain forest. I could feel that I was watched, but no matter how hard I looked, I never saw them. My watchers followed me as I walked. Eventually, I started running, and I panicked like a rabbit. It seemed as though I ran for hours. Every time I slowed down, I could feel