Dahlia

  The sound of loud knocking filled my house as I hung clean clothes in the large wardrobe in the corner of my room. I really didn’t want to answer the door. It had been a few weeks since Portia’s threats, and other than periodic visits to the Ledge, my Saturday trips to the Redmond compound, and occasional trips for Portia’s taskings, I kept to myself.

  Max seemed blissfully unaware of the effect his mother’s threats had on me, and I intended to keep it that way. He was easier to deal with that way. Besides, I didn’t like being reminded of how he failed to stand up to his mother for me.

  In the time since Bennett’s appearance at the bar, no one made any progress in identifying the Reaper. In fact, not a single Imm had turned up dead in over a month. As April turned into May and then the heat of June settled over Firen, I was beginning to think the Reaper was well and truly gone. But Portia wanted progress, so I often found myself wandering the streets of Firen at night in the hopes that I would catch a glimpse of the elusive, masked vigilante.

  But I still wasn’t sure what I would do if I found him.

  When I heard that knocking at my front door, all I could think about was that I was so exhausted from my nightly escapades. And I really didn’t want company. So, I ignored the knocking and hung a blue dress among my other dresses—smoothing the faintly wrinkled skirt with the palm of my hand before turning to the next dress.

  Knock knock knock!

  These knocks were louder, more urgent. I even heard my front door shudder with the impact before a croaking voice called out, “Don’t keep me waitin’, girl! I know you’re there!”

  Mathy. I’d recognize her voice anywhere.

  I hurried to my front door, knowing Mathy would likely complain for years if I kept her out in the pleasant evening air much longer. She’d probably fake a cold and blame me for nearly putting her in an early grave despite the beautiful weather.

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought as I threw open the bright orange door and laid eyes on the closest thing I’d ever had to a mother. My father had hired her to look after me when he was home in the Circle, which was almost all the time, so Mathy had become my live-in caretaker. I trusted her more than anyone. She would take my secrets to the grave—something that seemed to be on the horizon, given her old age.

  Mathy was a short, plump woman with thinning, gray hair and a dramatically wrinkled face—plump because she was such a good cook and believed in hearty meals for every meal. I, for one, was stubbornly plump growing up, and I was ridiculed for it for years. I attributed my persistent round hips and large breasts to Mathy’s cooking—and her cooking seemed to negate the effects of my Imm blood on my stature. Sure, I’d lost the weight as a teenager, but my curves weren't going anywhere anytime soon.

  Mathy walked into my house as she slipped her sweater off her shoulders. Noticing this, I held out a hand to take it, but Mathy turned up her nose at the offer.

  “Girl! I only have so much time left in this life. I’m seventy. Seventy! How dare you waste precious seconds doing Imm-God knows what! Dawdle another time,” Mathy pushed past me—swatting away my hand as she stepped into the small entryway.

  Instead, out of habit, she hung her sweater on one of the hooks on the wall to the left of the front door. She rummaged in her satchel for a while—testing my patience with the old woman—before finding a small white envelope and pocketing it as she hung her bag just beside her jacket.

  “I’m happy to see you, Mathy, but what are you doing here so late?” I asked, questioning her presence here when it was already getting dark outside.

  “You’ve been ignoring your father. You haven’t made a single attempt to see him in the last month,” Mathy poked me hard in the chest. “He travels miles upon miles and through a Seam between the worlds to see you each week, and you simply ignore the effort he makes to see you? Ungrateful brat!”

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  She threw her hands in the air and escaped through the closest door to the kitchen with me on her heels as I protested like a child, “I’ve been busy! Besides, he’s never complained when I’ve missed him before.”

  A lie. Training would be brutal when I finally rejoined him. I knew that from experience.

  As Mathy got to work cleaning my brightly-decorated kitchen—a kitchen that would never be clean enough for her so long as I was the one to clean it—she scoffed at me, “Not to you, he hasn’t! I get the brunt of his complaints—like that time you cut him off for three months when you were what? Fifteen? Sixteen? I heard from him every week, girl!”

  She approached me—poking me hard in the chest again as she complained, “And I don’t like Imms visiting me in the night, girl—no old lady wants that! Your father is no exception.”

  “I cut him off because I found out he knew my mother would die if she became pregnant!” I sank into one of the green, wooden kitchen chairs and fumed, “And he said had he known she was pregnant, he would have aborted me to protect her! How was I supposed to react to that?”

  I thought of the time Carmen had told me and several others from our class that human women didn’t usually survive giving birth to an Imm’s child, to Halflings like me. It was common knowledge, apparently, but no one had thought to tell me, despite my own mother falling victim to my birth. So, of course, I immediately confronted him about how foolish and selfish he had been.

  I may have moved past my anger towards him, but I would never truly forgive him for what he did to her—for what I did to her.

  “You’re too sensitive,” Mathy waved a hand at me dismissively, pissing me off more.

  “By the damned Imm God, Mathy. If that’s all you came to say, you can leave.”

  “I’m not leaving until your kitchen is properly cleaned,” Mathy scoffed and turned back to the kitchen sink—scrubbing it thoroughly with a rough cloth.

  “It’s almost dark,” I pointed to the far window where the sun was disappearing behind the nearby rooftops, “You can’t go home in the dark, Mathy. You know it isn’t safe.”

  “It’s perfectly safe when I have you to walk me home,” Mathy didn’t look up from her task, “I’ll be the safest woman in Firen.”

  I felt my rage settle in an instant.

  That was almost a compliment.

  Almost.

  And a compliment from Mathy was a rare thing indeed.

  I spent the next hour helping Mathy clean the kitchen before I finally convinced her to go home. As we walked on the dim streets to the large home she now shared with her daughter and grandchildren, she prattled on about how she had expected me to turn out better—to have more respect for my elders.

  I largely ignored her.

  This was common Mathy behavior—especially in her old age. Sure, she was bothersome, but I knew this was just Mathy’s way of showing she cared about me—this and forcing her home-cooked meals down my throat.

  I walked her right to her front door—painted the same shade of orange as my own—but as I moved to walk away, she held out the small white envelope I’d seen her take out of her satchel earlier that evening.

  “Open that in a safe place—someplace dark where the Predictors can’t see,” Mathy instructed before leaving me alone on her large, wraparound porch and slamming the front door behind her.

  Those weren’t uncommon instructions here in the Red. For children growing up here, many parents warned them to fear the Predictors. And when a child misbehaved, they would usually say something like—I hope you did that in the dark where the Predictors didn’t see you. But that made me more curious about the contents of the letter. Mathy implied that either the contents were immoral in some way, or the sender really didn’t want the Predictors to see the letter.

  “Good night to you, too,” I mumbled under my breath as I looked down at the letter in my hand.

  Impulsively, I nearly opened it right there on the porch, but I decided to heed Mathy’s warning and pocketed the envelope before making my way back home in the dark. As I walked, it felt like the letter was burning a hole in my pocket. I assumed it was from my father, but then why had Mathy been so secretive about it?

  As I debated, once again, if I should open the letter before I made it home or not, a movement in the shadows of a nearby bookstore caught my eye. But when I looked in the direction of the movement, there was nothing there but swaying flowers on a windowsill.

  But I was certain I’d seen a person.

  I closed my eyes momentarily, focusing my breathing until something deep inside me seemed to shift—almost like turning on a faucet somewhere in my mind. When I opened my eyes, the dark of night was gone—replaced by brilliant colors and details that would have been imperceptible to a normal person in broad daylight.

  This was what made me formidable even to the Imms.

  And no one—not even my father—knew what my eyes were capable of.

  This was the Sight—a long-extinct ability unique to the people of the Red.

  Extinct until me, that is.