I reared back from the wall, the palate clattering to the ground and the brush falling numbly from my fingers. The echo of a voice was chillingly familiar, but faded away even as I grappled to hear it again, to force it into clarity.
I crouched to retrieve my implements but ended up scrambling to form a scene on the floor instead, forcing the splattered paint to merge into comprehensible images before the vision could fade away from me completely. I brushed my fingers through a glob, spreading it down to form the neck of a man, broad shoulders, and hands that hung limply, secured by blocky shackles. I continued down further, shuffling back on my knees as I formed a naked torso. It was littered with wounds and hunched over as the person sat on a slab of bench, legs extended to a box on the ground. I jerked away from the box as the pain began to numb my arms; I reached back up to the man’s head. My fingers carefully formed an impression of his face.
“Paraponera clavata, they’re called,” a voice whispered ominously. “The bullet ant…” The words became garbled as I wrangled with the vision, the speaker sounding as though he was speaking from underwater. Eventually, the words became clear enough for me to understand again, but by then… I was already wishing that I couldn’t hear the conversation at all. “A single bite can be as painful as a bullet punching through your skin,” the garbled voice warned. “And you’ve got a whole box of them there…” The speaker’s voice faded away again, and this time I didn’t scramble to bring it back.
I finished painting the man slumped over the bench, my heart throbbing painfully. I felt the reverberation of a steel door slamming shut more than I heard it, but my hands didn’t attempt to paint the door or chase after the person who had exited it. Instead, I was pulled away from the outline of the man I knew to be Silas. My fingers escaped to another spill of paint, which spread into the base of a structure, arching upward with the coaxing of my fingers to form the bars of a cage. I was blind to whatever colours my fingers had reached for, but my mind was picking up on details that remained hidden from the paint: the stench of blood, the graininess of an unclean floor, the dankness that came from being hidden below the earth.
I sensed death nearby, and a chill raced down my spine.
My hands began reaching for the box at Silas’s feet, unable to part from the vision until it was complete. I tried to pull away again, to draw on some other detail, but the person who had spoken earlier in the vision was now gone.
Only the box was left.
My hands shook uncontrollably, a sob tearing at my throat.
“Stop her…” someone pleaded—someone outside of the vision—but it was too late.
I screamed, my body hunching over as shock after vicious shock of pain bolted up my legs.
“Angel…” I could feel Silas slipping away from me but I didn’t have enough control over my forecasting ability to hold onto him for any longer. “If you’re there… if you’re seeing this. Don’t come. Don’t try to save me. You have to stay away…”
My hand slipped from the painting, marring it in a way that had never happened before as I slumped over, catching myself against the ground, my cheek stuck to something red.
I had drawn the box in red.
Everything else was grey.
“That’s enough,” Noah spoke up, seemingly for the first time since entering the room, though he might have been speaking the whole time and I simply hadn’t noticed. “Why are you showing us this, Miro? What the hell is going on?”
I pushed up on weak arms, unsurprised when they buckled inward and I hit the ground with a jarring smack. Quillan was there in a second, pulling me gently upright.
“You needed to see,” he answered Noah tightly. “What was in the box, Seph?”
“Hurts…” I muttered. “Can’t feel my legs…”
He passed a hand over my thigh. “You’re fine, sweetheart. There’s nothing wrong with your legs. You’re not injured anywhere.”
I slowly focussed on his face, blinking away my tears as the comprehension slammed into me.
“Shut that off,” I groaned, slapping my hands over my ears.
Cabe walked over to the phone in the corner of the room and pressed a button on it to stop the song looping before slipping the phone into his pocket with a frown. He must have recognised that it was Silas’s. I pulled my hands from my ears hesitantly, scared that I might accidently hear the song again.
“He knew I would paint him eventually.” My throat was dry enough that my voice rasped. “He must say it whenever he’s alone.”
“Say what?” Quillan prodded, his eyes digging into me.
“You have to stay away,” I repeated angrily, pushing out of Quillan’s arms and rising unsteadily to my feet. I pitched sideways and he caught me, but just as quickly stepped back to give me space. “He knew the song would make me want to reach out to him. He knew I would see him eventually.”