Over the years she had developed the habit of confronting problems rather than hiding from them, but in the current case neither seemed to do any good. How could you confront something so nebulous? Clairvoyance wasn’t something you could see, or touch. It was just there, like blue eyes; you either had them or you didn’t. Same with clairvoyance.
Having blue eyes didn’t frighten her, but clairvoyance did. In itself it was scary enough, but now, looking back, she saw everything that had happened in the past year as a progression, from plants to red lights to ghosts to clairvoyance. Looking at it that way, she didn’t dare try to guess what would be next. Levitation? Or maybe she would start setting things on fire just by looking at them.
She tried to be amused, but for once her sense of humor wasn’t working.
But wandering around the studio afraid to go to bed did remind her of hiding in the laundry when she was fourteen, and she growled aloud at herself. Nothing had happened the night before, and just because the more she thought about the trance painting the more worried she became didn’t mean it would happen every night. It might not happen again for a long time, until someone else she knew died—
That was it. A lot of people died every day in New York, but none of their deaths had caused sleepwalking forays. She had known the hot dog vendor, however, so his death had disturbed her on a subconscious level.
For the first time, she wondered how he had died. After she had seen him yesterday, she had been too shocked to think about it, and he had looked as healthy as any ghost she had ever seen. But in the scene she had painted, blood had been coming from his nostrils, and he had clearly suffered a head injury. Had he been hit by a car or maybe fallen down some steps? Just how accurate was that painting?
Sweeney shivered. She didn’t want to know the answer to that last question.
She shivered again and realized how cold she was. She was also very tired, very sleepy, and she was not going to stay awake a minute longer worrying about things she couldn’t control. She put on her pajamas and crawled into the warm bed, curling into a ball and waiting for the heat from the electric blanket to seep into her flesh.
Just before she slept, she had the drowsy thought that if Richard were in bed with her, she wouldn’t need an electric blanket to keep her warm.
* * *
Just after midnight she gasped, pulling in a hard, fast breath. She pushed restlessly at the covers, fighting the blankets. She muttered, the sounds indistinct, and rolled her head as if trying to escape something.
In the silence of the night her sudden cessation of breathing was as noticeable as her gasping had been. For a long moment she lay utterly still, then breath returned on a long, slow, gentle inhalation.
She opened her eyes and sat up. Pushing the heavy cover aside, she got out of bed and walked soundlessly through the apartment. When she reached her studio, she put a blank canvas on an easel, stood for a moment with her head cocked to the side as if pondering her next step, then selected a tube of paint and began.
* * *
It was the cold that woke her. She huddled under the covers, wondering if her electric blanket was malfunctioning. Even so, the nest she had made for herself should have contained the heat. She fought her way out of the tangle of blankets and rolled over until she could see the blanket control. To her surprise, the little amber light was on, so the blanket should have been warm. She found a coil and pressed her fingers to it. She could feel the heat, but it didn’t seem to be transferring to her.
Next she looked at the clock and lifted her eyebrows in surprise. It was almost nine, and she seldom slept past dawn. She didn’t have any appointments, though, so it was the cold, not urgency, that drove her from the bed. She paused to turn the thermostat up as high as it would go, then went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, setting the water as hot as she could bear it. By the time she stripped off her pajamas and stepped under the spray, she was shuddering with cold.
She stood with the hot water beating down on her head and back, warming her spine. The shudders stopped, the fading tension unlocking her taut muscles as it drained away. Maybe there was something physically wrong with her, she thought, almost sagging as her body relaxed. The chills had started about the same time the other stuff had started happening, but that didn’t mean they were related. She wouldn’t have to tell a doctor everything, just that she was cold all the time. The realization that she was actually considering seeing a doctor startled her.
As she toweled off, her skin roughened as another chill seized her. Swearing under her breath, she hurriedly got dressed. Getting her head wet hadn’t been the brightest idea, she thought, because she didn’t own a hair dryer. One disastrous attempt at blow-drying her hair, which resulted in something resembling a hairy explosion, had persuaded her to let her curls dry naturally rather than outrage them with heat. Wrapping a towel around her head, she went into the kitchen for that first cup of coffee.
The light on the coffeemaker wasn’t on, but the pot was full. Frowning, she touched the pot and found it cold. “Damn it,” she muttered. The coffee had brewed right on time, but she hadn’t been up to drink it and the heat pad turned itself off after two hours, one more example of a manufacturer trying to protect itself from lawsuits by careless or forgetful customers who left their coffeemakers turned on and perhaps caused fires.
She poured a cup of coffee and popped it into the microwave, then dumped the rest of the pot down the sink and put some fresh coffee on to brew. By the time she finished that, the buzzer on the microwave had sounded. The warmed-up coffee tasted terrible, sort of like old socks, but it was hot, and at the moment that was more important.