Between Shadow and Skin

CHAPTER 2: Normal Is Overrated

The man had been watching her all night.

Sera knew this the way she knew when a painting was off — not from any single thing, but from an accumulation of small wrongnesses that the gut processed before the brain caught up. The slight pressure of attention across a crowded space. The way the air on her left side had felt different for the last hour. The fact that she had looked over three times and he had not, once, pretended to be looking at something else.

Most men, when caught staring, did the thing. The quick glance-away, the sudden interest in the middle distance. This one just looked back at her like he had every right to, like he'd been there first and she was the one who'd wandered into his line of sight.

She'd raised an eyebrow at him. He'd almost smiled.

She was still thinking about the almost.

"You've got that look," said Bri, materializing at her elbow with two fresh glasses of the terrible complimentary champagne.

"I don't have a look."

"You have a look. It's the look where something has gotten under your skin and you're deciding whether to be annoyed about it or interested." Bri paused. "Is it the tall one by the east wall? Because I clocked him twenty minutes ago and I want it noted for the record that he is genuinely alarming."

Sera took the champagne. "Alarming is one word."

"What's yours?"

She thought about it. The man had been still in the way that large things were still — not passive, but coiled. Like stillness was a choice he was making every second and could revoke without warning. He was tall enough that she'd noticed it from across a rooftop. Dark and broad-shouldered and dressed in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than her rent, with a glass of wine he hadn't touched and eyes that had, when they'd caught hers for that one suspended moment, looked almost gold.

"Inconvenient," she said.

Bri laughed. "Amazing. Anyway, he left."

Sera told herself the small drop in her chest was relief. She was mostly unconvincing.

••••

She walked home. She lived twenty minutes from the gallery on foot, which she counted as one of the genuine blessings of her life — she loved New York best at night, when the daytime performance of it fell away and the city got quieter and stranger and more like itself.

She had grown up here, technically, though "grown up" implied a kind of rootedness she'd never had. Seven foster homes in eighteen years, all in various boroughs, each one a different version of temporary. She'd learned early to carry what mattered and let go of the rest — a skill that had served her well professionally and made her approximately terrible at relationships, which was a trade-off she'd mostly made her peace with.

What she had instead of roots: a rent-stabilized apartment in Carroll Gardens that she'd sweet-talked the landlord into letting her paint floor-to-ceiling in her own murals. A best friend who ran a gallery and thought Sera was a genius, which was only half true but was still nice to hear. A freelance illustration career that paid actual bills, a fact that still surprised her a little every month. And the sketchbooks — always the sketchbooks, going back to the first one she'd been given by a foster mother she barely remembered, a woman who'd handed her a blank book and a set of pencils like she'd known that was the thing.

Sera had been filling them ever since.

She stopped under a streetlight at the corner of her block and opened tonight's book. The last thing she'd sketched — quickly, instinctively, the way she always drew when something caught at her — was a face.

Or most of a face. She'd gotten the jaw, the line of a shoulder, the suggestion of something gold where the eyes should be. She hadn't had time to finish it before someone had interrupted her, and now it sat on the page like a half-remembered dream — specific enough to be unsettling, incomplete enough to itch.

She stared at it for a moment. Then she turned to the page before it, and the one before that, and the one before that.

The symbols were there, as always. She'd been drawing them since she was six years old, tucked into margins and corners, automatic as breathing — intricate, interconnected shapes that looked almost like letters in an alphabet she'd never studied. She'd tried once, at seventeen, to look them up. Nothing had come close. She'd told herself it was just a pattern her brain liked, the way some people doodled spirals or hatching.

But tonight, for the first time, looking at them in the amber wash of a Brooklyn streetlight, she had the strange and specific feeling that they were trying to say something she almost understood.

She closed the book.

"Normal," she told herself out loud, to no one. "You are extremely normal."

She went inside. She made tea. She did not think about the man with the gold eyes.

She thought about him for two hours before she fell asleep.

••••

The first weird thing happened at 3am.

She woke to the smell of something burning — not acrid, not smoke-alarm burning, but warm and sweet and faintly electric, like the air before a summer storm. She sat up. The room was dark. Nothing was on fire.

But the candle on her windowsill — the one she definitely had not lit before bed, the one she was fairly certain she hadn't lit in weeks — was burning. Quietly. Without any visible cause.

Sera stared at it for a long moment.

Then she got up, blew it out, and went back to sleep.

She was twenty-four years old and she had been doing things like this her whole life. Lights flickering when she was angry. Plants growing faster in her apartment than any plant had a right to. The uncanny ability to find things that were lost, to sense when someone was lying, to feel the shape of a room before she walked into it.

She had a very practiced, very functional policy about all of this: she did not examine it too closely.

Some things, she had learned, were better as background noise.

She fell back asleep to the smell of rain on warm stone, and dreamed of a silver hall full of women with her eyes, and a voice that called her by a name she'd never been given but somehow already knew.