For seven years, Koren Fellows had thought she was crazy. Or that everyone else was. For seven years, she had remembered an old babysitter named Mrs. Núñez who supposedly never existed. She remembered a monster in her closet, a real one. She remembered forgetting things, her throat being sore from screaming even though she didn’t remember doing that, her face being dirty, things moving around. She remembered jumping out her bedroom window to escape the ugly man in the closet, landing on her trampoline, and seeing him at her window. She remembered the black rose he’d tossed to her.

She remembered all those things. And for the past seven years, she had tried to tell herself she wasn’t remembering them, that she didn’t know anyone named Mrs. Núñez, that the grouchy old babysitter she’d had hadn’t just magically vanished, physically and from the memory of everyone except for Koren herself. Because she was terrified of what would happen if the ugly man realized she remembered him. Or what her parents would do if she didn’t let them think she believed all of that was just a nightmare.

But now she was going to find out the truth. Now she was going to know exactly what that thing was, and how to protect herself from it. How to kill it.

And all of that started with a lighthouse. Standing in a lighthouse, staring into that very light, while Professor Dare went on about this awakening their powers or showing them the truth or whatever. All Koren knew was that it was the first step to finding out exactly what that monster was. And nothing this vision could show her would be more terrifying than that night had been. Whatever horrific, evil monstrosity this vision wanted to throw at her, she was ready for it.

The blazing, blinding light faded, as Koren braced herself… and saw a police badge. A sheriff’s badge, to be exact. As she blinked a few times to clear her head and look around, the girl realized the badge was attached to someone. In that case, the badge was on the shirt of a young woman with short blonde hair. She was driving the car that Koren was sitting in.

Okay, wait. Wait. As Koren’s eyes darted around quickly, her confusion mounted. She was supposed to see an ancestor or something, right? But everything here looked modern. Like, post-2000 modern. Within the past decade. So what the hell? Was her vision broken or something?

It had to be. Something was fucked up. She was supposed to be seeing an ancestor, and she was instead seeing some woman from within the past few years or something. She definitely didn’t have any relatives who were cops. Her mom was a defense lawyer, and given her tendency toward rants, she definitely would have mentioned a relative who was… not just a cop, but a sheriff?!

“Hey!” Koren raised her voice, shouting out loud. When the woman sitting next to her failed to react (as she’d expected given the rundown she’d been given about what to expect), she simply shouted again, looking up and around. “Hey, my vision’s busted! Try again! Hello?! It’s not the right--”

She was interrupted as another car suddenly went screaming past the sheriff woman, openly speeding and blaring its horn loudly. The sheriff gave a brief double-take, muttered something about tourists, and turned on the siren before taking off after them. On the way, she pressed two fingers against a photo taped to the dash and promised not to take long.

Koren took a close look at the photo. It was some little blonde girl. No one Koren knew. So… so what? Was she accidentally getting someone else’s vision? Even that didn’t seem like it made sense. Weren’t they supposed to be getting visions from like… a long time ago?

As they chased down the random speeder, Koren leaned over to stare at the woman once more. Nope, didn’t look familiar at all. A glance at the badge once more revealed a name: Chambers. Sheriff Chambers?

She was still trying to figure out what exactly all of this meant, as the speeder pulled over. For a moment after the sheriff lady got out, Koren stayed where she was. What was going on? Why was she seeing this? Was it really supposed to happen? Why was--

The man in the other car was talking. Koren blinked up, stepping right out of the car through the closed door as she heard him refer to Sheriff Chambers as Joselyn. How did he know her name? And what the fuck was with that creepy ass ‘you look very good in a uniform’ bullshit? Could this lady just shoot him or something alre--

Ghosts appeared. They couldn’t be anything else. Translucent figures yanked Sheriff Chambers back by the arms, while Koren reflexively blurted a useless warning. She was struggling to escape their grasp, freaking out, while the man stepped out of the car.

Koren had no idea why she was seeing this, why a vision that was supposed to show her an ancestor was instead showing her some random woman she’d never seen or heard of before being attacked by ghosts and some creepy dude from within the past decade.

But one thing was for sure, she’d been completely wrong about being ready for this.

*******

“--with your spine in the lowest fucking layer of hell, you evil piece of shit!”

As the last bit of what had been an extensive, if completely pointless diatribe against the… the monstrous thing that had abducted Sheriff Chambers left her mouth, Koren abruptly realized that she was back in the real world. The vision was gone, and she was standing there surrounded by an assortment of other students as well as Professor Dare. Apparently that part had been spoken--or rather, shouted aloud, because they had definitely heard it. All of them, every last one including the teacher, were staring at her as if she’d just transformed into a giant cuckoo clock, sprouted a boat propeller, and motored her way off across the nearby ocean.

“Miss Fellows,” Professor Dare finally spoke up in a gentle voice, “are you alright? Sometimes the vision experience can be a bit overwhelming, particularly knowing that it happened to someone in our past. If you’d like, we have a counselor who can help talk you through it. He’s even been known to help a student look into the facts of their vision to find out what happened next. If it would help to find some sort of closure to the situation you were presented.”

She did not, Koren noticed, ask what the vision had actually been. Was that because there were other students around, or because asking about specific visions without the details being volunteered was taboo or something?

For a moment, she nearly blurted out a whole mess of thoughts her particular vision had provided. A large portion of those thoughts involved extensive cursing. But she stopped herself. Why? Why was she given a vision of some woman from the past decade or so? A vision of a woman she didn’t know and couldn’t be related to, no less. What was that about? Looking around, no one else seemed as confused as she was. Shaken maybe, angry, determined, even scared. But no one seemed baffled as to why they had seen what they saw. No one was asking why their vision had been of events that were so recent. Everyone else seemed normal.

If she said something now, if she made them realize something had been wrong with her vision, they might send her away. They might cut her loose. And she couldn’t let that happen. Not when that… that monster was still out there.

Wait, did she mean the creature who had been in her room, or the--the--

Wait. Wait. Was the monster who had been in her room--wait. The thing in her room, she couldn’t remember the details, but it had fucked with her memory. She knew that much. And this guy--this evil fuck who threatened Sheriff Chambers’ daughter to make her come with him and swear some oath of loyalty or whatever, he’d… done something to her memory too. She didn’t remember him, then he made her swallow something and suddenly she did remember him. What did she call him? Fausser? Foe-Sir? Fah--something. Something like that.

Was this Fawsir guy the man who had been in Koren’s room that night? Was he the one who made everyone forget her babysitter? Was he the man who had thrown a black rose to her? Was that why she had that vision? That made sense, right? It would explain it--sort of. Maybe the reason for her vision wasn’t because she was connected to that Sheriff Chambers lady--Joselyn, he’d called her-- but because she was connected to him through the event at her house. That could be it.

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Suddenly realizing that everyone was still staring, Koren quickly shook her head. “N-no, no, it’s fine. I’m fine. Thanks. I just--whew, pretty wild, huh?”

No way was she going to tell them anything about her vision now. Not when she had so many questions of the sort that adults tended to shy away from answering. She would keep quiet, investigate this Fawsir guy (however you were supposed to spell it), and only say something once she had concrete evidence linking him to what had happened back in her own house seven years earlier.

Once she was apparently satisfied that Koren didn’t need to immediately see the counselor, Professor Dare dismissed them. Well, mostly she told them to go take a tour with a couple other students their age, twin girls who had apparently been living here for awhile or something. Sands and Scout, which were like… weird fucking names, right? Sands especially. Scout was okay, but what was up with Sands?

Trudging out with the others, her mind far away from paying attention to any kind of tour, Koren heard one of the other new girls, some blonde who had showed up like… at the last second after making everyone else wait for her (how exactly could you be late to a thing like this?), was saying something to Professor Dare about a painting of the headmistress, whom the girl… apparently didn’t recognize? Seriously, did this girl just not get any kind of orientation before coming here?

Whatever, it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding out who this Fawsir guy was and if he was really the monster who had been in her room that night. And then, how to stop him from terrorizing any other children like her.

Mind lost in thought thanks to all of that, Koren barely paid attention through the tour. She didn’t speak up and kept zoning out, to the point of almost being left behind a couple times. Seriously, what she wanted to do was raise her hand and ask if anyone knew what a Fawsir was, but something made her think that bringing up that name was a bad idea. At the very least, it would start a conversation she wasn’t ready to have. Not until she knew more. After all, if none of the teachers here knew she was looking into the guy, they couldn’t very well tell her not to.

Eventually, they’d had the tour, seen their rooms, and all that jazz. Koren had been given that Native American girl, Aylen, as a roommate. She seemed okay so far, though they’d barely exchanged a few words. With any luck, Aylen was someone who wasn’t a busybody and knew how to keep a secret if it came down to it. The last thing Koren needed was to be partnered up with some kind of narc who was going to run to the teachers at the drop of a hat.

Speaking of running to the teachers, she’d made a dumb joke about pushing one of the other kids over the line around that weird Pathmaker building, and some teen queen had fucking attacked and then lambasted her for it. Because making a stupid joke was really that big of a deal. Besides, all Koren had wanted was to see who was the class tattletale so she could avoid them. It wasn’t like she was actually going to shove the girl over the line, for fuck’s sake.

Anyway, now it was time for dinner. Or rather, first it was time for them to be Sorted--errr, assigned to their teams for the year. Yeah, there was no hat involved in this process. It was just Koren and the other freshmen sitting at a table in the front of the room while various ‘team mentors’ read off six names, which amounted to three pairs of roommates.

Right, so Aylen would be on her team. Who else? Koren listened and watched, trying to guess which of the people around her would be on her team. So intently was she listening, that she almost missed when the dark-haired, vaguely almost Asian-looking dude said a name that made her gaze suddenly snap around.

Felicity Chambers. He said that--he said that, right? It wasn’t just her imagination. She’d definitely heard him say Felicity Chambers along with several other names. As Koren’s gaze snapped up and around, lookingly wildly, she saw the blonde girl from earlier. The one who had been completely clueless about this place and clearly hadn’t had anywhere near the kind of orientation that Koren and the other new kids had.

She fit. She was blonde, would’ve been around the right age, and had the right name. Well, there could’ve been a different Felicity Chambers, right? It could’ve been a coincidence. Maybe.

Obviously, Koren needed to know more. She had to find out if this was the same girl. Because if it was, why hadn’t she had the vision about her mother being abducted? Why had Koren? Was it really because of some past interaction she’d had with this Fawsir guy? Or could it have been more than that? What… wait, was it--

An elbow nudged her, and Koren abruptly realized that her name had been called. Her gaze blinked up before she focused, flushing slightly as she saw everyone staring at her. With a mumble of words even she didn’t understand, the girl picked herself up and moved to join the group she’d been added to. Aylen was there, along with an Asian girl from the tour named Shiori, and a freaking tiny dark-haired girl named Rebecca. The two boys were a tall, super-thin guy named Gavin and another guy (an inch shorter than Koren) named Stephen.

They were all saying things, but Koren wasn’t listening. She was staring at the floor, mind reeling from the thought she’d just had. It was stupid, right? It was impossible. It was fucked up beyond belief. There was no way, none.

But what if…

The time for dinner came eventually. They all ordered their food through the (admittedly pretty awesome) magic menus, but Koren barely acknowledged it and barely tasted the food itself. She ate robotically, answering questions while staring at the table without really seeing it. She was looking at nothing, trying to avoid the impulse to put her head in her arms and just start shaking violently.

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t show that kind of reaction, because it was the sort of thing that would definitely attract attention. They’d make her go talk to that counselor guy, and he’d start prying. Which would be absolutely unacceptable.

So, with herculean effort, Koren kept it together. She stopped herself from violently shaking, from crying, from putting her head down, or even throwing up. She sat there and made herself eat one bite after another, no matter how tasteless it was.

Thankfully, everyone was pretty distracted. So no one seemed to notice how quiet she was, or the fact that she didn’t take seconds the way the others did. She just cleared enough of her plate to seem normal, put her fork down, and waited until dinner was over. Then she had to sit through Headmistress Sinclaire’s greetings and introductions.

It all took entirely too much time. Time that Koren wanted to spend trying to figure out if her sudden thought was wrong. It had to be wrong, right? It had to be. She was just--she was just being paranoid and crazy. There was no way…

Finally, dinner and the whole introduction thing was over. They were supposed to go to their rooms. Koren, however, waited until the rest of her team got up, then reached out to touch the arm of their mentor, the stocky, freckled guy with light blond hair. His name was… Andy? Albe--Andrew, that was it.

He held back, looking to her expectantly while the others started heading for the dorms. She’d have to make this quick. “Ahh, those vision things at the lighthouse, are they always focused on family members? Couldn’t it like, show you some random Stranger or something and get the same effect?” She’d thought long and hard about how to make this not be so suspicious, settling on, “I mean, it could be like… traumatizing to see your own family member go through bad shit. Even if they’re an ancestor. Couldn’t the teachers here make it show you… something not connected to you at all? Or just… connected some other way, like showing you a Stranger your ancestors fought but not your ancestor?”

Much as she desperately wanted the boy to agree with that, Koren wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. “Sorry, the way it works is looking back at things that happened to your own ancestors. Your own relatives. They have to be blood related to you.”

Koren kept her face as blank as possible, disguising the despair that had welled up inside her. “Right, so you’d have to see a relative at some point.”

The older boy nodded, then frowned a bit. “Are you okay?”

“Me?” Koren managed a weak shrug before starting to walk after the others. “I’m good.”

She was fucking fantastic, sure. No big deal. She’d seen two people in her vision, just two. One couldn’t be her relative. Joselyn Chambers couldn’t be her ancestor, because she was too young. It was too recent. Seriously, it was within the past ten years or so and Koren had never heard of any sheriff relative. She would have.

So, if Joselyn Chambers wasn’t the ancestor (and Koren was pretty sure this Felicity girl was that Felicity), there had only been one other figure there.

What if this Fawsir wasn’t just the monster in her closet that night? What if he had been there in the first place because they were related somehow? Was that--was that possible? Could her distant ancestor be one of those… those things? Was that why he was there? Was that why he’d shown up and fucked with her memory?

Was… was she related to him?

By that point, the group had made it to the dorms. Koren’s sense of helpless despair and more than a little inner rage had to be set aside, as her eyes focused on the blonde girl in front of one of the doors, as she suddenly blurted, “Felicity!”

“It’s Flick,” the other girl replied automatically, turning to her. “Uhh, hey… Koren?”

“Yeah, hi.” Walking past her, Koren reached out to catch the girl’s arm, pulling her away from the door and down the hall a bit. “I need to ask you something.”

“If it’s about my roommate, I barely know--”

“It’s not about her,” Koren interrupted impatiently. “You--um. Your mom, when was the last time you talked to her?” Boy, there really was no good or casual way to bring that up.

Flick just stared at her. “Uhh, I don’t think that--what?”

Okay, the band-aid was coming off. “Was--is your mom, was she a police officer? A sheriff.”

Now the blonde girl was really staring at her. Eyes wide, she blurted, “What the hell? How do you know anything about--”

Koren interrupted again. “Stop. Just--stop.” She turned away, folding her arms under her stomach as she fought not to throw up.

Flick Chambers was the daughter of Joselyn Chambers. She was that woman’s relative. Which left only one person for Koren to be related to. Fawsir. She--she really was related to that fucking evil monster who had terrorized her as a child and fucked with her memory. It was the only thing that made sense. And now, she had somehow found her way to the daughter of the woman he had abducted. The woman who had sacrificed her freedom to save her kid.

“I need to talk to you,” Koren quietly began.

“It’s about your mom. There’s something you need to know.”