The Shimmers in the Night Read Online Free

of fishy things—probably horseshoe crabs in mid-decay. She lifted clothes off the floor, straightened her desk and closet, then decided she could even change her sheets.
    Hey, once every few months, why not?
    After she pulled back the flowery turquoise coverlet and the jumble composed of the top sheet and blankets, she also lifted her pillow, and there, lying on the bottom sheet, was a small, blue eye on a silver band. Her favorite ring, a good-luck charm made of blown glass that her mother had given her. A nazar , they called them in Turkey, to ward off the evil eye—a good eye to ward off evil ones. She’d been missing it since the summer, and it’d been here all the time.
    Huh , she thought, and picked the ring up to slide it back onto her finger. She thought ruefully of the fairy tale about the princess who slept on a pile of twelve mattresses and could still feel the tiny pea beneath. Not much of a princess, am I?
    She found she was thinking of Jax again and what he had said about their mother’s work: a source, an unknown source. Where and what could this source be? And what did it have to do with what had happened to them in August?
    Her fingers still held the ring, settled now in its familiar place. Without knowing how she’d gotten there, she was lying on her bed—aware of her grimy sheets, the usual few grains of beach sand at the bottom—but she wasn’t seeing her room anymore. She was shifting through the turquoises and blues of her covers without touching anything, and in front of her was darkness, and out of the darkness came bubbling, roiling black columns of what looked like smoke.
    The smoke was dispersing strangely—through water, she thought, not air. It must be water.
    The black clouds were coming out of bumpy black and brown and white chimneys, not manmade but maybe mineral, she guessed—towers jutting out of rock piles on what she thought must be the seabed. The black smoke came billowing out of these rough castle-like pillars—billowing and billowing in clouds that spread and bubbled up again until she felt hypnotized watching it.
    But then she was moving closer to the rocks, right up to the towers and into the dark of the smoke and then emerging from it on the other side. There were tubelike creatures capped with plumes of red; there were lit-up floating animals that reminded her of shrimp. Others looked like jellyfish, and others, yet, the single-celled organisms she’d seen in biology class. They swirled around her until she passed them, too, and went farther down, burrowing through the ocean floor. Then it was black again and she couldn’t see anything for a while—until she could.
    She could see, but she couldn’t understand. There was movement here, there were spaces—caverns maybe?—and streaks of light through the darkness like rivers of fire, she thought, but it was all too surreal; she couldn’t see much beyond the blurs and flashes. She felt as though she were inside a volcano. Then she saw a line in front of her, an impossibly sharp, vertical line of gray, unlike anything else, that held her gaze. It was something recognizable, though she couldn’t put her finger on it….
    But she was in her bedroom again. Her old, familiar bedroom with its cozy disorder. She was sitting upright in a pile of rumpled bed linens, feeling a little dizzy. Outside she heard the crickets, the faint rhythmic wash of the tide. A low drumbeat from Max’s room, where he was listening to music without his headphones.
    She held up her finger, still faintly tanned from the summer, with its short, chewed nail and the blue-and-white nazar ring.
    Definitely not a coincidence.
    She’d mislaid the ring after what happened in August; now that she thought about it, she’d had no visions since then. Not a single one, at least that she remembered.
    Until now.
    Although…maybe the nightmares had been pieces of visions, trying to