Crimson Dahlia by Abigail Owen

“It’s going to voicemail,” he said. “She must still be in
class.”
    Charlotte
suddenly appeared in the room with Ellie and Alex in tow.
    “Selene
and Nate,” Griffin said. Without a sound, Charlotte was gone again.
    “Does
anyone know what’s going on yet?” Ellie asked.
    “Not
yet,” Hugh answered. “We’ll have to get to Ramsey to find out.”
    Griffin
turned to the room. “Adelaide’s class will be out in about fifteen minutes. She
doesn’t think she can leave without the professor’s causing a scene. She said
to send Charlotte the second class lets out.”
    As
Griffin finished speaking, Charlotte reappeared with Selene, who went straight
to Griffin’s side.
    “Where’s
Nate?” Hugh asked.
    “He
said he couldn’t leave Talia,” Charlotte replied.
    Hugh
and Lucy exchanged a worried look but didn’t say anything.
    “Charlotte,
Adelaide’s gonna meet you outside her biology classroom in about ten minutes,”
Griffin said.
    “Should
we all go?” Charlotte asked.
    “Better
if just you go versus all of us. Such a large group of her family would
probably look a little odd to her friends,” Alex said.
    Charlotte
nodded and disappeared once more.
    The
rest of them waited. Silent. They’d learned long ago that any speculation was
useless and only served to make the worry worse.
    So
they waited.

Chapter
9
     
    “We’re
here, Ramsey,” he heard Lucy call out the second they appeared in the woods.
“Please tell us she’s not—”
    Ramsey
shook his head. He took Lucy by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I
don’t know for sure. The link I felt with her is gone. I don’t feel it anymore.
I don’t feel… her.”
    “What
does that mean?” Hugh asked.
    Ramsey
looked over Lucy’s head at him. “I don’t know. I’m not sure when I lost it. I
was following our link, trying to find her. I stopped and ate lunch. And when I
went to start looking again, the feeling was gone. It just faded away.”
    Lucy
wrapped her arms around her waist and started rocking. “Oh my God… oh my God.”
    Hugh
pulled her into him and wrapped her in a warm hug. “Shhhh… it’ll be all right.”
    Ramsey
turned to Adelaide, who stood there with tears running down her cheeks. “Do you
see or feel anything different with your relationship to her?”
    Adelaide
sniffed, and then her face went blank as she reached for her power. She had the
ability to see relationships in the form of colored strands of light. “It’s
hard to tell ‘cause she’s not here, and I see relationships better when people
are right in front of me. But it’s not gone. That has to be good, right?”
    “That’s
better than good,” Ellie said. “That must mean that she’s still alive at least.”
She glanced at Griffin, and everyone waited patiently through their mental
conversation. The twins shared a unique connection that allowed them to share
each other’s powers. They’d been talking through Griffin’s telepathy most of
their lives. The rest of the family were used to it now. After a moment Griffin
shook his head.
    Ramsey,
who had felt a tiny amount of hope at Adelaide’s words, deflated again. Griffin
obviously couldn’t hear Lila anywhere. He had just one more option for them to
try.
    I
hope to heaven this works.
    He
turned to the group. “I didn’t want to share this yet, in case I raised false
hopes… but I saw Lila the other night in a dream.”
    No
one said anything, but they all looked at Selene, who had the ability to visit
people in their dreams. Ramsey turned to her and described the dream to her – without
the details about Lila in the pond, of course – but how it felt and most of
what he saw.
    Selene
let out a long breath. “The grey mist you described sounds a lot like what
dreams look like before they form. That’s usually when I enter, so I see it a
lot.”
    “So
you agree that maybe it was Lila’s dream?” Ramsey asked.
    Selene
made a little clucking noise. “Hard to say. It might just have