THE FOREWARNED DEATH
CHAPTER THREE

Olivia gulped down her breaths to stay quiet although her heartbeat was pounding loud enough to grasp attention. Something felt incredibly wrong, enough to make her limbs tremble and her bottom lip quiver, but there was nothing in sight. With her feet attached to the ground, her wide, glassy eyes searched through the darkness for any form of life. Still, all she saw was blackness.

She inhaled a slow, shaky breath before mustering up the courage to turn around. Her hands flew to her mouth to stop the desperate scream from escaping her lips as she watched before her in horror. She kept her hands glued to her mouth, not trusting her extent of terror as she took a step closer to get a clearer look of what were merely silhouettes to her.

Furrowing her brows, she narrowed her eyes to get a fixed image of what was several feet away from her in the darkness. Her frown deepened when she saw an unfamiliar Jeep. While she walked toward it, she scanned the area around her for any signs of The Claw. But when her eyes returned to the car, her heart dropped. "Oh my God," she whispered to herself. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she stopped walking, struggling to fathom the sight before her.

Plastered against the car window was a hand, motionless, and as Olivia began to trudge toward the car once more, she recognized the face glued similarly to the glass. The judgy waitress from The Claw, she thought, and her bottom lip started to tremble again. George. Her hair was floating wildly in the water that filled up the car. And while her eyes were wide, almost seemingly alive, her pale face and limp body confirmed otherwise.

She squinted her eyes to get a clearer view, mentally praying that she was seeing it wrong, but as she focused her vision, Olivia noticed another limp arm floating in the water. It was thicker and darker than George's, attached to a buff torso, but with his immobile head facing the other way, Olivia couldn't identify who it was.

As the realization settled that there were two helpless dead people alone in a car, a loud gasp brushed past Olivia's lips. She pushed herself onto her toes to force herself to move faster until she found herself in a hurried jog. She was all alone, lost, and trapped in a black box that she didn't know how to escape with a dead girl in a flooded car. As the thought crossed her mind, her breath hitched and her eyes blurred with tears. Her heartbeat raced faster than it ever had as her desperation for getting to the Jeep increased. George was dead but all Olivia wanted was to get to her, to free her from her suffocating doom. Yet, the faster she ran, the farther the car appeared to be. It grew farther and farther at a rate that Olivia's lungs began to clog with cold. She found her tired legs betraying her, bringing her to a gradual stop as they slowed down and as much as she tried to urge them to keep going, it was as though she had lost complete control. Of her legs, her body, her mind. Her body shook with exhaustion and terror and she found herself bending forward and propping her hands on her knees for support while her mind tortured her with a spindle of thoughts. Her body twitched and shivered with pain while her mind twisted and turned with unending thoughts until it felt like they were consuming her and all she could do was scream.

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Cheerful bells chimed tormentingly as Olivia pushed the restaurant door open. Before she had even properly stepped foot inside, her eyes were already scanning The Claw for familiar faces, although she wasn't entirely sure she'd have the courage to speak to some of them. George in particular. How was Olivia supposed to tell someone she barely knew that she had dreamt about them? Dreamt about them dead. Drowned in the Jeep parked right outside The Claw.

"Woah, hey, we're not open yet." George frowned and stepped forward to try and stop Olivia from entering further.

"Where's Nancy?" Olivia brushed her sweaty palms against her blue jeans. She avoided eye contact with George, unsure if she could bear looking at her while she was holding back an awfully sinister nightmare about her.

"What's with the rush?"

"I just need to talk to her about something. I saw her car outside; where is she?" Liv folded her arms over her chest, trying to soften her heavy breaths from her hurried jog to the restaurant.

George furrowed her brows, suspicion looming over her. "She's in the back getting ready for her shift." With a wary frown on her face, she turned her head to the side to signal to a tall man with beach-like wavy hair. "Ace, can you get Nancy over her?" He responded with a short nod before scanning the two girls who stood anxiously in the middle of The Claw.

"Who does that car out there belong to?" Olivia spoke up again, unable to hold back her torturous thoughts. "The Jeep."

"It's my boyfriend, Nick's." George's frown deepened at the random question. "Why?"

Before Olivia had the chance to nervously worry about coming up with a reasonable explanation, the storage and locker room door creaked open. Nancy walked through with her hands behind her back as she struggled to tie the back strings of her uniform. When her eyes landed on Olivia, a curious, almost satisfied smile corned her lips. "Olivia, hey. What are you doing here?" she asked, although her tell-tale smirk showed she already knew the answer.

"You know what we talked about last night?" Olivia trailed. She picked at the corner of her nails as she spoke. "I... I saw something again."

"You saw something? You mean like another vision?" Nodding, Olivia reached into her handbag for her sketchbook. Once it was tightly in her grip, she pulled it out and stared at it for a moment before hesitantly handing it to the girl. Nancy gave her a look before peeling the cover open and flicking to the page with the most recent drawing. Her lips parted slightly as the picture of her friend in Nick's car filled her eyesight. A hint of brown grasped her attention and she narrowed her eyes to get a closer look. "Nick..." she said through a breath of realization once she noticed Nick was drawn in the driver's seat.

"What?" George stared at Nancy in confusion. When she looked over Nancy's shoulder to look at the book, however, her eyes widened and she gasped. "What the Hell?" She pulled away after absorbing the sketch and looked at Olivia with wide eyes.

"This is what you saw, isn't it?" Nancy looked to George, the same dazed expression on her face. "The premonition you got of your death."

"The what?" Olivia took a step forward, her eyebrows knitted together while she tried to comprehend what the two girls were talking about.

"We each got these visions– warnings– of how we'd die. How the Aglaeca would kill us," Nancy said in a low voice. Her eyes returned to the sketch. "This is how George and Nick die."

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Olivia tapped her index finger nervously against the wooden table. She could hardly pull herself into enough focus to even pay attention to who was sitting across from her and beside her. When George let out a frustrated grunt, however, Olivia got her clarification as to who was sitting where.

"Can you stop that?" George snapped, her loud and cold voice booming from in front of Olivia.

Rolling her eyes, Olivia withdrew her finger from the wood and stuck her hands into her jacket pockets to try to resist fidgeting and aggravating George anymore. "Maybe this is normal to you but it's not like I wake up every day to find out I'm connected to some psycho ghost," Olivia barked back.

"Hey, come on... we're all on the same side here." Ace held his hands forward as a means to calm everyone down. The two girls slumped back into their seats in silence, avoiding each other's eyes.

When Nancy reentered the dining room from the storage room with Nick and Bess following behind her, Olivia sprung up in her seat attentively. With George being snappy and Ace being incredibly quiet, the redhead appeared to be the only one who could help Olivia. "Now that Nick and Bess are here, we can start trying to figure all of this out," Nancy announced with an encouraging smile that no one returned.

"Right, so this Aglaeca tried to kill you all– and is still trying to... and I'm somehow linked to all of this?" Olivia tried to mentally process her own words while saying them.

Nancy nodded. "And possibly because of your aunt."

"What does her aunt have to do with this?" Bess asked as she slid into the seat next to George.

Nancy pursed her lips and looked at Olivia through soft, apologetic eyes. The brunette only shuffled in her seat and bit her tongue to brace herself for what was about to be said. After her conversation with Nancy the other day about Hillary's police records and coronary images, Olivia more or less knew about what her aunt went through. It tore at her heart like a blade every time she thought about it. She had grown up believing that her aunt had committed suicide, that Olivia and Mason weren't enough to make her want to stay when really, Hillary had died in cold blood. Without justice.

"Her death was rendered a suicide, but the evidence and the pictures give me a reason to think it wasn't," Nancy elaborated vaguely. Her eyes never left Olivia who stared at her fingers as the words ripped at her soul.

"That's it?" George asked in a rough tone, in disbelief of the mediocre justification.

When Nancy didn't respond, Olivia sat up in her seat and finally focussed her eyes on the people around her. "She was schizophrenic. I mean, at least that's what the doctor's said..." she paused for a moment while it all started to click in her head. "But what if she wasn't? What if she was like me?"

"Well, do we know if she made a deal with the Aglaeca?" Nick's question was directed to Olivia. 

"Maybe she and her friends didn't pay the toll and that's why it killed her. Do you know if she had close friends who may have summoned the Aglaeca with her?" George added before Olivia could respond to Nick's question.

"Wait, but that still doesn't explain what this has to do with Olivia."

Everyone vocalized their thoughts and questions but when they met Olivia's ears, it all sounded like deafening clashing pans and shattering plates. Everyone's words struck like bullets that Olivia wasn't fast enough to catch, leaving her with a big mess at her feet that she wasn't sure she could clean up on her own. The clearest thing to her was her heartbeat, pounding in her chest, in her ears, at her fingertips and forehead like a mallet on a drum. It added to the loud noises from around her– of her new acquaintances throwing questions and statements at her about things she didn't know and hardly understood. It felt like the room was getting warmer and their voices were getting louder and her breathing was quickening until she couldn't bear it anymore and she shot up to her feet.

"Let me through," she said to Ace, and although she was looking at him, her attention was too foggy to see the confused expression on his and everyone else's face.

"Where are you going?" Olivia ignored Bess' question and walked in the direction of the restroom signs. Her body was stiff as she made her way to the bathroom and she could barely keep her breathing steady long enough to get out of Nancy's friends' sight. All she could think about was space– how refreshing it would be, how she could be in silence and breathe. She shoved the bathroom door open and it hit the wall with a loud bang. Once it finally shut, Olivia allowed herself to let out the shaky breath she had been holding.

Everything she had found out in the past forty-eight hours felt like the weight of Mount Everest on her shoulders, crushing her beneath its weight. But most painful of all was knowing something so dark and baleful had happened to her. That no one knew– no one was there to help her. At the same time though, something flickered in her chest: a faint flutter of warmth and joy. That her aunt hadn't killed herself. That nine-year-old Olivia had been enough.

She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes to try to suppress the desperate sob at the back of her throat. A light shudder went past her lips instead, and she slid down the door, burying her face in her knees. She reminisced about the times she was upset when she was little, especially during the time of her parents' fights. Hillary would always be there, to make her laugh or play hide and seek. She was only twenty-something, and like an older sister to Olivia, always keeping her company. Then when Mason and Christina, Olivia's mother, were going through the divorce, Liv would spend summers at the Irvine Lodge just outside Horseshoe Bay with her aunt. The pair were inseparable, joined by the hip almost. But then Hillary died.

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