Flip the Coin [BL]-Chapter 141. Pictures

I told Henry to turn away and conjured up a wet towel, starting to wipe the blood away.

"Have you told the others that the danger is over for now?" I asked.

"Mhm, while you slept, your grandmother also came here and said I should tell you to stop purposefully damaging her property."

I chuckled.

"The whole mansion is broken, and now she cares about a bit of blood?"

"What did the girl want?" I asked, remembering that she talked alone with Henry.

"Who?"

"The girl with the green eyes that wanted to talk to you alone?" I clarified, though he should know already.

"Jealous?"

"Yeah. No." I laughed. Seeing me being so paranoid, shouldn’t he try to divert my attention from that topic instead of making fun of me?

"She just wanted to know more about the shadows."

Bullshit, whatever it was he didn’t want to tell me, probably really something personal going on there. If not for my unfortunate vision about his future, I would be angry for his timing like I was with my first vision inside the forest; now, however, it became good news. Both had to be brain-damaged, though, to get it on while we were stuck in here.

I washed up in silence and went to the piles of clothes, putting on something new. After stepping to Henry, I touched him to flip the coin.

He watched me when I returned from my vision.

"In a few hours, the next shadow shows up. Hopefully they continue to come one after another. If they attack together, we’ll have a problem." Baggy Jeans would be the next to get attacked, inside the dining room.

The best course was probably to constantly flip the coin and get to know everything about the future, but I don’t want to overexercise my ability, and the future can change anyway. So to always be up-to-date, I would have to use my ability constantly. I opted for just watching the most important stuff for now.

"Yeah, that would be really nice. The next shadow is mine."

I nodded, being relieved as hell that we took turns. I wouldn’t really take his offer for him to fight the shadows alone, but I feel a real aversion at the thought of taking another shadow in and then having to kill myself again.

"Show yourself in front of the others first, then we get another mattress."

I nodded and left the room, with Henry behind me. Having him constantly around was meanwhile something I had grown immune to.

Coming to the dining room, everyone was there except for Chelsea.

"Did you tell Chelsea?" I asked Henry, and he nodded.

Taking a seat among the people staring at me, I waited for someone to ask.

"So it worked?" Glasses Guy, the oldest human inside the dining room, questioned.

"It did; we’ll get rid of them one by one like this." I nodded and saw my grandma again drinking something; this time it seemed to be tea, and in a tiny cup at that.

"What if they come together?" Jeyjey asked, sitting awfully far away from Baggy Jeans, who was now seated beside Valeria. Whatever was going on at their end, they could suit themselves, as I was uninterested in any additional drama.

"Good question." I looked at Henrietta, who had an awfully low presence and was behaving herself.

"Do you remember how many shadows entered this world through the portal?" I had seen them in my vision, but I hadn’t counted them, and I can’t say exactly how many there had been.

Henrietta didn’t answer until her mother grabbed her hand and squeezed her. She hadn’t listened, as it seemed, and after hearing her father repeat the question, she nodded.

"Seventeen."

The room fell into tense stillness.

"Now that we know how to get rid of them, can’t we just go?" The green-eyed girl asked, and Baggy Jeans chimed in.

"You can tell the military how to kill them."

Everyone looked at me with hopeful eyes, and I shrugged.

"If we open a portal home now, and fifteen shadows follow us without counting the two we have killed already, then we have thirty shadows in two weeks; additionally, there would be the need to release the information so that possessed people could even be found among the citizens. A mass panic would break out, and people would tell sick or dazed people to kill themselves because they would be deemed as possessed. If everything doesn’t work out in another two weeks, we have sixty shadows that possess people in a month from now. Then, in two months time, that would make two hundred and forty shadows, doubling every two weeks." After stating the facts, there was no response. Speaking it out sounded even more grisly than just doing the math inside my head.

"He made the right decision to close the portal." Henry eventually took the word, tapping his finger on the table.

Nobody objected to that.

Thanks, mate; it was really nice to hear that.

Yet, however pleased I was, there was still one missing person, and for that reason I felt somehow restless.

"I’ll bring Chelsea; wait a moment." I stood up before turning around again.

"Where is her room?"

"I’ll bring you." Henry had already risen and led the way.

"Why do you know?" I asked.

"I knocked on everyone’s door when telling them they could come out again."

When he brought me to a door after we climbed down the ladder, I knocked on the door. Seeing that there was no answer, I entered and found her curled up in a corner.

"What’s wrong?" I walked to her and crouched down, patting her head.

Chelsea looked at me with terror-stricken eyes and jumped into my arms, tackling me to the ground. I hugged her back and looked at Henry in question.

His answer was a grumpy look and a shrug while he crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe. He seemed to really like to lean against doorframes today.

"What’s wrong, Chelsea?" I stroked her back, and she shivered.

"I suddenly got strange memories, like Valeria." She said raspily.

Fuck.

"When did it start?" I asked, having a bad premonition.

"A few hours ago." That was when I killed myself before I fell asleep.

I exchanged a glance with Henry, whose expression also turned from annoyed to terrible.

"Can you tell me what you saw?" I asked Chelsea in a much more supportive voice.

"No." Still in my arms, she shook her head.

Time to stop the questioning. I flipped the coin; back of my hand; gold; correct past of Chelsea. Eyes, ears, and heart uncovered.

The blond girl sits curled up inside her room, scared of the shadow— scared that something will happen to Kenny. She waits for positive news about Kenny winning against the shadow when suddenly her body tenses, and she takes a deep, audible breath.

She sees pictures flitting inside her mind at an incredible speed, like playing a movie via fast-forward. Most of them don’t make any sense, but a few consistencies there are.

Absolute emptiness, desolation, the absence of anything positive—yet that isn’t all.

She also sees pictures of a landscape, barren and full of rocks. Amidst these rocks and the gray sky above, she perceives the presence of a massive, gigantic, nearly malformed hand. She doesn’t chance upon the rest of the body, only that hand that lay there unmovingly, as more and more pictures start to resurface.

Pictures of people killing each other; of someone fighting; another killing themselves; the massive hand in the barren land not moving; dead bodies; a child yelling that his mother will drown; decaying animal corpses; a man that rapes another; the massive hand in the barren land not moving; crying children; someone massacring his whole family; someone killing themselves by bashing their head against a mirror; someone jumping from a roof; the massive hand in the barren land that—

— moves.