Page 1 of The Other Omega

Chapter 1

Elowen

The stars moved. I stopped so abruptly that Nora’s arm tightened around mine and the three of us stumbled sideways on the grass verge. The whole sky shifted to the left, thousands of tiny white points dragging together before snapping back into place.

“El?”

I blinked and kept staring upwards, but everything looked normal again. The night sky stretched clear and black over the fields, every star back where it belonged. Ivy and Nora were looking at me now. Somewhere behind us, the last of the music from the village hall drifted through the darkness.

“What happened?” Ivy asked.

“Nothing. I thought I saw something.”

Nora followed my gaze. “What?”

“I don’t know.” I gave the sky one last look before letting them pull me onwards. We’d only been walking for about fifteen minutes, so I couldn’t blame it on exhaustion. The three glasses of Prosecco might have had something to do with it, but I wasn’t feeling that tipsy.

We’d been celebrating two hundred and fifty years since the first cottages were built beside the church. The village hall had looked lovely, with bunting on every available surface, a hired DJ, and enough beer and Prosecco to convince half our neighbours they were excellent dancers. I’d laughed so much my throat still felt raspy.

Then we’d got back to my car just before midnight and discovered it wouldn’t start. The lights came on when I turned the key, but that was about it. I tried twice more, hoping it would magically fix whatever was wrong, but it didn’t. A taxi home would have cost so much that walking the few miles had seemed perfectly reasonable when Ivy suggested it.

“My feet are freezing,” Ivy complained.

I looked at her. “You were the one who said we should walk.”

“I said it was an option.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘It’ll be nice.’”

“That was before I lost feeling in my toes.”

Nora laughed beside me, her head briefly bumping my shoulder. We were still linked: Ivy on my left, Nora on my right. I was twenty-two, Ivy twenty and Nora nineteen, but we’d always walked like this when we were together, one of us hooking an arm through another’s until all three of us ended up attached without thinking about it.

Our flip-flops slapped softly against the damp verge. My heels dangled from two fingers, Ivy held hers by the straps, and Nora had somehow squeezed hers into her handbag. Once you passed the last row of cottages, there was no pavement, only a narrow strip of grass between the road and the hedges. Mum had drilled the rules into us from childhood. Keep together, stay off the road and watch the bends. We’d followed them so long that we barely thought about them anymore.

Headlights appeared behind us. “Car,” I said, and we shuffled farther onto the damp verge, still linked together. Ivy’s shoulder pressed into mine, and Nora squeezed closer on my other side as the car came around the bend much too quickly. Its tyres hissed over the road as it swept past, the rush of air throwing my hair across my face.

Nora twisted to glare after it. “Idiot.”

“Definitely speeding,” Ivy said.

“Definitely drunk,” Nora added.

“I don’t think you can tell someone’s drunk from their taillights.”

“You’re right. I can diagnose stupidity from them, though.”

A thin red streak lingered across my vision after the taillights vanished around the next bend, but it disappeared when I blinked. Nora tugged gently at my arm. “What now?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve said that twice.”

“Just had too much to drink, I think.”

She gave me a look, but I rubbed beneath one eye and kept walking. The Prosecco, my tired eyes and the darkness seemed enough to explain why I was seeing things that weren’t there.

Ivy turned her attention to the far more important business of teasing Nora about her love life. “So.”