CHAPTER EIGHT —

— THE SHIFT.

"THERE'S AN OLD SONG. WAY OLD, LIKE FROM THE 50's, MAYBE. My mother used to sing it all the time when I was a small sprout. She'd dance 'round the kitchen, spatula as her mic, and sing every word right along with the guy. I'll be honest, she sounded like a dying cat. But she was so happy, no one ever had the heart to tell her to shut up. We all sucked it up and let our ears bleed, 'cause it was so rare, to see her happy."

Kane chuckled under her breath. She stared at the framed photograph on her desk looking back at her: a woman and a young child, holding onto each other on a boat. It was one of the few pictures she had left with her mother, and aside from her men's bomber jacket and the not-really-hers cat 'Argo' that visited her fire escape, it was her most prized possession.

"I don't have many memories left of my mom. Time's a cruel man, that way; I remember vague blurs, and voices, but I can't recall everything I know I should about her. But I remember her singing way too loud on Saturday mornings to Nat King Cole with that crappy blue spatula. I remember her best like that: happy and, well, alive."

She tore her gaze from the photograph and back to the recording device, steadily beeping beside her hand. A wry smile licked up her lips. "You may be curious, why I'm gettin' sentimental all of a sudden. I don't blame ya on that part, but I promise there's a good reason. See, this next case, well...it kinda feels full circle."

Kane extended her right hand, gloved, and grabbed the single piece of evidence she had been holding onto for the past three days. "Last Tuesday, I received a package. No name, no address, nothin' for me to trace back on. There was just two things inside. A white queen from a chess set, and a note." She turned the queen over in her hands. It was beautifully carved, clearly from an antique set. The work was exquisite. But there wasn't much else to go off of. No fingerprints, no key details, nothing.

"And the note, it's written on paper from The Whale Motel, close to Coney Island. A place known for 'discretion and anonymity', according to Google reviews." Kane chuckled to herself. "That doesn't sound shady at all, eh?

"Whoever wrote this, clearly didn't want to be found. The note is sloppy and almost illegible. And the slant of it makes me think it's writer wrote with their non-dominant hand, so as to not give a thing away. There's no name, no address, no telling who this writer is. All the note is, is a request."

Kane leaned closer to her microphone, lowering her voice to drive up the ante even more. "The note reads, very simply...'please find her, before it's too late'." She gives another pregnant pause before talking again. "Whoever's behind this note is not a fan of clarity, that's for sure. There's no telling who this 'her' is, what fate unfortunately fell upon her, or even where to start that isn't an obvious dead end. Honestly, that's not great grounds for starting a case, folks."

Kane's lip curled up further, though the smile didn't seem too genuine anymore. She traced one of the spires on the queen's carved crown, unbothered by how it dug into her thumb. "But you know me, folks. You know I have a love for unsolvable cases. For completing the impossible. And, perhaps more importantly...I have a thing about finding people. Call me sentimental, call me a sap, but whenever someone asks for help finding someone they clearly love, I'll do just about anythin'. And—

"—okay, I would never talk like this, Blackwell!"

CLACK.

"Crap!"

Kate glared at her bedroom wall, which had just been the target of a pink fountain pen — the only thing she could throw to try and ease the irritation building in her system. But it wasn't very satisfying, hearing the dull clatter or seeing the pen sit by her bedroom door out of reach. She felt just as frustrated as she had before the pen toss.

"Very smart, Blackwell," she grumbled to herself. "Now you have no pen as well as no script! Incredible!"

Somewhere, somehow, it felt like Karma was laughing at her.

She made no move to get the pen. Maybe it was for the best: it wasn't like the thing was getting any good use, because for the first time since the very beginning of Karma!, Kate was now completely out of ideas, and had absolutely no idea where to go from complete rock bottom.

It wasn't because of an actual lack of ideas, though. She had a vague plan, scrawled in lopsided, loopy handwriting in her designated 'ideas' notebook. But where usually, Kate was able to brainstorm a case from start to finish easily, this idea was going nowhere. All she had was everything on the page of her computer, and that was a load of crap with no direction.

She did want to write. She felt like she had ideas: she just couldn't access them. The Whale Motel, the mysterious chess piece, anonymous note — it all begged to be fleshed out. Problem was, Kate couldn't figure out how to make herself care about any of it.

Ever since the disastrous dinner party, she had bled this case dry because it felt like she finally had something. She researched chess until her dreams were filled with dancing knights and kings. She watched whale documentaries and learned a tonne of shocking, weird, and sometimes really gross information, but nothing useful for her case. She skipped school, she stayed up late, she spent every hour at her computer and nothing. Her premise remained paper thin and unanswered. All her efforts came up pointless. Which made no sense, considering Karma Kane was kind of all she actually cared about.

Karma! was her life, even though none of it was real or actually hers. She loved being Karma Kane, so much so that sometimes, she kind of felt like that was all she really was. Kate Blackwell wasn't a fun character to play anymore. Her life was grey and monotonous and depressing, so depressing to be stuck in. And when something changed, when her routine shifted from the same damn thing to something new, it wasn't in a fun way like Karma's.

"I don't know what's going on here, but you're welcome to be excused if you're going to continue acting like this."

"You sound so much like her, you know."

"I'm going to make things right, Katherine!"

Her jaw clenched. She swallowed around the heavy lump in her throat, because there wasn't a point in wasting tears on someone like him. Even if it would be nice, to finally cry, or feel grief for the relationship she had lost in the father she never had. She knew it wouldn't make her feel better.

"Maybe I'd have better luck making my case on him," she mumbled to herself. "Take your stupid miracle project and point out how stupid you sound. Yeah? Maybe then, I'd get something done, huh dad?"

Kate looked back down to her notebook, and to her computer screen, where her barely started Karma! script waited. All she wanted was to get lost in the words. Don her character again. Become the tired, thorny teen detective who could actually fix her problems, and leave wilted, wasted Kate Blackwell behind her.

But her brain wouldn't stop focusing on the stuff Kate Blackwell hadn't yet processed. She couldn't let go of the corpse of a father who held her wrist and begged her to hear him out, or the oddity that was Jaspar Byrne, waltzing around their haunted house and giving her no answers at all. Or the tiny note he gave her with his phone number with the cryptic message suggesting things were about to go way south. Or — honestly, Kate was pretty sure she hadn't ever properly processed any of her "tragic backstory", and it was all coming out after that stupid dinner party.

The only good thing was that she hadn't heard a peep from her dear old father since the party. If he was at home, she hadn't heard him in his office, and he hadn't made a single effort to reach out to her. Maybe he was too occupied with his 'miracle work' that the news wouldn't stop raving about. Or, maybe the stair incident was some sort of lapse of judgement (or sanity), because he clearly didn't care enough to fix things after that night.

Either way, Kate was fine with it. Totally fine with it. Not a single part of her wanted to talk to her crazy father. She was perfectly fine with sitting alone in her bedroom all day with just her thoughts to entertain her and only her mother's old notebook as company, and no will to do the one thing that brought her comfort in life and —

"Nice, now I'm spiralling again," she grumbled. She ran a hand down her face, dragging her skin exaggeratedly as her palm slid. "Kate Blackwell, the existential wreck."

Now, she could practically hear Karma Kane laughing at her.

Kate got up from her bedroom floor, where she had been planted for the past few hours, doing absolutely nothing. She glared at her laptop. At her notes. At her phone plopped at the edge of her bed, which she had left alone in an attempt to shut out the outside world. Aliana had texted wondering where she was, and Didi had incessantly asked for about a hundred different plans, but she'd ignored them. Too much teenage angst building up to care about maintaining friendships.

"What does it even matter, anyways?" She asked her phone. "They don't know you at all. They're barely even your friends, Blackwell."

Okay, most days, she knew that wasn't true. But some days, it felt all too true that she was alone. Even if Aliana and Didi said they cared, they didn't really past the character she played at school. Did they? Kate lived two completely different lives outside of social views: the lonely daughter stuck in a ghost house with her half-mad father, and the delusional podcaster convinced she could be someone else.

Truthfully, Kate Blackwell barely knew who she really was. So how could anyone else?

"Whatever," she groaned. She dragged her hands down her face, pulling her tired skin with her fingers like that would release the frustration building underneath it. It didn't help. "C'mon, Blackwell, think a little."

She searched her room for something to motivate her. It was splattered with colour and things that she loved: pictures of bands, movie posters like Black Swan and Scream, piles of books she bought because they looked good but never got around to reading. Her backpack full of homework she hadn't started on and didn't care about. She had a bulletin board with pictures of friends pinned to it, concert tickets like from Taylor Swift's Red tour — a friend of a friend's 13th birthday party — and half a dozen more things that felt more important then, then they do now.

Kate didn't keep up pictures of her mother, they hurt too much to look at. Those stayed in a photo album stuffed in her desk drawer she only looked at on bad days. Pictures of Mariana were few and far between; most of them were torn up or scribbled on by a younger, angrier Kate after she left. And of course, the only pictures she had of Killian were over a decade old and never looked at. No good, recent memories to display.

The edge of her Paramore poster was curled up. She fidgeted with the end and stared listlessly around her room. Nothing brings her inspiration or a lick of joy. Just a feeling of missing something huge sitting right in front of her eyes.

"Crap," Kate muttered again. She ran a hand through her hair, grimacing at how dry and messy it felt. "Y'got nothing, Blackwell. Really? Nothing?"

It was already December 1st, too. Her calendar on her bedroom wall had a big circle around the seventh — her next big deadline — and tiny Christmas decorations adoring the week up until the twenty-fifth. Kate glared miserably at it.

In a flash of ill-planned anger, she kicked her bed post. Unfortunately, all that did was send her leg into a frenzy of pain.

"Dammit," she cried out, falling back on the floor, cradling her throbbing foot. "Why...did I think....?"

As her foot throbbed and her frustration grew, Kate decided not to get up off her floor. She let the dramatic moment play, staring up at her bedroom ceiling in a mixture of vexation and rage.

"What am I doing?" She asked the static space around her, with no expectation of a response. "I mean, really. What am I doing?!"

Juggling two lives seemed fun at first, when Karma Kane was just a figment of imagination. But when it became a coping mechanism for her real, dull, depressing life, like now, it was harder to justify the work. Podcasting was supposed to be secondary to Kate Blackwell's life. But all Kate wanted to do, was be Karma Kane. 

Not that any of it was real. She wasn't stupid. She knew it was all fake. But Karma still had life. She had people who looked up to her, hundreds of thousands of people! They were real and they loved her. They ate up everything she did. There was a world out there and crazily, Kate just —

BUZZ. BUZZ.

Kate twitched at the notification sound, but she didn't get up.

BUZZ. BUZZ.

A second notification just a couple seconds later. Maybe someone was double-texting her? Or just a coincidence? Kate couldn't imagine anything worth getting up and checking. It was probably a stupid Instagram notification, or Didi asking what language Canadians spoke again. Kate didn't budge from her floor.

But then, for the third time in a row, her phone buzzed. And then again. And again.

She swallowed and sat up, perplexed. That was weird. She didn't have Karma! notifications on on her phone for privacy reasons, so it wasn't any sort of spam excitement from that. Ali rarely tripled texted; she preferred calling. All of her groupchats had been turned to silent for the past few days, because Kate couldn't bother faking excitement over things she didn't care about. Bitter apathy was eating away at her social image, and she was completely indifferent to it.

But then, who the hell was bugging her?

Jaspar? No, he didn't have her number.

Did he? Did he somehow find it?

The man did seem wily enough for that — and he had Blackwell blood. Blackwell's are, of course, notoriously assertive and invasive of privacy.

But why would he need to talk to her?

The paranoid part of Kate's brain that worked so well for Karma's character began to boot up. She stared at her phone on the other end of the bed, which was still buzzing like a thousand people were trying to get a hold of her at once. Of course, it could be something completely normal and she could just go check and save the mental trouble —

— but a part of Kate, or maybe that was Kane taking the reins, felt like something was wrong. Her gut flip-flopped, and a heavy weight sank to the bottom of it, making her feel like she was trapped to her bedroom floor. Like even if she tried, she couldn't check her phone, because her anxiety was too heavy in her frail body.

"You're crazy," Kate scolded herself, even while her phone continued buzzing. "Just get up. Check your phone. S'probably a groupchat you didn't turn off, ya dolt."

But her body didn't move. And the paranoia grew heavier, filling up her gut until she could feel her organs start to shift as they ran out of room. Her rib cage expanded and her heart started to leap for it's life, fleeing up to her throat where it sat, beating wildly. 

What if it was her father? He knew something. He found out about Karma!. About skipping school. Or he wanted to 'finish their chat', to drag her down to his evil lair and make her a proper Blackwell induct her in their black magic — and sure, the pharmaceutical industry wasn't literally evil, but the people running them totally were.

And considering she knew nada about what her father was up to these days, who's to say he wasn't a modern day Doctor Frankenstein? Maybe his stupid Resurrection Project was reanimating corpses, and Kate was his next victim.

"C'mon, don't be dumb about this," she urged herself, but it didn't feel like her speaking anymore. The sound felt detached and tinny. She didn't know why, but she had a bad feeling soon, her strange bout of panic was going to ruin her. And all over a stupid buzzing phone for no good reason.

Something feels bad. Really bad, worried Kane, who paced the back of Kate's mind convinced that something bad was coming. This ain't a good sign, Blackwell. We both know that.

"I'm just paranoid," she argued back, but it didn't feel believable. "I — I'm just in my head. Stuck in case mode."

Tell yourself that a million times, it won't convince you or me.

Kate huffed. She wasn't going to lose her mind for nothing. "And I'm definitely not gonna keep having conversations with myself about this," she added aloud.

With a huff and a groan, she hauled herself to her feet and, staggering against the heavy phantom weights clogging up her system, forced herself towards her bed. Towards the still buzzing phone waiting, case up and curious.

"So ridiculous," she muttered. She didn't know if it was to herself or whoever was wasting her patience that afternoon.

Kate grabbed her phone and sank down onto her bed. She flipped it over, glaring at the vibrating device and —

— a bloodcurdling, hysterical scream ripped through the house.

Kate whipped around to her bedroom door. All of a sudden, her lungs could barely take in oxygen, heart clogging up her throat. She hadn't heard the woman scream a day in her life, but she knew that voice too well, and it terrified her.

Cecilia.

For a moment, she debated running to help. The scream came like Cecilia was fighting for her life, and Kate couldn't bear to know she could have done something, and didn't. What if it was her father? What if he had snapped?!

But for some strange reason, the callous part of Kate's brain couldn't bring herself to fully care about the source of the scream. Her feet stayed frozen on her carpet floor. Curiosity thwarted compassion. She stayed pin-pointed on the still-buzzing phone in her hand, selfishly stagnant on her current investigation.

Cecilia could wait, Kane promised, itching for answers from the cellphone. One thing at a time, Blackwell.

Kate's eyes fell from the door and back to her buzzing phone. She unlocked the device with slow, shaking fingers, even as thuds and stomps echoed around her. Someone was coming fast down the halls, followed by guttural, heart-wrenching cries that only grew worse as they got closer.

Her eyes flitted back to her door. Panic was almost overwhelming her brain entirely at that point, making it impossible to think clearly. Reason wasn't an option. She couldn't process Cecilia's screams; they almost didn't feel real. They slipped through the cracks under her door, but as they echoed oddly through the room, the sounds felt hollow. 

Or, maybe that was just her and her clear lack of heart, a phantom beat pounding on the empty cage of ribs in her chest. She wasn't sure.

"I...I should go," Kate murmured aloud. "I...."

But the mystery at the tip of her fingers ate at her. 

Come on, Blackwell. Hurry your ass up.

Heart in her throat, Kate went back to her notification wall.

She stared at the phone, reading the first thing firmly plastered across her generic lock screen.

She reread it.

And reread it.

And again.

Cecilia's screams got louder. Closer.

The housekeeper's footsteps thundered.

The phone kept buzzing. Dozens of texts rolling in one after another. All about the same thing.

"Well," Kate Blackwell said quietly, but more in the way Karma Kane would. Her lips twitched up into a wry half-smile, though it wasn't the kind of news anyone should be smiling at. Cecilia's screams faded into a dull roar in the background of her mind as the information pouring in from her phone took forefront.

A strange foggy feeling made her toes and tips of her fingers feel numb and like everything around her wasn't actually real anymore. She could barely feeling the constant vibrations from her phone, or see the colourful bedroom she'd painstakingly decorated for the past five years, or process the information filling her brain up so fast, it was close to bursting right through the other side of her skull. Kate blinked, and somehow her lips stayed curled into a smile, frozen in the middle of her room.

From a million miles away, the sound of a door slamming open came. Kate couldn't move to acknowledge it. She just stayed motionless as her mind staggered the line between her grim reality, one world coming down crashing around her feet, and the gritty fantastical world invented as an escape plan. She didn't even flinch when someone grabbed her frozen body and hugged her to them. She barely felt it.

Someone kept screaming. She couldn't tell who it was anymore, or if it was just in her head.

"What a plot twist," Kate murmured, completely like she was talking to someone else and not her own self, "eh, Blackwell?"

And somewhere, Karma Kane was laughing.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I'm pretty sure what's going on here is obvious considering I wrote it in the synopsis of this book, but if not, chapter nine will clear things up for ya. In the meantime, here we are. :)) I finally had a chance to sit down and write some, I've pre-written up to the end of part one and I'm excited for what's to come. Especially now that the story's picking up and everything, I feel like this'll get more exciting to read. Lots of tension coming up, haha.

Thank you for all the sweet comments, by the way. I'm very bad at responding to comments and I feel so bad - I just have a bad habit of forgetting to respond, and then waiting too long and feeling weird responding two weeks late. But I'm working on it lol.

Painting above is by Bernardino Mei.

THANK YOU
for reading.