by Jen Talty
“I don’t remember you limping?”
“When you healed me, you fixed that. I think I’m headed for the park.”
A couple jogging rushed past them, moving the air across her body. “This isn’t like before. We weren’t actually there. We were just observers, taking a peek at history. Now it’s like we’re living it.” She held his hand tighter.
“That’s not possible.”
She reached out and touched the crosswalk button, giving it a good push. “Could you ever touch items in the past when in a vision?”
“I can’t say that I have because it was always more like watching a movie from a distance.”
Glancing over her shoulder, she checked on the car, half expecting to see her and Hunter sitting in it, staring like two zombies. She gasped, pausing in the middle of the street. “The Jeep’s gone,” she whispered.
“Cue music for the Twilight Zone.” Hunter tugged at her arm. “Willow just ran out of the park.”
“She’s going to see if Hazel is still crying or if I was successful.”
“Why was she crying?”
“Brett had just left for the Marines.” Alexis remembered the day like it was yesterday. It had been the first time she realized her talent alone couldn’t make people feel better when they felt pain deep in their soul.
“They were an item back then?”
A breeze rustled the treetops as they entered the park. She ran her fingers over the bench where she’d come back the next day and had carved hers and Hunter’s initials. It had been a childish thing to do, then again, she’d only been thirteen, and Hunter served as her first crush. For years to come, she could call on his image and daydream for hours on end what it would be like to see the sexy stranger again.
“For one night. She had a couple of visions about him in the future, and she wasn’t in them, so she opted not to pursue him. She had completely misread the visions.”
“Let’s sit over at the picnic table and watch. I have to think we’re being shown this for a reason.”
“Hopefully we can figure it out and find our way back to our time.”
“You say that as though you’re ordering a sandwich. Aren’t you concerned?”
“There isn’t anything we can do right now, except observe, so why waste the energy.” She settled on the wood plank and smiled. A warmth coated her chest, and her heart pumped it to the rest of her body. “I was a dorky kid,” she mused as her younger self sat up and smiled at the teenage version of Hunter.
“I thought to myself what a beautiful woman you were going to grow into,” Hunter said, shaking his head. “That made me sound like a total creeper.”
“Yeah, it did.” She scanned the park, searching for anything out of the ordinary. The details of that day were focused solely on Hunter. From the second she’d laid eyes on him, nothing else around her mattered.
A few boys kicked a soccer ball at the other end. A young couple walked hand in hand with a dog trotting at their sides. A mother pushed a stroller down the paved path while her toddler kicked her pudgy legs, giggling with excitement.
Birds soaring overhead caught her attention. The blue sky swirled with streaks of gray, green, and blue as Hunter’s original past vision came into view.
“Over there,” Hunter whispered in her ear, pointing to a clump of trees.
A woman hid behind a tree trunk. Her hands raised up over her head.
“I think that woman somehow showed us my vision.”
Alexis bolted from the bench and took five strides. She gasped, clutching her chest as the woman pushed out her hand.
“What’s wrong?” Hunter curled his fingers around her biceps.
She tried to take a step forward, but a powerful force held her in place.
The woman nodded.
“Holy shit.” Alexis sucked in a deep breath. The humid air burned her lungs. “That’s Riley.”
“What are we waiting for?” Hunter tried to plunge forward but stopped dead in his tracks. “Fuck.”
“She’s stopping us.” Alexis closed her eyes, channeling all the psychic energy that filled the park, but no sooner did she draw it close than Riley pulled it back.
“Why are you blocking me?” Alexis projected. Telepathy had never been one of her abilities, but ever since the first of the quadruplet brothers had come back into their lives, everyone’s talents had started shifting, or they developed brand-new ones.
“I’m not blocking you,” Hunter’s voice rang out strong.
“I was trying to talk to Riley. See how she’s holding her hand?”
“I’m more concerned about how her eyes are completely white and glowing. Do you see that?”
Alexis raised her hand, pressing them against the barrier keeping her from charging forward. Her skin prickled with heat.
The vision in the sky slowly evaporated. The luminous light beaming from Riley’s eyes etched a circle in the changing clouds. Only Alexis didn’t remember seeing clouds floating in the dark-blue sky thirteen years ago.
Riley tilted her head, lowering her hand as the young Alexis and Hunter slipped through the gates of the park. A flash of light reached down from the heavens, and Riley disappeared into thin air.
Alexis closed her eyes tight before blinking them open. The tree that Riley had been hiding behind faded until it too was no longer in sight. Tentatively, she inched forward, the barrier now gone. She turned in a circle. The old wooden swing set was no longer where it had been thirteen years ago, but instead on the north end of the park, where it had been moved about five years ago. The boys that had been playing soccer had been replaced with a group of teenage girls, lounging on blankets, listening to music.
“We’re back in the present,” she said.
“I’ll believe that when we’re back at the Jeep.”
Her heart pulsed when Hunter stopped at the bench in the entrance to the park. Hers and Hunter’s faded initials displayed prominently on the front side.
Hunter paused, pressing his thumb against the engraving. “These are our initials.”
“Coincidence.”
He laughed. “I was shown a past vision of you carving our names inside a heart on this very bench.”
“It must have been a false view into the past.” She dashed onto the sidewalk just as the crosswalk blinked. “I hear they happen sometimes.”
“It’s only the interpretation of what we see that could be false. That’s why I never try to pick them apart too much. Take them at face value and hope that someday I’ll understand why I was shown them.”
Scurrying across the street, she glanced over her shoulder. “Can you think about a past event and push yourself into a vision?”
“I’ve been working on that, but I often miss the mark, ending up a few years off, or in a completely different location than what I wanted. But no matter what, I learn something from each vision that eventually becomes useful. I just don’t always know the meaning right away, like the couple sitting on the dock.”
She let out a sigh of relief when the Jeep came into view. “We should categorize any past vision you’ve had that you don’t have a meaning for yet. It might give us more clues into who the fourth brother is.”
“That will take me a while. In the meantime, we might as well head over to Riley’s last known address. I bet she had something to do with us seeing the past with her in it.”
“You’re smarter than you look,” she mused.
“And how exactly do I look?” He draped his arm over her shoulders and winked. “Because thirteen years ago, you thought I was cute enough to carve our initials inside a heart on a wood bench for the world to see.”
“I was a child. How was I to know you had an ego the size of Texas and would read more into a silly schoolgirl with her first crush.”
3
Hunter rolled the Jeep to a stop in front of a well-manicured home on Lincoln Avenue in a posh neighborhood just north of Johns Hopkins University. Lush grass filled the front yard. Tall shrubs
with a combination of purples, reds, and yellows dotted the front of the brick house with a white door. The sun settled in the west, hovering over the horizon, casting a fiery-orange haze across the evening sky.
He shoved the gearshift into park, his heart hammering in his chest. It had been over a year since he’d stepped foot in Baltimore, much less this neck of the woods. “My mother is going to kill me when she finds out I’m in town.”
“Your parents still live here?” Alexis asked.
“My dad passed years ago, but my mom lives in the family home four blocks away.”
“Well, not sure if you can look at this as good news, but the military hasn’t said a single word about the mission or the lost sailors,” she said.
“Sorry. That’s not comforting at all. Especially when I know the family that lives at the end of the block. If they see me, they will go running to my mother.” His stomach tightened and twisted. The last time he’d seen his girlfriend, things hadn’t ended well. They’d exchanged a few letters over the last year, both apologizing, but every time they got to communicate via live video feed, they managed to end up in the same argument.
She wanted him to retire and go work for her father in one of his many car dealerships. He tried to tell her that being a demolition specialist didn’t lend well to sales.
He glanced down the street and stared at the home that belonged to Ellen’s parents. His lungs burned as a memory opened up in the sky.
“Whoa,” Alexis said as she jumped from the SUV. “Looks like I get to see all your past visions.” She pointed. “I guess this one we just hang back and watch.”
He swallowed as he watched himself drive down the street in Ellen’s father’s convertible a little over a year ago. His arm was draped over the back of the passenger seat. Ellen’s long, blonde hair whipped in her face. She laughed as she brushed it away.
“Who’s the hottie?” Alexis asked with a teasing tone, but her arms were crossed tightly across her chest as she leaned against the vehicle.
“Ellen Fitzpatrick. She’s technically my girlfriend.”
“And she lives at the end of the street?” Alexis glared at him with a narrowed stare and red cheeks.
They barely knew each other, but he could understand why Alexis might be upset considering they were supposed to be the third pairing in the Collective Order. But she could have a boyfriend as well.
“She doesn’t live with her parents.”
“Please don’t tell me you live with her.”
“I used to,” he admitted as he situated himself next to Alexis. “But when I left on my last deployment, she thought maybe it was best if we let our apartment go.”
“So, where’s all your stuff?”
“I don’t have stuff,” he said, focusing on the motion picture unfolding over his head.
In the past vision, he had parked the car in the Fitzpatrick’s driveway and helped Ellen from the convertible. They were greeted by her father, who extended his hand. Hunter remembered that day in particular because it was the first time he questioned if he loved Ellen enough to go the distance.
And as his mother told him, if he had any shadow of a doubt, there was no point in stringing her, or himself, along.
“Does she have any abilities?” Alexis asked.
He leaned into her, letting his hip connect with her body. Her warm energy floated gently across the air, landing on his skin with the softness of cotton. For years, she would show up in his dreams. At first, he figured it had to do with how she’d healed his leg. That event had been life-changing in more ways than one.
“No, and she doesn’t know about mine.”
Alexis tilted her head, tucking a long strand of hair behind her ear, showing off a dangling silver dolphin earring.
He reached out and ran his fingers across the cool metal. “I love dolphins. When I was a little boy, I used to beg my mother to take me where I could swim with them.”
“So did I,” Alexis whispered. Her lashes fluttered over her soft eyes like butterfly wings. “Did you ever get the chance?”
His breath hitched. “No.”
“Me neither.”
He dropped his hand, concentrating on broadening the scope of the vision to include Riley Jacobs’ last known residence. He’d met many of the neighbors during block parties and the Fitzpatrick’s famous New Year’s Eve spread, but he had no idea Riley Jacobs, author of one of his favorite books, had lived so close.
Actually, he always thought the person who lived there was some rich, eccentric woman by the name of Jessica Riley.
Ha. He got that now.
The image grew wider, but there weren’t any other people or cars on the street. Ellen’s father had pulled the convertible into the garage and in the vision, Hunter leaned against his pickup, his hands on Ellen’s hips as he drew her in for a long kiss.
“You two make a cute couple,” Alexis said under her breath.
“Are you jealous?” he asked, hoping his teasing tone came across as the words tumbled out of his mouth before he had the chance to retract them.
“Oddly, I am. But I have no right to be.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure she was going to dump me when I returned home. She said she had something major to discuss with me. I’ve been gone for a year and honestly, I don’t think we missed each other.”
“What if she wanted to discuss something else?”
He shrugged. “I’ve written her three letters ending it, but I never mailed them,” he said as he noticed a man stepping from the Jacobs’ residence.
Alexis pointed toward the sky. “That’s Mallard, but you’re too busy sucking face with your girlfriend to notice him scurrying to his car. Had you already met him before the scene we’re looking at?”
“This was two weeks before I deployed under his command. And I’d known him for a few years before that.” He watched himself get into his truck, and his pulse kicked up. “Come on.” He tugged at her arm.
“Vision’s not over yet. There might be something else we’re supposed to see besides your biological father leaving your biological mother’s home.”
“I doubt it,” he mumbled as a new image rolled across the sky. This time he jogged across the street going into the park where he’d first met Alexis. “We’ve already seen the park. Besides, I don’t want to risk being seen by the Fitzpatricks or anyone else for that matter.”
“Oh, my God.” Alexis turned, staring at him with wide eyes. “Right after being with your girlfriend, you decided to come looking for me?”
“I told you I did that once.”
She arched a brow.
“All right. I did it a few times. I’d sit on the bench where you carved out our initials and wait to see if you’d show up. I tried projecting to you, but it never worked.”
“I don’t know if I should be flattered or not, but I certainly feel sorry for your girlfriend.”
“Soon to be ex-girlfriend,” he muttered, taking Alexis by the hand. “All these peeks into the past only tell us that both Riley and Mallard knew who we were and where our entire lives.”
“And that you’re a creeper, being hung up on a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“You’re twenty-six now, and I wasn’t hung up. You have no idea what healing my leg meant or how it changed my life.” He led her up the concrete path toward the front door, mentally slapping the backside of his head for his tone. She deserved better. “It wasn’t just the burn you took care of.”
“I know. There was something wrong with the bone.”
“It had been broken in three different places and had never healed correctly.”
“How did you break it?” she asked.
“The fire. As I was following the young children from the house, a beam fell on me. I was lucky the fire department had just rolled in.”
She curled her fingers around his biceps. “I told you back then you were a real hero.”
“I did what any decent human being would do, and
even though it almost cost me my Naval career, I’d do it again.”
“What?” she asked.
“Had I not run across you that day in the park, my time in the Navy would have ended before it started.”
Alexis paused at the stoop. “What made you go to the park that day?”
“I was at the university where my mom works, waiting for her to take me to get my physical. I wouldn’t have passed, and I knew it. I almost didn’t go, but she insisted. Told me a walk in the park would do me good.”
“Do you think your mother knew about who you really were?” She took the two steps to the porch and rang the bell.
“I have no idea.” His mother had always been insightful, but he had to admit that it seemed odd she would make him go to the park that day of all days. Regardless, his mother was going to kill him that she wasn’t the first call he made when waking up, that was for damn sure.
A woman with dark hair who looked to be about thirty or so with her fresh, wrinkle-free skin opened the door. “I was told you’d show up,” she said, waving them in. “Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
“Who are you, and where is Riley Jacobs?” Hunter hesitated at the door, glancing over his shoulder. He looped his arm around Alexis and stayed in the doorway.
“And who do you think we are?” Alexis asked.
“I’m Ms. Jacobs’ assistant, Kim. And you’re Alexis and Hunter. Please. Come in.”
Hunter hesitated before following the woman down a hallway. Not a single picture or decoration hung on the walls, which Hunter found odd. Most people dotted a foyer wall with family pictures.
“Right this way.” Kim stepped to the side, pushing back a door that opened into an office.
“Impressive.” Hunter pointed to the multiple screens on the desk while he scanned the room, looking for anything that tied him to Riley. Books lined the shelves, but nothing personal jumped out at him.
“Ms. Jacobs has cameras covering every possible entry point to the house.” Kim tapped a screen. “She also can see who comes down the street.”
