by Joyce Lamb
Something was missing. But what?
He thought of what Mary Dillard had told him, that Laurette had paused after exiting the stairwell and gone through her bag as though she’d forgotten something.
Her cell phone. She always carried her cell phone. He’d found that funny about her. So simple yet devoted to that phone.
Leaning over, he snagged the clear plastic bag of stuff from her room. According to the woman at the front desk, it held the things Laurette had left on the vanity in the bathroom and scattered about the hotel room.
Unopened bottled water. Peanut butter snack crackers. A granola bar wrapper (Jesus, couldn’t they have thrown that away?). A travel alarm clock. Umbrella.
He picked up a thin sheaf of loose papers and sifted through them. Printouts of online stories by Charlie Trudeau, Lake Avalon Gazette staff writer, Charlie’s photo displayed next to her byline. So that’s how Laurette had recognized Charlie outside the newspaper.
Then he noticed the cell phone at the bottom of the bag.
He sank back in the seat and shook his head. Now he knew why Laurette had come out of the stairwell looking indecisive. She’d forgotten her phone in her room and had debated going back for it.
If she’d gone back, maybe she’d still be alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
AnnaCoreen stayed silent for several minutes after Charlie finished telling her about the hit-and-run and her subsequent paranormal experiences. The older woman, who’d listened quietly without interrupting, sipped her tea and watched the waves, a soft smile still in place before she began to nod and gently rock at the same time.
“Your experience is quite unusual indeed,” she murmured. “Quite, quite unusual.” She stopped rocking suddenly and pierced Charlie with an inquisitive stare. “Explain to me how these flashes feel.”
Charlie took a breath, held it for a moment, then blew it slowly out. “It’s like I am the person I’m touching at the time they experienced . . . whatever it is I relive. Sort of like an out-of-body experience.”
AnnaCoreen pursed her lips and began to rock again. When she said nothing for a long moment, Charlie asked, “Have you heard of anything like it before?”
“Never,” AnnaCoreen said, her blue eyes dancing in the afternoon light. She seemed more excited than perplexed, like a scientist who’s realized she’s on the cusp of discovering the cure for cancer. “You say this woman who was killed, Laurette Atkins, resembled you?”
“I believe she was my cousin, but getting that verified isn’t as easy as it should be.”
“Yes, Lily mentioned your family situation to me when we met.”
When they met? Why would Charlie’s family situation have even come up when they met? “How exactly did you know my grandmother?”
AnnaCoreen began to rock again, a slow, even rhythm. “Lily came to me shortly before she died. She wanted to make sure you and your sisters had someone to turn to concerning your empathic abilities.”
“You mean, my sisters . . .”
“Possibly. Lily knew only about you for certain. She explained that you come from a background of deep denial, that you and your sisters had been raised to reject such gifts.”
“How could we be raised to reject something we didn’t even know about?”
AnnaCoreen’s smile didn’t falter. “Let me rephrase. You weren’t raised to embrace your gift.”
“I’m not sure how Nana even knew I was sensitive,” Charlie said. “She just asked me one day.”
“She mentioned your mother’s ability.”
Charlie felt a moment of shock. Her mother was empathic?
“Lily suspected, yes,” AnnaCoreen said. “She didn’t know for sure, though.”
Charlie gaped at the older woman. “Are you reading my mind?”
AnnaCoreen’s smile deepened. “Mostly, I’m reading your face. It’s very expressive.”
Charlie forced her shoulders to relax. “So what would Laurette and I being related have to do with what’s happened?”
“It’s highly possible she also was empathic. Death is an incredibly powerful experience. Because you were holding her hand when she passed on, her energy could have mingled with yours to, as you so creatively put it earlier, supercharge your ability.”
Charlie had only one concern. “Will it go away?”
“It’s more likely that it will grow stronger with time.”
So not what Charlie wanted to hear. “Can you explain why I’m tapping into these particular events? I mean, why aren’t I just getting a . . . flash, or whatever it is, of them brushing their teeth or eating lunch?”
AnnaCoreen rose out of the rocking chair and walked over to the porch railing. “I’m not an expert in empathic phenomena, so please keep in mind that what I’m about to say is only conjecture. I could be wrong. Very wrong.”
“All right,” Charlie said with a slow nod.
“Each of us is surrounded by an energy field, or in mystical terms, an aura. Sometimes it’s negative and sometimes positive. The average empathic person can walk into a room and feel the energy, or current mood, of a particular person or several people at once. In the level of empathy that you’re describing, it appears that the act of physically touching another person, skin-on-skin, actually breaches the energy field, gaining you access to that person’s most intensely emotional memories. You’re tapping into residual energy, rather than what that person’s feeling at the moment, and absorbing it into yourself as if it’s your own.”
“Physical stuff is affecting me, too. I felt Laurette Atkins get hit by the car, and later I felt my sister bump her head.”
“Each intense event, emotional or physical, carries residual energy,” AnnaCoreen said. “That’s why brushing one’s teeth wouldn’t affect you, because it wasn’t intense. And why you might not feel something every time you touch someone. It’s likely you’ll feel only traumatic events.”
Charlie had to laugh. It was either that or cry. She’d never felt so overwhelmed. Or doomed. She imagined life without ever touching another human being, and desolation seemed to expand heavily inside her like a balloon filling with water.
AnnaCoreen lowered herself to the rocking chair beside her and patted her knee. “This is a lot for you to take in. You’re doing very well.”
Charlie fought back the sting of tears. Great. At least she was taking it well that she was so totally screwed.
“Have you had any side effects?” AnnaCoreen asked.
“A migraine last night. I’d never had one before. I thought it might be connected, but I wasn’t sure.”
AnnaCoreen nodded. “I expect the experiences will physically wear you out, sometimes severely and without warning. Especially if you have more than a few in a day. The more powerful they are, the more draining they’ll be, perhaps even debilitating.”
She rose and picked up the tea pitcher to refill Charlie’s empty glass. “I assume you learned how to shield yourself from others’ emotions before the accident?”
“Nana tried to get me to imagine a white light and a reflective shield, but it didn’t work for me. I could never get into grounding exercises, balancing my chakra or waving around sticks of sage to smudge my aura. Nothing wrong with any of that. It’s just not who I am.”
“Nothing wrong with that, either. Is there something that works for you?”
Charlie shifted, embarrassed. “Nana told me to sing a song in my head whenever I started to feel overwhelmed.”
AnnaCoreen smiled, nodded. “To focus on yourself instead of the other person. Not that it matters, but I’m curious about which song.”
“Sweet Pea.”
“Ah, yes.” Her eyes began to sparkle, as though reminded of a past crush. “Tommy Roe.”
“It was one of Nana’s favorites from the sixties,” Charlie said. “ ‘Oh, sweet pea, come on and dance with me. Come on, come on, come on and dance with meeee.’ ” She stopped and felt her face redden.
AnnaCoreen clapped. “That’s splendi
d. Some people pray or have a mantra. This is your mantra. The important thing is that it works for you.”
“Will it work with this supercharged empathy?” Charlie asked. “The . . . the . . . I don’t even know what to call them. I’ve been thinking of them as flashes.”
“You can call them whatever you like.”
How about big-assed mind-fucks? she thought. When AnnaCoreen’s lips quirked, Charlie wondered again whether the woman was reading her mind. Then she shrugged it off. Hell, maybe the woman really was psychic. “My point is that the flashes happen so fast that I can’t imagine being able to stave them off with a song or a protective shield.”
“Probably not,” AnnaCoreen said with a sober nod.
“And I can’t wear gloves to prevent skin-on-skin contact. This is Florida, for God’s sake. So how do I deal?”
AnnaCoreen began to rock again, gently, as she gazed out over the water that glittered like diamonds in the fading sunlight. “That’s something we’re going to have to figure out as we go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Back in her Escape, Charlie pulled into traffic and turned on the radio to distract her going-a-mile-a-minute brain. This really was happening. She really was super empathic.
And doomed.
She couldn’t live with this. Every time she touched someone? Shit.
And her mother was empathic, too? How was that even possible?
She thought of her mother’s reaction to her question about her sister. Not the violence, but the fear. They’ll know once and for all who I really am.
Straightlaced, stick-to-the-facts Elise Trudeau. Empath.
No way. No f-ing way.
Her mother scoffed at the idea of anything supernatural. Hadn’t even read fairy tales to her daughters because the ideas of fairy godmothers and children who could fly and poisoned apples were just too ridiculous. Forget about The Wizard of Oz or E.T. or even Mary Poppins and her magic umbrella.
Charlie remembered at her grandmother’s funeral that her mother had rolled her eyes when Alex mentioned she’d had a dream so vivid that it seemed Nana had visited her overnight.
How could someone that resistant to anything slightly paranormal be empathic?
Unless that was what made her resistant. Empathy scared the bejesus out of her, so she’d run the other way as fast and as far as she could, leaving behind the only people who knew: her family.
Jesus. Was that it?
Charlie slowed to turn onto a street that only locals knew led back to Lake Avalon proper. It would take significantly longer to get home, but she was tired of the tourist traffic and wanted the time to think, to figure out her next move.
Talk to her mother?
Right. Her jaw still ached from the last time.
Glancing in her rearview, she saw that a large SUV, or maybe it was a truck, had followed her onto the back road and was gaining on her back bumper. Great. An impatient driver. Take a chill pill, people.
She slowed down to let it pass, but instead of zooming by, it slammed into her.
“Hey!”
She grabbed the jerking steering wheel with both hands, fought to keep control of the car. In the rearview, she saw the dark—black? blue? dark green?—truck or SUV bearing down on her again. What the hell?
Bam!
The Escape swerved, shimmied. Charlie fumbled for the cell phone in the console between the seats.
Bam!
The cell phone flew out of her hand, hit the windshield and broke in two, its pieces skittering over the dashboard, one landing in her lap, the other on the passenger-side floorboard.
And then the truck, a Suburban, she thought, glimpsing the Chevrolet logo on the front end, was accelerating, coming up on the driver’s side of the smaller SUV. Charlie gunned it, her heart revving as hard as the engine.
But the Suburban was bigger, more powerful. Within seconds, it was beside her. She looked over, trying to see the driver through windows tinted almost entirely black. She couldn’t even make out the shape of the person behind the wheel.
And then the Suburban veered into the side of the Escape, and Charlie lost control.
She saw the banyan tree, knew she was going to hit it head-on but could do nothing about it.
The world around her exploded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She opened her eyes to pain, smoke and silence. As she remembered the tree, the impact, terror spiked into her brain and she jerked into brilliant awareness. Out, she needed to get out.
She shoved away the air bag, coughing at the powdery substance that puffed into the air. Her eyes started to water while she fumbled for her seat belt, her fingers frantic and clumsy. Something warm and wet trickled down the side of her face, but she was more concerned about the smoke burning her eyes, constricting her lungs.
Pain flared in her left shoulder and across her chest and abdomen as she pulled at the door handle and threw her body against the door. It seemed to jerk open on its own, and she fell sideways, tumbling out and hitting the ground with a bone-jarring thud. Breathless and aching, she clamped a hand to her shoulder and hauled herself up onto her knees. Get away from the car.
Get away, call for help, collapse. In that order.
And then a teeth-rattling blow drove her to her hands and knees as pain erupted at the side of her head. Her senses whirled, and she shook her head, tried to clear it. What the hell? Something just hit her?
A blur of movement came at her again, and she threw herself backward and tried to crab away. A black-clad body dropped onto her, driving her flat onto her back, and Charlie braced her hands against her attacker’s chest to try to hold him back. Black everywhere. Black pants, black shirt, black mask. The ninja again. What the—
Gloved fingers clamped around her throat. She gagged, bright lights exploding in her head. She thought she heard someone shouting her name before she managed to get her own, desperate fingers around the ninja’s throat, between the collar of his T-shirt and the edge of his face mask, skin-on-skin. And suddenly she wasn’t herself.
I dodge paint cans and tools scattered across thick plastic drop cloths as I run full out. The one who ruined everything stumbles to the floor ahead of me and, scooting backward, starts to beg, a black curl falling over one eye. “Please, oh God, please, don’t do this. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.” The odor of wet paint fills my senses as I raise the hammer and arc it down with all of my strength. The blunt end strikes its target with a crack-thud, and a warm spray of blood feathers my forearms and front of my shirt.
In the next instant, Charlie was choking. Murderous rage gave way to terror, and the masked head towering above her blurred before her eyes. The scent of fresh paint faded into the acrid tang of smoke and gas fumes, and then, at the same instant that she heard frantic shouting, the ninja shoved up off of her and took off.
Coughing and gasping for air, Charlie curled onto her side in the grass. She needed to get up, move away from the car in case it was on fire. Could it explode?
A shadow loomed over her, and before she could flinch or try to protect herself, a heavy, warm hand grasped her upper arm. The world shifted.
A black-clad figure looms over Charlie on the ground and her long, pale legs kick helplessly. What the hell? The choking, gurgling sound she makes flips a switch in my head. Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, that guy’s not helping her. Heart jackhammering, I race toward the smoking blue SUV, mindless of the uneven ground that tries to trip me. “Charlie! Charlie!”
She realized the voice was in the here and now, but she couldn’t respond. Dizzy, so dizzy.
The hand gripped harder, shook her a little. “You okay? Charlie, are you okay? Talk to me.”
She knew that voice. Deep, soothing, masculine. Noah. But she couldn’t see anything because of the smoke and tears burning her eyes. And, God, her head wouldn’t stop spinning.
“Fuck, come on,” he said. Hands grabbed her roughly by the wrists and hauled her up.
She tried to get her legs
under her, tried to help him by standing on her own, but her muscles refused to cooperate, as though her brain no longer communicated with them.
The next thing she knew, she was hanging upside down, her equilibrium, the world, completely scrambled. Her bruised gut bounced against a hard shoulder and knocked her into the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Noah felt it the instant her body went limp against him, and his heart rammed into his throat. Shit. By the time he made it to the other side of the road, a safe distance from her smoking SUV, the black Suburban was gone. He cursed himself for not getting the license plate number, but he’d been so stunned at the sight of Charlie’s mangled Escape that it hadn’t even occurred to him that the other driver hadn’t stopped to try to help her. His heart felt like it still hadn’t restarted since he’d seen that son of a bitch on top of Charlie, choking her.
Lowering her gently to the grass, he cradled her head in the palm of his hand to keep it from falling back and striking the ground. Fuck. There was blood at her hairline. Swallowing against the nausea, he eased some of her dark hair aside to inspect the area, relieved to see that it was only a small cut.
He trailed his fingers down her cheek, fascinated at the soft texture of her skin. She looked so much like Laurette that his stomach seized. And then her eyes fluttered open, and she looked up at him with a dazed, gold-flecked gaze that wasn’t anything like Laurette’s.
“Hey,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” she asked weakly.
He felt an idiot-sized smile spread over his face. Coherence was always a good sign. “Saving your ass again.”
And it was a cute ass, too, firm and perfect under his palm when he’d been holding her steady over his shoulder. Christ, once again, he’d noticed things about her, sexy things, that shouldn’t have even registered considering the circumstances. But he couldn’t help himself. Look at her. Even dirty and smudged, her hair a tangled mess, she took his breath away. All that dark, flyaway hair contrasting with porcelain skin. Those full lips and high cheekbones . . . and, damn, blood at her temple. He needed to stop.
