First Touch

by Teyla Branton

  “Stupid child.” Mr. Fullmer’s gruff voice was tinged with pain. “She should know better than to talk to crazies.”

  “She could be in danger,” Mrs. Fullmer protested. “She’s too young to know better.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. There was nothing more I could give them. I stood back from the counter and waited for them to leave.

  Jake handed me my rings. As I slid them on, his warm hand touched the middle of my back, and I was grateful for the support. Last September I’d begun entertaining the thought that we could be more than friends, but our relationship remained mostly linked to business. I didn’t mind too much. After my sister, he was my best friend, and since Tawnia had married and was now expecting her first child, her attention was divided. At this point I needed Jake’s friendship more than I needed romance.

  The Fullmers left, walking together slowly. Mr. Fullmer, his back rigid in his dark suit, carried the box of his daughter’s belongings. His sandy hair was thinning in the back. Jake had a natural remedy that would halt the hair loss, but that wasn’t why he’d come, so I remained silent. Next to him, Mrs. Fullmer looked shrunken, her shoulders hunched forward, her blond head bowed. She clung to her husband’s arm, staggering more than walking. Below her dress I could see a run in the back of her nylons.

  Before she reached the door, she paused, stepped away from her husband, and retraced her slow steps to the desk. “Thank you,” she whispered. She looked around somewhat frantically before her hand shot out to grab the Chinese thirteenth-century Jun Yao vase that sat in glory next to the cash register. It was wider than it was tall, a dark, glossy red piece with bright blue highlights. The sale price was seven hundred dollars and a steal at that because it was in extremely good condition. I’d found it in a basement in Kansas when I’d sheltered with some people during a tornado.

  “I want to buy this,” Mrs. Fullmer said.

  I arched a brow. I didn’t think she really wanted the vase, but business had been slow, and I wasn’t going to turn her down. I took it from her, enjoying the pleasant tingle of the thoughts that surrounded the piece. Not an image I could see but nice and comforting. At least one person who’d owned this vase had cared for it lovingly and had lived a life of quiet contentment. I wrapped the vase as Jake rang up the sale. Mr. Fullmer waited by the door, impassiveness and impatience alternately crossing his stern features.

  As I passed the bag with the vase to Mrs. Fullmer, she caught my hand and pressed something into it: the velvet box with the necklace. “Keep it for a little while. Maybe there’s something more.”

  I shook my head. “There’s never anything more. I’m sorry.” The last words felt ripped from me, not because I didn’t mean them, but because I knew they wouldn’t help her suffering.

  She made no move to take back the box. “Please.”

  I nodded, sighing internally. Keeping it gave her false hope, and I didn’t want that, but I wasn’t strong enough to refuse.

  She smiled. “Thank you for the vase.” She turned and joined her husband.

  I didn’t feel guilty about the vase because they could obviously afford it, but I did feel bad that she might think buying it could help me see something more.

  “That was nice of her,” Jake said.

  “Nice?”

  “Buying the vase. I told her when she called that you didn’t accept money, but I did suggest that she might want an antique for her house. This way you earn something for your trouble. That’s important, especially if it makes it so you can’t work the rest of the day.”

  As he spoke, he was pushing me onto the tall stool I kept at the counter. Then he disappeared into the back room and returned with a small book of poetry that my parents had written for each other for their wedding. I took it willingly, grateful for the positive emotions that flowed into me. Touching it, I could see them as they held the book in turn and exchanged their flower-child vows in the forest, Summer with a ring of flowers on her head and Winter with his prematurely white hair in a long braid down his back. Though this session hadn’t been all that draining, I felt full of life as I witnessed their silent, love-filled exchange. I hoped these feelings would never fade from the pages. Almost, it was like having them with me again.

  I kept the book at the store because not all imprints were as easy to stomach as Victoria Fullmer’s. Last month I’d been asked to touch the bicycle of a ten-year-old girl named Alice, who had vanished while riding her new birthday present. At first there had been only elation at her new toy—until the dark-haired man had stood in her path and torn her from the bicycle. I’d fainted with her fear. My description of the man had allowed the police to track him and had eventually led them to little Alice. Too late. The memory still haunted me sometimes when I was alone. I’d had to sleep with my parents’ book for a week—and the picture of Summer as well. I tried not to do that often, afraid my parents’ imprints would be overwritten by my own.

  Jangling bells told us someone had entered the Herb Shoppe next door. Jake looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Go ahead.”

  He walked around the counter and sprinted to the double doors that joined the two stores. My father had put in those doors back when Jake had worked for both of us. Jake and I still helped each other out, using a networked computer program to keep track of sales so we could ring people up at either counter. We also shared two part-time employees, Thera Brinker, who worked early afternoons and Saturdays, and Jake’s sister, Randa, who came after school and during special weekend sales events. Thera mostly worked for me and Randa for Jake, but they crossed over when either store had a rush of customers. It worked for all of us.

  “Jake,” I called. Too late, I thought, because he had disappeared, but his dark head popped back in. “I’m going for a walk, okay?”

  “No problem. I’ll keep an eye on things until Thera gets in.”

  I knew he would, but to make it easier for him, I locked my outside door on the way out, flipping over the sign that told people to use the Herb Shoppe entrance. That way Jake would be aware of any customers coming to browse my antiques, and they’d have to pass by him to leave. Only a few pieces in my inventory were really expensive, but all together, my inventory added up to my entire future.

  The cement felt warm against my bare feet, and I relished the sensation. In my late teens, the only time I’d gone through a shoe phase, my back had ached constantly, and once I’d spent a month in traction because of the pain, so for me it didn’t make sense to continue wearing shoes. But then, I liked the feel of the earth under me—or as close as I could get in this cement jungle. There was a better connection with nature that way.

  Thankfully, not wearing shoes wasn’t against the law, not even while driving, and there were no government health ordinances banning bare feet in public buildings. Only the few years I’d gone to school as a child had I been given any grief about my choice, when each October the principal would threaten to call child services until I brought shoes to school and kept them under my desk. My parents, who I’d called by their first names, had always taught me to celebrate my differences, so Summer would have been happier teaching me at home, rather than see me conform, but I’d wanted the public school experience. Yet I was always glad I had stayed with her that last year, when I was eleven, the year she’d died of breast cancer.

  My hand grazed the box in my pants pocket. I felt not the velvet but a flash of emotion. Victoria had loved this necklace, and she’d loved her family. Yet she’d chosen to leave them. A well of bitterness came to my heart. I’d give anything to have Summer and Winter alive and in my life. I could no sooner have left them than I could have cut off my own arm.

  What had possessed her? Was there more to her family than I’d seen? Had her father’s anger driven her to seek people who might love her unconditionally?

  It’s none of my business, I thought. My part was over. They knew she’d left of her own will, and they knew where to begin looking.
I’d even been compensated for my trouble. In a few days, I’d mail Mrs. Fullmer the necklace so she could eventually give it to her other daughter.

  Decision made, I focused on my surroundings. I’d walked long and far, or what most people would consider far these days, and my bare feet had taken a path I should have anticipated, given my reading for the Fullmers and what Jake had said about the group he’d seen.

  I’d ended up near the Willamette River, downstream from the Hawthorne Bridge, where the bombing had taken place and where Winter had died. We’d been on the bridge in my car when the explosion collapsed the structure. I had come up from the cold, heavy depths, and he hadn’t. Thirty others had also lost their lives in the bombing, and though those responsible had been punished, the holes in the lives of those left by the dead weren’t easily filled.

  I hadn’t been this close to the river since Winter had been found a week after the bombing, and it was strange to see the rebuilding in reality instead of on television. The construction area was fenced off, so I couldn’t go all the way to the riverbank, but I could see the bridge had come a long way in the past six months. The promise to have the bridge ready for traffic in less than three years would probably be kept. Not that I’d ever had any doubts. My brother-in-law, Bret Winn, was the director of the project, and he was conservative in his estimates. In fact, he was conservative in almost everything—that was part of what my sister loved about him.

  My tumbling thoughts halted abruptly as I caught sight of a man wearing coarse brown pants and an old-fashioned white shirt that looked all too familiar, though he wasn’t the man from Victoria’s imprint. He stood in front of the high chain-link fence surrounding the construction site, handing out flyers with his companions—young people of all sizes and shapes. All of them carried baskets and were wearing royal blue T-shirts with white lettering that proclaimed Love Is the Only Thing That Matters.

  Jake had been right about the group coming to the river, though why I had felt compelled to track them down was another matter altogether. Victoria’s college wasn’t far away, but that didn’t mean this group was connected with her disappearance.

  Or maybe they were. How many groups like this could there be in the same town?

  I moved toward them purposefully. Questions might not get me very far, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find a stray imprint or two. If they were hiding something I was going to find out what.

  END OF SNEAK PEEK. If you would like to purchase Touch of Rain on Smashwords, please click here. Or continue to the next page for a bonus sample of The Change, the first novel in the author’s Unbounded contemporary urban fantasy series. Enjoy! To learn more about the author and her books, please continue to the About the Author section following the bonus preview.

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  ON THE DAY I SET foot on the path to immortality, I was with Justine in her car driving down 95th on our way to pick out her new sofa. Ordinary. That’s what the day was. The plain kind of ordinary that obscures the secrets lurking in the shadows—or behind the faces of those you love.

  Justine was the sister I’d never had, and our relationship was close to official since her brother had asked me twice to marry him. Tom was sexy, persuasive, and best of all, dependable. The next time he asked, I was considering saying yes.

  A van came from nowhere, slamming into Justine’s side of the car.

  Just like that. No warning.

  Justine jerked toward me but was ultimately held in her seat by the safety belt. My head bounced hard off the right side window. A low screeching grated in my ears, followed by several long seconds of utter silence.

  An explosion shattered the world.

  When the smoke began to clear, I saw Justine’s head swing in my direction, though not of her own volition. Her blue eyes were open but vacant, her face still. Fire licked up the front of her shirt. Her blond hair melted and her skin blackened.

  “No!” The word ripped from my throat.

  I tried to reach out to Justine, but my arms wouldn’t move. Heat. All around me. Terror. Pain. The stench of burning flesh.

  Fire and smoke obscured my vision, but not before I saw something drip from the mess that had been Justine’s face. We were dying. This was it. The point of no return. I thought of my parents, my grandmother, my brothers, and how they would mourn me. I couldn’t even think about Tom.

  A premonition of things to come?

  I lost consciousness, and when I came to I was lying flat on my back. A sheet covered my face. I was suffocating.

  “Witnesses say . . . in flames almost on impact,” a man’s voice was saying. “A fluke . . . not for the fire . . . might have survived.”

  I turned my face, struggling to move my mouth from the sheet. Searching for air. Agony rippled up my neck and all over my head and down my body, the pain so decimating that it sapped all strength from me. I couldn’t move again, but that little bit had been enough.

  “What the freak!” the voice said. I could barely hear the words, but they gave me something to focus on through the pain. I clung to them. “Gunnar . . . the oxygen . . . thought you said she was dead.”

  The sheet lifted and air rushed into my tortured lungs. I could sense people all around me, though I couldn’t see anything except a hazy light. My throat was tight and burning, reminding me of the time I’d had both strep-throat and tonsillitis as a child. Only far worse. Blinding pain so intense that I couldn’t even moan.

  More snatches of conversation filtered to my brain. “Black as a crisp . . . try an IV . . . have to be amputated . . . University of Kansas . . . Burn Center.”

  Motion. The blare of a siren. Then blessed nothing.

  When I awoke the next time, my throat still hurt, and so did every single inch of my body, though not with the all-consuming pain that made me wish I were dead. Probably they’d given me drugs. Or maybe too many nerves were damaged. I could feel an oxygen tube in my nose and cold seeping into a vein in my right shoulder. How could that be? I’d had IVs before and I’d never felt the liquid. It was so good, so necessary, that for a moment I concentrated all my attention on that small, steady flow. Life seeping into my body. But far too slowly. I wanted more.

  Abruptly the sensation was gone. The pain cranked up a notch.

  I tried to open my eyes, but only the right one was uncovered. From what I could tell, I seemed to be completely swathed in bandages and unable to move. My single eye rested on Tom, who was standing near the window, staring out with the unfocused expression of a man who saw nothing.

  Tom shifted his weight, his muscles flexing under his T-shirt and jeans. In the past months I’d learned his body almost as well as my own, and even now I felt a sense of wonder at the miracle of our relationship. He didn’t push me for commitment, didn’t question why I was so hesitant to take the next step, and I loved him for that perhaps more than anything. It was also why I didn’t know if things would work out between us.

  A tiny rush of air escaped the hole they’d left in the bandages near my mouth. He turned toward me, his face stricken, looking older than his thirty-five years. “Erin? Are you awake?”

  I tried to nod, but found I couldn’t. I lay mute and helpless. Finally, I thought to close and open my single eye.

  He was at my side instantly. “Oh, honey. Thank God! I thought I’d lost—” He broke off, struggling for control. “Erin, can you understand me?”

  I blinked again.

  “Okay, good. That’s really good. Do you remember what happened?” He took a shaky breath and hesitated before adding, “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  I remembered the accident. I remembered the fire and how Justine had burned, but I wanted the rest explained. I wanted to hear if Justine was in a bed like I was. I wanted to hear if we’d be okay.

  I blinked twice.

  He leaned closer, not touching me, his eyes rimmed in red. His eyes had a tendency to change color with what he wore, and today they were the inviting shade of a lake on a hot summer day. My favori
te color.

  “This morning you and Justine were in a car accident. There was a fire. You were burned.”

  Over seventy percent of my body. The thought came from nowhere, and I wondered if I’d unconsciously heard someone talking about my condition. If that was true, my chances weren’t good. I’d heard of a formula at the insurance company where I worked: take your age, add the percentage of your body burned, and the sum was your chance of fatality. I’d be over a hundred percent.

  I’m still alive. I’m the exception.

  “Your parents just stepped out for a while. Your grandmother was here, too, almost all day, but they finally convinced her to go home. Chris is on his way.”

  Had that much time passed? My older brother, Chris, had left that morning to pilot a charter flight from Kansas City to Tulsa. I’d been planning to go over tonight when he returned so I could spend time with him and Lorrie and their kids.

  “They called Jace. He’ll be here soon.”

  Jace was on his way from Texas? My younger brother had barely arrived at his new unit, and the army would never allow him to come home.

  I knew then what Tom wasn’t saying: I was dying. Was that why there wasn’t as much pain? Or had my limbs been amputated? I tried to move my legs, but they felt heavy, and I wondered if that was the sensation the nerves sent to the brain after amputation. I concentrated on moving my arms, and though they were sheathed in bandages, I managed to move my right one slightly.

  Tom’s eyes followed the movement, swallowing so hard I could see the lump in his throat go up and down. He wet his lips, started to speak, stopped, and then tried again. “It’s going to be okay, Erin. You’ll see.” The lie was so bad I felt sorry for him. I knew it was killing him not to do something useful for me, to somehow alleviate my suffering, but there was nothing he could do now, nothing either of us could do. This was one of those moments you endured and survived. Or you didn’t.