Run to You Part Five: Fifth Touch

by Clara Kensie

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  The wind howled around me as I knelt in the dirt of Lady Elke’s cluttered shed, watching Tristan leave. His shadow stretching long, he trudged across the littered yard without looking back.

  All he had ever wanted to do was to keep me safe, but he couldn’t. He thought he’d failed me, that he would always fail me.

  But I was the one who had failed him.

  On shaking legs, I forced myself up and out of the shed, away from that little house with silver walls. I shuffled across the yard to the gravel driveway, where Tristan stood with his hands shoved into his pockets, head down, as Kellan lectured him. He wouldn’t lift his head to look at me.

  A black rental car sat next to Tristan’s blue one. Melanie sat in the back of the black car, huddling under a blanket. She wouldn’t look at me either.

  I needed to get Jillian’s ballet slipper and Logan’s sheet music back. They weren’t anywhere in the yard, so I pushed against the wind to Lady Elke’s house and slipped inside. Silent, shadowed and empty. Kellan’s guards must have already headed back to the APR with her. I found the ballet shoe and sheet music on the kitchen floor. Above them, a drawer was open, and it was full of silver. Utensils, ladles, spatulas. And knives. Lots of knives. They glittered and glimmered, sparkled and glowed.

  I slammed the drawer shut.

  Then I tucked the ballet shoe and the sheet music into the pocket of Tristan’s hoodie and went back outside. Time to face Tristan.

  He was still standing at the car with Kellan. “She had a vision of the nightmare Tessa has every night, and then she made it come true,” he said as I approached. “Her eye turned black, just like in Tessa’s nightmare. She said Tessa was tarnished. Tainted. She wanted to make her pay for what her parents did.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t disagree. That was exactly what had happened. “What’s going to happen to her?” I asked Kellan.

  “That woman is obviously an extremely wise and gifted psychic,” he said, “but she tried to kill my niece. We can’t risk her losing control like that again. She’s headed for the Underground.”

  “Please don’t neutralize her,” I begged. “She can find my brother and sister. She was about to tell us where they were.”

  Kellan snorted. “All inmates are neutralized, Miss Carson. I can’t do anything about it.”

  Frustration and despair roared in my ears. Once again, I’d come so close to finding Jillian and Logan, and they’d slipped away. “That’s not fair,” I said. “Nothing you do is fair. Our lives were in jeopardy today, but you didn’t shoot to kill. You only tranquilized her. If you find my brother and sister, you don’t have to kill them. Tranquilize them if you have to, but don’t kill them. Please.”

  He stared at me, speechless. I stared back, knowing my point was valid. Hypocrite, I shouted at him silently.

  Then the cool hardness returned to his face. “I am not a hypocrite. I didn’t use deadly force on that woman because I had a clean shot from behind.” He walked around the car to the driver’s side. “Your brother and sister used their psychokinesis to fly Aaron Jacobs’ car off a cliff. They can kill with the power of their minds, just like your mother. They are far more dangerous than a crazy old psychic with a knife. Make no mistake—if I feel my life, my agents’ lives, or the lives of any innocent bystanders are in jeopardy, I will shoot to kill.”

  * * * * *

  Read on for an excerpt from another unforgettable

  Harlequin TEEN digital-first story

  FORETOLD

  (Book 1 of Sisters of Fate)

  by Rinda Elliott.

  Available now at your favorite e-tailer!

  Copyright © 2014 by Kara Schein Critzer

  Three days after the end of the world began I had two choices—drive into a river or hit a deer. The light of the full moon reflected off the snow; the white stuff falling from the sky came in thick, noisy sheets that slammed the roof of my Honda Civic and coated the windshield.

  Snow, in my experience, had always been soft. This version was pissed, spitting at the world with a vengeance. It made clear vision impossible.

  Didn’t do much for traction, either.

  I had to go so slowly. Exhaustion burned my eyes, dragged at my lungs. I’d lost hope of finding a cheap hotel. The last one had been so full, people had actually been sharing rooms with strangers. I’d had two offers while scurrying back to my car in the parking lot. Hadn’t taken them. If I’d learned one thing on this long trip, it was that people turned into complete freaks when they were scared and a sudden Earth-wide snowstorm made for one wicked fear catalyst. I’d seen fights in grocery stores, fights in snowdrifts on the sides of highways and had even watched one lady jump into a car and drive off while the owner stood holding the gas pump nozzle.

  And the directions I’d printed sucked.

  It had taken me three days longer than expected to get here from Florida. I’d always wanted to come to this supposed place of great magic nestled on the edge of the Ouachita Mountains in eastern Oklahoma, but Mom freaked every time I brought it up. Too much magic, she said. Plus, the rumors of a real gloaming meadow upset her. As far as the Norse knew, there were only a couple in the United States. My two sisters and I had been conceived in the one up north. Nothing like knowing exactly where your mother had sex with a stranger.

  The snow let up slightly and I leaned forward like that would help me see well. I slowed even more, the car going barely faster than a crawl. I’d known what this snow was all about the second it had started.

  When my sisters and I were kids, my mother’s idea of a bedtime story had been a creepy Norse rendition of the end of the world. Ragnarok. Three years of winter, a great tidal wave and then fire burning across the land. And during all this, there would be battles between warriors who carried the souls of the old gods. Blood and death—my mother’s idea of a nurturing bedtime story.

  Kat, Coral and I hadn’t believed her until the souls of the norns inside us made themselves known. I was nine the first time I felt mine. Triplets like us, the norns had been goddess sisters, similar to the Greek fates, but they hadn’t woven threads of prophecy as some stories told; they’d carved runes into wood. The Norse called them the Wyrd Sisters. Kat, Coral and I preferred to think of them as the sisters of fate because the whole damned situation was weird enough.

  The car swerved, causing my hands to sweat as my hold on the steering wheel turned to a death grip. My cell phone buzzed in the front pocket of my jeans but I ignored it, too scared to reach for it because I was pretty sure I’d left the actual road at some point.

  I risked one hand off the wheel long enough to rub my temple. This anxiety was eating me alive. I’d been driving too long and my head had ached the past twenty-four hours. I missed my sisters. We’d never been apart this long before.

  So when the flash of brown stepped in front of my car, I panicked and swerved. The car hit a patch of ice, glanced off a tree and sailed with a groaning, metallic cry right over a ravine and into fast-moving, icy water.

  The jarring crash rattled every bone in my body.

  Shock froze me for a second or two. Then the terror hit. I screamed as the car floated down the river, slamming into boulders and tree limbs like some tricked-out carnival water slide. My suitcase flew between the bucket seats and hit my shoulder, knocking me into the steering wheel.

  Blinking, I wrapped my cold fingers around the wheel until they cramped. I couldn’t see crap! Ride it out or abandon ship? The decision was ripped from me when everything came to a jarring stop.

 
The car had lodged into...a fallen tree. I took a deep breath. But then the vehicle tilted and my head slammed into the driver’s side window. Metal groaned again. The weight of the car pushed into limbs, causing shrill, screeching noises as they scraped the door.

  Freezing water soaked into my jeans and through my T-shirt, ribbed turtleneck and my favorite jean jacket.

  Fear, pain and panic create a mess of stupid.

  I chucked my ego into the river and started scrambling. Everything was slippery and cold. I shivered, slid and gasped as I tried to right myself in the tilted front seat without standing on the driver’s side window. With teeth chattering and water dripping into my eyes, I searched out a dry spot on my jacket sleeve to wipe them. Water dribbled into my mouth. I caught the metallic taste of blood.

  I climbed over the side of the driver’s seat and into the back, trying to brace my feet on anything.

  Wrapping my fingers around the metal casing of the broken rear side window, I held on, dangling. Dizziness swept over me and I closed my eyes, trying to wrestle my panic into submission.

  I held my eyes tightly closed. Took several deep breaths. When it felt as if the world would stay still again, I opened one eye and pulled myself partly up through the window. The snow pounded, feeling more like ice pellets. They stung my cold cheeks. My breath caught on a sob as the car suddenly lurched, slid a foot or two, then settled into another tree.

  That’s when I saw him. Crouch-crawling along that tree. A man. A really big man in a black parka with the hood pulled over his face.

  Copyright © 2014 by Rinda Elliott

  ISBN-13: 9781460332863

  Run to You Part Five: Fifth Touch

  Copyright © 2014 by Kara Schein Critzer

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