“Please tell me I misheard that.” Phoebe’s voice came from behind us. Bastian and I both turned to see Phoebe standing in the entryway. Her hair stuck out of a messy bun on top of her head, and she still wore the yoga pants and tank top she regularly slept in.
“He means look into his future.”
“If you say so,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. I threw a throw pillow at her, which she laughingly batted away.
“Since you’re awake, perhaps you could help us.” Bastian scooted over so Phoebe could sit beside him.
“The great Sebastian Herrera and the all-knowing Chloe need help? I’m not sure I can handle this.”
“It’s fairly simple really,” he said, taking her words as a compliment. “I have a few questions, then you could observe Chloe while she checks my future and afterward you let us know if anything seems different than normal.”
Phoebe looked at me. “Aren’t you glad I introduced you guys?”
“Are you helping or not?” I asked.
“Sure, why not.”
“How long do Chloe’s visions usually last?” he started questioning her.
“A few seconds,” she answered.
“Eyes open or closed?”
“Open.”
“Does she speak during them?”
“Sometimes, mostly she just stares straight through you all freaky.” She froze and gazed at Bastian with her eyes crossed in what I hoped was a horribly bad imitation of what I looked like in the midst of a vision.
“Thanks,” I said.
She stuck her tongue out at me. “It’s true.”
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said, standing up and motioning for Phoebe to move. She took my seat in Dad’s recliner while I sat on the couch next to Bastian.
“Phoebe should take notes,” he said. We both reached for the pad and my fingers slid along his. Instantly, I was consumed by visions.
Shrouded in the familiar dark fog, the images I could make out were from beyond the time of the shooting. Bastian is older, gray streaks through the hair at his temples, and wrinkles curve out from the corners of his eyes. He smiles at a young girl. She has his hair and smile. Her eyes are larger, rounder than his, but still I know those eyes.
I push at that future, trying to move back, closer to the present. Things become clearer. Graduation. Bastian limping. Striding confidently. Then nothing. I shove until I see what I was searching for.
Glassy eyes, staring with an absence of life. Death. Blood. A gun. Withered hand and a wedding ring. Bastian standing. Running. Fear.
The vision faded and I blinked rapidly, refocusing my eyes. The fear was mine. It permeated my entire being. My muscles tightened and convulsed as a soul deep coldness settled within me.
“Told you,” Phoebe said to him. “Freaky. She always blames Lily, but Chloe’s the real reason we’re called the Freaky Matlins.”
“I’m sitting right here,” I said and she just shrugged in response.
“Thirty-six.” He glanced at Phoebe. “Normal?”
“Is anything about her gift normal?”
Bastian gave her an exasperated look along with a heavy sigh. “The length. Is thirty-six seconds standard for her visions?”
“No. Usually it’s only a few seconds.”
“Anything else unusual about the process today?”
“She held onto you.” She stared pointed at my hand.
Bastian and I both looked to see my hand still wrapped around his wrist. Tingles exploded within my fingers. I snatched my hand back and rubbed at the offending skin.
“So…what did you see?” he asked, lifting his pencil and pad.
I thought back to the older Bastian and the young girl. I wanted to tell him about her, but my gut told me this wasn’t the right time. Not with Phoebe here, not before…
“Everything is the same. Blood. Death. A gun.” Again, Phoebe’s presence kept me quiet. I had told her parts of what the coming future, but not all. Not about her or Nathan. I trained my eyes on Bastian, praying silently that he wouldn’t push me for details, because then Phoebe would know I was hiding something.
When I stayed silent, Bastian frowned at me. I tipped my head toward Phoebe. For a moment, I thought my prayers had been in vain, then he smiled and set his pencil down.
“I need to…” He picked up his nearly full soda, giving it a slight shake before putting it back down. “Uh…”
“The restroom is down the hall, second door on the left,” I said before he could spit out a lie she would without a doubt call him on.
“Well, he’s still strange,” Phoebe said after we heard the door close behind Bastian.
“Were you expecting him to suddenly be different?”
“Nope, but I’d hoped. Well, that’s not exactly true. I like that he’s a bit unique. He’s just especially weird around you.”
“So he isn’t strange twenty-four-seven?”
She snorted. “Maybe twenty-seven, but he’s way weirder when you’re around.”
“Why?”
“I think he likes you, I think he loves you,” Phoebe sang, mimicking an old movie. The pillow I threw at her smacked her in the face, effectively ending her taunting as she felt her nose for damage.
“He does not.”
And I didn’t like him. So why did the idea leave me with a fluttering in my stomach?
“Chloe, the guy spends his time either drawing you or finding ways to be around you.” She snatched up his notepad and turned to one of the pictures he’d done of me as evidence.
“So what? It’s a few pictures. As for spending time with me, he’s helping me figure out what’s going on with my visions.”
She pointed a finger at me. “You’re in denial.”
I slapped at her hand just as Bastian came back. “No,” I told her. “You’re imagining things and you’re also in desperate need of a manicure.”
She inspected her fingernails and he craned his neck to see as well, then the both of them shrugged.
“Shall we finish?” Bastian asked as he sat.
“Yep, but Phoebe has to leave.”
Lily would have taken the hint, but not Phoebe.
“Now,” I added when she didn’t move.
“Oh, right. I have to do…something.” She started for the basement stairs, but stopped in the entryway. “Thanks for letting me borrow your new skinny jeans.”
Barely managing to bite my tongue, I watched her vanish through narrowed eyes.
“So why don’t you and Phoebe get along?”
“Because she’s annoying and drives people crazy.”
“She doesn’t bother me. I think she’s mildly entertaining.”
“That’s because you don’t live with her. She knows exactly how to push my buttons. Some days I could strangle her, then others I remember she’s my sister and I have to love her.”
“You don’t have to love her,” Bastian said.
“Yeah, I do. She’s family. You have a brother, are you saying you don’t love him?”
“I do, but-”
“And don’t you love him simply for the fact that he’s your brother?”
“I guess, but-”
I clamped a hand over his mouth, careful to stay focused. “No buts or you’re going to begin annoying me again.”
His lips moved, and I for a split second I wondered if he was kissing my palm or trying to talk. Talk. Definitely talk. My hand dropped, fingers curling in.
“As it’s been established that Phoebe annoys you like crazy and you still love her, I won’t worry about ending up on your bad side.”
Thinking about him being on my good side was a slippery path I didn’t want to take. Instead, I focused on remembering the images of his future. Every piece of the shootings was the same. The older Bastian and the girl were new. She had to be his daughter. The similarities were too overwhelming for anything else. But there was something about her that nagged at me, that made me think I knew who her mother would be.
“Let try again,�
� I said and held out my hand, palm up. “Things seemed a bit clearer when there was physical contact, so…we should…”
I drew in a deep breath as his hand covered mine. Fingers interlaced and the warmth of his skin seeped into me.
As much as I wanted to figure out the girl, her existence would be decided by the shooting. Knowing the contact was coming made it much easier for me to control the depth of my vision. I kept myself to the shooting. But nothing new came.
Nothing new ever seemed to come.
Chapter 23
How do you stop something from happening when you don’t know when or where it will happen, who will do it, or even if they will?
For the past five days, Sebastian and I struggled to answer those questions. The original agreement we made vanished. The more I entered his future and the more time we spent going over what I’d seen, the more desperate I became to figure it out.
Phoebe. Nathan. Micah. Nadine. Andrew. Javier. Ms. Garcia.
Those were the names that never changed.
The names of the dead.
Sometimes there were others, but these always came up. They were recorded in Bastian’s notepad over and over. Once for every time I went into his future.
“Focus this time,” Bastian said from across my bedroom where he sat at my desk.
“I have been,” I snapped back, picking at my bedspread.
“Focus on something specific,” he suggested. “Something you haven’t tried before.”
“Like what? The only things I see are their faces, their eyes.” I burrowed my fingers in my hair and flopped back, thumping my head against the pillow. Banging it against a wall might have been more satisfying, but I wasn’t prepared to walk around blind to the future while sporting a massive goose egg on my forehead.
“That’s not true, Chloe.” He held up the pad where random words I said had been recorded. “You always look for the same things, so that’s what you see.”
“I don’t choose what I see.”
“I beg to differ. Don’t you decide how far into the future you can see?”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not. You’re focused on them, so you only see them.”
“Then what do you suggest?” I rose up on my elbows to glare at him. Sadly, my evil eye never had any effect on him.
“Don’t focus on them. Focus on me. Try to see what I see, or what I do. It’s my future, right? Shouldn’t it be telling you something about my choices?”
“Argh! Fine.”
I didn’t need to move my hand closer to him anymore. At some point in the past few days, I became so connected with him, with his future, that as long as we were near each other I could slide in. Other than my sisters and dad, I’d never been able to do that with anyone else. It was unnerving to think we had such a strong connection.
I squeezed my eyes closed, even though I now knew they would open once I was in. The things I’d seen were still there, unchanged. A groan of frustration escaped as I came back to the present.
“Blood. Dead eyes. A gun in a withered old hand. A wedding ring. Phoebe.” I shoved off of the bed, grabbed a pillow and threw it on the floor. It was the most unsatisfying tantrum I’d ever experienced. “Nothing changes!”
“You’re not focusing.” He shook his head and made another note.
“I am!” I yelled at him.
He looked up at me, his doubt glaringly obvious. “No, you’re still thinking about how this affects you. That’s what your real problem is with this.”
“No shit it affects me! It’s my friends and my sister that are going to die. And you just stand there, watching it happen, and do nothing!”
Bastian sat upright. “Wait. What did you say?”
“You stand there,” I said slowly. “You see everything that happens and you don’t do anything.”
Holy hell. That was new.
We stared at each other, shock silencing us as we both considered what this meant.
Bastian grabbed his pencil and wrote down the detail. “What else do you remember seeing?”
“Nothing, I mean…I don’t know. I didn’t even remember seeing that until I said it.” I collapsed against the closet door.
“This is good. Really good.”
I gave an exhausted laugh. “Yeah, it is. God, I feel like I’ve had a major breakthrough.”
Bastian smiled and put down the pencil. “It is. This is the first new detail you’ve remembered since Saturday.”
That was only days in the past, but considering the number of times I’d seen the same images flashing before me it felt like an eternity. I’d been on the brink of giving up hope, but now all I wanted to do was look into his future and find something else.
“I can’t believe this. Who knew getting pissed off was all I needed to do to remember something?”
Bastian rose, sending the chair into a slow spin. He grabbed the top and leaned forward. “We should celebrate our success. We could go play laser tag or bowling.”
“Wow. Did I just hear you suggest doing something for fun? Like with no experiments or observations?”
He inclined his head, pulled a serious expression across his face. “You did, and I’ll remind you that I’ve played laser tag before.”
“As you said then, the only reason you were there was because of your brother.”
“True, so I would suggest you take advantage as it is not an event that occurs very often. Make a choice. Laser tag or bowling?”
“Laser tag,” I said before he could change his mind. “Prepare for defeat.”
Apparently, laser tag in the middle of the afternoon during spring break wasn’t as popular as you’d think. Probably because everyone was outside enjoying the sun that was finally shining after a week of straight rain. We were the only two people there and the attendant made us wait ten minutes to see if anyone else came. Finally, we were suited up with our vests and laser guns.
“You realize when the door opens, you’re going down, right?” I said.
He pretended to holster the laser gun at his hip along with an imaginary one on the other side. “Why, little lady, don’t you know I’m the fastest draw in the Wild West? Why I could shoot a pimple off a pig’s behind at twenty paces,” he said with a Texas drawl.
“That is the worst southern accent I’ve ever heard.”
He hunkered down a little further and squinted one eye at me, but before he could defend his sad drawl, the door opened and I raced into the darkened space. The black lights illuminated the large metal structure and I made for the steps, determined to make it to the nest before Bastian. If I could get there first, there was no way he’d win.
A green light flashed on my vest indicating the lasers were activated. I crouched behind a half wall and tried to listen for Bastian, but all I could hear was the thundering of my heart. Trying to contain my laughs, I peeked through the holes trying to spot him. A movement to the far left caught my eye. He was climbing a rope ladder that would take him past the first level and up to the second. Dang, he was sneaky and fast.
Knowing he was busy climbing, I jumped up, ran across the bridge over to the next set of steps. I leaned around the railing but couldn’t see him any longer. My time was limited, so I made a break for it and took the steps to the nest two at a time.
What I didn’t expect was Bastian to be coming up the other side. We collided as we both tried to take possession of the small space. Both of us laughed between gasps for air. Then I stumbled, and Bastian wrapped an arm around me to steady me.
The air was sucked out of me at the sudden intimacy, made even more so by the black lights darkening the world around us. Annoying, nerdy Bastian ceased to be, and in his place was Sebastian, quiet and serious, and holding me in a way Bastian never would.
I stared at his chest as an anxious sensation filled me with the gentle flutters. My mind attempted to sort out every possible scenario I might want to occur. So used to looking into the future, it was slow to process the desire f
or something different.
His hand slid across my back and goose bumps broke out along my arms. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a reaction to his touch, but I didn’t think anything would ever help me get used to it. And despite the repeated reactions, it never stopped the questions racing through me at his touch.
What would it be like to kiss him? To know what his lips felt like? What would happen to our futures if we did?
That question always brought me back to reality, or at least it had right up until my visions of everyone but him disappeared, Bastian and I had been on two completely different paths in life. Only a few days ago, I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to claim him as a friend.
But logic didn’t exist in this moment. My fingers curled into his shirt as his head lowered just enough that his breath tickled my ear. I let out a shaky breath. His nose nudged my check and I tilted my head in response. Our lips passed over each other so briefly it wouldn’t even qualify as a kiss, but it was enough that I wanted more.
I stretched up and this time our lips locked. My eyes closed and his fingers pushed through my hair. Everything felt so right, so perfect. Meant to be. In that moment, he and I were all that existed.
Then the darkness behind my eyes deepened. Slowly my mind pulled back and a vision faded in. I struggled to hold onto the present, reluctant to leave Bastian and the emotions swirling inside me.
Then I see him. Bastian stands surrounded by darkness, a terrified expression on his face. I see me looking at him. Phoebe. Then the layers. So many in that one instance. Falling. Running. To. From. Standing. In every image, fear shadowed his face. It is a terror that has also existed in me, growing stronger each day.
Images continue to flash, shrouded in a darkening fog. The further they are from the present, the harder they are to distinguish and the more layered they become. Even though I’m no longer able to understand what I ‘m seeing, there is a sense of familiarity that settles in my chest. The girl is there amid the images, growing and changing. For now, she is only a possibility and I am saddened by the idea that Bastian may never know her.
My eyes opened to find Sebastian staring down at me. At some point during the vision, the kiss ended. I knew I should have been relieved, maybe even thankful, that he realized I wasn’t completely there, yet regret that I had missed even a second of that contact was all I felt.
Watch Me: Teen Paranormal Romance (A Touched Trilogy Book 3) Page 19
