AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I smile. But I’ve seen the way the guys are together. He likes me, but he’d give his life for them. That’s a heck of a difference.
“So, did you need me for something specific, or is all the testosterone getting to you?”
She chuckles and sits down beside me. “Maybe a little of both. But mostly, I just want to talk to you.”
I feel myself tense up on instinct, but when she reaches out and pats my leg, I relax a little.
“It’s like a whole different world out here.” She sighs, looking at the mountains I was just staring at.
“I know. And I say that having a pretty spectacular view of my own back home. But there is something about the mountains touching the sky that makes the world seem so much more infinite.”
“I agree. It’s scary and peaceful.”
I nod and wait for her to ask what she came here for.
“I’ve never talked to anyone before who was like me, except for my mom and Penn, but it was different. My mom… Well, that’s a long story. And Penn might be gifted like us, but he seemed somehow removed from the world. I was a little girl the first time I met him and found it hard to relate to a man in his twenties.”
I nod. “Though I guess as similar as our circumstances were, they were also completely different.”
When I don’t continue, I can feel her shoulders drop. I might feel bad for her if it wasn’t me that she wanted answers from. It gets tiring after a while when people expect you to reveal all your dark secrets but refuse to spill their own.
“My gift runs in the female line of my family. I don’t know what happened to my father. It was always just my mom and me until she got sick. We moved around a lot. As an adult, it’s hard to hide my gift. But as a child who didn’t understand that she was different, it was impossible.”
I sip my coffee, knowing exactly how she feels. When I started getting visions as a child, I didn’t have the capacity to understand them, so naturally, I told an adult. Nobody ever believed me, and the more I told the truth, the more I was persecuted for it. Eventually, I just stopped telling people.At least until I figured out what I was seeing wasn’t just nightmares but premonitions.
“How did you meet Penn?”
She bites her lip. “We met in passing when I was seven or eight. But he seemed familiar to me, and I didn’t understand why. My mom spoke to him like she’d known him for years, so maybe I’d met him and just didn’t remember. Anyway, he was the only other person I met who was gifted. He made me feel a little less lonely and a lot less like a freak. He taught me things about my gift that I didn’t know I could do.”
She pauses, her hands squeezed into fists. And I get the feeling she just skated over something important. Not that I’m one to talk. But it does act as a gentle reminder that she doesn’t truly trust me yet. I can’t say it doesn’t hurt, though. I know it makes me a hypocrite because I haven’t told them everything there is to know about me. But how do you cut yourself open and reveal all your dirty secrets to people you can’t trust?
“Anyway, we moved again, and I haven’t seen him since. I was surprised when you said he sent you to find me. I thought he’d have forgotten about me over the years.”
I look at her like she’s nuts. “You can literally heal people. Trust me, that’s not easy to forget.”
“You don’t know how much I wish that wasn’t true,” she whispers.
“Except I do.” I slide my free hand over and grab hers in a silent moment of unity. No matter what happens in the future, here and now, we’re the same.
“How about you? How did you meet Penn?”
I feel my stomach swirl as acid burns in my gut. She must sense my need to run because she holds my hand tighter. I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly before taking a chance and giving her a snippet of my past.
“He stopped me from shooting myself,” I whisper, staring at those mountains, wishing I had half the strength that they do.
Her hand squeezes mine to the point of pain, but I don’t pull away. It helps ground me, keeping me in the here and now instead of drowning in my memories. I turn to look at her and see tears in her eyes, but there’s no pity, only understanding.
“All I see is pain and death.” I never got to be a dreamer because all I saw were nightmares. “I wish, for once, I could get a glimpse of someone’s happily ever after. But alas.”
“You’ve never had a vision of something good happening?”
I shake my head. “No. Not once. I’m not a psychic, Salem. I’m a harbinger. I try to warn people.” I snort out a laugh. “Well, you saw how well that worked out for me. And your guys had a better reaction than most.”
“People are scared by what they don’t understand.”
“I know. Trust me. But what do I do with that? If I keep my mouth shut, people die. And if I speak up, people—” I shake my head, not voicing the shitty things people have done to me over the years. There are some things that are just mine.
“That day—the day Penn saved me—I was so mad at him. Taking my life wasn’t something I just decided to do on a whim. I’d thought about it for a long, long time. I brought nothing but misery into people’s lives. I’m the screech of tires on a wet road, the knock at the door at four a.m., and the last tortured breath leaving someone’s lungs. Nobody wants to believe what I can see. But that doesn’t stop them from avoiding me like the plague because wherever I go, death follows.”
