Recalled (8 page)

And before I knew it, we were climbing into the tiny space of the two-seater.

She glanced at me and smiled tentatively when I turned the heat on full blast and it was only then I realized I just told myself I was going to stay away from her. Far away.

So much for that idea,
I thought as I pulled away from the curb.

* * *

I drove slowly because once she wondered if my Roadster might not be very good in the snow, I started to wonder that too. I hadn’t had any problems up until this point so I just tried to enjoy the fact I was riding around in a car that cost more than a hundred grand. (I looked it up online). She didn’t say anything on the ride, except to give me directions, and I didn’t try to make small talk.

She didn’t live that far from the diner and when I pulled up in front of her apartment building, I left the engine idling at the curb. She glanced out her window and upwards so I assumed her apartment wasn’t on the ground floor.

“I almost died the other day,” she said quietly, still gazing out her window.

My hand tightened over the gearshift when I realized she was talking about the day I got crushed by that bus. When I didn’t say anything, she turned in the seat and looked at me through the dark.

“But I didn’t because someone saved me.”

I swallowed, my eyes locked on hers. “Wow,” I said, not really sure how to respond. Why was she telling me this?

“Maybe you heard about the accident? It was in the newspaper.” She continued to watch me. I couldn’t read her expression clearly because the only light in the car came from the dash as the streetlight in front of her building was burned out. Judging from the part of town we were in, that lamp probably hadn’t had a bulb change since the nineties.

But even in the practically nonexistent light, I could see the whites of her eyes, and they were focused directly at me.

“I don’t read the paper,” I replied. “What happened?”

Even though I knew what happened, even though part of me said not to even talk about it, I couldn’t help but want to know how she remembered that night.

“I’d just gotten off my shift. It was late, like tonight…” Her voice faded and the whites of her eyes suddenly disappeared. She closed them, like the memory was painful.

Then her eyes reopened and she said, “I was walking home and there was this guy… He was on the sidewalk too. A bus came around the corner and slid on a sheet of black ice. I froze. I knew it was going to hit me, but I couldn’t seem to move. But then he pushed me out of the way and the bus hit him instead.”

“Wow,” I echoed again, wishing this body came with a better vocabulary. My stomach cramped as I remembered the feeling of the bus plowing into me.

“He died right there in the snow. He didn’t have any ID. I don’t even know his name.” Her eyelids closed again and she took a deep breath.

“Didn’t the newspaper say who he was?” I asked curiously.

She shook her head. “I don’t even think they knew. I called the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“You called the hospital?” Why would she do that? Why would she care?

“I wanted to go to his funeral. To at least tell someone what he did, that he saved me—a complete stranger. I wanted to tell him thank you.”

“You did,” I replied, remembering. She said thank you that night. On the street when she leaned over me. The echo of her words whispered in the back of my mind.

“What did you say?” she asked, her voice losing a little bit of sorrow.

Dumbass.
I mentally yelled at myself. Way to make the Target trust you. Say suspicious things so she would run every time she caught a glimpse of you.

I pushed my hand through my hair—surprised to feel it shaking—and took a breath. There was no way she could think what I said was suspicious. There was no possible way on this earth she could know I was the guy who got flattened by the bus. To her, I probably looked like some dude who babbled stuff because he wasn’t really listening to what she was saying. I mean, this was probably the first time I ever listened to a girl talk.

“What I meant was you did say thank you. Right now. Where ever he is, maybe he heard you.”

She sat there for a long second, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. I hope he heard.”

She seemed like she really meant it.

My stomach cramped again and I felt a clammy sweat break out on my forehead. My knee started bouncing up and down, knocking the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Are you all right?” she asked, leaning a little closer.

I lifted my hand to adjust my glasses, and it was visibly shaking. I buried it in my lap and hoped she hadn’t seen. “Yeah, I just didn’t get that much sleep last night,”

My knee was still bouncing up and down and all of my insides felt jittery and bouncy. Maybe those three cups of coffee weren’t a very good idea.

“You don’t look too good,” she said, reaching across the small interior of the Roadster to brush her hand across my forehead.

I jerked and grabbed her wrist, pulling her closer toward me.

My sudden movement startled her and she fell forward when I yanked her. Her hair fell over her shoulders and brushed against my hand. She wiggled, trying to pull away, and I realized I was squeezing her.

I let go and she moved back into her own seat, rubbing at her wrist.

“I have to go,” she said, reaching for the door handle.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. You just took me by surprise.” I swallowed back the rising bile. What was wrong with me all of a sudden?

She pushed open her door and cold air rushed inside. I didn’t realize how hot it was in the enclosed space until the frigid air slapped me in the face.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said, completely out of the car but leaning down to speak.

I nodded and she shut the door, stepping onto the sidewalk toward the stairs of her building.

I didn’t hang around to watch her. I was still jittery and my heart hammered in my chest. I sped down the street, not thinking about the icy roads or my car. I didn’t even look in the rearview mirror to see if she made it into her building.

It wasn’t my job to keep her safe.

As the voice in my head so boldly reminded…

It was my job to kill her.

Chapter Ten

“Vision -
the ability or an instance of great perception, esp of future developments.”

Piper

I shut the door and leaned against it heavily, trying to calm the swirling emotions inside me. Of all things, that was the last thing I expected to happen to me today. Or any day for that matter.

He was just a regular guy—another customer in the diner, no one I would’ve normally paid any attention to.

Then he touched me.

The vision was so fast, so swift it would’ve knocked me on my butt if he didn’t have a hold of me. Ironic, really, because the only reason I had the vision at all was because he was holding on to me. It was just like before, exactly the same. It was an abrupt vision—more of an image really—of a man with very dark hair and dark, serious eyes. Those eyes were in direct contrast to the smile he wore on his face. It was a beautiful smile, full of joy.

And that was all of it.

So simple and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it if I had it any other time.

But there was nothing simple about this.

Because this vision belonged to someone else. To the man who died.

The fact that I had visions was something I understood as being different, an ability that not everyone (okay, no one) else had. I had my first visualization at the age of fifteen and I really didn’t know what it was at the time. And then I saw it happen in real time about two weeks later. I didn’t understand how it worked and it took me a while to realize I only had a vision when I touched someone. It took so long to figure out because it didn’t happen every time… just sometimes. The visions were
always
about the person I touched and they were always a piece of something that was going to happen to them in the future.

Until now.

Right before he got hit by the bus, the man touched me—he caught me when I slipped. The vision came over me and the next thing I knew I was hitting the sidewalk. When my sight cleared, I saw him lying in the street, clinging to his last breath of life.

Yes, I was studying to be a doctor and I understood death. I accepted it as a part of life. But watching the life drain from a man who was too young to die, watching his eyes, unfocused with pain, trying to focus on something—anything—was heart-wrenching. I’d never felt that kind of loneliness before sitting there in the ice and the snow, knowing there was nothing I could do for him. Knowing his last moments on Earth were full of pain and probably confusion.

Why? Why did he push me—someone he didn’t even know—out of the way like that? It was the most selfless thing anyone could ever do, and his heroic action was rewarded with death. Maybe that’s why the heroes of the world were becoming few and far between.

I hadn’t even thought of the vision until much later, when I was home and the numbness of what happened began to wear off. It was over a steaming mug of Lipton Ginger Twist tea that I saw his smiling face again and I was caught off guard. How could that possibly be his future when he was dead? Why was I seeing him smile with happiness?

Since then, the vision haunted me. I saw it in my dreams. I saw it when I was awake. It was never far from the surface of my mind. Sometimes I clung to it, pretended it was a memory so I could think of the man who gave his life for me as someone other than the broken body I saw upon the ice. I almost convinced myself that the vision had been my mind’s way of protecting itself, a way to give me something to hold on to after he died. After all, it was much easier to accept his death when I thought of his smile rather than watching the life drain out of his eyes and seep into the cold street where he lay.

But then the vision came to me again. Not as something I remembered, not as something I thought about, but as a true vision prompted by touch. Except this time I was touching the wrong man.

How could that be? What did it mean?

I had no idea, but when he walked out of that diner tonight, I had to follow. I had to know more about him. What was his connection to that man on the street? Did he know him? Were they friends? I’d never seen him at the diner before, and I was certain I would’ve remembered him. Maybe he knew his friend died on that street. Maybe it was his way of remembering. Maybe he knew where the body was.

Except he acted like he didn’t know about the accident. But the things he said… sometimes I thought he spoke about that night.

We keep meeting like this.

His words drifted like smoke through the back of my mind. I couldn’t help but feel like he was referencing when I slipped and the man caught me. But how would he know? There was no one else on the street that night and the witnesses on the bus saw nothing. The bus driver had been so frantic to stop the bus, he remembered only his own panic.

But I remembered. I remembered everything and there was something strange about that man. There was something about him I didn’t know, something I wanted to know.

And when I wanted something, I usually got it. I was a woman with a stubborn streak a mile long. It was only a matter of time before I figured out who he was and what this vision really meant.

* * *