True Vision (12 page)

“Sweet Pea.”

“Ah, yes.” Her eyes began to sparkle, as though reminded of a past crush. “Tommy Roe.”

“It was one of Nana’s favorites from the sixties,” Charlie said. “ ‘Oh, sweet pea, come on and dance with me. Come on, come on, come on and dance with meeee.’ ” She stopped and felt her face redden.

AnnaCoreen clapped. “That’s splendid. Some people pray or have a mantra. This is your mantra. The important thing is that it works for you.”

“Will it work with this supercharged empathy?” Charlie asked. “The . . . the . . . I don’t even know what to call them. I’ve been thinking of them as flashes.”

“You can call them whatever you like.”

How about big-assed mind-fucks? she thought. When AnnaCoreen’s lips quirked, Charlie wondered again whether the woman was reading her mind. Then she shrugged it off. Hell, maybe the woman really
was
psychic. “My point is that the flashes happen so fast that I can’t imagine being able to stave them off with a song or a protective shield.”

“Probably not,” AnnaCoreen said with a sober nod.

“And I can’t wear gloves to prevent skin-on-skin contact. This is Florida, for God’s sake. So how do I deal?”

AnnaCoreen began to rock again, gently, as she gazed out over the water that glittered like diamonds in the fading sunlight. “That’s something we’re going to have to figure out as we go.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

B
ack in her Escape, Charlie pulled into traffic and turned on the radio to distract her going-a-mile-a-minute brain. This really was happening. She really was super empathic.

And doomed.

She couldn’t live with this. Every time she touched someone? Shit.

And her mother was empathic, too? How was that even possible?

She thought of her mother’s reaction to her question about her sister. Not the violence, but the fear.
They’ll know once and for all who I really am.

Straightlaced, stick-to-the-facts Elise Trudeau. Empath.

No way.
No f-ing way
.

Her mother scoffed at the idea of anything supernatural. Hadn’t even read fairy tales to her daughters because the ideas of fairy godmothers and children who could fly and poisoned apples were just too ridiculous. Forget about
The Wizard of Oz
or
E.T
. or even
Mary Poppins
and her magic umbrella.

Charlie remembered at her grandmother’s funeral that her mother had rolled her eyes when Alex mentioned she’d had a dream so vivid that it seemed Nana had visited her overnight.

How could someone that resistant to anything slightly paranormal be empathic?

Unless that was what made her resistant. Empathy scared the bejesus out of her, so she’d run the other way as fast and as far as she could, leaving behind the only people who knew: her family.

Jesus. Was that it?

Charlie slowed to turn onto a street that only locals knew led back to Lake Avalon proper. It would take significantly longer to get home, but she was tired of the tourist traffic and wanted the time to think, to figure out her next move.

Talk to her mother?

Right. Her jaw still ached from the last time.

Glancing in her rearview, she saw that a large SUV, or maybe it was a truck, had followed her onto the back road and was gaining on her back bumper. Great. An impatient driver. Take a chill pill, people.

She slowed down to let it pass, but instead of zooming by, it slammed into her.

“Hey!”

She grabbed the jerking steering wheel with both hands, fought to keep control of the car. In the rearview, she saw the dark—black? blue? dark green?—truck or SUV bearing down on her again. What the hell?

The Escape swerved, shimmied. Charlie fumbled for the cell phone in the console between the seats.

The cell phone flew out of her hand, hit the windshield and broke in two, its pieces skittering over the dashboard, one landing in her lap, the other on the passenger-side floorboard.

And then the truck, a Suburban, she thought, glimpsing the Chevrolet logo on the front end, was accelerating, coming up on the driver’s side of the smaller SUV. Charlie gunned it, her heart revving as hard as the engine.

But the Suburban was bigger, more powerful. Within seconds, it was beside her. She looked over, trying to see the driver through windows tinted almost entirely black. She couldn’t even make out the shape of the person behind the wheel.

And then the Suburban veered into the side of the Escape, and Charlie lost control.

She saw the banyan tree, knew she was going to hit it head-on but could do nothing about it.

The world around her exploded.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

S
he opened her eyes to pain, smoke and silence. As she remembered the tree, the impact, terror spiked into her brain and she jerked into brilliant awareness. Out, she needed to get out.

She shoved away the air bag, coughing at the powdery substance that puffed into the air. Her eyes started to water while she fumbled for her seat belt, her fingers frantic and clumsy. Something warm and wet trickled down the side of her face, but she was more concerned about the smoke burning her eyes, constricting her lungs.

Pain flared in her left shoulder and across her chest and abdomen as she pulled at the door handle and threw her body against the door. It seemed to jerk open on its own, and she fell sideways, tumbling out and hitting the ground with a bone-jarring thud. Breathless and aching, she clamped a hand to her shoulder and hauled herself up onto her knees. Get away from the car.

Get away, call for help, collapse. In that order.

And then a teeth-rattling blow drove her to her hands and knees as pain erupted at the side of her head. Her senses whirled, and she shook her head, tried to clear it. What the hell? Something just hit her?

A blur of movement came at her again, and she threw herself backward and tried to crab away. A black-clad body dropped onto her, driving her flat onto her back, and Charlie braced her hands against her attacker’s chest to try to hold him back. Black everywhere. Black pants, black shirt, black mask. The ninja again. What the—

Gloved fingers clamped around her throat. She gagged, bright lights exploding in her head. She thought she heard someone shouting her name before she managed to get her own, desperate fingers around the ninja’s throat, between the collar of his T-shirt and the edge of his face mask, skin-on-skin. And suddenly she wasn’t herself.

I dodge paint cans and tools scattered across thick plastic drop cloths as I run full out. The one who ruined everything stumbles to the floor ahead of me and, scooting backward, starts to beg, a black curl falling over one eye. “Please, oh God, please, don’t do this. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.” The odor of wet paint fills my senses as I raise the hammer and arc it down with all of my strength. The blunt end strikes its target with a
crack-thud
, and a warm spray of blood feathers my forearms and front of my shirt.

In the next instant, Charlie was choking. Murderous rage gave way to terror, and the masked head towering above her blurred before her eyes. The scent of fresh paint faded into the acrid tang of smoke and gas fumes, and then, at the same instant that she heard frantic shouting, the ninja shoved up off of her and took off.

Coughing and gasping for air, Charlie curled onto her side in the grass. She needed to get up, move away from the car in case it was on fire. Could it explode?

A shadow loomed over her, and before she could flinch or try to protect herself, a heavy, warm hand grasped her upper arm. The world shifted.

She realized the voice was in the here and now, but she couldn’t respond. Dizzy, so dizzy.

The hand gripped harder, shook her a little. “You okay? Charlie, are you okay? Talk to me.”

She knew that voice. Deep, soothing, masculine. Noah. But she couldn’t see anything because of the smoke and tears burning her eyes. And, God, her head wouldn’t stop spinning.

“Fuck, come on,” he said. Hands grabbed her roughly by the wrists and hauled her up.

She tried to get her legs under her, tried to help him by standing on her own, but her muscles refused to cooperate, as though her brain no longer communicated with them.

The next thing she knew, she was hanging upside down, her equilibrium, the world, completely scrambled. Her bruised gut bounced against a hard shoulder and knocked her into the dark.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

N
oah felt it the instant her body went limp against him, and his heart rammed into his throat. Shit. By the time he made it to the other side of the road, a safe distance from her smoking SUV, the black Suburban was gone. He cursed himself for not getting the license plate number, but he’d been so stunned at the sight of Charlie’s mangled Escape that it hadn’t even occurred to him that the other driver hadn’t stopped to try to help her. His heart felt like it still hadn’t restarted since he’d seen that son of a bitch on top of Charlie, choking her.

Lowering her gently to the grass, he cradled her head in the palm of his hand to keep it from falling back and striking the ground. Fuck. There was blood at her hairline. Swallowing against the nausea, he eased some of her dark hair aside to inspect the area, relieved to see that it was only a small cut.

He trailed his fingers down her cheek, fascinated at the soft texture of her skin. She looked so much like Laurette that his stomach seized. And then her eyes fluttered open, and she looked up at him with a dazed, gold-flecked gaze that wasn’t anything like Laurette’s.

“Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she asked weakly.

He felt an idiot-sized smile spread over his face. Coherence was always a good sign. “Saving your ass again.”

And it was a cute ass, too, firm and perfect under his palm when he’d been holding her steady over his shoulder. Christ, once again, he’d noticed things about her, sexy things, that shouldn’t have even registered considering the circumstances. But he couldn’t help himself.
Look
at her. Even dirty and smudged, her hair a tangled mess, she took his breath away. All that dark, flyaway hair contrasting with porcelain skin. Those full lips and high cheekbones . . . and, damn, blood at her temple. He needed to stop.

Grimacing and coughing, she pushed him back and tried to sit up. He helped her with a hand behind her elbow, watching her carefully for signs that she might pass out again. Sure, that’d give him the chance to hold her close again, but he wasn’t a complete asshole.

Though she grimaced as she gingerly rolled her shoulder, she seemed relatively okay.

“Did you see that son of a bitch run me off the road?”

“Actually, no. I saw him trying to strangle you, though.”

“Yeah, a freakin’ ninja.” She giggled at that, then winced and started to cough. “Ah, crap, that hurts.”

Noah looked over his shoulder for the flashing lights of help, not sure what worried him more, the coughing and wincing or the giggling.

“Help me up, would you?”

He turned back to her just as she latched onto his arm and tried to pull herself up. “Uh, shouldn’t you wait for someone to take a look at you?” he asked.

She shook her head, and her forehead creased. “It’d be easier if you just helped.”

Sighing, he got to his feet and drew her up, steadying her when she swayed against him. He couldn’t stop himself from catching her closer for just a moment, glad that she was so warm and whole, if a bit shaky. He noticed that she leaned, too, before she started brushing at the stains on her khaki shorts. When she glanced over at her totaled car, she dropped her hand to her side as though realizing how silly it was to worry about something as simple as dirt.

“Damn.”

Noah’s thought exactly. “Not to be an alarmist or anything, but I think someone’s trying to kill you.”

She turned her head to look at him, her gaze steady and faintly accusing. “And here you are.”

He cocked his head and grinned. “Yes, it’s been my plan all along to repeatedly knock you senseless in hopes that you’ll tell me what you don’t want me to know about your family.”

She narrowed her eyes and put a hand to her temple. “Jesus, I couldn’t even follow all that.”

He grasped her chin to turn her head so he could examine the darkening bruise on her cheekbone. His stomach flipped at the thought that it could have been so much worse. “How’re you doing? Dizzy?”

“No. Pissed. Look at my car. That
bastard
.” Then she pulled away from him, her light eyes piercing. “I don’t suppose you got a license plate number.”

“No, sorry. I thought you were getting help, not getting attacked.”

“But you saw the ninja, right? I’m not going nuts?”

“I think we can both agree it wasn’t a real ninja. Probably someone in a Halloween costume.”

“He had one of those baklava things on his head.”

He looked at her blankly. Baklava? And then he laughed. “Balaclava.”

“That’s what I said. There was only a slit for his eyes.”

“Same attacker as the other night?”

“Unless there’s a band of raging ninjas on the loose.” She squinted at him, obviously struck by another coincidence. “How’d you get here? This isn’t a main road.”

Busted. “Uh, well, I was kind of following you.”

“Kind of?”

He shrugged, gave her his most sheepish smile, suddenly feeling as lame as he sounded. “You’ve been holding out on me.”