Lucid

Lucid

A Brightest Kind of Darkness Novel

Book Two

by

P.T. Michelle

Kindle Edition

Copyright 2012 by P.T. Michelle

All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook cannot be re-sold or given away to others. No parts of this ebook may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter One

“Did you just plug your flat iron in my car charger?” I rolled my eyes at Lainey brushing rose blush across her cheeks in fast swipes while holding the iron in her other hand. “Only you would multitask like this. No wonder you’re always late for school.”

She tore an exasperated glance from her image in the sun visor’s lighted mirror and jabbed the iron in the air like a fencer’s foil. “I wouldn’t be doing this in the car if you hadn’t tried to wake the whole neighborhood with your horn.”

Lainey might be my best friend, but this was why we’d never shared rides to school, even though our neighborhoods were only five miles apart. I owned my
own
lateness, not someone else’s.

I turned my attention back to the steady stream of bustling traffic on Highway 29 and shrugged. “I wouldn’t have had to do it if you’d come out of your house on time.”

Lainey clamped the flat iron around a hank of wavy auburn hair, then slowly slid it to the end before grabbing another wavy chunk. “And here I thought having you take me to school would be less stressful than my dad.”

“Why? Does your dad’s patrol car cramp your style?” I snickered and pressed on my brake to slow for the line of stopped cars when my attention snagged on a red sports car doing the same a couple of lanes over. Only, instead of slowing, the car’s front end jerked, then lifted up, as if something big had pushed it out of the way.

“Did you see that?” I whispered just as the red car’s front end landed partway in another lane. A silver car slammed into the red car’s back fender. Tires squealed…metal crunched. The red car spun until its front end crashed into the front of the silver car in a shower of headlight glass. More tires screeched, and oncoming cars veered to avoid the collision.

But my attention wasn’t on the accident or the cars slowing down to rubberneck. My gaze was locked on the huge spinning image that had catapulted from the bulging space in the air not more than twenty feet above the red car. A yellow, gray, black, and skin-colored “blur” barreled toward the red car in a tumble of vicious fists, bunched muscles, feathers, claws, and scales…and blood. Lots of blood. Surrounded by puffs of fog, the two massive beings’ velocity would flatten the red car’s roof like a piece of tinfoil.

My heart lodged in my throat and I jammed my finger on the window button. I ignored the biting December wind and clasped my steering wheel in a death grip to lean out the window and scream, “Get out of your car!”

I mentally braced and winced, waiting for the fighting duo to hit. When the strange beings and their cloud of haze slammed into the red car, they disintegrated in a poof of nothingness. I blinked rapidly, staring at the unmarred roof. Jerking my gaze to the airspace above the car, I shook my head. No bubble or distortions warped the fluffy white clouds and clear blue sky beyond. Had I imagined all of it? A horn blared behind me at the same time Lainey yanked at my arm.

“Nara!” Lainey’s pitch elevated as she shook me harder. “I’ve called nine-one-one to report the accident, but you need to move. People are getting pissed at the rubberneckers.”

My hands trembled. I slowly pushed on the gas pedal. “Did you see if the people were okay?”

“They looked like they were fine,” Lainey said in a shaky voice. She’d unplugged her flat iron, and since I’d glanced her way had yanked hard at her seatbelt at least three times to make sure it caught properly. She was probably reliving her own car accident from a few weeks ago. “Why did you yell for them to get out of their car? With all that traffic around, they could’ve been killed if they had.”

I kept glancing in my rearview mirror at the red car, then back to the road. “Didn’t you see that?”

“See what? I saw the red car spin around and hit the silver car, if that’s what you’re talking about.” Lainey’s brow furrowed. “You okay, Nara? You’re acting like you’ve never seen a car accident before.”

My gaze snapped to the rearview mirror once more.
Not an accident I wasn’t expecting. Or that crazy hallucination
.

* * *

Later that day, I got a text I
was
expecting.

Adam
[Omni Admin] – 3:45 p.m. ~ The feather message doesn’t exist. You must be mistaken
.

Even though I’d seen these same words in my dream last night, I ignored the swell of people bolting out of school around me as I shuddered against the cold wind. The message board owner’s snappy reply had made me grind my teeth in my dream. Seeing it in real time today was like coarse salt scrubbed into a festering wound. I punched the keys, cutting and pasting the response I’d typed in my phone the moment I woke this morning, then hit Send.

Me – 3:46 p.m. ~ There was
definitely
a post on your message board from two years ago. I ran across it a few weeks back. The poster asked if anyone had experienced a feather tattoo suddenly appearing on their shoulder. Here’s the link to the cached info from the Internet. I’m not asking you to provide an email address. I’d just like to be able to private message the original poster
.

“Nara,” Lainey said.

Instead of hitting Send like I’d done in my dream, I preempted the response the owner would eventually send back to me late in the day.

Me – 3:46 p.m. ~ And before you tell me “The person deleted their profile, so there’s no way you can provide that info”—

“Nara! We’re freezing our asses off out here for a reason,” Lainey hissed in a low tone. “Quit Ethan-texting and pay attention.”

My fingers paused over the keyboard. “Huh? This isn’t Ethan—” I began, but then Lainey jerked her head in stiff-neck fashion at a couple who’d passed, telling me to look. I followed her line of sight to Jared, her ex, who was snuggling a platinum blonde, apparently to keep her warm against the cold wind.

The girl was pretty in a plastic-y kind of way. I folded my frozen fingers into a fist to warm them and shrugged. “She’s not all that.”

“Her hand,” Lainey huffed. She wiggled her gloved fingers. “Did you see her left hand? Was she wearing his class ring?”

I returned my attention to my phone and waved absently, saying as I finished typing my text message, “It’s not. It’s some ring she picked up in an antique shop.”

Me – 3:47 p.m. ~ I’m sure you have a way to get to the history through your administrative panel. PLEASE. This is pretty important
.

At the same time I hit Send, Lainey grabbed my arm in a grip worthy of a Blue Ridge wrestler. “Antique store?” Auburn eyebrows raised, hope flickered through her brown eyes. “What makes you say that?”

Every muscle inside me tensed. I’d been so distracted with the message board guy that I hadn’t thought to make up something other than the truth to squelch Lainey’s angsting. I wouldn’t learn the truth from Lainey about the ring until the end of the day, when she called me at nine tonight with the news.

Swallowing past the sudden knot in my throat, I made a goofy face. “Uh, ’cause I dreamed it?”

Lainey dropped her hand and scowled. “Don’t make up crap on my account. If you didn’t want to help, you could’ve just said so. You didn’t even look as they passed.”

While part of me heaved a silent sigh of relief that Lainey thought I was joking, another part of me wished I could tell her.
I really
did
dream it, Lainey, because I have this gift. I dream my entire next day every night when I go to sleep. That’s why I was freaked by the accident this morning. I hadn’t dreamed about it. Nothing surprises me. Ever. Well, until I recently had a deadly run-in with Fate over my meddling in people’s lives in order to save them from strange accidents—including
your
life, by-the way. You’re welcome!
I met Lainey’s frustrated gaze and simply said, “Sorry, Lainey. I was just distracted by this project I’m working on.”

“Project? You weren’t texting Ethan?”

By the squeak in her voice, I had just made another
major
best friend faux pas. Even though the crowd had thinned, I stepped close and gripped her hand. “What I meant to say was, I think you’re going about getting over Jared all wrong. You need to find something else to focus on, not stress over a guy who’s proven he’s not worth your time.”

Tears filled her eyes and she quickly brushed them away. “Just because I dumped Jared for cheating with Sophia doesn’t mean I can just cut off how I feel about him, Nara. I’ve tried, but—” She paused and waved in the direction Jared and his new girlfriend had headed. “Look how fast he replaced me. The thought he might’ve given her his ring after only a few days with her when I never even got to see the damn thing after several weeks of dating…it just hurts.”

I nodded as she sniffed. “I get it, but that’s just another reason to move on. He’s a jerk. Can you at least try to put him out of your mind?” It didn’t help that soccer season was over and we were in the weird in-between hiatus before indoor season began. It gave Lainey too much free time to get worked up about Jared-related stuff.

If Ethan were here, I’d enlist his help. My boyfriend also has a unique power, though neither one of us knows why he has the ability to absorb the negative energy in people’s lives whenever he’s around them. Just by touching you, he can make all your worries fade away. I could really use his ability to keep Lainey from angsting about Jared every five seconds. In the meantime, I needed a distraction
right now
.

Glancing past her shoulder to a guy with ash-blond hair tossing a basketball into the back of a dark blue Jeep, I nodded in his direction. “I remember seeing that basketball player with the new girl Jared’s dating. I’m pretty sure they were a couple before. He didn’t even look at them. Seems like he’s taking their breakup okay.”

Lainey cast her gaze over her shoulder and I continued in a softer tone, “He moved on, Lainey. You can too—
aouff.
” Air whooshed past my lips with Lainey’s sudden bear hug.

“You’re brilliant!” Pulling back, she glanced at the guy again, then at me, eyes shining. “I’m going to go talk to him.”

“Wait. That wasn’t—” I tried to grab her arm, but Lainey backed away before my fingers could connect.

“This is
just
what I need. Thanks, Nara.”

“—what I meant…” I trailed off as she made a beeline straight for the guy. Lainey was always so impulsive. The whole breakup with Jared wasn’t going to change that aspect of her DNA. If anything, it seemed to intensify it.

As she lifted her hand to tap the basketball player on the shoulder, I held my breath, unsure of what would happen next. This part wasn’t in my dream. Once I’d slipped up in front of her, I’d improvised, which sometimes changed how events unfolded for the rest of my day.

“You’re on your own, Lainey,” I whispered just as my phone pinged with a new text. I quickly glanced at the screen, surprised that the message board owner had gotten back with me so soon.

Ethan – 3:45 p.m. ~ Hey, Sunshine. How are you
?

Excitement spread through me. That was another unique aspect about my boyfriend. Unlike everyone else in my life, he never starred in my dreams. Even conversations I had with Lainey about him didn’t show up in them. Nothing with him was a do-over. I’d missed hearing from him. He wasn’t big about talking on the phone, but ever since he got his phone, he’d been great about texting. Recently though, his texts had slowed to just a couple over the last few days.

Me – 3:45 p.m. ~ I’m doing good! You’ve been kind of quiet. How are things with your parents
?

Ethan – 3:46 p.m. ~ Been working through some stuff. Headed in the right direction at least.

Me – 3:46 p.m. ~ That’s fantastic! I’m so glad to hear it. How
—

Another text from Ethan came through before I could send the question singeing a hole in my thoughts.

Ethan – 3:47 p.m. ~ I wanted to let you know. Looks like I’ll be here a little longer. I know that’s not what you want to hear
.

My anticipation of his impending return deflated. I resisted the urge to text back the next thoughts spiraling through my head.
How much longer?
I miss you so much.
Did you know there’s a winter dance coming soon? I’d love to go together
. My fingers hovered above the keys, shaking from more than the cold. I didn’t want to make Ethan feel guilty about being gone. He needed to work things out with his parents.