Recalled (Death Escorts #1)(12)
Author: Cambria Hebert

“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.