Gifted (Awakening Book 2)

by Jacqueline Brown

  “This is difficult for him,” Sam said. “Siena is not the first person he has known … and loved,”—her voice cracked—“who could see the memories of a place.”

  Jason remained steady beside her.

  “Who else could do that?” Avi asked.

  Sam’s hand held Jason’s arm that was wrapped around her waist. “His mom had the same gift,” she said reluctantly.

  My mind whirled. That was the reason he was terrified. It wasn’t that I could see the past, it was that his mom could too, and his mom was dead.

  I could tell by Sam’s expression she was afraid it would be my fate. Luca’s running from the room told me he feared the same thing.

  Even Gigi and my sisters would not meet my eyes. Only Jason offered me a faint smile before he followed Sam from the room.

  Twenty-Two

  Nobody argued when I told them I was going for a walk. Without me around, they could talk more freely about the oddity I now was, or maybe always had been. That didn’t matter; I didn’t need their thoughts. I needed answers. Answers only Luca and Sam could provide.

  After Sam fled, with Jason following her, we heard their bedroom door close. A minute later her sobs could be heard through the closed door.

  My sisters searched for Luca. When they said he wasn’t in the house but that Jackson was whining by the back door, I excused myself. I needed answers. I needed to find Luca. I drew on my coat, boots, and hat, and escaped the echoing sound of Sam’s sobs. Jackson followed me out. He was the only one who was not, on some level, scared of me.

  As we entered the trail, my feet automatically began to move faster, to run, to free me from the binding earth. For once, I didn’t argue as Jackson sprinted down the trail that led to the beach. The sea was calling to me, as it called to Luca. We were different in so many ways, but not in this one. I didn’t have to wonder where he was.

  As the trail widened, the bright morning sun hovering just above the sea caused my eyes to narrow as they adjusted to the blinding rays. Farther in front of me, white froth spread across the beach, making it appear like snow was floating on top of the churning water. When the trail gave way to the sand, my eyes fell on Luca. It was as if he’d been waiting for me. The tide was high; there was not much room for us on the beach, so Jackson and I stuck to the edge of the forest—where the dead winter grasses met the waves. Jackson was trotting in front of me, cautiously avoiding the splattering of the waves. He was smart enough not to get wet on cold days. Together we made our way to the center of our cove. Luca sat on the edge of the forest, his feet resting on rocks with icy water lapping gently around them.

  As I approached, he said, “I’m sorry I ran.” The sound of the waves muffled his childlike voice. “I needed the sea.”

  “Me too.” I sat beside him, my coat long enough to keep the snow from wetting my pants.

  “Have you and your grandmother ever talked about that restaurant? I mean, when you were younger or anything?” he said eagerly, as if he’d been waiting for years to ask that question.

  “No,” I said, wishing I could answer differently. “I would’ve remembered something like that, even if I was young when she told me.”

  Luca stared out at the sea. Jackson went to him and placed his head on Luca’s lap. Luca placed a hand on the dog’s head, hungrily accepting the support and warmth Jackson offered.

  “I was hoping you had imagined those things last night. I thought you had. There was nothing I could find out about it. But after what Gigi said … there’s no way ….” He lowered his head against his bent arm.

  “No way I could have randomly imagined the right details,” I said as a wave rolled toward us, bringing a heap of brownish-yellow foam with it.

  His body slumped forward, his head going onto his hands. His elbows rested on his knees. He looked beaten; life had beaten him.

  “What am I?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.

  “You’re a woman who’s been given a great gift,” he said solemnly.

  “Then why is your aunt crying uncontrollably, and why did you run from our house, and why … why does it feel like I’ve been given a death sentence?” I said, my voice far from steady.

  He put his hand on top of mine.

  “It is a gift,” he said. “But gifts can be dangerous.”

  “You have a gift … and so does Sam. Maybe I’m like you,” I said with forced hopefulness.

  “Your gift is not like mine. It’s like ….” He didn’t have the strength to form the words.

  “Your mom’s,” I said, raising my voice above the sound of the waves. “Sam told me. She told us right before she ran out of the room and started sobbing.”

  “It’s a lot for her. And for me, if I’m being honest.”

  “You told me last night your mom was a psychic, a medium. That’s not what this is. I can’t tell the future or talk to spirits.”

  Luca offered a sad grimace that he meant to be a smile. “That’s how it started for her. That’s what lured her in.”

  I tilted my head, asking for an explanation.

  He poked at a rock with his boot, and the water rushed into the space. “She could always sense evil. That was something she was born with, the same as Aunt Sam … the same as me. But she was different. Evil didn’t make her sick like it does me and Aunt Sam. She could sense it, but it didn’t bother her. Whenever we were where evil had existed, I felt it, but it was distant—faded like an old forgotten memory. She would try to sense it, to understand it. She saw its past.”

  My mouth became dry. Some part of me was the same. When I saw Thomas’s bloody arm or the children in the attic, I didn’t pull away. I wanted to see more, to understand what was in front of me.

  “Did your mom want to be near evil?” I asked, hoping the answer would clearly distinguish her from me. After all, I didn’t seek evil, as Thomas had done.

  “No,” he said, his shoulders dropping a little. “I don’t think it was that. I think she could sense something and she wanted to know what it was. Like a mystery to solve. Like, if there was a tiny piece of something sticking out of the sand, you’d dig deeper to try and uncover it.”

  My back straightened. We were the same.

  Beside us, Jackson whined. Could he sense my discomfort, the fear I felt?

  Luca spoke. “Interacting with the spiritual world is like a muscle. The more you do it, the better you are at it—for better or for worse. For many, that leads to better. For her, it did not.”

  “Why …”—my voice cracked—“why not?” I had to understand what led to the destruction of this woman Luca loved, this woman … like me.

  “She began to call on the spirits to help her understand what happened in these places,” he said, using his fingers as quotation marks for the word spirit. “They were not good spirits, as she believed.”

  “Demons,” I said, his words from last night fresh in my mind.

  He nodded slowly, painfully—these were not pleasant memories. These memories ultimately led to his mother’s death.

  “It was Aunt Sam that told her how dangerous it was. This is what they fought over. It’s why Aunt Sam moved up here. She’d already met Uncle Jace online, but I doubt she ever would’ve come up here to him if she didn’t have to leave.”

  “Your mom kicked her out?” I said, surprised that anyone could ever be mean to Sam.

  “No, Mom loved her. Aunt Sam was the only family she had, the only family we had. She wanted her to stay. I wanted her to stay,” he said, the heartache of the past evident on his face. “But Aunt Sam’s like me. She could feel the evil beginning to invade our house. She had no choice. She couldn’t stay. She begged my mom to let me come with her.”

  “Sam left you there?” I pictured Luca as a young boy, left alone, surrounded by evil.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Luca said. “Aunt Sam was more sensitive to it, more aware of it than I was—at least back then. She was sick whenever she was near Mom, and Uncle Jace offered her a good life up here. Wh
at choice did she have? She loved my mom and me. I never doubted that. I understood why she had to go,” he said. “Plus, I was a kid. I loved my mom and didn’t want to leave her.”

  “If Sam was so sick around your mom, why weren’t you?” I was grateful for the bright morning sun and calm ocean. They kept me steady in a world that was anything but.

  “I wasn’t as sensitive back then. So things weren’t that bad for a long time. Only toward the end did it become too much for me. Then, I did my best to stay away from the house. I went to school, did my homework outside, anything I could to stay out of the house or at least out of the sunroom, where Mom saw clients. That’s where it was the worst.” His body shook in a spasm at the recollection.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was manageable for a long time. She still had her other job. She did this on the side. The evil was not … all-consuming. It didn’t start to get really bad until my dad stopped sending child support. Then she felt she had no choice.”

  “He couldn’t afford to help you anymore?” I asked.

  “It’s not help when it’s your child. I was his responsibility. But no, he had plenty of money. He simply didn’t want to pay anymore, or maybe his wife didn’t want him to.” Luca shrugged. “Either way, he stopped.”

  “Your mom didn’t make him pay?”

  Luca scoffed. “You make it sound like she could order him around. He didn’t care what she said. She didn’t have the money for an attorney, and he could afford the best. She would’ve lost in court, same as she did when I was a baby. Thank God he didn’t want me, or I’m sure he would’ve gotten full custody. As it was, he got away with paying pennies, compared to what he should’ve paid. But the truth was my mom hated taking money from him. The things he said to her, the things he called her.” Luca rubbed his hair as he lowered his head into his arms. “We’re each responsible for the decisions we make in life, but so much of the darkness she experienced was because of him.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t possessed.”

  Luca sat up straighter. “There were no demons around him, no more than the ordinary amount. They didn’t need to be there. He was creating enough evil on his own.”

  I was sorry for all that Luca had been through and for what his mom had experienced in this life. Sorry, too, for the pain his father had caused, all on his own.

  “His checks were never much, but with Aunt Sam gone and no money from him, it was hard for Mom to make rent. That’s when she quit her other job and became a psychic full-time. Things went from bearable to unbearable pretty quick at that point.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to the beach,” he said sadly. “If I wasn’t in school, I was at the beach.”

  “What about friends?”

  “I didn’t have many. None, really. No one was ever mean to me or anything. To be honest, I felt invisible, which I guess is better than being actively disliked. The truth is, I didn’t fit in. Never had. The beach was my friend and my family. I could walk to it from our house, so that’s where I went when the school bus dropped me off. It’s where I was as the sun was rising and setting on Saturdays and Sundays.

  “Eventually, I sort of made friends with the guys who fished in the waves. We never talked about anything other than fishing, but they taught me how to fish. Aunt Sam sent me a little bit of money for birthdays and Christmases. Eventually, I had enough for a pole. Then I could at least start providing some food for the two of us. But it was too little too late,” he said, staring out at the fluffy clouds gliding toward us, low above the ocean.

  With them came warmer air than that of the forest at our backs. The slight warmth felt like a gentle caress against my cold, reddened face.

  “What happened to her?” I asked, with a steadier voice than I thought possible. She killed herself. This I knew; we all did. But why? How could a mother leave her child, especially a child as good and kind as Luca?

  He picked up a stick that floated toward him. The icy water dripped onto his hands as he held it. “The darkness that Aunt Sam felt, that I felt—it went from being outside of her to being within her.”

  “She was possessed?” I gasped, remembering Thomas. Had Luca experienced that level of evil twice in his life?

  He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t that it owned her like it did Thomas. Her body wasn’t theirs to control. It was more like … she was a glass filled with darkness. It was destroying her. I tried, but I couldn’t get within fifty feet of her without my head pounding and my stomach lurching. Except for one night.” He grimaced with a mixture of sorrow and gratitude. “The night before she died—I’m not sure what happened—it was a gift … from God, I guess. A gift to her or me, I’m not sure.”

  “It was a gift to both of you,” I said, tears beginning to burn my eyes. Somehow I knew part of the story he was about to tell. The part where the darkness faded and she was able to love her son.

  He clasped his hand over mine. “She returned that night. I had my mom back, her true, good being—for the first time in years I wasn’t alone.”

  Tears ran down my face. Luca sniffed.

  He’d already lived this story—but I was living it for the first time, with him. My heart was breaking for the man who sat beside me. The man I once thought was a creep. Now I questioned what life would be like without him.

  “We talked all night. I hugged her. I was almost eighteen, and I was hugging her and crying like a little kid, begging her not to return to the darkness. Begging her to stay with me as she was in that moment. Begging her to be my mom.”

  I clasped his hand with both of mine. “She didn’t stay?” I said, tears dripping into the ocean that surrounded our feet.

  “We were up all night. She believed the spirits who spoke to her were what they told her—angels. She believed she was helping people and the angels. But she agreed to stop if it meant that much to me.”

  “What happened?” I asked, feeling the tension build in his body.

  He squinted away the tears. “She didn’t … she didn’t have a choice. When the sun rose, it all came back. The evil, all the horrible things around her were back, and even stronger than before. I had to leave. It was like a magnet pushing me away. But it was different. This time she recognized what it did to me. She saw how much pain I was in. I tried to hide it from her but I couldn’t. I vomited as I ran out the front door. She tried to come to me to comfort me, but every step she took made me sicker. Finally, she stopped trying.

  “In that moment I had the sense that the full weight of her actions became clear to her—all she’d done to me, to herself … to us. As sick as I was, the most pain came as I watched her struggle with the knowledge of her actions.”

  “What did you do?” I whispered over the murmur of the ocean.

  “The same thing I did today. I fled to the only consistent home I’ve ever had, the beach.”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “She died that day.”

  I turned my head away in anguish.

  “I came back to check on her before sunset. There was a police car in my driveway. My entire body started to shake.”

  “You knew?” I asked, tears streaking my face.

  Luca was silent, watching the waves. Then he said, “There was a live oak not far from our house. She loved that tree. Its limbs canopied the road.”

  He stared at the waves, unseeing. “Every year for my birthday, she made me stand in front of that tree and she’d take a picture. Not the last couple of years.” He inhaled and exhaled. “In the end, maybe its beauty called to her, or maybe it was too much for her to be reminded of what she’d lost—of what she threw away without realizing it.”

  After a deep breath he said, “Her car was found smashed against the tree. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt.”

  Sobs rocked my body. She and I were the same—the thought swirled in my grief. No, I thought defiantly, never would I leave him like she had done. Never would I allow the darkness to invade my being so completely t
hat I’d abandon him to go through this world alone.

  “A note was in the kitchen. One of the officers found it when she went to get me a drink of water. Mom’s writing was barely legible, like she was fighting against herself to write it. The paper was stained with tears. She begged me to forgive her. She said Sam would come for me, that I’d be better off with her.”

  My salty tears seeped between my lips.

  “I slept under that live oak,” Luca said. “I didn’t leave it for a day or two, or maybe three, I’m not sure. I was in shock, I guess. I didn’t eat or … or think clearly. I just sat under the tree. Aunt Sam found me there. When I saw her, I lost it. She hugged me and I fell apart—I guess, because I could. I finally had someone to hold me. She walked me back to my house. It was a few blocks away, but I never could’ve found my way without her. When I stepped through the door of our house, I collapsed. All I could think about was my last night with my mom.”

  He looked toward the heavens. “I wanted her back. I prayed it was a dream, a horrible nightmare. It wasn’t fair.”

  My tears for his loss mixed with the tears I cried for my own loss. None of it was fair, not to him or me or our moms. They loved us and evil took them from us.

  “No,” I said, “it isn’t fair.”

  He put an arm around me. “I’m sorry you know how unfair it is.”

  I wrapped my arms around his chest. He kissed the top of my head. His chest rose with the slow inhalation of breath.

  “Aunt Sam forced me to eat something, crackers, I think, while she packed my stuff in garbage bags. I sat at the kitchen table, the spot where my mother always sat, until Sam came and got me. She didn’t take much, which was good, I guess, since what she did take was burned up a few months later. She left a check for the landlord, both our keys on the kitchen table, and led me to the car.

  “At the cemetery, the urn was waiting for us next to a tiny grave marker. Aunt Sam placed it in the ground. She pushed the little pile of dirt around the urn, covering it. Her hands turned brown—she didn’t wash them. I remember that, even as she drove and I fell in and out of sleep, I remember how dirty her hands were.”