by Rob Thurman
The New York Times bestselling author of the Cal Leandros series delivers a bold new supernatural thriller where one man’s extraordinary abilities come with an equally phenomenal cost.
Picking up a small, pink shoe from the grass forever changed young Jackson Lee’s life. Not only did its presence mean that his sister Tessa was dead—murdered and stuffed in the deep, black water of a narrow well—but the shoe itself told him so.
Tessa’s death triggers an even more horrific family massacre that, combined with this new talent he neither wants nor can handle, throws Jack’s life into a tailspin. The years quickly take him from state homes to the streets to grifting in a seedy carnival, until he finally becomes the cynical All Seeing Eye, psychic-for-hire. At last, Jackson has left his troubled past behind and found a semblance of peace.
That is, until the government blackmails him. After Jackson is forced to help the military contain the aftermath of a bizarre experiment gone violently wrong, everything he knows about himself will change just as suddenly as it did with his little sister’s shoe.
And while change is constant … it’s never for the better.
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ROB THURMAN lives in Indiana, land of cows, corn, and ravenous wild turkeys—the rural velociraptor at large. Rob is the author of the darkly gritty urban fantasy series the Cal Leandros Novels: Nightlife, Moonshine, Madhouse, Deathwish, Blackout, and Doubletake; the Trickster Novels: Trick of the Light and The Grimrose Path; and the thriller-suspense novels Chimera and the sequel Basilisk.
Besides wild, ravenous turkeys, Rob has three rescue dogs (If you don’t have a dog, how do you live?)—one of which is a Great Dane-Lab mix who barks at strangers like the reincarnation of Cujo, then runs to hide under the kitchen table and urinate on herself. Burglars tend to find this a mixed message. However, the other two dogs are more interested in keeping their food source alive. All were adopted from the pound (one on his last day on death row). They were all fully grown, already house-trained, and grateful as hell. Think about it the next time you’re looking for a Rover or a Fluffy.
For updates, teasers, deleted scenes, social networking (the time-suck of an author’s life), and various other extras, visit the author at http://www.robthurman.net and @Rob_Thurman.
Discover All Seeing Eye, a heart-pounding new thriller by
ROB THURMAN
… the sensational writer whose gripping work New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris described as always having “an engaging protagonist, fast-paced adventure, a touch of sensuality, and a surprise twist that’ll make you blink.”
Only don’t blink—because here, you believe the unseen at your own risk.…
More praise for the New York Times bestselling novels of Rob Thurman
“[Nightlife] is like the illegitimate love child of Lenny Bruce and H. P. Lovecraft.… Dark fantasy fans who enjoy their novels with plenty of smart-ass attitude will find this chaotic and raging debut refreshingly unreserved and impenitent in its over-the-top narrative style.”
—Paul Goat Allen, Explorations: The BN SciFi and Fantasy Blog
“As good as an urban fantasy series can be. Buy it. Read it. I defy you not to love it.”
—Penny Dreadful on the Cal Leandros series
“Supernatural highs and lows, and a hell of a lean over at the corners. Sharp and sardonic, mischievous and mysterious … the truth is Out There, and it’s not very pretty.”
—New York Times bestselling author Simon Green on Nightlife
“The combination of Chandleresque detective dialogue and a lyrically noir style of description is stunningly original. The reader’s attention is captured and held from page one.”
—The Green Man Review on Nightlife
“The plotting is tight and fast-paced, and the world building is top-notch.”
—RT Book Reviews on Moonshine
“Thurman continues to deliver strong tales of dark urban fantasy.… fans of street-level urban fantasy will enjoy this new novel greatly.”
—SFRevu on Madhouse
“A touching story on the nature of family, trust, and love lies hidden in this action thriller.… Thurman weaves personal discovery seamlessly into the fast-paced action, making it easy to cheer for these overgrown, dangerous boys.…”
—Publishers Weekly on Chimera
“Chimera—a contemporary thriller with science fiction underpinnings that blends elements of medical speculation à la Cook and Crichton with the breakneck pacing and psychological suspense of novels by Koontz and Kellerman … powered by Thurman’s signature acerbic wit.”
—Paul Goat Allen, Explorations: The BN SciFi and Fantasy Blog
“If I had only three words to describe this book? They’d be: Best. Twist. Ever.… Go. Buy this book. It will floor you.”
—New York Times bestselling author Lynn Viehl on Trick of the Light
“Just enough action, angst, sarcasm, mystery, mayhem, and murder to keep you turning the pages to the very end.”
—Bookspot Central on Madhouse
“A beautiful, wild ride, a story with tremendous heart. A must-read.”
—New York Times bestselling author Marjorie M. Liu on Trick of the Light
Also by Rob Thurman
The Cal Leandros Novels
Nightlife
Moonshine
Madhouse
Deathwish
Roadkill
Blackout
Doubletake
The Trickster Novels
Trick of the Light
The Grimrose Path
The Korsak Brothers Novels
Chimera
Basilisk
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Robyn Thurman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Pocket Books paperback edition August 2012
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Designed by Kyle Kabel
ISBN 978-1-4516-5222-2
ISBN 978-1-4516-5223-9 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
This dedication can only go to Adam Wilson, Jennifer Heddle, and Lucienne Diver.
You believed I could make the leap.
Watch me jump.
“The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands.”
—Benjamin Franklin
“Truth lies at the bottom of a well.”
—Democritus
ALL
SEEING
EYE
PROLOGUE
I never saw it coming.
Pretty ironic for a psychic, isn’t it? People would say it was what I was paid the big bucks for. It was my job. I should’ve whipped out my damn crystal ball. I should’ve known, but I didn’t. Sometimes you don’t. A sky that turns from blue to green in a heartbeat, while a tornado with your address lands like the hand of God to swat your house to pieces that scatter half a mile away. A simple cough shows up on a chest X-ray as the future shadow of a grave marker. The ocean inexplicably retreats miles from the beach, only to return at a thousand times the fury and blot out the sky itself. And there are days you wake up surrounded by family, and by the time twilight creeps in, you’re alone.
For the rest of your life.
No matter how careful you are, sometimes the bad … the horrific, they sneak up on you. Sometimes they come boiling out of the shadows, out of the dark corners, and there they are. There they goddamn are.
There were no shadows today, but there was darkness, the kind you bury six feet under—in the dirt and in your mind. It doesn’t do any good. That darkness never stays down. It digs its way out, handful by handful. It may take years, but it always comes back. You feel the bloody fingerprints of it on your subconscious as it rips its way free. You hear its choked and gleeful laughter at how you thought you’d left it behind—that you’d dare imagine things could be different.
Because in the end, it would always be the same as before.
It was the same as before.
Right now. Right this moment.
That guy who said you can never go home again? What an asshole.
The sky was the same blinding blue. Exactly the same. The air still with the same choking heat. The grass an identical faded green splotched with crisp dead brown. I’d lived every summer of my life until I was fourteen with that sky, that heat, that ground. I’d lived every day of every year since then knowing I’d never see it again.
Wrong.
Unlike the sky and the earth, which belonged although I didn’t, not anymore, the knife and the shotgun shouldn’t have been there. Couldn’t have been.
It didn’t stop the bright sliver of metal lying on a dusty kitchen counter. It didn’t stop a hand from yanking a shotgun out of a closet with a warped wooden door. Everything in its place—just as it had been the first time.
I saw the slash and spill of blood as the knife—her best knife, her meat knife—hit a throat and sliced. I felt the lead pellets rip into my ribs under my arm as I lunged at a man who had lost his mind to carry the mind of a dead boy instead. It hadn’t done much good. I was on my feet, and then I was falling. I went from the sight of the worn boards and dirty window glass of a rundown shack to that of a stained ceiling. I wished it had been blue summer sky.
From standing to lying in a house as dead as the people who’d lived in it.
From whole to a little less than.
I touched the pain, a player all its own in this game, and my hand came away red. Who knew agony had a color? It did, though, and it made sense that it would be the same as blood. Crimson as the ever-present Georgia dirt turned to liquid mud, the kind to run like a river after a hard rain. I closed my eyes, but the red remained.
The knife had happened before.
The shotgun had happened before.
I didn’t like guns. I didn’t have to be on the receiving end of one to realize that oh-so-fascinating bit of news. I’d recognized that since I held one for the first and last time sixteen years ago.
I heard the shotgun being pumped again. An echo of the past. My past.
I’d known this whole nightmare would end in violence, I’d known it would finish in a pattern of blood and brutality, but I didn’t imagine that it would end here. My own place of violence—my own personal hell.
Home.
And I never saw it coming.
1
A lost shoe. That’s how it began.
It was nothing more or less than that. A shoe, just one small shoe.
At first, I didn’t recognize it, although I should have. I’d seen it hundreds of times on the front porch or lying in the yard, its shine dulled by red dust. Tess was a typical five-year-old, careless with her things. Not that she had many things to be careful with. The pink shoes had been her only birthday present. I’d been with Mom when she’d picked them out at the secondhand store in town. She’d paid two dollars for them, but that didn’t stop me from thinking she’d gotten ripped off. Pink patent leather with bedraggled ribbon ties and rhinestone starbursts on the sides, they were ugly as hell and louder than Aunt Grace’s good church dress.
Tessie loved them, of course. She wore them everywhere and with everything, even when we went blackberry picking. With hands stained berry purple and hair in lopsided pigtails she’d done up herself, she would skip along in denim overalls, shirtless, ignoring the thorn scratches on her arms, and beam at the sight of those damn awful shoes.
That’s where I was walking home from, selling the blackberries. I had a stand up at the main road. It wasn’t much to look at, a few boards I’d clapped together. A strong wind could take it down and had once or twice in a good old Georgia thunderstorm. I sold paper bags full of plump, gnat-ridden berries for a dollar to people driving by. Sometimes Glory and Tess hung around and helped, but usually not. Five-year-old twin girls don’t have much patience for sweltering in the sun in the hopes of making a couple of bucks. Besides, today was a school day. Glory was at kindergarten. Tess, with a bad case of chicken pox and spotty as a Dalmatian, was stuck at home, and I was skipping. I’d get my ass busted for it, no way around that, but it was for a good cause. A skinny teenager, I was two years away from my license and probably four years away from filling out. If I ever wanted to date, money was all I was going to have going for me. Cast-off clothes and home haircuts weren’t the way to any cheerleader’s heart, not in my school, anyway. Not that cheerleaders were the be-all and end-all of what I wanted out of life. They weren’t, but they’d do until graduation.
Mom worked bagging groceries; it was the same place she’d worked since she dropped out of high school pregnant with me. Boyd, my step-dad, worked on holding the couch down. He was on disability, a “bad back.” Yeah, right. I remembered when he’d gotten the news. It was beer and pizza with his buddies for a week. You would’ve thought the fat bastard had won the lottery. That bad back, along with a near-terminal case of laziness, might have kept him from working, but it didn’t keep him from other things. I rubbed the swollen lump on my jaw as I walked and then fingered the four dollars in my pocket. I liked the feel of that a lot better.
“Dirt poor” wasn’t a new phrase, not in these parts, but it was a true one. That wasn’t going to be me, though. I sold blackberries, delivered papers in a place where most houses were at least half a mile apart, and had an after-school job at the same grocery as my mom. It was hard work, and there wasn’t much I hated more than hard work. But I did like money. One day I was going to figure out how to get one without doing too much of the other. I had plans for my life, and they didn’t involve rusted-out cars or jeans permanently stained red by Georgia mud. I had plans, all right, and plans required money. But it wasn’t going to be made by sponging off the government like Boyd. No, not like that sad sack of shit.
He was lazy. I could swallow that. No one knows lazy like a fourteen-year-old kid. But if I could make myself work, so could he. Instead, he squatte
d on the couch, scratching his balding head and blankly watching whatever channel happened to be coming in that day through our crappy antenna. He yelled a lot at the girls and me, during the commercials. And on occasion, if he was drunk or bored enough, he would lever himself off the worn cushions to back up his bark with some bite. He was careful not to break any bones. Boyd might not be smart, but he wasn’t stupid, either. Coyote-sharp cunning lay behind the cold blue eyes. That same cunning held his large fists from doing the type of permanent damage that would draw the eye of the police. He hadn’t touched the twins yet, and he wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let the son of a bitch get the chance. Girls were different. Girls were good … well, I amended as I scratched the bite on my calf, mostly good.
As for me, black eyes, bruises, some welts. No big deal. Teenage boys were troublemakers, right? We needed keeping in line. I might not have believed Boyd about that, but my mom didn’t say a word when he pounded the message home. She’d only smooth my hair, bite her lip, and send me off with ice wrapped in a worn dish towel. She was my mom. If she went along with it, it must be true. Boys needed discipline, and a good smack upside the head was the usual way to go about it. I told a kid at school that once, not thinking anything of it. Why would I? It was the way things were, the way they’d been as long as I could remember. But the look that kid gave me … it made me realize, for the first time, that wasn’t the way things were, not always. And when he called me trash, I realized something else. We were trash, and trash hit each other. It was the way of the world. The law of the trailer park. Being trash, I promptly punched that smug punk in the nose so he’d know what it was like to be me.
I didn’t hate Boyd. He wasn’t worth hating. I did despise him, though. He was worth that. A mean-spirited, beery-breathed sponge that did nothing but suck up money. He hadn’t even wanted to make Tess lunch and take her temperature for a couple of days, but he gave in rather than have Mom miss work and bring home a day less paycheck. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered, that was Boyd all over. Just couldn’t be bothered about anything. Tess and Glory were hell on wheels, no getting around that, but taking care of your kids is supposed to come with the territory. Sure, Tess chattered nonstop from sunup to sundown about anything and nothing, while Glory was sneaky and wild as a feral cat, but that’s who they were. You had to accept it. That’s family. I knew I’d done a lot of accepting in my time. The bite that itched on my calf was courtesy of Glory, and the cartoon Band-Aid over it was from her twin. Two halves of a hellacious whole.