Destiny Calling (19 page)

“Are you going to explain how a rat opened the window, next?” I turned as Tercet hunkered down, preparing. “Watch out.” I’d forgotten to warn him about her hatred of most men. She’d already assaulted the mailman and hissed at the cable guy when he came to hook it up. She even gave George a wide berth.

It was too late. The cat flung herself at him.

My mouth gaped. Instead of seeing a look of terror on Chance’s face, followed by the thrashing of tiny claws and teeth, Tercet was the one who appeared terrified.

She was looking at me.

Chance smiled and caught Tercet in his arms. “Watch out for what? This little sweetie? I raised this gal. Don’t worry. All the junk in the bathroom scared me, too.” He crooned to the kitten while she clung to him as he stroked her. She nuzzled his chin.

“Very funny.” Narrowing my eyes at the little traitor since she’d yet to nuzzle me. I scowled as he calmed my little savage beast.

I stalked into the kitchen and turned on the light then stopped in my tracks, all thoughts of Tercet evaporated, and a cry escaped my lips.

Chance walked up behind. “Don’t worry, if you ask nicely, I might help you with the dishes.” He spotted the table. “What’s that?”

The kitchen table had papers shredded all over it. I picked up a piece. “My pictures.” My breath quickened as I looked at the walls where the frames hung. They were pathetically empty. The torn remains of the cheap, bent cardboard on display. The memories I’d been collecting treated like the trash they were.

“Hope?” Chance laid his hand on my shoulder.

I picked up a piece of the photo depicting a mother reaching around a young girl. The mother’s head had been torn off and the eyes of the girl were cut out. The mouths were ripped, leaving a black gaping hole where their smiles had been. The paper eyes were all piled together and beside them, another picture lay cut into a large C and a U. My vision grayed as panic filled me. Someone had been in my apartment. No, not someone, some
thing
.

Chase picked up the empty spice bottle and turned it side to side. “What is all this? And why is ginger dumped all over the table?”

I looked at the pictures cut up and saw the message for what it was.
“I see you, Ginger.”

Chapter Thirteen

“He’s trying to scare you.” Chance sat down at the table, placing Tercet on the floor as he did.

Well, it’s working
, I wanted to say, but kept it to myself. Leaning against the counter, I tried to stay out of the mirror’s reflection so Tessa didn’t decide to pop in.

“I told you not to talk to him.”

“You’re saying this is my fault?” Fatigue overwhelmed me, and my patience level was thin.

Chance held his hands up. “No, I meant you can’t trust them. Griffith was probably trying to lure you—”

“You think Griffith did this?” My voice rose as I gestured to the empty picture frames. A piece of my heart may as well have been ripped out and shredded instead of the pictures of those nameless people.

“You don’t?”

“No,” I said. “It’s obvious Drake did this.”

“How is it obvious?” Chance crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair. “And
who
is Drake?”

“Because he calls me Ginger. He claims to be Griffith’s brother. But I don’t believe him.”

“Wait, he’s Griffith’s brother?” Chance’s mouth gaped.

“He says. But Griffith—”

“So you trust Griffith, but you don’t trust me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Don’t you see he’s not right? He has his own agenda. It’s not just the no smiling thing.”

Of course, he’d notice that. There was probably a smile plastered on his face when he slept.

“There is such a thing as smiling too much. It’s kind of creepy.”

“I’m not smiling now, am I?” He wasn’t, but his lips looked like they were resisting the serious expression he wore and could rebel at any minute.

I rolled my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, they weren’t real pictures, and they were nothing important anyway.”

“No, the pictures meant something to you.” Chance tried to catch me in his gaze. “Why did you take off like that at the bar?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Every time I turn around, I find more family members. You didn’t mention you have a twin brother. Or what, are you going to tell me we’re quadruplets now? I wasn’t even sure it was you, or which was you or…I don’t know.” I put my face in my hands and rubbed my temples.

“I don’t have a twin brother. You left without letting me explain. Now I find out you’re chumming up to these scum instead of your family.”

“I’m not chumming up to anyone.” I sighed into my hands. “I like being alone.”

“Do you? Then why did you come here if it’s not to be with family?”

I smacked my palm on the table. “I came for revenge for Tessa.”

“Don’t you think we want justice? She was our family, too.” Chance looked away, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. “It’s not only about you.”

There’s a difference between revenge and justice, but I wasn’t going to point that out. “I’m exhausted. If you want any sensible conversation out of me, you could use that charm you have to see if Ruthie has any coffee she could spare. I saw the light on in their kitchen.”

“Fine.” His footsteps echoed off the wooden steps as he descended.

I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, meeting my reflection in the mirror and the sea green eyes Chance and I shared. That was where our similarities ended.

“Why did I come here?”

His words had me questioning my motives for blindly trusting Griffith. Was my kinship with Griffith because we shared a shitty, lonely upbringing? Was I petty enough to reject my family because I was jealous? Maybe I had been too hard on Chance.

I changed into comfortable clothes and waited on the couch, trying to keep from nodding off. As I heard footsteps ascending the stairs outside, I opened the door. Chance held two mugs of coffee and clutched a paper bag under his elbow.

“What took you so long?”

“Not what, who,” he corrected. “Ruthie’s sleeping, but George is there and wide awake. That man is always starved for company. The only way I could escape him was by promising you’d stop down and visit him soon.”

I raised my brow.

“What? He’s lonely.” Chance handed me a mug and made a beeline to the kitchen table to drop the bag and plop into a seat. I considered asking him to move to the living room, but the mirror merely displayed a reflection of the kitchen at this time. I folded a leg under me and sat in the chair facing him, careful to avoid the mirror.

“What’s in the bag?” I eyed it, my mouth watering imagining what Ruthie might have conjured, err, cooked up.

“Coffee cake. George insisted I take some.” He laid out napkins.

“I’m glad he did.” I snagged a piece. “Though I’m surprised he’d give you or anyone any.”

“Like I said, the man wants company. I think he used this to lure you to stop down later.” Chance watched me shove coffee cake into my mouth in a very unladylike manner.

I shrugged. “I can be bought for good food. Where’s your friend?”

“What?” Chance took a sip of coffee. “Man, I’m tired. I haven’t gotten much sleep the last few nights. Destiny’s been stressed now that you’re here.” He shrugged. “Then I worry more.” He peered into his cup. “This coffee is good.”

“Of course it is.” I smiled at my Ruthie-like response. “I said, where’s your friend? The one that looks just like you.” I brandished a finger, dropping a few crumbs as I did so. “Now you know how I feel. Don’t tell me I was hallucinating.”

“You weren’t. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think our gifts are growing, now that we’re together.” He sat back in the chair, sipping his coffee. “Have you noticed anything different since you got here?”

“Really? You’re going to have to be more specific.” I thought of all the unusual things I’d seen.

“I mean with you. Your gift we talked about. Has anything changed?”

He waited expectantly for my response with his cup poised halfway to his lips.

“You can trust him. He’s your brother.”
Tessa’s voice invaded my head.

The mirror remained vacant. It irritated me to have someone interrupting my thoughts. Even if I had been wondering whether to confide in Chance, I didn’t need Tessa to tell me. “I can decide myself,” I said to the mirror.

Chance set his cup down, looking from the mirror to me. “Who are you talking to?”

I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, I
have
noticed things. Like how I haven’t had a migraine since…”

“Since what?”

“You asked for it.” I nodded.
Maybe it would sound less crazy if I blurted it all out at once.
“Since I started hearing voices and talked with Tessa in the mirror, even though she’s dead but apparently can pop into what she calls
The Kitchen
, when she feels like having a chat.” I gestured to the mirror, which housed nothing but the reflection of the other side of the room and Chance’s incredulous expression.

“And you were freaked out over me?” Chance took a bite of his coffee cake and tried to snag mine before I intercepted him with a smack on his hand.

“Well, at least as far as I know, there’s one of me. I had nothing to drink all night, but I was definitely seeing two of you.”

“I knew you needed me. I don’t know how, but I did.” He ran his hand through his hair. “But I didn’t know where you were.” He slouched back into the chair. “I’d forgotten to charge my phone and debated whether to go to your apartment or the bar. I remember thinking it’d be nice if I could be in two places at once, then there was another one of me standing beside me.” He stood to pace around the living room. “You know how people say they wish they could clone themselves and how cool that would be?”

I nodded.

“Well, it wasn’t cool. At all.” He shook his head. “It was weird. Like I was me, but there were two of me. I was present in both bodies. I didn’t want to waste time figuring it out, because I was concerned about you and your safety. So I went to the bar, and the other me went to your apartment. You weren’t here and suddenly the urgency driving me to find you evaporated. I figured whatever the threat had been, it was over.” He shrugged. “My other self, met me at the bar. As soon as you took off like a bat out of hell, the other me disappeared.”

I struggled to keep my expression neutral. “That sounds so weird hearing you explain it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don’t remember thinking I needed you, but I could have used you there, I guess.” I recalled Drake’s taunting, and his efforts to invade my mind. Although, I wasn’t sure what Chance could’ve done about Drake. “Why didn’t you ask Destiny to go to one of the places, and you to the other?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I told you about Destiny’s gift of seeing the future, right?”

I nodded, again wishing I’d gotten Destiny’s gift. Maybe I could’ve saved Tessa and then gotten her out of there instead of arriving too late with no knowledge about my own abilities to do anything.

“Knowing the future is a lot to handle. Not knowing when something is going to happen, or even if it’s
going
to happen, because sometimes things change. When Destiny and I learned about our gifts, she was ecstatic, thinking she could make a difference in the world.” He hung his head.

“That was before she learned about the limitations of her gift. She’d tell people about her visions.” He paused. “Most thought she could be a little eccentric.
Special
was the word many used, but not in a nice way.”

I’d recalled that term, and others, more times than I could count.

“A few laughed in her face. Then the event didn’t happen, if one little thing changed to move its course. Kind of validated Destiny didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Kids can be cruel,” I said, thinking about my own childhood.

“It wasn’t the kids. Kids can accept what they don’t understand. They still believe in magic, but adults, not so much. Or there were people that did believe Destiny, but wanted to use her ability. They’d ask her to give them lottery numbers, stocks or thought she’d be able to find lost loved ones. They harassed her constantly.”

My cheeks warmed, recalling my comment about the lottery.

“Despite it all, Destiny tried to make a difference, to help people. She said it was her purpose. We knew this, but then people started dying. As her gift grew stronger, she had visions warning of illness and death but never knew how far in advance the visions were. Imagine if she told you to be careful crossing the street because she saw you getting hit by a car?” Chance paused. “But she couldn’t tell you when. Do you know how many streets you might cross in a day? A week?”

“Still, it’s a wonderful gift.” I finished my coffee and curled my other leg under me.

“I think so. But Destiny...” He shrugged. “Not so much. You haven’t been here long, but if you do a little research, you’ll find there are a lot of unusual deaths here. Most seem like suicide or freak accidents. But many aren’t.”

“What is it then?”

“The Oppressors. It’s what they do. You know how you feel when you have a bad day or when you think you’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Or you feel down, so awful you wonder how you have the strength to go on, and think why bother getting up to face another day? Then the next day you get up feeling fine?”

Everyone knew about those days. It’s the reason people drank, or overate…or used
me
to get rid of those feelings they couldn’t shed.

“Our gifts help others to their destiny, to take a chance, to have hope. The Oppressors do the opposite. Make you feel bad, worthless and hopeless. They’re the little voice saying…
Don’t get up, have another drink
.” Chance paused until I met his eyes. “
Take those pills. Put the bullet in the gun. Because no one cares about you.
”

“But why would anyone listen to them?” I thought of the ones I’d seen. The way I felt when they were near. Dirty, slimy, like a shady used car salesman. “Why would anyone even talk to the Oppressors?”

“People can’t see them for what they are. Only you can. They don’t know the Oppressor is making them feel bad. It’s kind of like being in an abusive relationship. You start to blame yourself for all the bad in your life.”