The Haunting of Secrets (23 page)

As they work, they’re staring at me
strangely, as if my awakening was an impossible act and now they
aren’t sure how to handle it. Once the tube is out and I am
breathing again on my own, the world around me comes into focus.
Three nurses and a doctor hover around me, spitting out stats as
they push buttons on the numerous monitors surrounding my bed. I
keep waiting for them to ask me questions, but they don’t; they
simply stare at me in wonder. I try to ask a few questions of my
own, but the doctor quickly quiets me and tells me to save my
strength.

I lay my head back onto the pillow. I’ve
never felt more tired in my life. What happened to the flowers, the
lake? Why does every bone in my body feel like it was broken and
then taped back together again? My body is a strange mixture of a
ridged soreness and a Jell-O type feeling. The nurses work, but
keep me sideways glances. What’s happening? How did I get here? I
can’t remember a whole lot from my dream, but I do remember the
flowers, the lake, and the wonderful feeling of peace that
accompanied it. I lick my lips, my mouth is dry like I had
swallowed a pool full of seawater and every inch of my skin was
dehydrated. The nurses and doctor have finally stopped their
ministrations and calmed down. Whereas they all avoided my gaze in
the beginning, every one of them is now staring at me wide-eyed and
open-mouthed.

I take a deep breath to speak, my lungs burn.
“What happened?” I ask. “How did I get here and why are all of you
staring at me? Did I drown in the lake?”

I am met with silence, all the medical staff
in my room still staring at me, but now the stare has changed from
amazement to incredulity. After such peace, the silence in the room
is eerie and the confusion that muddles my brain just makes me
angry.

“Someone better answer my questions now
before I get out of this bed and find a person who will tell me
what happened!” I say furiously.

“You died,” says a shaky voice from the door.
“For five minutes now, you’ve been dead, Aimee. Then you came back
to us. Somehow, you woke up on your own after being dead for five
minutes,” says the voice before dissolving into tears.

The nurses turn in unison to look at who
spoke. As they part, I see my person, my one, and only friend in
this world.

“Dejana!” I breathe happily. “You’re here.
How’s this possible? How did you find me?” I ask ready for
answers.

The nurses excuse themselves from the room
telling me they will be back in a few minutes to check my vitals,
update my records. Before leaving, the doctor made some offhanded
comment about cancelling the coroners. I ignore him, still in shock
from Dejana’s admission. Dejana makes her way to sit in the chair
beside my bed. Her cheeks are red and her eyes are puffy. It’s
clear that she’s been crying.

“Dejana,” I plead. “Please, tell me how I got
here. The last thing I remember I was in a beautiful meadow with
flowers of every kind surrounding me. I saw Logan in a lake and he
was begging me to go with him. I jumped into the water, my only
desire to be with him and I wake up here, in hell.”

Dejana opens her mouth to explain, but her
breath catches and she dissolves into a fit of tears. I wait
patiently, strangely happy that my friend was so bereft by my
apparent passing and subsequent revival. She calms a few minutes
later, wipes her eyes with a tissue from the table beside my
hospital bed, and tries again to explain. “Do you remember where I
found you?” she asks.

I think about it for a second, search my mind
befuddled by painkillers and apparent resurrection, for the answer
to her question. The search is a little bit like swimming in mud.
Suddenly, a bubble in my mind pops and it all comes back to me:
Tyler, the torture room, being stabbed, and Logan kissing me.

“It was Tyler!
” I scream to Dejana,
the memories flooding back into my mind like waves crashing onto
the shore. I sit up and I’m immediately sorry that I did, the pain
in my abdomen reminds me of my injury and forces me back down onto
my pillow.

Beside me, Dejana jumps up, Kleenex in hand,
and concern written all over her face. “Aimee, are you ok?” she
asks desperate to help.

“Yes, I’m fine and I remember everything
before I blacked out. What happened after that? How did you save
me?”

“It was Leah that found you,” says Dejana,
the tears flowing once more. “The flash drive Leah gave you before
she died had the location of the cabin we found you in. Somehow,
she had used the information we gathered about the girls in your
visions and used each victim’s abduction site to pinpoint a small
area where the killer would have privacy and room for a disposal
site. It took me a while to get the information, because Leah had
encrypted it. But as soon as I read what she wrote, I gave
everything to the police at my house. I told them the person that
killed Leah would be there and they immediately went to
investigate. Lucky for you they did, since they found you barely
alive and Logan badly hurt. Tyler was already dead.”

“What about Alex?” I ask Dejana. “Did the
police find Logan’s twin brother?”

Confused, Dejana pauses and looks at me as if
I had grown a second head. “What do you mean twin brother? There
wasn’t anyone else at the cabin apart from you three. You lost a
lot of blood, it would’ve been easy to see two of Logan,” she
responds clearly not willing to believe me.

I stay quiet, keeping this news to myself for
now. The last thing I need is for any doctor to think I’m nuts. By
now, Alex must have realized that Tyler is dead and his plan didn’t
work. That would mean that he’s in the wind. But now that Logan and
I know he’s alive, we won’t be so easily fooled again. I’ll just
find a way to prove it to Dejana later.

“You’re right of course,” I say to my friend.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. What happened after you all
found us?”

Apparently appeased and no longer worried
that I’m losing my mind, Dejana continues to fill me in on the
story. “The police are at the cabin now with dogs searching the
woods that surround the property. They have already uncovered two
bodies. Luckily, an ambulance followed us to the cabin and the
minute they found the basement where Tyler was holding you, they
whisked you and Logan to this hospital for treatment. You were
alive, but barely. Logan has a few broken ribs and some contusions
to his face, but he’s going to be ok. He’s with the doctor now, but
they’ll release him soon. You, on the other hand, were critical
from the moment we found you. The paramedics were able to keep you
alive until you got here, but the minute they raced you back into
the ER you died. The doctor had just told me you were dead when a
nurse came running out and told him that you were awake. I ran back
in here with him. He was so stunned he didn’t even notice me behind
him. It’s a miracle,” she finishes before once again, giving in to
tears.

I sit there, absorbing all that Dejana told
me.
Wow, I died
.
No wonder I feel like shit
. How had
I come back? There’s only one reason I can think of: Logan. I must
have come back for him, come back to become the kind of person I
saw through his eyes. I guess the old saying really is true: love
conquers all, even death.

As if on cue, Logan walks through the door to
my hospital room, a look of complete shock at me being alive,
painted all over his face. He’s holding his right side as he walks,
I can see the tape for his broken ribs through his ripped shirt.
His bruised eye is completely shut, but the blood on his face has
been cleaned and his cut tended to. He smiles at me and I can see
the dimple I love, come out beside his swollen lip. I smile back at
him, his memories buzzing in my head, making me lightheaded and
happy. Logan walks over to my bed and takes my bare hand into his.
Beside us, Dejana gasps in shock since I never touch anyone
willingly, nonetheless with my uncovered hand. I feel a spark, a
sort of electricity pass through us, but I don’t absorb any more of
his memories. Perhaps I only absorb a person’s memories when I
first touch them. I wouldn’t know because I have never willingly
touched anyone twice, not even Mary. But for now I don’t care, I’m
too absorbed in soaking up the pure pleasure I feel of having
Logan’s hand in mine.

“You did it,” he states. “You caught the
killer.”

“No,” I argue. “I caught
you
. Thank
you for giving me back my life, for showing me that a life was even
possible.”

“Anytime.” He smiles brightly as he leans
down and kisses me. It’s a kiss that sends us both flying;
returning us to the perfect peace we found in our perfect lake in
heaven. But this time, it's breathtakingly real.

Chapter
Thirty-Six

~ Unforseen ~

The orderly in charge of Aimee’s needs, sets
down the food tray he was carrying to her room on a random counter
before making his way down the stairs to the door that leads out of
the intensive care unit. David, or The Seer, to those precious few
that know him, leaves as silently as he had arrived, slipping
unnoticed among the staff of Grady Hospital in Atlanta. His best
weapon is his ability to blend in anywhere and with any type of
people. After witnessing the kiss between Aimee and Logan in her
hospital room, he’s fuming. He prides himself on always being
patient, but this situation has absorbed him for years. He simply
has no time for any more disappointments. He had planned for years,
waited for months to see how everything would play out. Yet, he
never foresaw this scenario; never guessed that happiness would be
Aimee’s fate.

However, there will be time to fix it. He
already had to intervene and shoot that boy in the cabin. Only
he
was going to kill Aimee and by God, no one will do that,
but him. That’s her fate. David has plans for her demise, plans
that did not include an easy death by stabbing. None of it would
have been necessary if the damn bomb had done its job in the first
place. He had watched her eat lunch in that cafeteria for weeks. He
knew that she sat in the same place and at the same table every
single day at lunch. How could he have anticipated that on that
fateful day a red-haired boy would take the chair with the bomb
taped underneath it to another table to join his girlfriend? One
redheaded kid ditching class ruined his most carefully laid plan.
But David couldn’t be too mad about it, the boy paid for his
intrusiveness with his life. Still, it should’ve been Aimee’s death
by his hand that sparked his ascension into his new life. She
thinks she’s alone. She thinks he has no memories. What she doesn’t
know is that if he touched her he would see the same thing, no past
whatsoever. Over time, David has learned to use his affliction for
his benefit. Money, revenge, killer for hire, nothing was beneath
him. But his problem of late is that his mind can’t absorb an
infinite amount of memories. His mind has been filled with so many
memories that it keeps short-circuiting, causing his power to
lessen each time. He can already feel the pressure building up in
his brain, the fragile balance held together only by his will.
Aimee’s powers, it seems, are limitless. Her death was to be the
catalyst that leads him to the correct path, the place where he’s
to regain his birthright, his true power. Her death was supposed to
give him back his life.

“Oh well,”
thinks David.
“If at
first you don’t succeed…”

Acknowledgements

An author never publishes without tons of
help. It takes a whole crew of very creative and wonderful people
to bring a book to fruition. Thank you to my readers: Melissa
McDonald, Mary Kay Donovan, Kari Manning, Beth Knight, and Scot
Ferrel. Without you, I never would have known if the book was good
in the first place. To my wonderful editors, Erin Elliott and
Jordan DeGennaro, without your keen eye and creative help I would
have been lost. To my awesome young adult editor, Keely Murk,
without your purple pen and hard love, the story would have so many
holes in it you’d be able to see through the paperback. You helped
me more than you could ever know. Thank you to my wonderful husband
and awesome kids who understood every time Mommy had to write. And
thank you to everyone at Fire and Ice Young Adult Publishing and
Mélange Books, especially my ‘coolest people ever’ group of
authors. You truly are a family and I’m honored that you asked me
to be a part of it.

But most of all thank you, Caroline Andrus.
If it weren’t for you believing in my story and creating the most
amazing book cover imaginable, my dream never would have come
true.

About the
Author

Shelley Pickens is a Spanish teacher by day
and a novelist by night. She’s been in love with everything
paranormal since she can remember. After years of teaching high
school students, she decided to take her firsthand knowledge of
young adults and apply it to her passion for creative writing and
fantasy. When not teaching or writing, Shelley likes to spend time
with her husband and two beautiful children in Atlanta, Ga. Her
escape from reality is her love of complex thriller and science
fiction TV series like Supernatural and Sleepy Hollow. In her spare
time she is an avid watcher of little league baseball. THE HAUNTING
OF SECRETS is her debut novel.

Website:
www.shelleypickens.com

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/shelleypickensauthor

Twitter:
twitter.com/shelleypickens

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