Read Watch Me: Teen Paranormal Romance (A Touched Trilogy Book 3) Online
Authors: Angela Fristoe
Watch Me: Teen Paranormal Romance (A Touched Trilogy Book 3)
Watch Me (A Touched Trilogy)
by
Angela Fristoe
©2015 Angela Fristoe
To my family for their unfailing love and support
To Rebecca, Sheree, April, Linda, Marge, Susan, and Rhonda, and all of the amazing writers at TNBW who have pushed me to never settle for anything less than my best
Table of Contents
“I want to see them.” Zoe winced, a hoarse croak struggling from her lips. Hours of laboring had torn her throat ragged. She fought the urge to close her weary eyes. “I want to see them. I need to.”
He went to the door and spoke to a nurse outside the room. Zoe gazed at his strong features when he returned to her side. “They're bringing them now.” Even as he said the words, three nurses entered the room rolling the carts.
Her babies.
Michael handed her the first baby, and she cradled it in her arms, smoothing a hand over short raven curls. “Phoebe, my little truth teller.” The baby’s eyes opened and the deep blue twinkled as Zoe whispered, “I love you.” She knew.
“Truth teller?” Michael asked. He nuzzled Phoebe's hand that wrapped around his finger.
“She knows I'm telling her the truth. It's her gift. To hear the truth of the words.” Zoe gave her another kiss on the forehead. “Tomorrow and always I'll be with you.”
Zoe looked up at Michael, his face lined with worry. “Don't worry. Everything is fine.”
Phoebe's little face scrunched up as she gave a small whimper.
He gently lifted her and put her back in the rolling crib, then picked up the next baby, placing her against Zoe’s chest.
“Chloe, my sweet seer.” Their eyes met and Chloe gave a cry filled with fear and sadness, her fingers clutching desperately at Zoe.
This time she ignored Michael's questioning gaze. She couldn't share with him what Chloe had seen. It still hurt too much to think that her sweet baby would forever hold with her the images of what was to come. But Chloe would be strong, maybe the strongest of the three girls. She pressed a kiss to Chloe’s head and passed her to the nurse then leaned over to take the last baby from Michael’s arms.
“Lily,” She said, placing her over her heart. Warmth flooded Zoe and she smiled weakly. “My healer.” Lily's little heart beat fiercely and Zoe rubbed her hand along Lily’s back as she began to wail. “I'm sorry, little one. You’re not strong enough yet.”
Gradually, Lily’s wail subsided into a soft mewing and her eyes fluttered closed. Michael lifted her from Zoe’s arms, placing her back on her mobile bed, and the nurses wheeled the babies out of the room. Zoe wanted to scream and cry for them to come back, to let her hold her girls just one more time. But there was no strength left in her. This time when her eyes closed she didn't fight. She let them fall as a tear slipped down her cheek. A hand gripped hers and a panicked voice began shouting. Michael. Girls. Be strong.
I don’t stare at guys. I let them do the staring, but in this case I couldn’t help it. Bastian was my sister Phoebe’s new friend. There wasn’t anything spectacular about him really. He’d moved to town a few weeks back and, after fixing Phoebe’s cell phone when she managed to break it by simply turning it on, was granted access to her little group of friends.
He wasn’t ugly or deformed, but he wasn’t the kind of guy girls were panting over either. Definitely not my type. He was just kinda weird. Tall and skinny, his hair was a bit too short, his clothing looked like he bought them second hand, but he was just a bit too nerdy to be hipster.
What had me staring was the haze surrounding him. That was new. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it right away. The cloud blocked out almost everyone near him, thicker where it was closest to him and then thinning to a faint white puff about five feet all around him.
Most peoples’ future was right there, hovering about an inch or so around them. I was usually careful enough to avoid touching it and if I had to, I could push through without catching a glimpse. It was something that had become increasingly difficult lately though. I wasn’t sure if my ability as growing stronger or if I was getting sloppy, but it was getting harder to avoid reading the people around me.
Thank God, he was on the other side of the classroom. I wasn’t in the mood for a serious slide show of his future. That sounded selfish, or at least Lily, my other sister, would have said so, but sometimes what I saw was best left unseen.
I tore my gaze away and focused on Mrs. Ellis. Her class was never anything to get excited about, although it would probably be hard for any teacher to make calculus exciting. If Mr. Hanes taught it, I’d at least have something to look forward to. He was super hot and considering this was his first year teaching, he wasn’t much older than us. Sucked for most of us girls that he only taught senior level German and every one of his classes was full.
She stood with her back to us, scrawling the assignment on the whiteboard. Leaning over my book, I started writing down the page numbers. In front of me, Nathan groaned as he copied our homework down. I couldn’t help the smile that crept across my face. Nathan had been dating Phoebe for almost a year now and he was as big a slacker as she was when it came to school.
Then Nathan flopped back in his chair and into my zone. The classroom faded back and Phoebe’s bedroom settled around me. Nathan lay on the bed with Phoebe draped over him. Way too much bare and flushed skin for me to not know what was going on. There is a flash of the bedroom door opening and they look back at it. My dad stands in the doorway. I hadn’t seen his face that red since he’d fallen asleep on the beach six years ago during a trip to Hawaii.
Nathan sat forward, pulling his future away with him. I gave a snicker and kicked his desk. He glanced back, one eyebrow raised.
Given a choice, I would’ve gladly avoided seeing that.
“My dad is going to kill you.”
He sat up straight, panic crinkling his forehead. “Why? What did you see?”
“Chloe? Nathan? Is there a problem?” Mrs. Ellis asked as she turned from the board.
“No,” I said, giving Nathan an evil smile.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, because I did. Nathan was a great guy. Teasing him was more about how he’d tell Phoebe what I said and it would drive her crazy. She hated when I peeked into her future, even if I had saved her ass a few times from the full brunt of her errors.
Falling into Nathan’s future was exactly the lack of control I’ve been struggling with. This school year I’d had to drop the cheer squad. Each time we performed a lift, I’d start reading the person I was touching and zone out. For a while, I thought I’d be able to keep things under control, to push through it like I always had. Then I dropped Vivian during a stunt. Phoebe thought it was hilarious that her archenemy had literally fallen on her ass in front of the entire school, but I’d felt guilty knowing the drop could have end with much worse than a bruise for Viv.
With my assignment written down, my gaze wandered back to Sebastian. He was watching me through the haze. Not that he could see it.
As nosy as I am, minding my own business was the best decision. And that was exactly what I was going to do this time with Sebastian. The bell rang and still I couldn’t pull my eyes away. Knowing better did little to end my curiosity. Sebastian gathered his things and walked across the room and to the door. His future came so close to me I could have simply reached out and for a second as he passed I would have had a glimpse.
“You planning to stick around for the next class?”
I glanced up at my best friend Nadine, missing my opportunity to see into Sebastian’s future, and gave her a vague nod. My original plans had been to veg at home, maybe even watch one of my favorite cheesy romance movies, but saying no to Nadine was hard. We’d been best friends for nearly two years and I knew if I backed out she’d be pissed.
She flipped her blond hair over her shoulder and gave me an expectant look. I shook my head and grabbed my things from under my seat. “No. Just feeling a bit spacey, I guess.”
I’d been ditching her a lot the past few weeks. Visions of the future came with a hard price. Most of them stayed unspoken. When I was younger, I reveled in the power knowing the future gave me over people. To have them actually listen to what I said, because according to them I had some weird sixth sense. It was how my sisters and I had ended up with the Freaky Matlin Triplets title.
Black and white. That’s the future. I know, because it’s how I’d always seen it. If I saw it, it happened.
Most people, though, aren’t prepared to hear that their lives are predestined or that they were going to do certain things they never thought they’d do. What I’d seen in Nadine’s future had crushed me. Her betrayal of me would be so complete that it was hard to look at her and know what was coming. But how do you tell someone you can’t be friends with them because of something they haven’t even thought of doing yet? There was no way I could tell her the truth.
Besides, my friendship with Nadine would lead to certain parts of my own future happening. Without her, I wouldn’t get into Berkley next fall. Without her, I wouldn’t have the worst night of my life that would show me how little the word love meant to some people.
Black and white.
There wasn’t supposed to be any gray area. There wasn’t supposed to be anything that wasn’t right. Yet everything I saw had started shifting just a bit left of center. The first time had been with Phoebe a year ago. Parts of her relationship with Nathan hadn’t gone according to plan. My visions had had smoothed out for a while, almost going back to normal, and then Lily’s boyfriend Dylan died right after I told her they’d be going to prom together. I still didn’t understand how I could have been so wrong.
A few times over the past year, I saw things that hadn’t happened and never would. It terrified me to think of how many my visions had been off. I wanted my black and white back. Even if it meant hiding behind a fake smile and standing next to the girl who would help rip my heart out.
We walked toward the cafeteria and Nadine told me all about the new cheer they were working on. It made me sad to think of everything I was missing out on now. At the beginning of the school year, we had managed to convince the academic counselor we needed to have similar schedules in order to facilitate our cheerleading practices. What they hadn’t known was I was off the squad.
Cheering had been such a big part of my life. Now I struggled to find things to fill my time because really, there’s only so much shopping a girl can do when she’s broke. I tried writing like Lily, but that had bored me nearly as quickly as it had Phoebe. I even considered trying to draw like Phoebe, an idea that lasted all of two seconds before I remembered I was the least artistic person I knew.
“It totally sucks.”
I glanced at Nadine, realizing I’d tuned her out. If Nadine complained about the suckiness of something, then it probably did.
“I can’t believe Mr.
Gutierrez
is making us do an essay this weekend. He knows there’s a game tomorrow. I don’t have time to write a thousand-word narrative about the circletor system.”
“Circulatory. Do you have practice this afternoon?” I asked as we settled at a table and I pulled out my container of chicken caesar salad.
“Yeah, Mia is filling in as base since you deserted us, but she’s really struggling. She almost dropped Vivian the other day.” She shuddered causing her long blond ponytail to swish behind her. I didn’t doubt her horror at picturing what could have happened, definitely something worse than when I had dropped Viv. We’d been lucky she’d only bruised her arm that time. She could have died.
“I can help if you want,” I offered.
“Seriously?” Nadine perked up. “You’ll join the squad again?”
“No, I meant help you write the paper.”
Rejoining the cheer squad was out of the question. As much as I missed being a part of that group, I couldn’t risk someone getting hurt because I zoned out in the middle of a stunt.
“Oh, come on, Chloe. Please? Please, please, please?”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t.” I wanted to explain, but there was no way to do that without telling her the truth and I couldn’t. She started to argue, but the arrival of Bianca cut her off.
“Your sister is turning into a complete drag,” Bianca said, sliding onto the bench across from me.
“Which one?” Nadine asked.
“Phoebe,” I answered before Bianca could say anything. Bianca would never complain about Lily like that because Lils was just too sweet to be a drag. Phoebe on the other hand possessed the ability to drag anyone down with her if she felt like it. Although, I had a feeling Bianca was thinking more about how boring Phoebe had become. “What’s she doing now?”
“She totally ditched me for Nathan. Again. I wish they’d just do it and then she’d get over it. I mean ever since you told her they were gonna do it and then they didn’t, she’s like waiting for it to happen. It’s the only thing she talks about. Well, that and zombies.” Bianca reached over and grabbed one of the grapes sitting on my tray. “I still can’t believe you told her she and Nathan were gonna have sex. It was awesome.”
That’s what I liked about Bianca. She was friends with both my sister and me, but it was as if she fed off the drama between us, never picking a side for long enough that we got mad. Possibly since her own siblings were way too boring for her tastes.
“I don’t get it,” Nadine said, looking between Bianca and me, confusion shadowing her eyes. “Why would Phoebe believe Chloe about something like that?”
Bianca raised a brow and looked to me. My sisters and I were as far from normal as people got in Beachgrove, California. Besides being triplets who, thanks to the scientific gift of in vitro fertilization, looked nothing alike, we were gifted with some unique abilities.
The youngest by a few minutes, Lily was barely over five feet with curly red hair and a boatload of freckles. She was also a healer, able to heal the emotional and sometimes physical pain of others. She wasn’t quite the miracle worker our uncle was, but she was pretty handy with minor cuts, bruises, and of course Phoebe’s constant teenage angst.
Phoebe, the middle triplet, looked the most like me. She was tall with dark wavy brown hair. As the first in our family to have the truth telling gift, and having it be dormant for the first sixteen years of her life, she was still trying to figure out what that meant. As far as I could tell, she had a voice in her head telling her when someone was lying. Our nanna called it the gift of discernment. I called it the gift of pain in the ass.
As for me, well, I saw the future and, to use Nadine’s oh so eloquent words, it totally sucks.
Not that we regularly advertised our abilities. A lot of kids at school called us the Freaky Matlin Triplets, mostly because when we were younger Lily and I didn’t bother hiding what we could do. We’re a bit more discrete now, but the memories of the things we’d done or said lingered with people. Only a handful of people knew that the rumors were true and only because Phoebe told her friends.
It always amazed me that Nadine didn’t even suspect or pick up on the strange things I said. Although, Nadine was a little light in the intelligence department, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
“Who knows how Phoebe’s brain works,” I said, running my hand through my hair and sweeping the long locks across one side of my face to hide it from Nadine. “I’m of the mind that she doesn’t even have one. And if she does, then it’s not fully functioning.”
Bianca fluffed her purple bangs. “Whatever, let’s talk about something more interesting.”
“Such as?” Nadine asked, and we shared a knowing smile.
“Logan. My dad decided to go spastic last Saturday when I got home. He told me I can’t see Logan again until they meet him.”
“What does that mean?” Nadine asked, oblivious to the fact that such an event was probably the worst and best case scenario for Bianca.
While Logan had a certain slacker boy appeal, he also had the exact type of style that would drive Bianca’s parents up the wall. Which of course was Bianca’s primary goal.
“It means my parents are in for a shock once they get a load of his piercings, and I’ll end up grounded for the next year of my life.”