A Gift of Time (Tassamara) by Wynde Sarah

Author:Wynde, Sarah [Wynde, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Natalya worried. She hated it, but she couldn’t seem to help herself, and she hated that, too.

Seeing the future had never been as useful as one might imagine. Oh, sure, she’d probably saved a few lives with her gift. When a seemingly healthy patient walked into the emergency room complaining of a headache, the knowledge that she’d be scrambling to lower his dangerously elevated blood pressure in the near future meant she moved him to the front of the line. But that incident and others like it led to uncomfortable questions and odd looks.

And the silly stuff never worked out. She didn’t know the lottery numbers, probably because she never won so they weren’t important enough for her to remember. She still forgot to bring an umbrella on rainy days. Sports were boring when the winner was never in question and card games lost all their appeal when every turn of the deck was predictable. Not to mention no one she knew would play with her.

No, her precognition had always been more of a curse than a blessing. But losing it left her feeling like she was standing, blindfolded, at the edge of a chasm, where one false move would send her tumbling over the edge.

She stared at the blank canvas in front of her. The underpainting was done and dry, waiting for her to start sketching. A sampling of her drawings of her father was pinned to the wall. The blinds were up, letting in the clear natural light of a wintry Florida day. She had no reason not to get to work.

But her studio didn’t feel right.

Nothing felt right.

It wasn’t because her studio had become Kenzi’s bedroom with startling rapidity. She didn’t mind that she’d had to put most of her paints into boxes to make room for a small dresser to hold the clothes the little girl was accumulating. Or that she’d had to do the tone coat on the canvas outside, so Kenzi wouldn’t have to sleep surrounded by the smell of linseed oil. And sketching while Kenzi played contentedly with the over-the-top dollhouse Grace had brought by that morning ought to be easy. Kenzi was peaceful company most of the time.

But the feeling of foreboding was like ants crawling on the back of her neck, a prickling sense of danger, danger, danger. Without conscious thought, her hand started to move. Quick, light strokes. Fine lines, shading, charcoal angling smoothly across the burnt sienna surface of the canvas. Darker lines, deeper, heavier, almost a scribble of black curves until the charcoal snapped from the pressure and she stepped away from her easel. What the hell?

She glanced at the sketches on the wall. In them, she’d caught her father’s warmth, his lively curiosity, the quality of focus he gave to his conversations as if nothing could be more important to him than the person he was with. It was in his eyes.

This man’s eyes were cold.

She hadn’t drawn her father. But who had she drawn? She’d never seen him before.

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