Shattered Dreams by Ellie James

Author:Ellie James [James, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Romance, mystery, Adventure, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780312647025
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Darkness absorbed me. The roar took everything else. I tore for the street, knew it was my only chance. It wasn’t that late. There could still be a car.

Something hard caught me from behind. An arm. Around my chest. Wrenching me back. “No!” I screamed. But another arm joined the first, a hand sliding to my mouth.

“Trinity!”

The scream ripped through the silence, and everything just stopped. Froze. Went blank. The hands fell away and I was falling, going down to the punishing concrete and rolling into myself, and then the hands came back, but not hard like before. Soft. Gentle.

Tentative.

“Trinity—oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Vaguely I was aware of being tugged, of rolling, of my body being shifted, and when I blinked, when I finally hacked through the shadows of my mind, it was my aunt I saw, crouched over me, her hair wild and stringy against the twist of horror on her face.

“Oh, my God,” she said again, and finally other things slipped into the haze of awareness, and I could feel how badly she shook. “What happened—are you okay?”

“There was a man,” I whispered, but even as I said the words, I knew that he was gone. “He was here…”

She gathered me closer, clinging to me as she twisted toward the back of the garage. “I just got here,” she whispered as I tried to breathe. “I didn’t see—”

“Sara?”

Through the fog I made out the older woman from the third floor, who lived directly below us and waited tables in the Quarter. She was running toward us, her face contorted. “My God! Are you okay? What happened?”

Methodically Aunt Sara started to rock, just rock, back and forth. “Call the police,” she whispered. “Ask for Aaron … LaSalle.”

* * *

“I saw her—she was in a small room. It was dark and she was huddled in a corner…”

“You saw her,” Detective DeMarcus Jackson repeated, very slowly. “And were you in this room, too?”

“No, I—” Words shifted around inside me, none of them adequate. I could see the disbelief in Jackson’s and LaSalle’s eyes, even as they pretended to take me seriously. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. One minute I was in the garage, reaching for the towel, then I was … with Jessica.”

“Floating,” Jackson said, throwing back at me a word I’d already used.

Frustration made me want to scream. The two had shown up at the condo with lightning speed. I hadn’t even had a chance to shower—my aunt had barely let go of me long enough to get me a glass of water.

Now, every second dragged, and the more I talked, the crazier I knew I sounded.

“I know you don’t understand,” I said, changing approaches. “And I know you think I’m crazy or making all this up—”

“Trinity!” Sitting next to me, Aunt Sara squeezed my hand really tight. “That’s not true.”

“But I’m not,” I said, despising the way my voice cracked on the words. “It was real. The second I touched the towel, everything just flashed and then

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.