Unnatural Occurrence (An Anna Morgan Novella (Part 1)) Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Peggy Martinez

  Cover Art by Najla Qamber

  www.najlaqamberdesigns.com

  Edited by Becky Stephens

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  I normally ignore the recently deceased. I definitely don’t stare at them openly or watch in awe and horror as the colors of their leftover aura meld into and out of them until they slowly fade away, leaving nothing behind but the slightest wisps of energy to indicate that they ever even existed. The dead can’t tell their side of a story. The living can’t see the dead like I can. Of course, I’m not normal. Never have been and never will be. Maybe I could have had a normal childhood. If it weren’t for the accident that killed my dad when I was three and if the very life hadn’t been snatched from my body for over seven minutes before I “came back”…maybe I could have lived a happy and ordinary life.

  But I knew…I knew it was just a matter of time before they came to lock me up in a padded room and threw away the key. I spent my entire childhood trying to avoid that fate, but it was just a matter of time before I could no longer hide the fact that I was different. Just a matter of time.

  On the day of my high school graduation I finally realized a simple truth. No amount of pretending and no amount of ignoring could change the fact that I was different. And it was high time I sucked it up and accepted it as the truth. It was actually a lot easier than I imagined it would be, but I guess that could have had something to do with fact that my momma’s ghost was hovering near her body with her aura already fading to the palest shades of gray as police and other officials walked around. They were taking notes and examining the body as I sat at the kitchen table, not hearing whatever it was they said.

  My eyes were riveted on my momma’s face, and for the first time I was not hiding the fact that I was staring at something no one else could see, at something unexplainable. In that moment, I didn’t care what people thought of me. I didn’t care if they would question why I was staring at nothing. I only cared what it was my momma wanted to tell me, what it was she needed to let me know before she moved on from this world.

  “She didn’t kill herself,” I whispered through my tears.

  “Excuse me?” A young detective named Patterson, with dark brown hair, green eyes, and a dimple in his cheek stepped closer to the table, his eyes sharp and his voice low. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five. Waves of blue aura poured off of him. Sympathy.

  “I said she didn’t kill herself. She wouldn’t have.” I didn’t let my eyes drift away from my momma’s ghost, afraid she’d disappear as soon as I let her out of my sight. After a moment, Detective Patterson’s eyes slipped away from my profile and glanced over at the spot above the body, where I was staring before turning them back to me with a frown between his eyebrows.

  “How do you know that, Anna?” he asked gently.

  “I know because I can…” Momma’s ghost shook her head sadly and placed a blurry finger near her lips. I clenched my jaw as more tears poured down my already wet cheeks. The detective’s eyes glanced between me and where momma’s ghost stood, the frown on his face deepening. “I just know,” I said softly. He sighed deeply before crouching down next to me.

  “I know this is extremely difficult for you, so I won’t tell you how it will all eventually get easier, because the truth is it never gets easier. But I will tell you that I’ll make sure your mom’s death is thoroughly investigated to the best of the city’s ability. To the best of my ability.” I sucked in a sharp breath, my head buzzing with a new realization—his ability would never be good enough. No matter how thorough he was, no matter how deeply he dug into everything he knew about her death, he would never come to the correct conclusion. He’d never be able to really know what happened to my momma, because the only person who had the ability to see past the normal, to look past the everyday explanation was me. My momma’s eyes closed gently and a small smile graced her lips. Her form immediately began to disintegrate.

  As she disappeared before my eyes, I began making plans. I knew right then that if I wanted justice, if I wanted to know what had happened, I’d have to figure it out all on my own. There was no other way. There was no one else. I blinked back my left over tears and looked over to where Detective Patterson was still kneeling beside me. Still watching me. I met his gaze and gave him a small, tight smile.

  “I know you will, Detective. And I’ll do whatever I have to do too.” I stood up from the table and glanced down at my momma’s empty shell on the kitchen floor. I allowed myself full access to my special abilities like I had never dared to before. I opened my eyes wide, and…saw.

  I saw the tiniest flickers of my mother’s life force, her energy, her aura, floating about her body. But more importantly, I saw the strands that I knew would be there. Strands of black aura danced around my mother’s corpse. Death had been here and not the grayness that enveloped all of the newly dead. No, this was an inky darkness that coated my mother’s body, clung to it, reluctant to leave its prize. I heard the Detective calling my name, but I blocked out the sound of his voice as I pushed my ebony hair out of my face and exposed my “bad” eye, focusing it intently on the crime scene. Ah, yes. Something evil had been in my kitchen, something evil and not quite…human.

  In the back of my skull a tingling sensation crept across my scalp, prickling the hair on the nap of my neck. How could I know that? How could that even be possible? My head swam with the implications and I staggered from the awareness that it wasn’t really all that much of a surprise to me. Images, colors, and scents all flashed across my memory, all from the first few years after the accident. All those years I worked to suppress the things I saw with my “extra” consciousness to keep my mother from worrying, to keep my teachers from noticing, and to keep myself sane. The room spun.

  “Whoa there. Let’s get you out of here,” Detective Patterson murmured as he led me out of the kitchen and into our tiny living room with his arm around my shoulders. I sat down on the sofa and stared at the carpet. I knew I had other abilities, but I never realized that other things could have been a possibility. “Anna?” The Detective’s voice seemed more strained than before and I realized that he must have called my name several times. I put a hand out and looked up from the carpet to meet his gaze. His eyes widened slightly as he saw all of me. My eye wasn’t hideous, just surprising. His aura was glowing so brightly that I had to stop myself from shielding my eyes. His aura, light golden in color with a small smudge of black marring its perfection, was intertwining with blue waves of sympathy and helplessness. His feelings beat upon me mercilessly. I winced and looked away from him. I wasn’t used to opening myself so entirely to my “gifts”.

  “Thank you, Detective. I appreciate your kindness. I’ll be okay, don’t worry,” I assured him. He looked at me, watching my face and trying not to stare too long at my eye. I could tell he was concerned about me and just the smallest bit intrigued. I’m not sure why I did it, but, I stood, raised a hand, and ran my palm lightly over his aura, hovering an inch from his face and then down and around the spot over his heart. I watched, fascinated, as his aura danced around the palm of my hand. “You are a good man, Detective.” He stood in front of me with his eyes wide and barely breathing. The tendrils of his aura caressed my wris
t and intertwined with my fingers. I ran my palm back in front of his heart.

  “You’ve been touched by darkness,” I said sadly. He sucked a breath in through his clenched teeth. “That darkness will always be there. It has become a part of you now.” I held his stare and placed my palm flat on his chest. My hand vibrated from the contact. “But, it doesn’t have to be who you are and it doesn’t have to eat away at you as it does now. Search inside yourself and you’ll find the strength you need to move past your fears, past your doubts.” I stepped back from the Detective, suddenly so tired I could barely keep my eyes opened.

  I laid down on the sofa and listened as one-by-one everyone finished their jobs and left me alone in the house. Even though Detective Patterson was hesitant, he too eventually left me. I didn’t have any other family and I was already eighteen, so there really was nothing anyone could do for me.

  I knew that my life had already been altered the moment my mother had been killed. And the moment I decided to open myself to see without restraint since I was a child, I knew I could never go back to the way things were before.

  To go back would be bliss, but not without a cost. To go back would be serenity in darkness, but what kind of life could I lead without the illumination of the truth? To go back would be to choose ignorance over my new reality. No. I would never go back…even if that meant moving forward into the unknown all alone.

  There was one thing that I hated more than crowds, and that was crowds of people my own age and younger gathered in the name of higher learning. I snorted under my breath as I walked quickly up the steps of the building I was headed into. High school had never been my thing and I was pretty sure college was going to be even worse. But after several failed attempts to get a meeting with the man I wanted to talk to, the renowned Dr. Christopher Young, I became desperate. So here I was auditing a class at Duke University against my own sense of self preservation and sanity. After bypassing a group of guys chugging hot cokes and entertaining the idiotic masses by belching the national anthem, I slid into the classroom I was looking for and quickly found a seat in the far back-corner at the top of the amphitheater style room.

  The room filled rather quickly and I realized I’d been wrong in thinking this class wouldn’t have been a popular one to choose. I watched in horror as the majority of the seats were filled in the final moments before the class started. Just before class was to begin, Dr. Young came in with a leather satchel and took his spot near the huge chalkboard at the front of the class. It was immediately apparent to me what held the rapt attention of the class. The good doctor ran a hand through his disheveled auburn hair, pushed his just-nerdy-enough-to-be-sexy glasses up, and grinned crookedly into the crowd. He wasn’t my type, but I could see how some women could lose all their senses in his presence.

  “Well, looks like a full house again this year,” he said, his blue eyes raking across the classroom. The audience sighed audibly. Dr. Young had a thick British accent. Good God. I glanced around the room again and realized that about eighty percent of the class was female. Unbelievable.

  “I didn’t realize how full this class would be,” someone murmured next to me. I glanced over from behind the curtain of my hair. The girl was pretty, with wide, brown eyes and a light smatter of freckles across her nose. Her light brown hair hung all the way to her waist and looked like it belonged in a Pantene commercial. She wore expensive clothing and carried high-end designer accessories. I could feel the nervousness and unhappiness flowing off of her. I wondered what she could possibly be nervous about. She looked like she’d fit in anywhere and probably in any crowd she chose. She fidgeted and I realized she was waiting for me to reply. I shrugged. She turned back to the front without another word. Man, I sucked at socializing.

  “Let’s begin the semester with some basics, to give you some ideas of what we’ll be covering in this class, and more importantly, what we won’t be covering,” Professor Young said with a self-indulgent grunt. “Let me clear up what we will not be covering in this class first. We will not be studying mermaids, fairies, werewolves, Greek or any other mythological gods, and will most certainly not be studying sparkling vampires.” The class laughed at his summary.

  “Can someone tell me one of the topics we will be covering this semester?” He turned, picked up a piece of chalk, and then quickly swung back around. Several hands were in the air. He pointed to someone.

  “Precognition,” a girl in the front answered. The professor nodded and turned around to add the word to the board.

  “Good. Anyone else?” he asked as he wrote. “Yes, you.”

  “Telepathy.” He nodded once again and added that word to the board. By the time the outline points that were readily available to any idiot who signed up for the class were on the board, I was already getting irritated. Precognition. Telepathy. Clairvoyance. Psychokinesis. Near-death and apparitional experience. How was I going to be able to learn anything from the class when he’d probably be covering the same generic crap I could’ve gotten off of the Internet myself? That was the whole reason I’d been trying to set up a private meeting with the man. I didn’t have time for this.

  Forty minutes later, the professor glanced down at his watch and then back up at the class. “Does anyone have any questions?” He began putting papers back into his bag. My hand was the only one in the air. He found my hand in the crowd and pointed to me. Crap. Everyone turned to me. I shrunk down into my seat a bit.

  “What about extrasensory perception?” I asked. His brows rose as everyone turned back to him at the front of the room.

  “Extrasensory perception isn’t something most students are interested in, so I don’t usually get to it by the end of a semester.”

  “What is extrasensory perception?” someone asked from the other side of the room.

  “Extrasensory perception—ESP—is the way it is believed some people can gather information not using one of their normal five senses, but instead a sixth sense of some kind.” He was staring at me now and I recognized the glow of his aura, the way it began to reach for me just a bit to feel me out. He was wondering who I was. He was wondering why I was in his class… I wasn’t the normal type.

  “I’m Anna and I’m here because I wanted to learn more about ESP and how it correlates with a near-death experience. Or death itself,” I said, answering his unasked question. His eyes widened fractionally and his aura pulled back. The entire class was quiet. I hadn’t meant to answer the questions I thought he wanted to ask. Dang it, this was awkward. His eyes left my seat and he clapped his hands together once.

  “Class is over. We will pick this up on Wednesday. Make sure you bring your textbooks and be ready to take notes.” Everyone filed out of the room as quickly as they’d filed in, with only a few brave girls hanging back to make sure they were noticed by the teacher. I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses. I picked up my backpack and slung it over a shoulder. This class had been a horrible idea. I was getting desperate. It had been four years since my mom’s death and even though I taught myself how to use my senses a whole lot better than I used to be able to, I didn’t know enough about my condition to be able to really use it to help me figure out what had killed my mom. I just kept running in circles. There were very few so-called experts in parapsychology. Most were quacks and a lot were paranormal fanatics, waiting for their Lord and Master, Dracula to make them one of the dark chosen. It was disgusting. I marched down the steps, ready to get off the campus and out of North Carolina.

  “Anna, was it?” Professor Young stepped forward, halting me halfway to the door. I nodded.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to bash your class itinerary or anything. I guess I was just hoping for…more,” I said in exasperation. I was getting tired of traveling all over the country and never finding anyone who could truly help me learn more about my abilities.

  “No, don’t worry about that. It was nice to have someone take some initiative and step out of my regular routine.” He studied my face a bit longe
r and I could feel his aura pushing against me again. His eyes focused on my dark sunglasses.

  “I wear them because I have an eye that was damaged when I was a little girl,” I said softly.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare or to pry,” he said gently.

  “I know,” I answered. And yet, his aura still swirled around me. It felt like an invasion of privacy, though the professor couldn’t have any idea of what he was doing. “You know, you can just ask me.” I said. He studied me and I just barely kept from fidgeting.

  “Ask you what?” he asked with a raised brow.

  “Ask me about my eye. How I was hurt. My near-death experience.” His mouth flopped open quite unattractively, which was a difficult thing for him to accomplish. “Well, in my case…my death experience,” I went on.

  “I didn’t mean to offend,” he said, his aura pulsing light blue in apology. I smiled. He frowned.

  “I know,” I said again.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” he asked.

  “Because I know how you’re feeling and almost what you are thinking, though not quite.” His eyebrows almost rose to his hairline.

  “Really?” I nodded and smiled again. The professor was a sceptic. How perfectly ironic. I reached up and lowered my glasses just to the tip of my nose and held my hair back with a deep breath. When I opened my eyes, Dr. Young sucked in an audible breath. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t disfigured. As matter of fact, except for the thin scar that ran down the side of my face, from my temple to my jaw bone, my face was flawless. My eye was perfectly intact as well. It just had almost no color at all. In the accident, nerves were damaged and somehow the blue of my iris just dissolved and my pupil was a slight shadow instead of the normal black center. I was legally blind in that eye, but not even the doctors who treated me knew that I could see so much more with that eye now.

  “I was legally dead for over seven minutes. When I revived, the damage to my eye left me legally blind…and yet I can see other things with my eye.” I was taking a chance. I knew that, but I felt like it was time that I did. “When I said that I knew how you were feeling it was because I can more or less tell what you are feeling. Your aura has been harassing me since the moment I opened my mouth to ask you a question.”