I woke up to the roar of an enraged tiger, and a giant paw next to my head. I looked up and into Jack’s furry, orange, black, and white face. His eyes shone hot amber.
“He won’t let us near you,” Uncle Mike said, irritated.
My vision cleared, and I glanced up at the counter, where Uncle Mike, Aunt Ruby, and Leona were all peering down at me.
Because I was lying on the floor.
Again.
I sighed. I’d thought I was over the passing-out part of my visions. On the other hand, I’d never seen ten deaths at once before. What the hell?
Jack made a grumbly-growly sound and pushed his enormous face into my side, and I batted him away.
“Move, already. I’m fine. I just need to sit up,” I told him.
“Tess,” Leona gasped. “Be careful. He’s a tiger.”
I rolled my eyes as I sat up, checking my head for bumps or blood. Funny how just two months ago I would have freaked out at the sight of a quarter-ton Bengal tiger standing right next to me, too.
“I caught you on the way down. You didn’t hit your head,” Aunt Ruby said. “But then Jack showed up and decided we were all dangerous.”
She sounded as exasperated as Uncle Mike.
Jack snarled, but it was half-hearted. Could tigers get embarrassed? In any event, he needed to be human Jack again.
“Tiger Jack thinks differently than human Jack,” I explained apologetically. “He just thinks protect.”
None of the three looked impressed with my explanation.
“Shift back, please. I could use some help with all this,” I murmured to Jack, almost inaudibly. He was always bragging about his superior tiger hearing, after all.
He swiveled one rounded ear toward me, and a feeling like a mild electrical shock swept through my body as he entered the shift. In seconds, he was human. Luckily for both of us, he could pull clothes into the shift, so he was fully dressed. Uncle Mike might have shot him if he’d turned into naked Jack.
And why did I keep thinking about naked Jack?
Argh.
Jack held out a hand. “What happened?”
I put my cold hand in his big, warm one and let him pull me up. I even leaned against him for a moment before putting my brave face back on and turning to face my family.
“Leona didn’t know,” I said, feeling some inexplicable need to defend her.
Leona’s face was pale under her perfect makeup. “I’m so sorry. When you said death visions, you never mentioned that touch provoked them. Did you…did you…”
“Maybe if you’d bothered to keep in touch with your only granddaughter, you might have known,” Aunt Ruby snapped.
Leona gasped. “You told me to stay away. Much to my eternal shame, I listened. Now I’ve finally met Tess as a beautiful, grown woman, and caused her to see my…my…”
I looked at her and immediately knew what she was thinking. “No. I didn’t see your death. I saw a bunch of other people die, though.”
A shudder raced through my body, and Jack put an arm around me to hold me up. I wasn’t that fragile, but I appreciated the support.
“Whose deaths?” he asked gently.
“I didn’t know any of them. A very old woman with a long white braid, a thirty-ish man driving an RV, a girl—” I had to stop and swallow hard. “A young girl on a red bicycle. Others. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Uncle Mike had apparently had enough waiting. He strode around the counter, shoved Jack out of the way, and hugged me. “Has that ever happened to you before?”
“No, never.”
Uncle Mike smelled like the outdoors, his horses, and my childhood. His hugs had gotten me through many an emotional trauma, and I appreciated him more than I could ever tell him.
“They’re mine. My deaths,” Leona said hoarsely, as if anguish were wrenching the words from her throat. “Those were all deaths that I foretold.”
I stared at her. How was that even possible? I’d seen deaths that had already occurred? Deaths that my grandmother the banshee had foretold? A sick, burning feeling started in my stomach and snaked its way up through my chest.
“I need to sit down,” I said.
“We need to go home and get some lunch and talk this out,” Uncle Mike said, practical as usual.
“I don’t want her in my house,” Aunt Ruby said, not softening in the least at the sight of Leona’s obvious pain. “She let that man hit Tess. He knocked her down so hard she had a black eye for nearly two weeks.”
Jack’s eyes, back to human green, flared hot with a hint of amber fire in their centers. “Who exactly hit Tess?” He bit off each word.
“Her son of a bitch of a grandfather,” Leona said with so much bitterness that Aunt Ruby flinched.
“Where do I find this man?” Jack’s voice was dangerously calm. I’d heard that voice before, and it was bad news.
“I beat the crap out of him when it happened,” Mike said, with no little satisfaction.
“Maybe he needs a reminder,” Jack said, ratcheting up the testosterone level in the place to an eleven. Good thing the GYSTers were gone. There weren’t enough adult diapers in the world for this.
“Stop it, both of you,” I said, fed up. “We’re not living in a TV melodrama. You don’t get to go all alpha male on an old guy because he hit me more than twenty years ago. And anyway, you can’t kill him, he’s already dead.”
“Good riddance,” Aunt Ruby said.
“Lunch. Now,” Uncle Mike said firmly, taking a look at my face. “You don’t want Leona in our house, Ruby. Are you telling me you want to air our dirty laundry at Beau’s?”
Beau’s Diner was the only eat-in restaurant around, and it was gossip central for our weird little town. Only a fool would talk about personal stuff there.
Aunt Ruby threw her hands in the air. “Fine. Let’s go. Tess, you can ride with me.”
Jack shook his head. “Why don’t I bring Tess, since you’re both upset? If that’s okay with you, Tess?”
“Sure. Leona?” I swallowed. “Um. Do you want to come with us?”
Aunt Ruby shot me a look filled with betrayal, but Leona looked as wiped out as I felt, and I was the only other person in the room beside her in the room who understood how hard it was to see dead people.
Jack and Leona were silent on the drive, which gave me too much time and space to remember how my visions had started. I’d been barely eighteen, working at the shop and saving money for the college I’d never get to attend. Jeremiah had been out, and I’d been all alone when the desperate-looking woman came in to pawn something.
She’d touched my hand, and I’d told her how she’d die.
I’d hit the floor that day, too, just like today. I’d had a seizure, my head screaming with pain and my mind flashing the vivid image of Annabelle Hannah Yorgenson—a name I’d never, ever forget—being brutally murdered.
I’d later found out that it happened just as I’d foreseen. Exactly as I’d told her it would. Annabelle’s husband smashed her head in with a shovel.
As far as I knew, my visions had never been wrong.
I hated that part the most.
Since then, I tried not to touch people. It didn’t always work. I was getting better at managing the pain when I saw someone’s brutal death, but luckily that rarely happened. Mostly I only saw normal things. Old age. Heart attacks.
Sometimes the visions were even kind of lovely. My ex-boyfriend Owen was going to die when he was very old, surrounded by people who loved him. Seeing that had been one of the few times I hadn’t minded this curse so much.
Jack made the turn into Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike’s driveway, and I shook off my melancholy. My aunt and uncle lived in a beautiful old farmhouse about five miles from my little house. They had animals, too—chickens, goats, and Bonnie Jo, their ancient but very sweet horse. The vet came out once in a while to file Bonnie Jo’s teeth down, but she was definitely just an old horse, and not a horse vampire, as I’d briefly thought when I was a kid. We’d known about supernatural beings in Dead End long before the rest of the world figured it out, so the violent firestorm over vampires coming out of the coffin, so to speak, hadn’t bothered us much. We’d already known about most of the supernatural creatures in the world, and we’d suspected about many of the others. Not much surprised me, anymore.
Aunt Ruby’s reaction to Leona had, though.
“So what’s behind the fight between you and Aunt Ruby?” I turned to face Leona, who was sitting silently in the back seat. “It has to be about more than one incident when I was little. Where were you between then and now, by the way? You couldn’t visit? Call? Send a postcard?”
Her eyes widened, and Jack turned off the truck and put a hand on my arm. “Tess. Maybe it would be better if we talked about this in the house, and get it all out at once.”
I glared at him. “What? You’re suddenly the reasonable one here? I don’t think so, Mr. Tall, Bronze, and Furry. Anyway, this is a family thing, like you said. Last time I checked, you told me you’re not my family.”
If I hadn’t known it was impossible, I’d swear that a trace of hurt crossed his face, but it was gone so fast I dismissed it as a trick of the light.
“Sure. Fine. I’ll just be on my way as soon as you get out of my truck,” he said quietly, and I felt like a jerk.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sighing. “I’m just off balance from all this. Come in, please. You can be the neutral referee.”
“Knowing Ruby, we’re going to need one,” Leona muttered, and then she opened the door and climbed out.
“We could just lock the doors and drive somewhere far, far away,” I said wistfully.
“Why not?” Jack looked at me and shrugged. “I’ve spent my whole life running head-first into trouble, and look what it got me. I’m willing to try it the other way.”
We stared at each other for a minute, but then Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike drove up and the moment was lost.
“Next time one of my crazy long-lost relatives shows up, we’re definitely running away,” I promised.
Jack laughed. “It’s a date.”
And then Aunt Ruby got out of her car and punched Leona in the face.