EXCERPT

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

“Do you want to explain this?” Ted dropped

a folded copy of that morning’s Sacramento

Bee onto my kitchen counter and jabbed a

finger at an article in the Our Region section.

 

I picked up the paper and looked at the article.

Some dude in Oakdale had died under

suspicious circumstances. Crap. Another one

had bitten the dust. Neil Bossard was the

second person I’d made a delivery to in

Oakdale in the past two month that had

ended up dead. Coincidence? Possibly.

Not likely, but possibly. I wasn’t crazy

about the odds though. Oakdale was tiny.

It had been weird enough to make two

deliveries there within such a short time period. To have both of the recipients of the deliveries wind up dead? Not likely to be a wacky fluke. Still, I didn’t know for sure and there was no point in upsetting Ted before I knew that there was something to get upset about.

 

“Why do you ask?” I avoided looking up into his cornflower blue eyes. Not because I couldn’t look directly into them and lie, though. I could do it. Probably. The real problem was the way my heart did that weird flip flop thing in my chest every time I looked directly into his baby blues. The flip flop thing was what made it hard to lie. I needed to focus to lie and Ted was nothing, if not distracting to me.

 

“The case is weird, which always makes me think of you.” He took a step closer and lifted my chin.

 

Now I had no choice but to look into his eyes and there went the damn flip flop. “Is that a nice way to talk to your girlfriend?” That gave me a shiver. I was someone’s girlfriend. Who’d a thunk it was possible? It never had been before.

 

I am twenty-six years old, nearly twenty-seven. Ted Goodnight is my first boyfriend ever. There have been a few dalliances before, but never a boyfriend. I still can’t decide if it’s the best good fortune that has ever befallen me or the worst mistake of my short life, and there have been some doozies before, starting with the day I decided to sneak into the swimming pool behind my mother’s back and drowned. That was pretty much the mother of all mistakes. It’s the one that started me down the road to all the other mistakes.

 

On that day, I was legally dead for three minutes. They resuscitated me and everyone said it was a miracle that no harm had been done. The doctors couldn’t detect any brain damage. I would be “normal.” Ha! If only they’d known. Apparently, the ability to sense supernatural creatures and see all the crazy-ass paranormal doings that go on around most people without them noticing doesn’t show up on an MRI.

 

No other guy has been able to get past the freaky things that happen around me or my crazy schedule or what my mother refers to as my “moods.” In fact, the only guy I can remember making it past two dates was David Bounds in eleventh grade and he was bipolar. Even he couldn’t hang in there with me, not even with medication to help him.