Touch The Dark Page 0,1

it sure wasn't faith in "that witchcraft crap," as he put it. Jerry didn't believe in the supernatural—any of it. Since I didn't want him to lock me in a small padded cell somewhere, I didn't mention my visions, or how close he'd been with the ghosts and ghoulies comment.

I've always been kind of a ghost magnet. Maybe it's part of the whole clairvoyance thing; I don't know. Tony was always careful about what he let me study—I think he was afraid I'd figure out some way to use my abilities against him if I knew too much—so I'm not very knowledgeable about my talent. Of course, it might be that my attractiveness to the spirit world is simply because I can see them: it must be a downer, haunting someone who doesn't even know you're there. Not that they haunt me, exactly, but they do like showing off when I'm around.

Sometimes that's not a bad thing, like with the old woman I met in an alley as a teenage runaway. I tend to see ghosts as solid much of the time, especially if they are new and powerful, so it took me a while to realize what she was. She was there to act as a sort of guardian angel over her grandson, whom she'd helped to raise. She died when he was ten, and her daughter's boyfriend started beating him as soon as he went to live with them. The boy ran away in less than a month. She told me that she hadn't spent a decade watching over him to abandon him now, and she was sure God wouldn't mind waiting on her a bit. At her request, I gave him enough money to get on a bus to her sister's place in San Diego before I moved on. Naturally, I didn't mention that sort of thing to Jerry. He didn't believe in anything he couldn't see, touch or put a bullet in, kind of limiting subjects for conversation. Needless to say, he also didn't believe in vampires, at least not until a couple of Tony's guys caught up with him one night and tore his throat out.

I knew what was about to happen to Jerry because I Saw his last few seconds as I was getting in the bath. As usual, I got a vivid, full-color, up-close-and-personal ticket to the carnage, which almost made me slip and break my neck on the slick bathroom floor. After I stopped shaking enough to hold a phone, I called the Witness Protection Program emergency number, but the agent who answered got suspicious when I wouldn't say how I knew what was about to happen. She said she'd get a message to Jerry but didn't sound too enthused about disturbing his weekend. So I called Tony's lead thug—a vamp named Alphonse—and reminded him that he was supposed to find out where the government had stashed me, not risk angering the Senate by killing humans who didn't even know anything. Jerry was useless to them because his information was about to be old news.

I'd never been very successful in altering my visions' outcomes, but I was hoping that use of the Senate's name would be enough to make Alphonse think twice. The Senate is a group of really old vamps who pass laws that the less powerful ones have to obey. While they don't think any more of humans than Tony does, they like the freedom of being only a myth and go to a lot of trouble not to draw mortal attention. Killing FBI agents is the sort of thing that tends to piss them off. But all Alphonse did was give me the usual runaround while his boys traced the call. In the end, the only thing I could do was make sure that by the time anybody got to my door, I was already on a bus out of town. I figured that since the government won't even admit that vampires exist, its chances of keeping me safe from them wasn't too good.

I thought my odds were better on my own, and for more than three years I'd been right. Until now.

I didn't bother to grab anything from the office except the gun: one thing about running for your life—it really narrows your priorities. Not that my 9 mm would do much to a vamp, but Tony often used human thugs for minor errands. I really hoped he hadn't thought me worth calling in actual talent. I wasn't