Run to You Part Four: Fourth Shadow Read online

  Part Four in the riveting romantic thriller about a family on the run from a deadly past and a first love that will transcend secrets, lies and danger...

  With no more secrets keeping them apart, Tessa and Tristan explore Tessa’s developing psychic powers and embark upon a desperate search to find her missing brother and sister. But not even Tristan can keep Tessa safe from the hostile classmates at her new school, or from the nightmare that haunts her even while she’s awake.

  Run to You

  Part Four:

  Fourth Shadow

  Clara Kensie

  Dedication

  To G

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Excerpt from Run to You Part Five: Fifth Touch

  Excerpt from Foretold

  Chapter One

  The heartless thing about the past is our inability to change it. It’s too late to make any alterations. Too late to warn those you love that something horrible is going to happen to them.

  Too late to tell them the people they trust the most are actually the bad guys.

  The past does not have an Undo command.

  As the early January wind howled outside, I shivered in the foyer of my old house in Twelve Lakes, Illinois. Only the thrift-store furniture that had come with the rental house, along with a thin layer of dust on the surfaces, remained. Before they’d fled, my parents and siblings had destroyed everything we’d brought into the house, leaving nothing personal behind. No clothing. No books. No half-empty bottles of shampoo. Not even any fingerprints.

  My family was gone, and they were never coming back. My parents, because they were now incarcerated in the Underground prison of the Agency for Psionic Research. My brother and sister, because they believed they were on the run from a killer named Dennis Connelly, and because they believed he’d already killed our parents and me.

  A vise clamped around my chest, making my breath hitch.

  Behind me, my boyfriend, Tristan, wrapped his arms around my middle, drawing me to him, and instantly opening my lungs again. It had been three weeks since my siblings disappeared, and the APR still had no leads in their search for them. Tristan and I had woken before dawn this morning to take the five-hour drive here from his home in Lilybrook, Wisconsin, hoping to find something the APR had missed. “You can wait in the car if this is too hard,” he murmured. “I’ll look around on my own.”

  It was hard to be here, in this house, this place of lies and betrayal and pain. But I needed to be here. “Two people looking are better than one,” I said. “Besides, this is the only way I can see Jillian and Logan again.” And I needed to see them again as much as I needed oxygen.

  Even if the only way I could see them was through a vision.

  “You’re lifting the fog?” Tristan asked, stiffening.

  I nodded, already lifting the fog that kept the visions away. Just a little, then a little more.

  My newly discovered psychic ability allowed me to see the past. Suppressed by a mental fog until recently, my retrocognition showed me the history of an item, a place or a person. I was going to use my retrocognition now, to see my brother and sister.

  I kept my breath slow. Even. Steady. I adjusted the fog again, lowering it this time, then nudging it a tiny bit higher. I needed to keep it balanced just right. Too much, the fog would overwhelm me. Too little, the visions would crush me.

  There. In the thinning fog. A vision of Jillian from three weeks ago, our last night in Twelve Lakes, right after my family realized that I’d been kidnapped. Her long blond hair was disheveled, and her usual tall, ballerina grace was eviscerated by slumped shoulders as she sobbed into her hands.

  I tried to keep the swelling grief and shame at bay, tried to push the despair and guilt deep into the fog.

  “Careful, Tessa.” Tristan’s voice cut through the fog. “You’re about to lose control. I can see it happening.”

  Whereas I could see the past, Tristan could see the future. His precognition took the form of warning premonitions—visions of something about to go wrong. He used to have premonitions only about himself, but once he fell in love with me, he started getting them about me, too.

  Heeding his warning, I adjusted the fog before I lost control. I lowered it, raised it, made it thicker, then thinner. Once it was perfectly balanced, I looked for my brother.

  There he was. Logan. Standing tall and lean, his chin thrust out in a display of feigned courage as our parents, eyes wild with panic, instructed him and Jillian to run, to run and never stop.

  The fog danced and swirled around me, carrying Jillian’s sobs and Logan’s fear with it.

  I breathed in fog instead of air.

  “Tessa,” Tristan said, sharper this time. “Too much.”

  I adjusted the fog again. Took a deep breath. Went back in.

  Just in time to see Jillian and Logan dash out the front door, lugging several getaway bags each, into the snowy night.

  “Wait! Don’t go!” I cried, running after them. “Mom and Dad lied to us! They’re the killers, not Dennis Connelly!”

  The sound of my own desperate voice shattered the vision like glass. I’d shouted to an apparition, an illusion, a mirage. Jillian and Logan couldn’t hear me, would never hear me. They were gone.

  The most heartless thing about having psychic visions of past events is watching the people you love run straight into disaster, and being unable to stop them.

  * * *

  Is it over? Tristan asked silently, though his voice was clear in my head.

  Unable to speak around the brick in my throat, I replied in the same manner. The visions are gone. It’s over.

  But it wasn’t really over. It wouldn’t be over until I found my brother and sister, and told them the truth about our parents.

  The APR had been searching for my siblings since the night they ran off, but they had no leads. Not a single one. They’d even followed up on my theory that Jillian and Logan would go to our former hideout in Union, Nebraska, to seek help from Jillian’s old boyfriend, Gavin. But so far, they hadn’t gone to Nebraska, probably because they were following our parents’ rule to never return to one of our previous hideouts. On the slim chance that they did go to Union, the APR left instructions with Gavin’s parents to call the agency right away.

  A small part of me hoped they wouldn’t go to Union, where they would only learn that Gavin had died of a brain aneurysm two years ago, the same night our family had fled that hideout. They would not learn, however, that our mother had planted that aneurysm with her psychokinesis, to keep Jillian from contacting him.

  Poor Gavin. Killed simply because Jillian loved him.

  I swallowed my grief. There would be time for that later, when I could mourn for him along with my brother and sister.

  Hoping for more visions of them, I took Tristan’s hand and led him upstairs to the second floor. The dust on the railing would have driven my mother mad. She was probably keeping her Underground prison cell immaculate. My unconsc
ious father would have no idea if his prison cell was dusty or not.

  Logan’s bedroom was first off the top of the stairs. “Just one thing,” I said. “I just want to find one thing.” One thing we could bring back to the investigators to help them with their search. But like the rest of the house, Logan’s room was empty except for the dented and scratched secondhand furniture. No sheets on the bed. No books on the shelves or posters on the wall. No clothes in the closet. No hints that this room’s most recent occupant was a lanky fourteen-year-old boy. Even the air in here was stale and hollow.

  Almost filling the door frame with his height and broad shoulders, Tristan stepped into Logan’s room. A single sunbeam streaming from the window illuminated Tristan’s blue eyes and made his sandy brown hair turn gold. “Let’s get started,” he said.

  Knowing the probability of finding anything was next to zero, I searched in each dresser drawer while Tristan looked under the bed and between the mattresses. Even if Logan had accidentally left something behind, the APR would have found it. They’d scoured the house and hadn’t found anything.

  We didn’t either.

  Disappointment draining the strength from my legs, I sank to the bed. Tristan slid the dresser from the wall, then gave a little gasp. “Tessa. Look.”

  Against the wall, on the floor, behind the dresser, lay a piece of paper.

  I pounced on it, then held it between my fingers, careful not to wrinkle it.

  Composition paper, torn down the left side. The kind with treble clefs and staff and bar lines. The kind Logan used to write music. He’d even jotted a few notes on the bars.

  This was more than a piece of paper. This was a piece of Logan.

  I lifted the fog to see my brother, his dark hair neatly combed, playing his saxophone. As I watched, he jotted a few musical notes onto a page in his composition book. Then with a frown and a quick shake of his head, he ripped the page from the binding and used his psychokinesis to float it toward the garbage can. While he wrote new notes on a fresh page, the paper slipped under his dresser instead.

  “I can’t believe Kellan didn’t find this,” I said. John Kellan. With his red beard, scowling lips and cunning, ruthless ambition, he was the APR investigator who’d finally captured my parents.

  “I’m not surprised at all.” Tristan moved the dresser back in place. “All he cared about was apprehending your parents. I doubt finding your brother and sister is his top priority. He didn’t even come back here himself. He sent an untrained security guard. Said it was all he could spare.”

  Another vision appeared in the fog, of a short, bored guard dressed in the standard-issue black APR jacket, giving a cursory glance into Logan’s bedroom, then leaving.

  “How can Kellan not care about finding them?” I said, dismayed. “They’re out there, somewhere, scared and alone. They think I’m dead. They think our parents are dead. They think there’s a killer after them.”

  “I’ll find them for you,” Tristan said. “I promise.” He pressed my hand to his chest, right over his heart. He’d done this same thing just yesterday, our last day in the Underground cell, when I was about to leave him forever. “I will never forgive myself for failing you in Twelve Lakes,” he’d said then. “And I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

  He’d failed me by lying about his true identity as a junior agent on Kellan’s mission to capture my parents. He had betrayed me by telling Kellan my family’s secrets. He’d failed to keep me safe from Kellan’s plan to kidnap me and hold me as bait. He’d failed to stop Kellan from punching me, an act of vengeance because one of my parents’ victims was his brother-in-law. He had deceived me about his true identity as Dennis Connelly’s son.

  I’d tried to leave Tristan. I’d gotten as far as the elevator that would lead me up to the ground floor of the APR and away from him. But I couldn’t get on the elevator. I couldn’t leave him. So I’d run back to him. Tristan had betrayed me because he loved me. I forgave him, fully and completely. I accepted him back into my heart, and I would never let him go.

  I’d forgiven him, but he would never forgive himself.

  He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Come on. Let’s see what else we can find.”

  My bedroom was across the hall. I gave it a quick glance as we passed it. My family had destroyed my things too. My closet empty, my bed stripped of pillows and blankets. No sign that I had never, not even once, slept in that bed without waking up from a nightmare, biting back my screams.

  I passed my parents’ bedroom without looking at it. I did not want any visions of them.

  Next was Jillian’s room, where cosmetics and hair supplies should have been flip-flopping though the air, her bed unmade, her socks and sweaters dangling from half-open drawers. But like my younger brother’s, my big sister’s room was empty. Stripped and stale and still. The only movement was specks of dust dancing in a sunbeam.

  We found nothing in her dresser drawers or between her mattresses. Lips tight with determination, Tristan pushed each piece of furniture from the wall. He moved the sheetless bed, and—

  “Her pointe shoe,” I exclaimed. In the far back corner under the bed frame was Jillian’s battered ivory ballet shoe. Dirty and worn, the ribbon frayed, she must have forgotten to destroy it when she got a new pair.

  I slipped the shoe in my bag, along with Logan’s composition paper.

  Sheet music and a shoe. All I had left of my siblings. But it was two items more than I’d had just an hour ago. They would have to do, until we found my brother and sister.

  * * *

  The bright afternoon sun was powerless against the frigid wind that swirled and howled around us as we rushed to Tristan’s car in the driveway. I was wearing the only clothes I had: Tristan’s blue hoodie from his old high school tennis team, his sister’s jeans that she’d decorated with five sequined butterflies down one leg, and a pair of laceless sneakers from the APR. Tristan shielded me from the cold as best he could, tucking me under his arm. “First thing when we get back home,” he shouted over the wind, “is get you a winter coat.”

  I nodded, miserable. Not because of the cold, but because finding my siblings would be almost impossible. It had taken the Agency for Psionic Research eight years to find my family. But now the APR wasn’t putting much effort into finding Jillian and Logan. It could take them twice as long to find two powerful, terrified, desperate teenagers with an almost unlimited amount of cash and eight years experience in running, hiding and aliases.

  A heavy, panicked sob tore through the wind, but it hadn’t come from me. It came from two shadows, running into the night, heavy bags slung over their shoulders. Then a low, faint shout, just an echo: “...train to Union Station...”

  Jillian and Logan. In a vision that had escaped from the fog. It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but it was all I needed.

  “I know where they went from here,” I said, elation blooming in my chest. “They took a train. To Chicago. Union Station.”

  “You sure?” Tristan asked.

  I pointed into the sunny, empty yard, where my siblings had been running in the dark night just moments ago. “I heard Logan say it. In a vision.”

  Tristan squinted into the wind, down the road. “It makes sense. The train depot’s only a mile from here in the town square.”

  I twirled, the frigid air becoming refreshing and crisp. “We can find them. Us. You and me. With my retrocognition. We’ll follow their path. They’re three weeks ahead of us, but maybe they’ve settled somewhere by now, living under new names. We’ll catch up to them.”

  “We’re supposed to start school next week,” he said. But his protest had no strength; he was already convinced. Finding Jillian and Logan was so much more important than me going to Lilybrook High, or Tristan starting classes at the nearby Heron University. Kellan had fired
Tristan from his job as a junior agent, but finding Jillian and Logan on his own would prove to the APR that he would make a good investigator after all.

  Finding Jillian and Logan would make up for failing me.

  He lit up from the inside out: first his eyes, then his smile. “Union Station, here we come.”

  I laughed, and the wind carried it away with the snowflakes. As early as tomorrow, next week at the latest, Jillian and Logan could return with us to Lilybrook. No more lies. No more aliases. No more paralyzing fear that each day would be our last. Just happy, stable, peaceful, normal lives.

  Finding Jillian and Logan was my top priority, and therefore it was Tristan’s. We didn’t need the APR. We had my power of retrocognition and Tristan’s warning premonitions to keep me from losing control of the fog or the visions. We had each other. Together, we would find my siblings.

  Chapter Two

  Tristan drove us straight down the road, just over a mile, to the little train depot in Twelve Lakes’ town square. Today was a Saturday, and the faded schedule mounted on the door informed us the next train was arriving at one o’clock, only five minutes from now. We’d made it just in time. From here, it would take almost an hour and a half to get to Union Station.

  Too cold to wait outside, we entered the tiny depot. A wall of plate glass windows faced out toward the train tracks. One had been replaced by plywood, slightly dimming the interior. Only one other person was there, a college-aged girl in a red wool coat and brown fur-trimmed boots, sitting on a bench and playing on her iPad. On her way to see a friend, perhaps, or to meet a guy for a date. Just a normal girl, with a normal life, with normal problems. Certainly not a girl whose parents had used their powers of remote vision and psychokinesis to blackmail and murder people.

  The normal girl gave Tristan and me a disinterested glance, then returned to her iPad.

  Tristan sent a quick text to his parents to tell them what we were doing. Too anxious to wait patiently for the train, I paced the perimeter of the depot.