Deception So Dark Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  To be continued

  Acknowledgments

  Deception So Dark Playlist

  Q&A with Author Clara Kensie

  Also by Clara Kensie

  More from Snowy Wings Publishing

  DECEPTION SO DARK: Deception So, Book Two

  Copyright © 2014-2018 by Kara Schein Critzer.

  Published by Snowy Wings Publishing.

  www.snowywingspublishing.com

  Second Edition.

  Cover and interior designed by Key of Heart Designs.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form without permission.

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-946202-64-2

  eISBN: 978-1-946202-63-5

  To J:

  I. D. W. T. M. A. T.

  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 that 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 fled, my parents and siblings had destroyed everything we 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 make 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 lump 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, my brother and sister 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 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, after I found my brother and sister and we could mourn for Gavin together.

  Hoping for more visions of my siblings, 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 comatose 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.”

  Behind the dresser, against the wall, on the floor, 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 printed 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. Finding your brother and sister is far from 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.”

  “We don’t need Kellan. 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 betrayed me by telling Kellan my family’s secrets. He failed to keep me safe from Kellan’s plan to kidnap me and hold me as bait. He failed to stop Kellan from punching me, an act of vengeance because one of my parents’ victims was his brother-in-law. He 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 forever. But I couldn’t get on the elevator. I couldn’t leave him. So I ran 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 forgave 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. Closet empty, 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 through 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 drifting 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 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 we need to do when we get home,” he shouted over the wind, “is get you new clothes and 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 psychic, powerful, terrified 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.”

  “How do you know?” Tristan asked.