SoulFire – Chapter1
Rae was standing in a long line at the lingerie store when she felt it again. That feeling of a finger sliding up the back of her brain. The universe telling her “pay attention.”
She didn’t ignore that. So she looked around the store, but saw nothing else. For a moment, she panicked. Was it a bad feeling? Was something about to go wrong?
Fifteen years ago, she’d been a kid in a clothing store with her family. She and her older sister Sloan had been sent to the back aisle to pick something out for the weekend. Rae had been looking at a red top with white stripes when she felt it. That slide up the back of her senses that always put her on alert. Only that time it felt bad. Bad.
“Sloan!” she’d whispered it harshly, terrified even though she didn’t know what of.
“Rae?” Sloan’s voice had been at a normal volume, just confused.
All Rae had wanted was for her sister to be quiet and for her parents to be in the same aisle. Her eyes must have told the whole story, because Sloan’s whole expression went round when she looked at her little sister. They had to go find their parents, even though Rae still didn’t know why she felt this way. She only knew that she did. And that she was never wrong.
Dropping the shirt she’d been admiring, she reached out and met Sloan’s hand where it was on the way to grabbing hers. When they touched, they connected. Rae felt things, but Sloan saw them. She only saw snippets and pieces, but it was sometimes enough.
As their hands joined, Rae heard Sloan gasp. She felt the churning in Rae’s stomach, the gut clenching dread that something was wrong. Rae saw the pieces that Sloan saw. Gunfire. Bodies. A square, armored truck.
Holding hands, they ran toward the back of the store. The two girls spotted their parents and made eye contact as the sounds started. The handful of store employees on duty abandoned their stations and began running toward the rear doors, holding them open for patrons to escape. There had been gunfire at the front of the store.
They’d learned later that two, armed men came in and gunned down the guards from the armored truck. They’d come to collect the deposit money at the bank next door. Despite being in full Kevlar, the two guards had been killed instantly. The robbers had made off with the entire set of four bags of money. They’d never been caught. And Rae had never forgotten it.
She still had some mild PTSD when she saw an armored car. To this day, she’d never felt anything that strong again. But now, standing in a checkout line at the back of the lingerie store, her first thought was, “Is it bad?”
She stopped, almost ducked, but managed to stay upright and attempted to look normal. She didn’t want to have a panic in the checkout lane. But a few slow breaths later, she realized the feeling wasn’t bad. Not at all. That was just her memory being worried.
Someone was in the store. Someone she knew? Rae couldn’t quite tell.
After a moment’s debate, she turned around and acted like she’d forgotten something. Despite having all her things neatly folded and ready, she headed toward the middle of the store. There was someone the universe needed her to see, and Rae didn’t ignore the universe.
She heard them before she saw them, though the voices didn’t trigger any memories, just the feeling.
Luke and Yasmin.
The couple that got married at the B-n-B last year. That feeling she got demanded that she stopped dead still in the lobby of the beautiful old house. Then she’d seen the pictures, of Luke and Yasmin, from infanthood all the way to their wedding day. The photos of Luke looked like they could be pictures of her grandfather. And here the two were again.
Rae stopped, stunned. She hadn’t been able to find them, and she had looked. She’d even used her boss’s database, but with no last name, and no knowledge of even what state they were from, “Luke and Yasmin” wasn’t enough to get her anywhere. Now here they were.
She followed them around a corner debating what to do. Was he the cousin they’d lost track of? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if maybe Yasmin was the one that triggered the feeling. All Rae knew was that she felt it.
Still, here they were. In the lingerie store. That put really high odds on them living somewhere near here. It could be they were visiting and had lost all their luggage or something, but to Rae it looked as though they were shopping like locals.
She was trying to figure out what to say, how to introduce herself when she didn’t even know what she was to them—if anything—when they turned another corner. Rae followed subtly, not wanting to spook them. She didn’t think she was scary, but stalking people was not kosher.
She almost had a plan by the time she turned the corner. But in the end it didn’t matter. They had disappeared.
