The Twin Prophecies: Rebirth - Special Edition Read online

  The Twin Prophecies: Rebirth

  Special Edition

  Nina Perez

  Copyright © 2011 Nina Perez

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1466389362

  ISBN-13: 978-1466389366

  For Donny, Kali, and Jack. I love you completely.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  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 Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Bonus Chapter

  Sneak Preview – The Twin Prophecies: Origins

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  March 13, 2011

  If you’re reading this, you purchased my book and that means you should receive the first thank you. To those of you who have been reading my blogs since the 2005 MySpace days and swore that you’d one day plunk down cash to read my writing, a super duper thank you.

  Thank you to all of my writer/editor friends that have read this book numerous times. Your feedback might not have always been taken, but it was always appreciated. Simon Smithson, Jordan Rosenfeld, and Amy Goudy, thank you for providing valuable story advice and a special thank you to Emily Taisey Parker for helping me break bad habits.

  To Steven Novak, you da man!

  To Kevin Palmer, thanks for my job and teaching me things when I thought I knew everything.

  Muchas Gracias to everyone on Facebook and Twitter, for all the RTs, “likes,” and sharing.

  To my parents and family: thank you for always being supportive of my efforts and dreams. xoxo

  I have the bestest bestie in the world. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you for always believing in me and pushing me to finish. Most of all, thank you for always being happy for me.

  Thank you to my long-suffering husband, Donny, for holding it down while I spent long days, sleepless nights, and endless weekends working on this book. You always tell me I can do anything, but that’s only because I have you.

  And to my beautiful children, Jack and Kali, I do this for you. Kali, you asked me, “How come you never write anything I can read?” Well, here you go.

  Nina

  Chapter One

  That Was the Start of Everything

  Rosemont is the bottom of New Jersey. Not bottom as in, the lowest of the low or worst of the worst. Bottom as in, it is physically the bottom part of New Jersey. On a map, New Jersey looks like a man’s profile; a man wearing a flat hat, with a hooked nose, sunken mouth, and hunched back. Rosemont is his protruding belly; curved and hugging the slice of the Atlantic Ocean that separated it from Delaware and Pennsylvania.

  North Rosemont - just thirty minutes outside of Philly - is known as Little City. Little City is a simple downtown with municipal buildings, warehouse loft apartments, semi-trendy shops, cafes, cinemas, two nightclubs and various office buildings. The Preston River separates North Rosemont from its southern suburbs, rich farmlands and humble shoreline known as Cisco Beach.

  With a population slightly over eight thousand, it still qualifies as a small town, but barely. Residents could make the short trip into Philly for a bit of big city nightlife or culture, but feel removed enough that there was no unseemly spillage. Their crime rate is low and their neighborhoods tight.

  Like all small towns, Rosemont has its secrets; big ones, small ones, bubbling under the surface secrets, dead and buried secrets, secrets shared amongst a few, and secrets that lived in the heart of one. Then, there were those fantastic secrets that when people caught a glimpse of them, or picked up a faint whisper, they pretended that they hadn’t. Sometimes, they made excuses to help them sleep at night.

  In a fourth floor corner classroom of South Rosemont’s Kennedy High school, fifteen-year-old Violet Ross sat at the front of the class trying to discover the mystery behind only one secret – the secret of algebra. Her black hair fell across her shoulders and along the side of her face, blocking the screen of her laptop from the view of the other students who were, in truth, not paying attention to Violet’s desk. They were too busy trying to remember if x equaled positive or negative b, plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, divided by two a to worry about the fact that Violet was allowed to take this quiz with the help of an aid and that they did not have laptops with special software to help them. She removed the earbuds plugged into the computer from her ears and tossed them on the desk.

  “Having a problem, Jumbles?” One student had been paying attention to Violet, Benny Richards; an overweight sophomore with eyes too small for his face and pale blond hair. He leaned forward, his face nearly resting against the desk, and whispered, “Fancy laptop not much help?”

  He was referring to Violet’s dyslexia. Diagnosed two years ago, it was Violet’s first indication that life wasn’t always iPods and roses. Her parents were relieved by the news – her academic performance up to that point had always been described as lazy or unmotivated. No matter how much or how hard Violet studied, and no matter how prepared she felt going into an exam, she’d score so poorly it was questioned whether she’d studied at all. Looking at the words on the paper, they might as well have been written in a foreign language. Every question looked like a trick designed to confuse her. When she’d finally confessed these feelings to a school counselor, it was suggested that Violet test for a learning disability.

  Even though she’d cringed at the thought of being labeled disabled, she took some comfort that she wasn’t too stupid to learn as she’d suspected for years. Violet simply learned differently. Her parents hired a tutor and the school permitted the use of the laptop to access audio programs that helped Violet focus during exams. She was allowed to take major exams alone with a teacher reading the questions aloud. Benny had overheard Violet describing her dyslexia as “a jumble of letters and numbers,” and had been calling her Jumbles ever since.

  “Gastric bypass not much help?” Violet whispered, her eyes resting on the rolls that were his stomach.

  Benny’s smirk disappeared and his eyes darted around the room, checking to see if anyone had heard. Then he licked his lips, swallowed any retort, and went back to his own exam. Ever since his parents’ divorce, Benny had put on a lot of weight. Violet knew it was a low blow, but she wasn’t in the mood for his jabs. Besides, he could always lose weight. She’d be dyslexic forever.

  Violet looked around the room. The other students were hunched over in concentration, shoulders folded towards their desks, scribbling furiously on scratch paper. Others looked up at the ceiling with their pencils in their mouths as if the answers would fall from above if they stared or chewed hard enough.

  Violet shut the laptop, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought about what her tutor, Kalina, had taught her about clearing your mind and taking each problem one at a time. As she opened her eyes and prepared to focus on the final question, she felt a pop in her ears. There was a static-like noise, like someone changing frequencies on a radio. Her ears clogged and the static amplified.

  Here we go again, she thought.

  Violet looked around the classroom trying to guess which one it would be. Would it be Sammy Farr’s
nervous-tummy anxiety he got whenever they took a quiz? Or Deena Cole’s restlessness? She hoped it wouldn’t be Larry Stone; all that boy thought about was girls. Violet didn’t have to speculate for long. Her eyes burned and her head ached. She yawned into her hand and began to feel sleepy, then exhausted like she hadn’t slept in days.

  A light rap at the door drew everyone’s attention. The algebra teacher, Mrs. Marsh, quietly made her way to the door and stepped outside to chat with Ms. Tucker, the teacher from across the hall. She left the door ajar. Violet yawned again, making her eyes water. She looked down at her paper, but knew focusing on the last problem was out of the question. She would have to wait for the feeling to pass. It didn’t last long – it never did – only a minute or two.

  For the past few months, Violet had been keeping her own secret: she was able to feel the emotions of those around her. Not in a, “I can relate,” or, “I know what you mean,” kind of way, but her body and mind reacted to the emotion as if it were her own. Sammy’s anxiety would have given her sweaty palms and a rapid heartbeat. If she’d tapped into Deena, she might be rapping her pencil on the desk and bouncing one leg up and down. She didn’t even want to think of what would have happened had it been Larry.

  Apparently, she’d connected with someone who needed a nap. Badly.

  “You don’t look so good. No offense.” Ms. Tucker said. Violet glanced at the door. Mrs. Marsh was standing with one arm folded across her ample mid-section. She raised the other to her face and covered her mouth to hide a yawn before she spoke.

  Bingo.

  “None taken. Henry still isn’t sleeping through the night. He’ll be ten weeks old tomorrow. Pete and I take turns getting up with him throughout the night, and it’s killing us. Pete almost fell asleep driving home from work yesterday!”

  Mrs. Marsh peeked into the room and Violet quickly looked back at her paper. The sleepiness had worn off as quickly as it started, returning her frustration over the exam. She scribbled an answer, x = 2, to the last equation just as the bell rang.

  “OK, guys. Leave your papers on my desk on your way out,” Mrs. Marsh said as she stepped back into the classroom. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  Violet pushed her laptop into her shoulder bag and joined the exodus slowly making its way to the teacher’s desk. She placed her quiz on the pile, and had just made it into the hallway when someone grabbed her arm.

  “You’re coming, right?”

  Violet looked at the excited face of Liza Grant. Though the girls were the same medium height, there was something about Liza that always made Violet feel as if she were dealing with someone well beyond their age. When they were freshmen, she and Violet had both begun to blossom, but Liza was more at ease with her new rounder hips and fuller breasts. She seemed to fall into the new world of early womanhood with more ease than Violet, who often felt like her new body was thrust upon her without asking - like she’d been handed an instrument she didn’t know how to play and told to make music with it. She sometimes envied Liza for knowing how to adjust to her new body and use it to hit all the right notes.

  Violet didn’t have to ask what Liza was referring to. “Liza, I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “It’s a school night. You know how my parents feel about that.”

  “Yeah, but my mother…”

  Liza’s mother was an engineer who traveled a lot. She was also a single mother, which meant that when she went out of town Liza was left home alone, and Liza took advantage of those times to throw lots of parties. She narrowed her green eyes and studied Violet’s face.

  “You’re not coming!” Liza stomped her foot like a denied toddler and her red curls bounced. Liza fit the profile of the majority of the students at Kennedy who, for the most part, came from families who were well-off – they expected life to always go their way. To be fair, it’s kind of hard not to when your morning announcements were delivered via mounted flat-screen televisions, student parking was filled with new cars and your football team went fifteen-and-oh last year.

  “It’s a school night and I have to meet with Kalina later.” Violet knew her excuses were lame, but that didn’t make them less true. Violet pulled a scrunchie from her bag and used it to corral her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail. She had P.E. next and from the stubborn look on Liza’s face, she could tell her friend would keep her in the hall till the warning bell… at least. Liza’s next words were drowned out as Violet’s ears clogged and she heard the radio static sound again.

  It had never happened back-to-back before. In fact, Violet had gone days in between connections. She’d started referring to it as connecting because it reminded her of linking to Wi-Fi. Now, not five minutes after connecting to Mrs. Marsh, it was happening again.

  “I will never, ever, ever speak to you again if you don’t come. Patrick is going to be there and you know how much I like him. I will never, ever, ever be able to speak to him coherently if you’re not there to have my back.”

  Violet opened her mouth to protest, to tell Liza she’d be just fine and that she never had a problem talking to boys with or without Violet around, but instead she was overcome with feelings of wanting to go. More than that, she was excited to go to the party. Violet felt giddy and had an overwhelming desire to see Patrick, a boy whom she had always found to be rather dull and dim.

  She’d never connected with Liza before and had wondered what it would be like. As she suspected, it was like being on a sugar overload. She could barely feel one emotion before it was completely replaced by another.

  Even though she knew the desire to go was false, or at the very least, didn’t belong to her, Violet surprised herself when she said, “OK. I’ll be there.”

  Later that afternoon, on the other side of South Rosemont, Jack Morrow left Carter High School after his last class and walked two blocks to the bus stop. That’s what most kids at Carter did; they rode the bus. Those old enough to drive and fortunate enough to have cars, inherited their families’ secondary clunkers and were grateful for them. These families knew what it was like to live on a budget that didn’t include three-figure monthly allowances for their kids. They were a blue-collar lot that took pride in their modest homes and lawns. The students at Carter, to their credit, were just fine with their hi-def-less classrooms and ten-and-five football team, thank you very much. The overall mindset there was that life didn’t cut you any breaks, and anything worth having was worth working for. They didn’t complain about their situations because, above all else, they weren’t whiners.

  Despite the exceptionally cold fall weather, Jack did not mind that the bus was running late. He wasn’t in any rush. Leaning against a light pole in faded jeans and a graphic tee, Jack resembled the male models gracing the bus stop advertisement behind him. The girls at Carter found his all-over-the-place hair and deep brown eyes attractive; more than he realized. His ignorance of this fact only served to make them more attracted and Jack seem less attainable.

  He pulled a worn baseball cap from his backpack and put it on as the bus stopped at the curb. Jack found a window seat in the back and settled in for the ride across the Newton Bridge into Little City. As the bus began to make its way to the heart of the city, Jack gathered his backpack and walked to the front of the bus. He had been making this trip once a week for almost six months and he figured he’d continue to make it until someone deemed him cured.

  Jack’s final destination, a four-story brick building with a glass front door, was only a few feet from the bus stop. As he entered the foyer and made his way to the second floor office, Jack remembered to remove his baseball cap and return it to his backpack. Dr. Tesla did not like him to wear it during their sessions.

  “Are things getting any better at home?”

  “Sure. I mean, Dad is still stressed, but, you know, other than that, things are good.”

  Dr. Robert Tesla searched Jack’s face for signs that he was lying. Jack was never sure what Dr. Tesla believed, but he fo
und it easier to maintain his façade if he didn’t make eye contact. He kept his eyes on the bowl of jellybeans that sat on the round table between their armchairs and reached for a handful in what he hoped was a casual manner. He could feel Dr. Tesla’s blue eyes studying him. He hadn’t been fooled.

  “Are you and your father getting along?”

  Jack had once heard his mother refer to Dr. Tesla’s lined face, gray-tinged brown hair, and lean frame as “ruggedly handsome,” and Jack had always thought he reminded him of a younger Harrison Ford. Maybe that’s why he found it difficult to lie to Dr. Tesla; it was like lying to Indiana Jones.

  “Not really. I don’t think it has anything to do with me. He’s stressed out a lot. No one is buying houses, much less building any. We just don’t talk. Which means we don’t fight so… I guess that’s better? I mean, things aren’t perfect. Not like before…”

  Jack stopped talking and popped a jellybean in his mouth. Dr. Tesla straightened his glasses. “Before Bobby’s accident?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Before that.”

  “Have you…”

  “Listen. Not today. If that’s alright, I don’t want to talk about it today.”

  “That’s fine. It’s your session. We can talk, or not talk, about anything you want.”

  Jack glanced at the wall clock. He had three minutes left before he had to meet his mother downstairs. Three minutes to stall and talk about anything but his own secret – a secret that sat within his body like a stone, rising into his throat if he tried to talk about it and pressing against his heart when he thought about it. It had been six months and Jack didn’t know how to explain that the last time he’d touched his best friend, he had a what? Feeling? Premonition? A vision of pain, twisted metal, and blood? It had been six months, and Jack hadn’t touched another living soul since.