Читать книгу A Place Called Paradise - Honey Perkel - Страница 8

In cottage number five, nine-year-old Halley Bee, clung to her mother. Night Terrors. That’s what Dr. Ranken had called them. It was always the same. The nightmares. The visions. The voices. In the daytime, too, though nights were the worst. Everything had changed since that day last summer when shots rang out in the convenience store and her sister Emma was gunned down. The day Mama had gone deaf. One year ago last week.

After the episodes, she was always ill, sometimes staying in bed for days. Headaches. Nausea. Flashing lights and pain across her eyes. Halley Bee supposed it was the price she had to pay to have the Gift.

It didn’t matter to her that Mama hadn’t heard her screams in the night. She’d been there for her just the same. The only good that had come out of Emma’s murder, if one could call any part of it “good”, was the fact that her beloved sister was with her all the time now.

It had bothered Halley Bee at first that she hadn’t figured out why she and Mama had been told to come to Seaside. After all, she had the Gift, didn’t she? She should know these things. She should see them. Feel them. Halley Bee knew who Bernard was. Everyone with the Gift did. He was their mentor, their advisor. Their hero. Bernard was admired throughout the world. She wanted to do whatever she could to impress him.

Halley Bee hugged her cat, Buckley, as she lay in Mama’s arms. Her heart wasn’t pounding quite so hard now. She wasn’t quite so scared. This latest vision had been of Nonni, her beloved grandmother, who’d come to her screaming some kind of warning. Hands waving. Eyes ablaze. Blackness all around her.

Outside, the surf pounded against the rocks at Surfer’s Cove, the wind and rain at its back. Halley Bee didn’t notice; she was thinking of something else. She knew that somewhere in the dark, Bernard was watching over them. Watching over this beach town he loved so much. But, another thought was pressing on her mind — a darkness. A stench. Halley Bee knew beyond any doubt that there was another energy. An evil force trying to destroy them all.