Prologue
Prologue
Riley covered her ears and began humming, but she could still hear them fighting. Her mom was mad at her dad again. Even at the age of ten, she knew things between her parents were falling apart and fast. Riley looked out the window; her sad reflection in the dark glass stared back at her. She closed her eyes and thought about home. Not this new home, but her old home in Chicago. The place where she had friends, where her parents had loved each other. The car jerked sharply. Riley opened her eyes and sat back in her seat clinging to her seatbelt.
“It’s ok pumpkin,” her dad said, leaning back to squeeze Riley’s leg.
Her mother’s scream made her dad turn back and jerk the steering wheel; the car swerved wildly. He tried to correct it, but the pavement was slick. He couldn’t stop in time. They smashed through the guardrail diving nose-first into the water below. The fast-moving current carried the vehicle rapidly downstream. Riley’s mom continued to scream. Her dad yelled at her to stop screaming. Water began to seep into the car. Riley lifted her feet onto the seat. The vehicle drifted sideways, tilting dangerously closer to the water. Up and down they went. Riley clung to her seatbelt; she wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t.
The vehicle jerked before slamming into an outcropping of rocks and coming to a stop. Water rushed against the side. The SUV shifted but held its place against the rocks. Riley’s dad undid his seat belt and opened the sunroof. He climbed through and reached down for Riley. She shook her head.
“Riley, please, take my hand.”
“I don’t want to leave mommy,” she said.
“I’ll come back for her. I promise. Now please pumpkin, take my hand.”
Riley undid her seatbelt and reached for her father’s hand. He pulled her up and they shimmied across the roof to the other side and slid down to the ground. Her dad carried her to dry ground.
“I’m going to get your mother. Don’t move.”
He ran back to the vehicle, disappearing through the sunroof. Riley waited; her hands balled into fists. The headlights on the SUV flickered. A scream tried to escape from her lips, but nothing came out. Her fingernails bit into her palms as she watched and waited for her parents to emerge from the top of the SUV. A wall of water slammed into the vehicle, turning it around into the current. Riley heard metal grinding on rocks and then the vehicle slipped away. She stared at the rocks, at the water, until she became aware of a click, click, clicking sound. She clamped her teeth together making the sound stop. How much time had passed by?
Maybe they were waiting for her downstream. Maybe they couldn’t find their way back to her.
Riley backed away from the water. In the distance, she could see the lights of a town, but they might as well have been stars in the sky. However, walking in that direction made sense. She reached down, pressing a button on her shoes. They lit up like a neon sign. She absently hoped the water hadn’t ruined them. They’d been a birthday present from her dad and were her favorite. She picked her way over the rough ground, tripping a time or two. Around a bend, she stopped. She saw something glimmer like lights in the water, it looked like the SUV. She ran towards the water’s edge. Her feet slid out from underneath her, she fell backward and her head hit the rocks with a solid thud.
Two months later:
Riley opened her eyes. The room was bright and cheerful. A nurse stood at the side of the bed looking at the machine monitoring her heart rate. Riley knew the machine’s function because she’d been in the hospital once before with a broken leg.
“Where’s my mom and dad?” she choked out.
The nurse turned, surprised to hear Riley speak. “Oh, my goodness, you’re awake.”
Riley tried to sit up, to push the covers back. “I want to see my parents. Where are they?”
The nurse gently pressed on Riley’s shoulder to hold her down. “Please sweetie, I’ll get the doctor. Ok? And your Aunt JoAnn is here as well. Do you want to see your aunt?”
Riley shook her head. She wanted to see her parents. Why wouldn’t they let her see her parents? She stopped fussing long enough to look at the nurse, noticing for the first time the blue color sort of pulsating around her body. Riley reached out, running her hand through the blue. It felt warm. She withdrew her hand and laid back, watching the nurse, watching the color vibrate around her.
“I’ll be right back, ok?”
Riley nodded. The nurse walked away, and the color faded. The doctor came in soon after. He asked Riley questions about how she felt, and if anything hurt. She nodded and shook her head unaware if she was answering correctly. Her focus was on the colors. The nurse was blue and the doctor yellow. Riley held up her hand in front of her face. She didn’t have a color.
The door opened. Her Aunt JoAnn came rushing in. She was purple.
“Oh, Riley my love. My poor girl.” She hugged Riley tight.
Riley blinked several times, but the colors remained. It was a strange thing the way she saw the colors. They were there in her mind it seemed but not outside her mind. There but at the same time not there. She couldn’t make sense of it.
Her aunt was talking in a low voice with the doctor and glancing her way every so often. She asked if they’d told Riley the news yet. The doctor shook his head and her aunt frowned back at him, saying she would tell Riley herself. She took Riley’s hand. Riley heard her say something about the police not finding her mother. Riley pulled her hand away, rubbing it as if it hurt.
“Riley, honey, it’s going to be ok. I’m going to take care of you. Everything has been arranged.”
Riley blinked repeatedly and then rubbed her eyes. She heard them talking, saying that her mother was missing, and her father had died. She was going to go live with her aunt. The news of her parents was devastating but Riley couldn’t process her feelings right then. She couldn’t get past the colors and why they were there.
“Do you see the colors?” Riley asked her aunt, explaining what she was seeing
JoAnn turned to the doctor. “Do you think there might be brain damage?” she asked, crossing her arms, and giving the doctor a reproachful stare.
“It’s possible. We’ll run some more tests,” the doctor answered. “Could be a form of synesthesia.”
“Please, laymen’s terms doctor. What is synes…whatever you called it?”
“Synesthesia. And it’s a blending of the senses where one sense triggers another sense.”
JoAnn uncrossed her arms and shook her head. He might as well have been speaking in a foreign language.
The doctor tried again. “It’s like this, someone with synesthesia may hear colors, feel sounds, or taste shapes. It’s not common and I’ve never heard it being brought on by head trauma. And, I’m not saying that’s what is wrong or if anything is wrong. In any case, we’ll run the tests and rule it out just to be certain.”
After two weeks of being poked and prodded, Riley was ready to go home. When the doctor questioned her again about the colors, she said they were gone. She wanted out of the hospital.
✽✽✽
At seventeen, Riley’s ability progressed to a form of sensory perception. If she came into contact with someone’s color, she felt that person’s emotions. It wasn’t mind reading or telepathy, but more like a warm or cold sensation. Despite the challenges her ability presented, Riley maintained her secret. She learned to adapt while studying everything she could about synesthesia. However, nothing explained her situation. She wasn’t seeing numbers or letters in different colors; she was seeing people in different colors.
She’d almost given up hope anything would make sense until she stumbled upon an article about auras and the meaning behind an aura. She began to rethink her situation. She decided she had a new form of synesthesia that enabled her to see someone’s aura and to sense their feelings by touching their aura. It wasn’t a diagnosis by a long shot, but it was a sliver of hope that she hadn’t lost her mind.
Riley accepted her strange ability and could almost ignore it at times. However, nothing in all her research prepared her for people with a transparent aura. Riley thought of them as Voids. When she crossed paths with her first Void, she not only felt his emotions, but she heard his thoughts as clear as if he’d spoken them aloud. She learned firsthand, and quite by chance that Voids were truly evil people.
