Dark Vision by Debbie Johnson

other times, it’s … not so happy. It’s how they die, or how they get ill. Which is—’
    ‘Bloody depressing!’ she butted in. ‘I can see that. So – if I held your hand now, you could see what my future holds?’
    ‘Not necessarily,’ I replied, feeling uncomfortable at the thought. I couldn’t bear to see a future that held anything bad for Carmel. ‘It doesn’t seem to happen with the vampires at all. And with humans I don’t have any control over it, or know when it will happen. Which is one of the many things that suck about it. Why? You don’t want me to, do you?’
    ‘No way!’ she answered solidly. ‘I can’t think of anything worse. The present is plenty interesting enough, thank you. And it does explain a lot – all these years I thought you were just being weird. I didn’t mind, it was all part of the package, but I know you freaked a lot of other people out. Like the canteen staff, when you insisted they put your coffee down on the counter so you didn’t have to touch their hands. They thought you were a real stuck-up cow.’
    Good to know. Lily McCain, social pariah.
    She paused, cast her eye over Morgan and Marcus, squatting bare-chested on the floor in front of us.
    ‘So, you can touch vampires … again, could be worse, if this lot is anything to go by. And I noticed that you gave the old High King a bit of the cold shoulder earlier. What’s up? Have you two had a falling out? The path of true mating not running smoothly?’
    She’d noticed, of course. Being a girl. She was right – I had been off with him. Following the revelations in the Coconut Shy bathrooms, I was finding it hard to fall back into the routine of banter and sarcasm that Gabriel and I had established. After my encounter with Eithne, he’d been so worried I thought he’d explode, insisting that he stuck by my side the whole night. I guess he thought he’d failed in his protection duty – which he had. They’d all been shocked that she’d come in person – the Fintna Faidh usually stuck to their men-in-black foot soldiers on Earth, apparently – and Finn thought it was to do with something called Samhain.
    Samhain, it transpires, is an ancient festival when the walls between the Otherworld and ours come down. In the modern era we’ve claimed it as our own with Halloween, taken its mystery and magic and made it safe by dressing it up with Frankenstein masks and candy baskets. And in the approach to Samhain, the walls waver, allowing more contact between the two planes. The fact that Eithne had been able to come and go undetected was plain good luck for me. Hurrah.
    Gabriel had explained all this on the way back from the nightclub, in a cool voice that suggested he’d also noticed my stand-offishness. He’d got the message and kept his distance since, which was fine by me. Because the news that Eithne delivered, however hideously, had changed the way I felt about him.
    Knowing that he was keeping secrets, that he was the man who had calmly handed me over to Coleen and my miserable fate, had changed everything. It’s not like I was one hundred per cent sold on him before, but I had believed him when he said he was on my side. And I had, truth be told, not been totally repulsed at the thought of being his mate.
    But now … now I was even more confused. My life had been plunged into this netherworld of madness without so much as a by-your-leave, and throughout, Gabriel had given me the distinct impression that there was nothing I could do about it, apart from cling to him and hope. That my role had been decided in advance. Then along came Eithne, slinking and stinking her way from the Otherworld, to tell me I had a choice. That I could decide my own destiny. Change my own future.
    I can’t say that the thought of allying myself with her appealed in any way – she had almost killed me, after all – but I now felt a deep-rooted dissatisfaction with what was happening around me. I could feel the change