Shimmer: A Novel by John Passarella Page A

know, I should probably go help Barrett. Right? He said something about bringing him a turkey club.”
    “No need to be embarrassed, Logan,” Ambrose said.
    “I won’t be,” Logan said. “If everyone stops talking about my love life.”
    “Or lack thereof,” Liana said, grinning.
    “Jeez, I get less abuse from Barrett!”
    “Sorry, little brother,” Liana said. “I’ll try to restrain my inner Barrett.”
    Fallon pressed her index fingers against her temples and shook her head. “Look, this all sounds—wonderful, really. Well, not the stuff about Logan’s love life. The rest of it. All of it. But what does it mean? I don’t know how to do anything—any of that unbound or catalyst stuff. True, I have these dreams, prescient dreams, but it’s not as if I control them.”
    “You control your lips,” Ambrose said. “Right?”
    “Okay, sure,” Fallon said. “That’s one thing.”
    “Action and reaction,” Ambrose said. “Equally important. Talents may be active or reactive or passive, as with your prescient dreaming. But even dreaming may be aided and guided.”
    “I don’t know what you want me to do, or what you expect me to do,” Fallon said. “I’m confused—it’s all confusing.”
    “And yet you demanded the truth.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “That was your choice,” Ambrose said. “You will make other choices. This is how you shape the clay of your potential.”
    “By every decision I make?”
    Ambrose shrugged. “Why should it not be so?”
    “I think I want—need to go home now,” Fallon said. “Can I just go home?”
    “Of course,” Ambrose said, rising from his chair. “As much as I enjoy your company and as much as Logan, apparently, enjoys your kisses—”
    “Leave me out of it!”
    “In any event, you are free to go.”
    From behind Fallon, another voice—a woman’s voice—demanded, “Who is she?”

Chapter 15
    Fallon gasped, and her heart lurched in her chest like a startled deer in a meadow. She turned to face the woman, who wore a long, paint-stained smock, and clutched a dripping camel hair paintbrush in her trembling left hand.
    The woman’s long blond hair was in mild disarray and her hazel eyes had a wild cast to them. Her question hung in the air like a threat of violence or a plea for mercy.
“Who is she?”
    Liana slipped by Fallon and wrapped a comforting arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “Fallon, this is my sister, Thalia,” she said carefully, in a soothing voice, as if she were afraid to agitate the woman.
    “Hi,” Fallon said. “You startled me.”
    Under the paint-smeared smock, Thalia wore a gray, long-sleeved T-shirt. She’d pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, exposing forearms decorated with the same strange, rune-like golden tattoos that Liana sported. Thalia’s arms, however, exhibited long fingernail scratches, one of them stippled with fresh blood.
Almost as though, absent-mindedly, she’s been trying to remove the tattoos,
Fallon thought.
She’s… damaged.
    Thalia looked from Liana to Ambrose and back again. “Who is she?”
    “Fallon is a friend of Logan’s, from his new school,” Ambrose said, watching Thalia closely for any reaction to his words.
    Thalia looked at Fallon again. “Friend, but I…” She shook her head and glanced briefly at Logan. “More than friends.”
    Logan spread his hands, palms up, as if to exonerate himself from Thalia’s perceived conspiracy. “Really, it was
one
kiss.”
    Thalia ignored him, slipped out from under Liana’s embrace, and walked toward Fallon. “I saw you!” Thalia whispered urgently. Forgotten, the wet paint brush slipped through her fingers and plopped to the floor, blotting the hardwood with a comet-shaped smudge of red paint. Thalia canted her head to the side, contemplating Fallon as if she were a different species. “Up there… alone. But I… saw you.”
    Fallon fought the urge to back away and duck out the nearest exit. She wanted to ask