Shadows Falling: The Lost #2 by Melyssa Williams

quit beating around the bush.
    “ I did.” Connelly takes his cigarette from his breast pocket and lights it, calmly. “If she’s been here, he didn’t see her.”
    “ Ah, well, she’s a sneaky thing,” I mutter. “Do you want to leave then?”
    He puffs on his cigarette a moment and eyes me, thoughtfully. “I suppose I do. We should get you back to hospital. I don’t want to be accused of kidnapping.”
    “ I’m not a kid.” I stand up straighter.
    “ Mmm.” The corners of his mouth turn up again, in that maddening way I’ve come to learn is what he does when he’s trying (not very hard) not to laugh at me. “Come along then, Grandmother.”
    We barely say a parting word to the librarian, who is urging us to return again someday.
    “It’s these braids,” I protest, descending the stairs outside. “They make me look fourteen.”
    “ I have the same problem when I do my hair that way,” he teases. He opens the door to his magnificent chariot for me, and I climb in.
    It has begun to rain lightly, a drizzle, and it splashes on the windshield in airy plops. Dancing splashes of water skitter and skate across the car like water skippers. I watch Connelly as he circles the Rolls -Royce: his hat askew, giving him a rakish appearance, his new cigarette in his mouth, those nice-looking lips hugging it.
    Goodness, Lizzie! I give myself a mental shake. What schoolgirl, idiotic thoughts!
    He is rather nice to look at though. Even my practical self has to admit it. But he ’s entangled with a lunatic. Well, the best ones always are, I expect.
    Being so young, they went slowly with me, and carefully. Oh yes, one must be careful if you are remove bits of bone and brain and matter. Of course, I don ’t recall it really; I’m only relaying what I was told after by the nurses. They read from my charts in dull, clipped voices. I didn’t feel any different, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Did I want to be different? What was so wrong with me anyway?
    I was just a little girl!
    Recovering, I remember feeling very blurry. The world outside my little window was smudged. Everything in my room was smudged. I held my hand up to my face, and it was smudged. Blurred. Like it had rained upon my life and someone had smeared the colors: a bad watercolor painting. It got a little better later, but for the most part, life still looks like that to me, years later.
    I sat there by my window, staring lethargically out, and the doctors came and went. I ignored them. They were pleased. I was not. I was becoming bored with them. Sleeping was coming easier, but I was not traveling. I was awaking in the same place in which I had fallen asleep, and it was maddening. I tried to sleep for longer and longer periods, and sometimes I would dream of being in some far off land, some distant or future time, and then I would wake. One morning a nurse shook me awake for my pills right in the middle of a lovely dream , when it had taken me so long to fall asleep. I was so angry; I slapped her hard and pulled out a chunk of her hair.
    The doctors concluded my loboto my was not a success. They became bored of me and left me tied for hours in bed.
    One night I had an excruciating headache. I thought it was because of what they had done to me, and I pressed my fingers to my temple and rubbed the spot where they had taken out the bone fragments. It throbbed and ached and felt hot to the touch. I thought they had damaged me, but it turns out they must have heightened my abilities. That night I finally traveled.
    Old Babba had always known what my family was: Lost. She told me the barest bits of what I needed to know. She had “the sight,” a vague term people coined back then to explain visions or over active imaginations. At first I thought she was batty, an old lunatic, but then I began to see that for the most part, her mutterings made sense, and her predictions always came true. Once, when she was in a talkative mood and both of us feeling