The Abandoned Trilogy (Book 1): Twice Dead (Contagion) Read Free Page A

most people, but mostly I refused to be drawn into his angry world.
    He often called me Lady of Shadows, telling me that one day I would disappear into the shadows never to be seen again. Seb liked to give people knick-names, mainly to annoy them, but mostly I thought because he was often bored despite his speed obsession.
    I in turn just shut his voice out of my head whenever I felt a touch of ire rising in me. It was something I had always been able to do from being a child who had been forced to undergo painful medical treatment for days at a time.
    I sat on the bench under the tree and drew my good leg up under my bad leg to get more comfortable.
    “Lucy!” the high-pitched voice of Jasmine cut through the air like the opening of a rusty can with a saw. I ignored her at first, flicking open the first page of my book, unaware that I would never get to finish it, intent on loosing myself in its pages of fictional fantasy, “Lucy!”
    When would people get my name right? It was Lucia, not Lucy. Jasmine’s voice came closer. I lowered my head, ignoring her.
    “Lucy,” she bellowed in my ear making me jump, my head jerked and she beamed at me.
    “Don’t yell!” I said.
    She gave me a happy smile, “You didn’t hear me.”
    “She was ignoring you, she is good at doing that is our Lady of Shadows,” Seb spoke from his wheelchair; he had a ratchet in his hand and some wires. What he was doing to his spare wheelchair I had no idea, but it looked interesting if nothing else. Interesting and probably downright illegal. Like the time he had increased the speed on another’s resident’s mobility scooter.
    Poor Mark had literally shot across the gravel pathway as if he had been flung out of a cannon. His shrieks of terror had reduced Seb to hysterical laughter. He didn’t like Mark who was a bit of a pet to all the staff, in the same way that Eden was, and on a few occasions had got Seb into trouble for home infringements that he had witnessed.
    Mark had gone home to his family for the long weekend. I had watched as his mobility scooter, now back to a sedately four miles an hour speed wise being put into the back of his father’s adapted car. His excitement at seeing his family had been palpable. Hugs, kisses, and laughter.
    Jasmine stuck her tongue out at Seb and turned her back to me, “Can I borrow your CD player?”
    “No,” I said as I tried to find my place in my book.
    “Please,” her voice was wheedling, “Eden and I want to practice our dance routine and mine is broken.”
    “You broke it,” I moved my head away from her breath which was sweet, she had been eating chocolate again, “You dropped it.”
    “It was an accident,” she protested.
    “No,” I repeated.
    “Please!” she pleaded, “Please, Lucy,” Jasmine simply didn’t know how to take no for an answer. I exhaled, pushed my untidy fringe from my forehead and wished I had stayed in my room.
    “If you break it…” I said in a warning voice and she flung her arms around me and hugged me, which made me flinch, but I didn’t pull away. Jasmine had no understanding of personal space, she was an innocent child in a woman’s body.
    Twenty-two years old, with a body a cat walk model surely would kill for, beautiful to look at facially too, everything physical about her was in proportion, from her long natural platinum tinted hair, along with her pale, and almost perfect skin, to her rosebud shaped lips and round blue eyes with delicate white eyelashes that gave her an almost ethereal appearance.
    She also had, as the singer Meghan Trainor said in one of her songs, “ All the right junk in all the right places, ” but this was where perfection ended. Jasmine had the brain power of a punch-drunk pumpkin. She would forever be seven years old and not a very bright seven-year-old either. Deprived of oxygen at birth Jasmine had the outward appearance of an exquisitely beautiful young woman, until she opened her mouth that was.
    “Thank