Twiceborn Read Free Page A

bucket for me either. I’d given him plenty of practice in the first few weeks after the accident, trying to drink the pain away, or drink myself to death. I hadn’t much cared which. What was the point of existence without Lachie? I’d been lost in those first agonising days, and only Ben’s persistence had pulled me through.
    My sister had tried to help, but she still had kids, and I didn’t, and it formed an impossible barrier between us. Mum tried too but eventually she had to go home to Brisbane, which left me sitting alone in Lachie’s room drinking till Ben had dragged me out of there with a job and a bracing, no-nonsense kind of friendship.
    “Here.” He shoved a bucket at me, and I had to open my eyes. My vision darkened in that same alarming fade-to-grey thing it had done in the bathroom at the shopping centre. I tried to focus on his face. His eyes were a deep, warm brown, now full of worry. He had lashes any girl would kill for—long and lusciously curled. Seemed a criminal waste. He steadied me as I swayed on the chair. “You’re not going to pass out on me, are you?”
    “Can’t make any promises.”
    “What happened?” He tested my forehead with the back of his hand again, checking my temperature. I inhaled his comforting pine forest smell as he leaned close. “You were fine when you left here.”
    “I don’t know. It came on all of a sudden, after I changed disguises.”
    “You had no trouble, then, with the outfit?” He grinned. “No running required?”
    “Told you it’d work. You guys are so easily distracted.”
    “What about the pick-up? What was the big rush?”
    The pick-up had been booked with less than an hour’s notice. I’d barely had time to pull my outfit together and make it to the address—a house in The Rocks—in time. There’d been trees there. Lots of trees.
    I frowned, letting my head fall back against the wall again as I thought. Yes, lots of trees, and … what else? I remembered a garden, I remembered arriving at the shopping centre afterwards; I even recalled when I’d first spotted the two guys tailing me. But in between? Nothing.
    “Kate? You falling asleep on me?”
    Why couldn’t I remember? The image of my arms, red to the elbow, dripping blood—that was clear enough. As if I’d been bathing in gore. I shuddered. That couldn’t have happened. Who forgets a thing like that? But then where had the blood under my nails come from?
    “I can’t remember.”
    “You can’t remember what was so urgent?”
    “No.” My voice was very small. “Can’t remember any of it.”
    I opened my eyes. Ben crouched beside me, lanky body crowding the tiny room, bucket at the ready. He leaned forward, urgency in his gaze.
    “Have you still got the necklace I gave you?”
    I blinked. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
    “Have you got it?”
    “Geez, what’s your problem?” The necklace sported a little silver man with a Robin Hood-style hat and tunic and tiny wings on the back of his sandals. The detail was pretty good for something so small—the figure was no bigger than the first joint of my little finger. I pulled the charm on its silver chain out of my singlet and he sat back, the urgency gone.
    He’d given it to me when I’d first graduated from manning the shop counter to going on these odd little courier jobs of his. He had one too, on a leather thong round his tanned throat.
    “Never take it off,” he’d insisted. “Wear it the whole time you’re on the job.”
    “What for?” I’d asked, watching it spin on the end of its silver chain.
    “It’s always been a good luck charm for me.” His dark eyes had softened. “God knows you could use a bit of luck for a change.”
    Well, I couldn’t argue with that, and if it made him happy it was no skin off my nose, though I couldn’t see why he was bringing it up now.
    “It’s nothing.” He frowned, lost in thought for a moment. “Tell me everything you can remember.”
    Well, that