Lightning Kissed Read online

  ***

  So what did this hard ass do? Yeah, I emailed them back and told them to name the price so we could help them—I was such a sap sometimes.

  The third email was from a client who was willing to pay double for our services, but as I scrolled down, I saw that the writer of the email constantly used words like special interest and highly confidential, and that meant only one thing. They wanted us to transport drugs or worse. I deleted it.

  I hovered my finger over the email from him. I resisted in vain—I knew I was going to open it. He wrote in prose, like poetry-pointed journal entries. He was now in New Zealand with his family. He had taken the Lord of the Rings tour three times. He missed me. He didn’t understand why we couldn’t be together. He couldn’t remember the exact color of my eyes.

  Theo Ramsey was so full of shit.

  I yelled at the computer, “You do remember, liar!”

  I moved the heartfelt letter into the folder marked Theo and pushed the lighted button, turning off the monitor.

  There was just so much I could take. Yes, I’d broken it off with him. Yes, it had been my decision. But I’d done it to keep him out of the spotlight and, selfishly, to keep my heart safe from the likes of the one guy who could ruin me with a single word.

  He knew why we’d split up. He was a Lucent, like me. That didn’t have anything to do with it. Anyway, I wasn’t that big of a snob. We were allowed to date and marry outside of our race, the powerful mutation still powered through the female of the coupling.

  There were flukes in the system—one or two per century—males who could flash, but only short distances, and their wakes were so bright, it brought them immediate attention.

  Theo was one of those—a male Lucent who could flash.

  And my fetish for frequent travel plus his genetic mutation was just a government experiment waiting to happen—not to mention, the Synod’s Book of Lei would crumble to ashes if they ever found out. And the government experiments, they happened every day. Lucents were grabbed up in set-up meetings or facades of money-making opportunities. Then they were tortured, tested, and re-tested, trying to see what made us tick. The government just didn’t get it—our blood on a microscopic slide would never reveal the power of the Almighty to them.

  Duh.

  The ones experimented on—they became the Resin—their wakes of light dirtied, muddied, and clouded by the sadistic acts performed on them. It was devastating to us all and we mourned such sisters as if they’d died a slow and painful death. Such was the case of my other friend Sway. She was now one of the Resin. She could no longer flash—and it made her less than hospitable, to say the least. Lately, she was a real peach. But it wasn’t her fault.

  And some of them chose to live a life that portrayed their name—they became lawless—denied respect or acknowledgement in our world.

  I’d rather be tortured thirteen times over than for Theo to ever come to even a flicker of harm.

  So I kept my distance, in theory. Being with me would just bring attention to him. The Synod kept track of me like their checking accounts because of what they suspected I could do.

  There was one more glitch in my Lucent DNA, as if I wasn’t freaky enough. I could travel between places but my chromosomes took it one step further. I was a seeker—a specialized flasher who could also travel to a certain person, anywhere, anytime—which is why he could send emails all he wanted, thinking he was doing me some service in updating me.

  In truth, my body always knew where he was—always.