CHAPTER 1
The ballpoint pen was a bully. And it was going to get her fired.
“Lexi.” Robert Cohen, the Cohen of Cohen & Patterson, LLP, gripped the obnoxious writing utensil, his thumb clicking the button on the top, again, again, again. “Ms. Cross?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.” The clicking sounds pulled Lexi’s attention to the pen instead of his face. “What did you say?”
Click-click, click-click.
“If you could stop daydreaming for a minute, I asked if you finished indexing the evidence for the Dixon case yet. The trial starts in three weeks. I took a chance on making you the lead paralegal on this one. Tell me I haven’t made a mistake.” His eyes locked to hers while he pressed the top of the pen over and over.
Click-click, click-click.
She ran her hands through her hair, hoping to clear her head of the rhythm. An oncoming vision skirted the edges of her mind, searching for a chance to slip in and take control. And the damn pen with its incessant tinny sound was its perfect wingman, driving her to distraction while the vision sought a foothold. She needed to focus and ward it off a little longer.
At three in the afternoon, most of her colleagues were half asleep anyway. If she could make it through the rest of the meeting upright in her conference room chair and at least semi-coherent, she’d pass as just another member of the nine-to-five walking dead. Then she could retreat to the safety of her cubicle. If a waking dream overtook her there, at least she had a chance of getting through the episode without anyone noticing.
A chance at surviving one more day without being fired.
A chance at not being thrown into the hospital on another seventy-two-hour involuntary psych hold.
Click-click, click-click.
The staccato rhythm pursued her with the same relentlessness as the playground bullies of her childhood.
“I sent my requested changes to you days ago, Lexi. I hope they’re not still sitting in your email inbox.”
She had finished them, days before, and forwarded the final versions to his secretary for distribution. She opened her mouth to say so, but the damn clicking morphed in her mind, becoming pounding memories of schoolyard ridicule. “Freak, freak! Lexi is a freak!”
The words echoed, over and over, loud and obnoxious, like a jackhammer to her cerebrum. The clicks and the freaks forming themselves into her very own musical composition—a mocking, psychotic, metallic fugue that was building to a crescendo.
Mozart would be proud, she joked to herself, even as panic gripped her throat.
It was coming now.
Her field of vision narrowed. Robert Cohen’s face slowly dissolved to a pinpoint of chapped pale lips. Her head fell back against the chair and then—
The scene widened again, the lips now a soft pink, smiling and laughing on the face of a porcelain-skinned redheaded woman. Lexi and the woman bounced along in a satin-lined carriage. A crystal pendant dangling over the woman’s forehead jostled with the motion of the horses. Lexi felt calmed as she always did when the mysterious redhead appeared before her mind’s eye. The woman opened her arms to hug her, and as Lexi reached out in response—
—a man’s rough hands yanked her forward, shaking her awake into the ugly green fluorescence of the conference room light. The pleasant vision was over. Along with her career at Cohen & Patterson, LLP.
Score one for the ballpoint pen.
Malingering was cited; repeatedly falling asleep on the job. Human resources even hinted at substance abuse, being careful not to put that particular concern into writing, though she knew they believed it to be the real issue. Veiled offers for rehab were thrown around, her severance check printed out on the spot. All in exchange, of course, for her signature promising not to sue them for any conceivable reason. Legal and tidy and fast. Within the hour Lexi was clearing out her cubicle, another job having bit the dust.
At least they hadn’t called 911, she thought as she packed up her University of Pennsylvania Alumni coffee mug, her Dr. Who mouse pad, and her just-in-case-of-revolution Guy Fawkes mask buried in her bottom desk drawer.
That call had been placed once when she was in college. As bad luck would have it, the visions came twice in her Abnormal Psych class, and she mistakenly trusted her professor with the truth of her precognitive abilities. Deciding she was delusional, he used his influence to initiate a three-day psych observation. Lexi’s visions always showed her moments that were destined to happen at some point in her future and, ironically in this case, the visions she’d been having were of the hospitalization itself—which she still thought was a bit of a mind fuck.
In truth, she’d been thankful for the hospitalization, because the moment she was admitted to the ward those visions had ceased, the actual event having finally come to pass. That was how it always worked—the visions would not stop until the act took place in real time. Then she might get a blessed break from them for a few weeks, months, or even a year if she was lucky.
Since that experience, however, she’d learned it was wiser, and easier, to let people think she was simply a slacker. Even a reputation as a fuck-up was preferable to that of whacko.
Or freak.
Her desk almost cleared now, Lexi reached to pack a delicate enameled clock her parents had brought back from a trip to Italy, its analog hands reminding her of a simpler, more elegant time. She looked at the Roman numerals on the clock face and—
—she was looking at her wrist. Some kind of clunky digital watch was strapped to it. Concern crawled up her spine as she noted the LED numbers on the face were counting down. She was running out of time, but… time for what?