Chapter 1
HAZEL RAVEN HIP-CHECKED the back door to the home she shared with her three sisters while balancing a large pizza, a bag of wings, and a two-liter bottle of diet soda, but of the caffeinated kind. “Anyone want to give me a hand?” She wiggled her key in the old lock. Damn thing got stuck all the time.
“Did you get dessert, too?” Willow, the youngest of the four sisters at twenty-five, snagged the wings off the cardboard box.
“There’s some cookie thing in the bag you’re carrying.” Hazel kicked off her shoes, before locking the door. Their house, which was also their office, had been built in the late nineteen-forties and still had much of its original charm with vaulted ceilings, large plank wood floors, and no central air-conditioning, which on a hot summer evening made her wonder why they loved the house so much.
Situated between Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, the neighborhood consisted of undergrads, grads, and medical students, with the occasional young professional tossed into the mix.
“Where is everyone?” Hazel made her way through kitchen, then up the spiral staircase to the living quarters. At one time, the house had been set up as a duplex, which served the sisters well, allowing their office to be the main two front rooms and giving them the ability to work when needed, but also allowed them to separate the Raven Agency from their personal lives.
“Savanah went to interview some of the relatives from the Kae Gyeon case and Alexis is in her room, studying.”
Hazel laughed, but her heart swelled with pride. Alexis would make a fine doctor someday. Hazel breezed by her sister’s room, tapped on the door, and yelled, “Dinner.”
“Coming,” Alexis called.
Hazel was the second oldest sibling, though she and Savanah were Irish twins being only ten months apart, but somehow Hazel ended up being the responsible one. Not that Savanah wasn’t, but she had a rebel streak that often got her in trouble.
The same could be said about Willow, though she tended to be more reckless, fearless even.
Where Alexis was more grounded, like Hazel.
But all of the sisters appreciated their special gifts and it made perfect sense for them to use their psychic abilities to help others. So, four years ago, they formed the Raven Agency, a local private investigative firm dedicated to helping the lost be found and the broken be fixed.
Hazel tossed the pizza box on the table in the upstairs kitchen and glared at Willow who sat on the counter, fiddling with her weapon in one hand, and a wing in the other.
“What?” Willow asked with a smirk.
Hazel shook her head. There was only five years between she and Willow, but sometimes Hazel wondered if her parents hadn’t lied about her age, because Hazel often felt light years older than her siblings.
Alexis strolled into kitchen, tugging her long dark hair into a ponytail. She and Willow were both brunettes, both on the taller side, and both skinny as a rail. Hazel and Savanah were blondes, on the shorter side, and a lot more curvy, yet they all had two traits that were identical: their dark brown eyes and the desire to use their gifts for good, unlike others.
“I hate organic chemistry,” Alexis said. “It’s going to be the death of me.”
Willow laughed, tossing a napkin at her sister. “Try going through boot camp. Now that will kill you.” The Navy, while she only served four years, had given Willow her unnatural obsession for weaponry.
Hazel placed a slice of pizza with extra cheese on a plate and sat down at the table. People thought the girls were weird for living together, but they couldn’t imagine not being under the same roof. As young girls, they’d been picked on and bullied for being different. At one point in their lives, they’d turned their back on their talents, trying to ignore them. But they couldn’t do that and they learned to rely on each other.
“Anything else on the Gyeon case?” Hazel asked.
“There’s something the family isn’t telling us, but I can’t pinpoint it,” Willow said. “And I can’t seem to get into Mr. Gyeon’s thoughts.”
“Do you think he’s telepathic and blocking you?” Alexis asked, twirling her ponytail and nibbling on a chicken wing.
“No, but it’s possible there is an outside force doing it. Or it could be I don’t understand Korean, since I do occasionally pick up a few things. I’ve tried looking the words up using a language translator, but it comes back all gibberish.” Willow finally set her weapon down and joined her sisters around the table. “Savanah can’t find a location on their missing son. Literally, she has nothing, which doesn’t add up.”
Savanah’s razor sharp skills had never failed, so it struck Hazel as odd that Savanah couldn’t at least get some kind of trail on what might have happened to Kae Gyeon.
Hazel dropped her pizza as the room spun and swirled into a kaleidoscope of images that floated through her mind.
She heard her sisters call her name, but she was lost to them. Gripping the table, she let the pulses of broken pictures race by like a time lapse film set to hyper speed. A wave of nausea rattled in the pit of her stomach. There was a misconception that people who had premonitions saw things clearly. That assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.
Often times, Hazel only got glimpses into potential outcomes, especially when she was trying to connect herself to a person in order to help protect them, or save them.
Quick images of thick, dense trees…men with guns…
“Savanah!” Hazel bolted upright, fighting the urge to regurgitate her extra cheesy pizza. She’d think twice about that order next time.
“What is it?” Willow placed her healing hands on Hazel, sucking in the earth-shattering pain searing in her brain.
“We need to find Savanah. She’s in danger. Grave danger.”
Not wasting any time, the sisters ran through the house. They knew the drill. It wasn’t the first time Hazel had gotten a premonition about one of her sisters, and it wouldn’t be the last.
But thus far, this had been the scariest.
While Alexis raced to the main office to start making phone calls, she also ran a trace on Savanah’s phone, while Hazel and Willow made their way to the car.
“What exactly did you see?” Willow asked as she slipped behind the steering wheel. Her skills on the road surpassed most race car drivers.
But only because she had no fear.
“Guns. Lots of guns and they were all aimed at Savanah.” Hazel mentally flipped through the images, trying to break them apart. There were times her premonitions were a mirage of more than one possible outcome.
“What else?”
“Focus on driving and let me deal with what went on inside my head.”
“Yeah, because your mind is a dark and dangerous place,” Willow said, her dry humor coming out in spades.
Hazel inserted her ear piece. “Anything?” she asked taping the mic.
“I’m sending you her phone coordinates now,” Alexis said. “I’ve called three times. Straight to voice mail.”
Not unusual for Savanah to ignore her cell if she were in the thick of a case. “Have you sent the S.O.S. code?”
“I did,” Alexis said. “Still nothing.”
“Stay on it.” Hazel craned her neck, doing her best to compartmentalize the images of her sister. She needed to approach this exactly like she would if it were a case.
“What about you?” Hazel turned her attention to Willow, who had a death grip on the steering wheel as she weaved in and out of traffic. “Can you get her thoughts?”
“Nothing. Either she’s blocking me, which we know she can, or someone else is, or…” Willow let her words trail off. “Maybe she’s getting laid.”
Something Hazel wouldn’t put past Savanah.
Hazel glanced at her phone and stared at the address Alexis sent.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Hazel said. “Savanah’s phone is sending signals from the mall.”
“She hates shopping. Why would she go to the mall?” Willow asked.
“That’s a good question.” Hazel pulled one particular image from her mind. She closed her eyes and tried to zoom in. Premonitions often intertwined themselves in the here and now, especially when they involved another psychic.
Even more so when the people were intimately related, like sisters.
“I have an array of colors with Savanah sitting in the middle of them and there are at least three guns aimed at her. She’s calm, almost too calm. In the background I see a boat, which is weird.”
“What kind of boat?”
“It’s changed three times,” Hazel admitted.
“You’re still having visions?”
“I wouldn’t call them visions. More like a bread trail, only the images are fading…no, more like melting.”
“Like when mom and dad died?” Willow never minced words. Normally, that would be considered a good trait.
“Same but different.”
“Elaborate,” Willow said as she maneuvered the vehicle into the parking lot of the mall near the east end department store. “Because, while I can’t be sure, Savanah’s ability to project is less than stellar, and I really get the vibe that’s she’s helping to secure the block, but also there is a small window I’ve been able to project my thoughts to, though I have no idea where they went.”
“You think she’s managed to channel you?” Hazel’s heart pulsed against her ribs. The sisters had always known they were different, but early on they did their best to squelch their abilities.
However, as they embraced their unique talents, they worked on honing the psychic traits that were but a whisper in their psyche with the help of their parents.
“It’s something we’ve been working on, figuring her key trait being remote and mine being telepathic that when you merge the two, you can help a captive maneuver themselves out of danger.”
Hazel understood the concept, but also knew that her little sister needed to go through the motions of explaining it. Hazel looked at her phone, matching the coordinates to their current location. “We need to go inside.”
She tapped her earpiece. “Guide me little sister.”
“You’re thirty feet away,” Alexis’s voice boomed through the tiny bud in Hazel’s ear.
“Based on the map of the mall, her phone should be ten paces in front of the pretzel store,” Alexis said.
“That’s fitting, considering Savanah can’t go five minutes without carbs.” Willow slammed the driver’s door shut and pulled her weapon from its holster.”
“Put that thing away.”
“We have no idea what we’re walking into.”
Hazel laughed. “A freaking mall, now hide the gun.”
Willow groaned, but thankfully did as asked. Her idea of handling any kind of conflict generally meant the use of a weapon.
Hazel scanned the area, noting the lack of cars in the parking lot. Who wanted to shop when it was a balmy eighty degrees out and the sun shone bright in the evening sky? She held the door open for a mother and her two young children, eyeing Willow, who smiled gracefully, as if she weren’t packing at least three guns.
The images continued to swirl, constantly changing and morphing into things that made no sense. Hours before their parents had been murdered four years ago, she’d had a similar experience. It wasn’t a vision, but more of a mirage of potential events that morphed with each change in her parent’s location until the images went from swirled, blurred colors to black. As long as the visuals remained in some shape or form, she had to believe Savanah was okay.
Standing in front of a pretzel and hotdog store, she looked for her sister, but she was nowhere to be found. The store to the right had a picture of a lush wooded area and to the left, an outdated travel agency with images of boats in the background.
“Over here,” Willow said, pointing to a garbage can as she lifted the lid, holding up a phone.
Hazel blinked. She’d been too late. Her sister had been kidnapped. She moved in a three-hundred and sixty-degree circle. The world around her churned like a child who filled their fingers with paint and swirled their little hands on the canvas. Images of men in uniforms toting guns, appeared in the soiree of colors. Behind them, her sisters’ face appeared. She mouthed something, pointing at the men, and then over her shoulder, only Hazel couldn’t see through the rivers of blue, green, red…lots of red.
She’d seen a similar mix of colors the day her parents died.