Prologue

The Catskill Mountains

       “Sweet Jesus in heaven, I’m losin’ my damn mind.”

       Her eyes unblinking, Geris Jackson mumbled her thoughts in a monotone as she plunked into the black leather driver’s seat of her BMW. Freshly recovered from a fainting spell, she decided that she had hallucinated the events leading up to it. She had to have.

       Because no way had that happened, she thought, her jaw gone slack. No way had two gigantic men with glowing blue eyes kidnapped her best friend from the parking lot of The Smiling Faces and Peaceful Hearts Meditation Retreat. That was simply too ludicrous to believe. It sounded like a scenario straight from a sitcom—and a really cheesy one at that.

       But if that was true, if she had been dreaming or hallucinating, then where the hell was Kyra?

       Geris nibbled on her lower lip, her almond-shaped eyes wide. “She must have gone to get me help,” she murmured, her gaze slowly lifting to stare at herself in the rearview mirror. “You know, when you fainted, girl.” She forced a nervous smile to her full African-inherited lips, as if that small gesture somehow made her barely audible words more credible to her ears.

       Closing her eyes tightly, she took a deep, calming breath and slowly blew it out. You were hallucinating, she told herself over and over again. You were hallucinating. And when you open your eyes everything will be back to normal.

       Drawing in another deep tug of air, Geris’s light brown eyes flicked back open, her breath expelling in a rush. She stared at herself in the rearview mirror while she absently tucked a stray micro-braid behind an ear. “Get out of the car,” she muttered to her image. “Get out of the car and go find Kyra.”

       Her hand trembling, she lifted it to the handle and slowly opened the driver’s side door. Her heart beating wildly, her body feeling as heavy as lead, she lifted herself up on unsteady feet, terrified beyond reason that the hallucination hadn’t been a hallucination and that her best friend was…

       No.

       She shook her head. No, the good lord above wouldn’t do that to her, she told herself firmly. Kyra was all Geris had in this world, and the ministers in church had always said that God would never give a person more burden in life than they could bear.

       Geris’s mother was dead. Her father was dead. She had no siblings, no husband, no children, and no friends she felt connected to in the way she felt connected to Kyra.

       Kyra was not dead, she resolutely decided, her hands clenching so tightly her fingernails dug into her palms to the point of pain. Nor was Kyra gone. She was here. She had to be here. Because if she wasn’t here Geris’d be all alone, separated from the woman she hadn’t been separated from since kindergarten. And then what would she have?

       Nothing.

       For twenty-seven years Geris and Kyra had been all but joined at the hip, completely inseparable since the age of five. They had met in Miss Rocco’s kindergarten class after Geris and her mother had moved from a trendy part of Harlem into a trendier part of Manhattan Island when her father died. Geris’s mother, an actress, couldn’t stand to be reminded of her dead husband and Geris, although only five years old, understood enough about what was going on around her to realize that her beloved mama was slowly fading away from her.

       So she hadn’t complained when the woman she loved more than life itself took her from all that she knew and moved away from the old neighborhood. All she cared about was pleasing her mama, and making her eyes light up again.

       The move didn’t help. And every day Hera Danelle Jackson faded away more and more until she was nothing but a ghost of her former self.

       Five-year-old Geris had been lonely. She missed her daddy, wanted her mama back, and had no friends to play with at school. She felt different from the other kids, and was shy to boot, so finding playmates had been difficult.

       But then a couple of months later something happened, something completely unexpected...

       A chubby little redheaded girl from the Irish Bronx moved to Manhattan and into Miss Rocco’s class. The girl was awkward and overweight, shoddily dressed (at least for Manhattan) and wore the ugliest coke-bottle glasses Geris Jackson had ever seen.

       At first Geris hadn’t paid the chubby little redhead much attention. But then one day on the playground when Geris was swinging as high as her swing would go, flying away from her life like a bird in the sky, she heard the Irish girl softly crying as some older kids shoved her into the dirt and called her mean names.

       “Look at the fat kid cry!” a third-grade boy named Jimmy Paluchi taunted as he kicked the redheaded girl in the knee, breaking the skin. “Maybe if you weren’t so fat and ugly you could fight back!”

       The other boys laughed while Jimmy continued to mock her. The Irish girl didn’t fight back, just sat there in the dirt and softly cried, looking as broken as Geris had felt ever since her daddy’d gone and died.

       For as long as she lived Geris would never forget that moment. Like a freeze-frame, like a still portrait in time, Geris would always be able to recall Kyra’s tear-stained cheeks, the terrified expression in the silver eyes that had been magnified through thick glasses, the way that her bottom lip quivered as the boys taunted her with cruel names…

       Her nostrils flaring, a warbled sound of anger erupting from her throat, five-year-old Geris jumped off of the swing, landed on her feet, and flew as fast as her nimble legs would carry her toward Jimmy Paluchi. She jumped onto his back and began beating him with her tiny fists, feeling as out of control as a wild animal.

       She continued to lash out at him, angrier than she could ever remember being, all of the emotions she hadn’t known how to express since her daddy’d died erupting in one fierce burst of strength. She hit Jimmy Paluchi for her dead daddy, for her ghost of a mama, for herself—

       And for the chubby little redheaded Irish girl with the ugly-as-sin glasses and banged up knee.

       “Geris!” she heard Miss Rocco screech as she came running toward her. “Geris Jackson, stop this fighting at once!”

       But try as she might, she couldn’t stop. She hit Jimmy Paluchi with her tiny fists until they were numb, until two teachers pulled her off of the sobbing bully’s back and forcibly carried her into the principal’s office. “You wait until your mother hears about this, young lady!”

       Her mama had heard about it, she recalled. And sad though it was, even that incident hadn’t been enough to snap her mother back to reality. The renowned Broadway actress Hera Jackson continued to die a bit more every day, and Geris reacted accordingly, withdrawing more and more into her five-year-old shell.

       The memories were a bit fuzzy at the age of thirty-two, but the impressions of how alone she had felt were still poignant.

       After the playground incident, Geris had seen Kyra in class, but never spoke to her. Later she would find out that Kyra’s father had just died too and that her mother was as broken in spirit as Geris’s was—a common bond that would forever unite the two women. But at five years of age, Geris couldn’t see that. All she could see was that this girl she had defended, this girl she had gotten in trouble for, treated her as though she didn’t exist. Just like her mama.

       But then one day, roughly two weeks later, she was eating her lunch outside, sitting away from the others as she always did, when she heard footsteps coming up from behind her…

       Geris frowned at the chubby redhead. “Whadda you want?” she asked gruffly, her almond-shaped eyes narrowed.

       The Irish girl stopped dead in her tracks, her silver eyes wide. The girl hesitated for a moment as if deciding what to do, unknowingly giving Geris time to realize that she didn’t want the girl to leave. Something inside told her she had done the wrong thing and her five-year-old heart knew she’d made the chubby girl feel as badly as Geris’s mama always made her feel.

       Like nobody wanted her.

       Geris frowned severely. She had a chip on her shoulder a mile wide by now and wasn’t nobody gonna knock it off. “Well since y’here you might as well sit down.” The girl plopped down on the ground beside her. Geris scowled. “What’s your name, anyway?”

       The chubby redhead pushed her coke-bottle glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Kyra,” she whispered, her childhood accent a mix of lilt and the Bronx. She cleared her throat. “You’re Geris. I heard Miss Rocco say that.”

       Geris nodded.

       “You wanna be best friends?”

       And that quickly the chip on her shoulder fell off. At five years of age, Geris reflected with a smile, it didn’t take much.

       Geris shrugged. “Okay.” She thought about that for a moment, then scowled some more for good measure. “But only if you hate Strawberry Shortcake. Me”—she jabbed a finger toward herself—“I like the Smurfs.”

       Kyra’s expression fell and Geris instantly realized she’d made a horrible mistake. When the girl started to stand up to miserably walk away, Geris felt, for the first time in months, panicked by the thought of being left behind. Her tiny hand flew out and tugged gently at Kyra’s arm. “I guess we can play both kinda dolls,” she said quietly.

       Light brown almond eyes clashed with wide silvery blue ones. Life would never be the same again.

       “Okay,” Kyra said, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. She held out her hand. “You wanna play hop-scotch right now?” she asked as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her other hand.

       Geris smiled for the first time since her daddy’d died. Skinny mahogany fingers threaded through pudgy pale ones. “You can jump first if you want to…”

       Rubbing her temples and forcing the old memories at bay, Geris reminded herself that there was only one way to stop the overwhelming panic she was currently feeling at the thought of having lost the only person in her life who’d ever mattered. And that one way was to find and collect Kyra.

       Somewhere on the grounds of The Smiling Faces and Peaceful Hearts Meditation Retreat her best friend was walking around, most likely trying to find someone with medical training who could help Geris out of her faint. Yes, that sounded just like Kyra. She would have immediately gone for help.

       Feeling better once she’d decided that Kyra was alive and well, Geris took one last steadying breath then turned on the heel of her fashionable jogging shoe to go retrieve her best friend. She even managed a faint smile and her heartbeat began to return to normal as she strolled away from the BMW.

       “You see,” she said in the way of self-assurance. “Everything’s fine.” She frowned, her lips pinching together in their trademark glower. She felt like an idiot for having believed her hallucination might be real for even a minute. “So quit muttering to your damn self,” she muttered.

       Her chin thrusting up, Geris walked briskly toward the exit doors of the parking facility, determined to get back to the camp as quickly as possible. She felt the panic begin to inexplicably bubble up again and forcibly quelled it. “Stop it, Geris,” she quietly chastised herself. “Stop—oomph.”

       Her words faltered as she unexpectedly stumbled to the ground, having tripped over an object she’d been in too much of a hurry to notice. She sucked in her breath and expelled it in a hiss as fire shot through her skinned up knee. “Shit!” she yelped, her hisses turning into small whimpers as she softly probed her knee. “Ouch.”

       Geris sat there on the hard concrete floor for a prolonged moment, then glanced around to search for the offending object. When she saw it, when her gaze landed on the very thing that had felled her, her eyes widened as nausea churned in her belly. “Sweet Jesus,” she breathed out, her chest heaving up and down as her heart began rapidly palpitating. “Oh Kyra—oh no.”

       It hadn’t been a dream, she thought in horror as she held out a trembling hand and reached for her best friend’s jogging shoe—a shoe that had been shredded into three separate pieces. The gigantic men, the glowing blue eyes, the possessive way the dark-haired one had stared at Kyra…

       Geris swallowed roughly, convulsively.

       “You wanna be best friends?”

       Oh God oh God oh God oh God…

       Light brown almond eyes clashed with wide silvery blue ones. Life would never be the same again.

       Geris gasped as she clutched the shredded shoe to her chest and wept uncontrollably.

       No. Life would never be the same again.