Excerpt:

 Prologue

This was home: the street. Where she slept. Where she ate-- if she remembered to eat. Where she drank--if she could scrounge up enough money for a bottle. And the drugs--they were easier to score.

But even here she couldn't hide from the voices, couldn't drown them out. They kept whispering...in her head, the voices echoing in her mind, and it didn't matter...what she did.

She couldn't shut them out.

Cardboard shifted and crumpled beneath her as she curled into a ball against the wall of a brick building. The stench of moldy food and dirty diapers drifted from the Dumpster behind which she lay, but she hardly noticed. She hardly noticed anything...outside her head.

She pressed her hands against her ears, trying to block out the noise. Not the rumble of traffic from the street, nor the murmured conversation drifting from the other end of the alley where shadows crouched around a barrel with flames lapping up the rusted rim.

The noise she tried to block was already inside her head, and her efforts were futile. As the voices rose, her vision dimmed, the stars, streetlamps and the fire at the end of the alley reduced to sparks in a sea of black. Blinded, her hearing sharpened.

"Where could Irina be?"

The sparks glittered and danced against the black backdrop as she struggled to recognize the voice.

"We have to find her before he does!"

Although she didn't think she'd ever heard either of the two soft feminine voices before, in person, they were oddly familiar. Despite the anxiety in these adult voices, each of them resonated with the echo of a child's laughter.

Her sisters...

She'd had sisters, hadn't she? Her parents had told her no, that she'd been an only child. That she was only theirs. But there was another life to which she belonged...and it was calling her back.

"Irina..."

"Irina!"

She'd once been called Irina, twenty years ago, before she'd been taken away from her mother and her sisters. Before she'd been adopted by a couple who had wanted her to forget who she'd once been. They'd tried to convince her that she'd been born to them; that she'd been born Heather Bowers. But they hadn't adopted her until she was nearly five. She remembered. And even if she hadn't, she'd heard their thoughts; she knew the truth.

She wasn't theirs, and because of her uncanny ability to read their minds, they didn't want her to be. They couldn't love her. But they'd tried.

Like her sisters were trying to find her now. Why, after all these years?

The sparks brightened like embers on a stoked fire, as the voices quavered with fear.

"If he finds her first, he'll kill her like he killed the others."

"Like he killed our mother."

She squeezed her eyes shut, so that even the sparks of light disappeared. But she couldn't shut out the voices. Others called to her, jumbled inside her head, echoes of thoughts and fears she'd already heard.

"I'm not a witch."

"Don't kill me! Please, don't kill me!"

But the killer ignored their pleas, and the women's voices rose in screams of terror and pain. Irina winced at the volume, which threatened to shatter her skull, and she cringed at the agony expressed in each shrill cry. No matter how long ago she'd first heard them, she couldn't get them out of her head, couldn't forget their suffering. Not only had she heard their cries but she'd felt their pain too. The fire scorching her flesh, burning her alive. The noose chafing her skin, tightening around her throat until it cut off her last breath. The jagged rocks piled one by one onto her body, crushing her beneath their weight.

She'd wanted to help them, but she hadn't known where the women were. She hadn't been able to see them or their surroundings; she'd only heard them. Even if she had been able to figure out where they'd been, she would have been too late to save them. She'd wanted to help, but she couldn't even help herself right now.

One of these screams, the first she'd heard filled with such agony and fear and so hauntingly familiar, had driven her back here...to the street. Her biological mother's. She hadn't heard her voice in twenty years, not in person, just many times inside her head. With that scream, she'd known her mother had been killed, even before she'd heard her sisters speak of her death.

Were they real? Any of them? The voices? Her memories? Or had that first scream been the beginning of some kind of psychotic break?

Before hearing that scream, just months ago, she'd been managing. She'd been living. Going to school. Working.

Now she was barely existing, just waiting...until the next scream...was hers.

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