Dream Tracker - Starseeds Two

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I slipped into a soft pair of shorts and pulled a faded Depeche Mode t-shirt over my head, shaking out my dark hair after I emerged. I eyed it critically in the mirror. The purple was just beginning to fade from the streak at my temple, I’d have to dye it again in another week or so. The sun was just cresting over buildings to the east, the pale light barely reflecting in my amber eyes through the mirror, but the breeze coming through the windows was already dry and warm. Keeta would want to run – we hadn’t really had a good outing the day before – so I wore sneakers instead of sandals, the white Adidas Superstars gleaming against my long brown legs.

I turned and smiled at my dog. People say dogs don’t smile, but anyone who owns a happy dog knows that’s not true. Keeta’s grin curved deep into her cheeks, teeth showing just a bit where she gently held the leash between powerful jaws. Her white tail thumped heavily on the floor and her bright blue eyes stared into mine with expectation.

“Okay, girl, gimme that.” She dropped the leash into my hand and waited while I clipped it onto her collar. “Let’s go.”

We walked to the door where I grabbed my bag off a small table. Walking out into the shaded atrium of my apartment building, I locked the door with one hand and perched my favorite golden Elvis shades on top of my head with the other, Keeta’s leash clenched between my own teeth now.

It was too early yet to run into Amelia, my landlady. We had locking gates for the complex, but she liked to open them during the day and sit sentinel by the entrance so that she could watch over us all. Plus, it made it easier for her to stay up to date on all the hot gossip. I’d lived here for almost a decade, and I knew my foster mother still checked in with her from time to time, as if I remained a young, innocent college student.

Kate had never adopted me, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. She was the best mother figure I’d ever had but I’d turned down her offers to make it official. We’d had such a good thing going, I suppose I’d been a bit nervous to jinx it that way. Better, I’d thought then, to let her keep receiving the money from the state each month for my upkeep. She hadn’t really needed the money, though. She was a successful businesswoman in her own right, dressing movie stars and trophy wives for a living. When I’d graduated from high school she’d turned all the funds over to me to pay for college and a down payment of the rent for this apartment. She’d done the same for my brother and sister, Doug and Melissa, foster kids who’d stuck with her through the years while others came and went.

Keeta and I spent the next hour playing fetch in the shaded foothills of Griffith Park, the iconic refuge just blocks from my place on Hillhurst and Los Feliz. It was her favorite place to run and play, and I agreed. Close to home; soft, sandy fields; lots of dogs. It had everything a girl and her dog could want. Not that I could read my dog’s thoughts – no, that was my friend Evie’s talent, talking mind-to-mind with animals. But over the last few weeks, I had started to recognize certain images popping into my head as coming from Keeta. Plain vanilla ice cream in a cup, burger patties, green tennis balls – yeah, it was pretty easy to tell these thought-forms weren’t coming from my own head. Evie had told me animals communicated more in feelings and images than actual words, and I was still trying to wrap my own head around that. Keeta, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding me, ever. She’d even managed to travel miles through the city to find Ethan when Toby had taken Cliff and me hostage. Evie said all animals were capable of understanding us, and each other, telepathically, and that when we threw an image at them with strong emotion any animal would get it. That’s what I’d done that day outside Toby’s apartment, shouted for her to run to Ethan and tried to project an image of his building to her. It had worked, and I’d been amazed.

Thankful, and amazed. I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my life as I had been the day I saw Ethan’s car driving through China Lake to rescue me. Never mind that I had already broken out on my own with Cliff – it was the thought that counted. The fact that I was being supported. Looked for. Rescued.

No one appreciates that more than a girl who’s grown up thinking she’d been abandoned.

I smiled to myself remembering that day, and the ones leading up to it. The truth was, I’d never been abandoned. My grandfather was sure that my parents had wanted me. Before Finn, my dad, had gone missing, he’d told Joe he’d met a girl, someone who was in some sort of trouble. Then he’d gone missing. Disappeared for over a year, until one day my father received a call that his body had been found, washed up on the beach. The heartbreak almost killed Joe, and treated my grandmother even less kindly. She passed away shortly after receiving the news.

For almost twenty-eight years, Joe believed his son had simply drowned, either by accident or suicide. It wasn’t until he’d received a call from Henry Kim, the doctor in charge of the local Gregor headquarters, that he’d found out his son might have had a child. And it wasn’t until he met me, saw my necklace, that he’d understood. If I was wearing Ozan Fanai’s ring, a ring that strengthened his solar ability as a speaker, a ring that he never, ever took off, then my parents had somehow taken it from him. And the only person Ozan had ever trusted enough to get near it, near him, would have been my mother: Ozan’s daughter. Joe had known Fanai, long before my birth, and he’d recognized the ring around my neck instantly.

It was all conjecture, of course. No one had seen Ozan’s daughter for almost thirty years, she was either hiding, or dead. So, we couldn’t ask her. And we certainly couldn’t call Ozan himself. You didn’t just dial the shadow puppeteer of numerous governments in the Mediterranean, Baltics and Middle East, not if you wanted to live a long or free life.

At Joe’s insistence, I kept the ring hidden. If he’d had his way, I wouldn’t wear it at all. But I couldn’t give up my attachment to the piece. It was all I’d ever known of my parents, and while some kids had their binky, or a well-worn blanket, I’d clutched that ring on its long, thick chain whenever I’d felt adrift. It had always calmed me down, comforted me somehow. The ring was heavy, set with a large iridescent stone that flashed with purple fire against 24K gold. I’d gazed into it for more hours than I could count, searching for answers.

I’d always assumed it was an opal or some sort of man-made aura crystal, but every expert I’d ever shown it to had never seen anything similar. It was one-of-a-kind.

Like me.