Read Online Tattoo #1: Tattoo by Jennifer Lynn Barnes - Free Book Online

strange, but I was getting used to A-belle taking charge. "But if the voices are really just Adea and Valgius talking to me," I whispered back, careful not to talk too loudly about the voices since I didn't want the entire mall to think I was crazy, "why don't they just tell me whatever it is they want me to know?" Annabelle bit her bottom lip in thought. "Maybe they need some medium to speak to you through," she said. "Like the tattoo. Or like something else in or on this stand" I thought for a moment, and then I ran my fingertips gently over the edge of the kiosk. Nothing. I touched the sign lightly, and as I touched the word "Mabon," the voices filled my head. She comes, she comes. To fight, to live, she comes. Same old, same old, I thought. Our lives. Your fight. Both worlds. I relayed the new information to the group, and they stared at me, waiting for more than a cryptic suggestion that we might have to fight for our lives sometime soon. "Why can't someone else hear the freaky voices?" I asked, feeling completely useless. "Why does it always have to be me?" My friends didn't say anything. Zo ran her hand along the sign, and without warning, she gasped, her eyes rolling back in her head and blue-green light that I deeply suspected only I could see streaming out of her face. "I guess someone else is hearing the freaky voices," I said, my voice shaking. "Big yay on that one" "I don't think she's hearing anything," Annabelle corrected softly. "I think she's seeing something" Anna-belle looked at me and swallowed hard. "Something bad" "Zo?" Zo didn't respond. "Okay, now you're freaking me out," I said. "Zo?" Delia's voice was uncharacteristically little. "Come on, babe, pull out of it" With no warning, the light disappeared, and Zo fell forward onto the kiosk, gasping for air. "What did you see?" Delia, Annabelle, and I all asked at once. "A girl," Zo said. "Really blond hair. Like white. She was singing to herself under her breath, this freaky song that sounded like a mix of a lullaby, a death march, and some kind of twisted nineties boy band. She was standing on a balcony or something, and then her eyes just kind of glazed over, like she was seeing something the rest of us couldn't" Zo paused. "And she just stared at nothing, for the longest time, and then her eyes flashed, like they actually lit up and turned bright blue, and then her pupils disappeared, and I saw her leave her body" "Leave her body?" I asked. Someone was sounding crazy, and for once, it wasn't me, but I couldn't be happy about it. Not with Zo standing there, looking as though she was about to burst into tears. Zo, who I'd seen cry a grand total of once since she was four. "She just stepped out of it. I saw her body, and I saw her, and she wasn't in her body. And then something pulled her away, and she was gone, and her body was just standing there, and then the blue left her eyes, and her eyes closed" Zo swallowed hard, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up one by one. "And then," Zo continued, looking down at her shoes, her voice reduced to a whisper. "Then the body fell forward, off the balcony" Zo looked up at us, and her voice hardened. "She was on the eleventh floor" Her words sunk in, and I couldn't shake the image from my mind. The girl, standing by herself, singing, and then ...boom, no more girl. "Premonition," Annabelle said in her I-know-my-def initions voice, "is having visions of the future" I squeezed Zo's shoulder. "So whatever you saw," I said, catching on to A-belle's point, "it hasn't happened yet" "We can stop it," Delia said. When Delia said something in her confident voice, it was nearly im- possible not to believe it. "But what about the voices?" Annabelle asked softly. "You know: `our fight, both worlds'?" I shook my head, my eyes still locked on to Zo's. "That fight's just going to have to wait," I said. "Zo, do you have any idea where the girl was?" Zo closed her eyes, her forehead wrinkling as she thought. "Near