“I just don’t know what it means,” she said.
Far off in the distance, sirens could be faintly heard. Maddy sat up straight in her chair. The sirens began to grow louder and louder. She jumped up from her chair and threw open the front door just as a pair of ambulances and three Angel City Police Department cruisers roared past on the street. Their sirens rang in her ear as they disappeared at top speed.
They were all streaming downtown. Maddy stepped out on to the lawn and looked towards the tall buildings of downtown Angel City. The paparazzi began shouting questions at her, but she paid no attention. Far off, she could see a tendril of smoke rising. Her eyes popped open and she raced inside to her confused uncle.
“I need to borrow the car.”
Maddy followed the spire of smoke coming from downtown, past the tall buildings and into the rough area east, where her uncle had told her never to go. Chinese stores crammed with plastic gewgaws and streets crammed with pedestrians gave way to grimy alleys peppered with the homeless, who shuffled around under the hot sun. Skid Row. The dark side of Angel City’s glamour.
Soon she was able to follow the smoke and emergency vehicles to a building set on a cracked side street. She parked her uncle’s old station wagon and jumped out, but was quickly stopped by bright-yellow crime scene tape and a line of ACPD officers guarding the perimeter. Smoke continued to roil out of the building as the firemen on the ladder shot water into the dying flames from their hoses. Maddy could read the remains of the name on the scorched building: ANGEL CITY MISSION FOR THE HOMELESS. A shelter.
Firemen and paramedics were placing blankets on the shoulders of soot-covered women and children, their eyes rimmed red and faces pale as they staggered away from the building. Survivors.
A news van suddenly appeared at the scene. Maddy tried to cover her face so she wouldn’t be recognized. That was the last thing she needed.
Ducking away, Maddy approached a firefighter near the yellow tape who was gulping water from a sports bottle. He was sweat-drenched, dark ash smeared on his yellow fire suit.
“What happened?” Maddy asked him diffidently.
The fireman nodded towards the building. “Fire at the family shelter. It started over on the men’s side. The guys were able to get out. But the fire had spread to the side with the women and their kids. Two out of three exits on their side were locked. Don’t ask me w
hy. Not all of them could get out.”
His words sent a shiver along Maddy’s spine.
Two emergency workers emerged from the now-smouldering entrance with a stretcher. Maddy watched them in horror. On the stretcher was the body of someone small, covered with a black tarp. With nauseating dread pouring into her stomach, Maddy realized it must be a child. The tarp briefly pulled back as the two men shifted it in their arms. For a split second, Maddy saw an arm underneath the tarp.
She couldn’t be sure. But she thought she saw a striped shirt.
CHAPTER 3
Maddy placed Kevin’s car keys absent-mindedly on the counter as she walked into the house in a daze, her mind still back at the terrible scene downtown. She climbed the stairs and reached her room, sitting down on the corner of her bed as she tried to sort her confused and surging emotions.
She looked around the room – or, at least, at what was left of it. The room seemed almost strange to her now. Foreign. Bare walls, empty wardrobe. Ghostly outlines where posters and pictures once hung. The room felt naked, stripped of its identity. It was her room, but it wasn’t her room any more.
Maddy began shivering uncontrollably as she relived the vision she’d had on the staircase. It had to have been a premonition of the fire at the shelter. That boy emerging from the flames and smoke. His pale face and doomed hands reaching out to Maddy as his lungs blistered and burst from the inside. Flames licking up the striped shirt.
Maddy felt like she might throw up, and she began rushing to the bathroom before she controlled the nausea. Numbed, she slowly sat back down on her bed.
She could have saved that child. She could have prevented those people’s deaths. If she had only known how to focus on the frequency, as Jacks called it. They might not have had to die.
Her eyes drifted to the boxes and suitcase in the corner, the picture of her and Jacks sitting on top. Slowly, she walked over and picked up her suitcase. She hesitated only a moment before placing it on her bed. Opening both latches, she began unpacking it, putting clothes back in her drawers.
Maddy Montgomery wouldn’t be going to university.
In the space of just a few moments, Maddy had felt it deep in her bones.
She needed to become a Guardian.
“Maddy?”
The voice startled her.
Uncle Kevin stood in the doorway, concern on his face. “Are you all right? You left in such a rush.” He nodded to the open suitcase on the bed. “Are you still packing?”
“I – I’m unpacking,” Maddy said, her face turning slightly away from her uncle. She had a feeling he was going to be upset.
“I don’t understand,” Kevin said. “Why?”