Where Lightning Strikes (Bleeding Stars #3)
A.L. Jackson
BRIGHT LIGHTS BLINDED FROM above and gleamed against the stark white floor. I hurtled down the narrow hall, desperate for escape.
With every pounding step, I felt the separation grow. A chasm rending and ripping until I felt myself splitting in two.
Gasping for breath, I stumbled out the building and into the vacancy of the deep, deep night. Wind gusted, tumbling along the surface of the ground, a stir of agitation at my feet.
Above, the storm raged. Clouds dark and heavy and ominous.
Lightning struck. A crackle of energy shocked through the air and wrapped me in coils of white-hot agony.
For a moment, I gave into it and let myself feel. I lifted my face to the tormented sky, hands gripping my hair as I screamed.
Screamed in anguish.
Screamed in regret.
Screamed loud enough I would never forget.
A crack of thunder opened the sky.
Rain poured.
My hands fisted at my sides. I buried the memory of his face and the memory of the way he’d felt in my arms in the deepest part of me.
Sealed it off and cemented my heart.
My spirit grasped and wove with the promise I made him.
I will never fall in love again.
Not ever again.
Not after tonight.
I PUSHED THROUGH THE crowd roving the sidewalk.
What the hell was wrong with me?
Running?
Hiding?
This wasn’t me. This wasn’t who I’d worked so hard to become.
But Lyrik West made me this way.
Desperate to escape the overwhelming intrigue simmering in the sky.
Do you know what it feels like right before lightning strikes? How you can feel the current running through your veins? The trembles of warning that ripple through the dense air? The crackling energy that bristles across your skin and shakes you to your bones?
It’s as if nitrogen and oxygen have come alive.
As if every element in the air is combustible.
Explosive.
Your heart beats fast because you know you’re in danger. It’s instinctive. The awareness that in the mere flash of a second and without warning you could be consumed by the force. By nature and blinding light.
Incinerated.
But there is also an overwhelming exhilaration surrounding it. A power in standing below those foreboding clouds with your face lifted to their bloated, sagging bellies, as if you’re issuing up the bravest plea.
Let me be a part of what you are.
You feel so small. Scared. Yet strong at the same time. As if you’re witnessing beauty unseen. Touching upon an experience meant only to be observed from afar.
That feeling? I’d chased it for a long, long time.
The excitement.
The thrill.
Growing up, I’d been the girl who’d try anything once. I’d thought that attitude made me brave. Turned out, it’d just made me stupid. Na?ve and unsuspecting and vulnerable.
In the end, it had only burned me.
Now, I did anything and everything in my power to stay as far away from that feeling as possible.
I sought safety from that storm in the walls I’d built up around myself. Behind the fa?ade of this hardened exterior—tattoos and makeup and dyed hair—that had become my home.
No longer were they just a mask.
They had become me.
Yet somehow…somehow he kept reappearing at the fringes of my life, pushing and prodding and drawing me back into all those excited, convoluted feelings I didn’t want to feel.
Lyrik West.
Cowardly, I ran, tracking him like a lunatic over my shoulder as I did.
A short yelp flew from me when I bumped into a guy in front of me. My face whipped back around to meet the irritation in his scowl.
“Think you could watch where you’re going?”
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled. Too shaken to wait for his pardon, I ducked my head and quickly wove deeper into the crowd browsing the farmers’ market set up along the sidewalk.
My nerves raced like a panicked dog as I constantly looked over my shoulder in fear he’d spotted me.
I had to be crazy. Insane. Every reasonable, rational part of me was screaming at me to stop and handle this like a normal human being.
There was absolutely nothing to fear.
Lyrik West wasn’t Cameron Lucan.
Yet he made me feel things I couldn’t allow myself to feel.
The Savannah afternoon was hot and the humidity thick. Trees that had been here for over a century overhung the sidewalk—their old branches stretched out, full of leaves and dripping with Spanish Moss—as if loaded down by the weight of wisdom. The June sun shone high, rays slanting and burning bright.
I felt flustered by the heat. Flustered by his presence.
I glanced again.
A crown of ebony hair bobbed through the mass as he ambled along the busy sidewalk, as if he were just another person meandering the quaint Savannah street.
It didn’t matter he was surrounded by a crush of bodies. He might as well have been alone. Or more apt, under a spotlight up on a stage.
He stood out like a fiery bolt of electricity. A streak of light and a blanket of dark. So destructive and compelling it was impossible to look away, the boy poised to strike and set you aflame.
My eyes scanned for a place where I could cower and hide.
Shit.