Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

momentarily startled at any response her words evoked. Nola didn’t bother responding most of the time, and this time was no exception. She loved her mother but sincerely hoped they didn’t have to spend too much time together doing whatever it was they had to do that morning; it got very tiresome listening to someone have a one-sided conversation.
    The moment they entered the room, Nola knew: he was dead. Something seemed to brush against her skin, wispy, feather-light. It lasted no more than a few seconds, but there was no question in her mind what it had been, even if she couldn’t put a name to it right then.
    “His soul was there,” she said to her mother later in the car. “Wasn’t it?”
    Her mother had misunderstood this, of course, in a way so typical of her. “Thank you, Nola, that’s sweet of you to say.” As if Nola had been trying to say he wasn’t really dead but still with them, or some other consoling cliché. When Nola’s father arrived the next morning to pick her up for the weekend, she repeated her statement to him: “Grandpa’s soul was there.”
    “Grandpa doesn’t have a soul,” he said. He grinned at his ex-wife, who shook her head and sighed, though it seemed far more likely that she was displeased with his new haircut than his remark. “No one has a soul,” he continued. “That’s just another bullshit story made up to get you to join the cult. ‘Wooooo!’” he moaned comically. “‘Join us! Confess your sins or your soul will burn in hell!’”
    “Steven,” Nola’s mother said calmly, “the muffler is dragging again.”
    This was the kind of Emma Lantri statement that made most people blink and scratch their heads, wondering if she was a spy speaking in code. Nola and her father were used to it by now. “Ooh, the muffler is dragging!” Steven Lantri shrieked. “Eternal damnation shall be mine!” He started to laugh and then stopped. Perhaps he’d gotten tired of the joke, or perhaps he realized he’d gone too far; his ex-wife’s father had just died and his young daughter had been there. “Nola, can you go get me the duct tape? Bottom drawer under the microwave, I think, unless you’ve moved it.” He said this last part to his ex-wife, and the two of them stood there in the driveway looking at each other in a way Nola was too young to understand then and still, when she thought about it now, didn’t get. She supposed she wasn’t meant to get it. It was solely for the two of them, and maybe even they didn’t understand it.
    It was easier when you were a kid and didn’t understand things, though. You were used to not knowing. That first trace experience hadn’t frightened her, but neither had it filled her with some kind of reverential awe. It just happened, that was all, and she understood it instinctively without being able to explain it or even feeling the need to have it explained. It was the same way the next time it happened, and the time after that. In fact, since then, detecting trace hadn’t played much of a part in her everyday existence at all. Life went on in its usual way, often frustrating, sometimes exhilarating, frequently dreary. After halfheartedly earning a B.A. in psychology two towns over at the nearest state college, she’d discovered that her typing speed was far more useful than her degree in terms of obtaining gainful employment. She ended up getting work as a court transcriptionist. The job was mind-numbing, but it paid the bills, and she considered it a plus that she didn’t have to interact with many people. The solitude she’d experienced as the only child of a shut-off single mother was something she continued to seek as an adult.
    It was at the courthouse that she got her “big break” as a tracist. On a lunch break one morning, she overheard someone standing nearby—Jack Dalton, as it turned out—talking to a man from the DA’s office about how another county had taken to using psychics to help them with