Lightning Strikes Read online

  LIGHTNING STRIKES

  An Andromeda Spencer Novel

  Book 1

  BY

  THERESA PARKER

  Also by Theresa Parker:

  (Click on covers for available retailers)

  Copyright

  Lightning Strikes is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Copyright © 2010 by Theresa Parker

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1499615280

  ISBN-13: 978-1499615289

  Used with the permission from Microsoft

  Font: Georgia 10, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 26

  Dedication

  I would like to thank my husband, Mark, for making it possible to do nothing but write all day and for encouraging me to put myself out there. My boys, Stephen and Drew, for reading it and not saying it sucks. To the wonderfully talented Natalie Boyajian, for giving me the best cover design I could hope to get. To my sister, Lisa, for being my biggest fan and amateur proofreader; I forgive you for missing all those mistakes because you couldn’t stop reading long enough to spot them. Lastly, I would like to thank my niece, Jessica, and her friend, Tiffany, for giving me an outside opinion of the story and to Kelly at Bookside Manner for being the best editor in the world! Thank you all.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Author’s Note

  Sneak Peek - Melody of Murder

  About The Author

  Chapter 1

  ‘The air was still and muggy. There was a storm heading this way. I hate storms. It’s probably because I was struck by lightning when I was almost sixteen. Really, I was! It left me in a coma for a month.

  I pulled into my driveway, to the very back, where the detached garage sat. I got out and waved to Joey. He waved back, smiled, and disappeared. It’s nice to be greeted by your neighbors, even if they are dead.

  This was one of the many side effects of being struck by lightning. I am now what the parapsychology community calls clairvoyant. Yep, that’s right—I see dead people. I know, I know, it’s been done to death, but there you have it. I’m also clairaudient, meaning I can hear the dead as well as see them, and a bunch of other “clairs” I don’t even want to think about.

  My name is Andromeda Spencer. I’m five foot four inches tall. I am not short or vertically challenged, no matter what my sister says. I have light-brown hair (I’m thinking of getting highlights) and a not-so-bad body, although I have my mother’s ass, which though round and perky now, has the potential of becoming flat as a pancake by the time I’m fifty.

  Most people ask me where I got my name from—Andromeda, what an unusual name.

  I just smile and tell them my mother loved Greek mythology. But the truth of the matter is, during the years my sister, Cassandra, and me were born, my mom was actually worshiping the Greek pantheon—not just enamored of their stories. You see, Mom’s a pagan. It’s kind of like a Wiccan, but pagans don’t believe in that “do no harm” crap. When Mom was going through menopause, she’d curse you for just looking at her cross-eyed. Talk about scary. I think it was when Dad found her singing to a spider on the back patio that he decided modern medicine was called for and got her on hormone patches. She’s a lot better now.

  Dad’s not a practicing pagan; he’s into astrology. It gets a little confusing when he tells me that Mars is in Pluto’s house or that I’m going to have a good day because my moon is aligned with Uranus. When Cassie and I were kids, anything with “Uranus” made us snicker; I think that’s why Dad said it so often.

  It was because of my mother’s religious preference that I was struck by lightning. My parents own an occult shop called Piercing the Veil, and my sister and I worked there after school. It was three months to my sixteenth birthday, and I was just learning to drive. I had my learner’s permit, and I was always bugging my mom to let me drive her around. Dad had left earlier to get ready for some celestial event that was taking place that night. I begged Mom to let me drive us home. We were supposed to stop by the grocery store for a few items Mom needed for dinner, but Mom changed her mind. She said she had to perform a small ritual at Kearney Park. My sister and I groaned, because Mom’s rituals had a tendency to take forever no matter how small she claimed them to be. She quashed the mutiny my sister and I were planning by saying that she would order pizza when we got home. Cassie still whined, because she said she had tons of homework. I knew she just wanted to get home so she could spend the evening on the phone with her new boyfriend.

  We pulled into a parking area near a large clearing. The sky was growing dark, and it looked as though it was going to rain. Cassie and I stayed in the car while Mom did her thing.

  The storm seemed to blow in out of nowhere. It started with a couple of fat drops and progressed into a deluge with thunder and lightning. Don’t ask me why Mom didn’t come running back to the car, but when lightning struck a tree at the edge of the clearing, Cassie and I opened the car doors and started screaming for Mom.

  The wind was so fierce it whipped away our voices before they reached her. We both got the idea at the same time to run out and get her.

  Together, we sprinted into the clearing. It happened so fast that I don’t really remember much. According to Mom and Cassie, we were almost to Mom; she was gathering her stuff up and turned to us. Cassie was standing right next to me. I took a small step forward and yelled something to Mom; I don’t remember what it was. Before I could take another step, a bolt of lightning shot down from the sky and went right through the top of my head. I was lifted off the ground and thrown about seven feet into the clearing. Cassie said I had smoke coming off my body when they ran to where I landed. If it wasn’t for a passing security guard with a radio, I would have been dead for good. He called for an ambulance and tried to perform CPR, but I wasn’t responding. From what the paramedics said to my mom, the lightning stopped my heart. They had to defibrillate me to get it going again. No one was really sure how long my heart had stopped beating. I was rushed to the hospital. I remember waking up surrounded by mom’s coven. The black cowls freaked me out, and I thought I was in hell until Dad moved up next to the bed and took my hand. I guess I hadn’t noticed him sitting in the chair next to me.

  The doctors rushed in and everyone ooohed and ahhhed and remarked about how lucky I was to be alive. My hands and feet tingled, my body felt like I’d been dragged behind a truck down a gravel road, and I was missing a whole lot of hair on the top of my head. My sister told me later that the hospital had to cut it because the metal barrette I was wearing that night melted into my hair. The doctors told my parents that the barrette was what attracted the lightning. To this day, I have never worn anything metal in my hair. I don’t even wear jewelry anymore.

  I can’t begin to tell you how it felt to hear from my family and the hospital staff that I had been in a coma for a month. As far as I was concerned, we had been at Kearney Park just yesterday.

  My mom cried. My dad got misty-eyed
but managed to hold it together. My sister brought a light bulb with her and asked me if I could put it in my mouth and light it up like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. Mom got mad at her, but Dad and I thought it was funny.

  I had a couple weeks of physical therapy because my arms and legs were as weak as cooked noodles. It was during this time that I started seeing things in my mind. We were on our way to one of my therapy sessions, and my mom couldn’t find her car keys. As soon as she said, “Have you seen my keys?” I knew they were on the top shelf of the fridge. She gave me a funny look and went into the kitchen. She didn’t say anything to me when she came back into the living room holding her cold car keys, but she still had that funny look on her face.

  It was a couple of days later that it happened again. Someone lost something, and I knew exactly where it could be found. My mom started deliberately hiding things and asking me where they were. I told her where every item was—no matter that some of them were in odd places, such as buried in the backyard by the old oak. She sat me down and asked me point-blank how I was doing it. At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I guess I hadn’t realized what I was doing. I thought about it for a minute. I was shocked to realize that every time she asked me where something was, I would picture that thing in my mind and get a detailed image. It was from that image that I knew where the item was located.

  So that’s how I became my parents’ favorite party trick. I mean that literally. They would trot me out in front of friends and family, and I would perform my amazing I-can-find-anything trick. Thank God it didn’t get out to the general public that I could do this. The local and national media had picked up the story of the lightning strike, and for weeks afterward they hounded my family to the point where Mom was ready to have her coven perform several curses. They were even trying to sneak into my room at the hospital and take pictures of my comatose body. It was worse after I woke up. I can’t even imagine what kind of weirdoes would crawl out of the woodwork if it was known that my brush with death had given me paranormal abilities.

  I entered my house through the kitchen door. Well, it’s not really my house, it’s Nana’s. Nana lives with my mom and dad now. When she tackled a Jehovah’s Witness in her front yard and tried to perform an exorcism on him, the authorities said Nana could no longer live alone. So my mom took her in. She has my sister’s old bedroom. She could have gone to that nice, new assisted living complex near the mall, but my mom said that it is our responsibility to take care of the very old and the very young. My sister says it’s because Mom doesn’t want us to dump her and dad into one of those places when they start going after religious missionaries in their old age. We have been playing rock-paper-scissors every day now—loser has to live with Mom and Dad and keep them in line when they go crazy like Nana. Cassie is ahead by two wins. I think she cheats.

  I plunked my purse down on the small kitchen table and went to the refrigerator for a cold soda. Before I could open the fridge door, a pile of black-and-grey striped fur rolled off the top of the fridge and landed with a soft thump on the pillows that I had previously laid out below.

  “Hey, Pollini,” I said, nudging the pillow with my foot so I could open the fridge door.

  Pollini is my two-year-old cat. I got him when he was six months old, from one of my parent’s neighbors. She was selling the cats, trying to find them good homes, because she was moving to Canada to live near her son and she couldn’t take her precious babies with her. That’s what she called the cats: “precious babies.” She gave me the last one for free. She said it was because she’d known me since I was a little girl. Yeah, right! It took about a million trips to the vet and about two thousand dollars to find out that nice old lady punked me by giving me a narcoleptic cat. Of course, she was already gone, moved up to Canada, so I couldn’t give the cat back. What the hell was I going to do with a narcoleptic cat? My mom guilted me into keeping him—she told me that if I didn’t keep Mr. Nibbles (that’s what the old lady named him) there would be no one else and they would be forced to put him down. I was horrified that he could be killed. After all, he was cute, even when he fell asleep face-first in his kitty crunchies. Oh well, it couldn’t be that hard to take care of a narcoleptic cat.

  Boy, those words came back to bite me in the butt.

  I took him home, and it immediately became clear to me that we were going to have big problems. He kept falling off the furniture and counters. I tried to keep him down on the floor. That worked for all of about two seconds. I think it was when he rolled off the second-floor banister that I knew I needed to do something fast. It was fortunate that my sister was there that day to catch him, or we could have added brain damage to the narcolepsy.

  Cassie suggested throw pillows. “Lots of throw pillows,” she told me. “Target’s having a sale on them starting today.”

  Lucky me!

  Off I went to Target and maxed out my credit card to the tune of nine hundred dollars, all for a bunch of throw pillows for my narcoleptic cat. Nobody ever told me owning a pet would be so expensive.

  When I returned, my sister informed me that she had changed Mr. Nibbles’s name to Pollini, after the narcoleptic Italian character in the movie The Rat Race.

  “You can’t all of a sudden change his name,” I told her. “He’s been going by Mr. Nibbles since he was born. You’re going to confuse him.”

  My sister rolled her eyes at me. “Mr. Nibbles is a lame-ass name,” she said. “Who names their cat Mr. Nibbles?”

  “Sneaky little old ladies who live across the street from our parents and dump defective kitties on their unsuspecting neighbors, that’s who,” I muttered darkly.

  Cassie tsked at me. “Would you let it go?” she huffed. “I think Pollini suits him. Here, Pollini,” she called the cat. He leaped to his feet and toddled over to her, giving her an inquiring Meow.

  “See,” she said, “he likes it.

  I was pretty stunned. I’d been saying, “Here, Mr. Nibbles,” every day since he came to live with me, and I never even rated a twitch of his whiskers. My feelings were a little hurt. “Wow, maybe you should take him home with you. He seems to like you much better.”

  I admit I was being snarky, but she wasn’t the one who’d just spent nine hundred dollars so his mangy ass could have something soft to land on.

  She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “Don’t be a whiny-baby,” she said in exasperation. “I told you Mr. Nibbles was a lame-ass name. Even the cat thinks so. Go over to the counter and call him by his new name.”

  I stomped over to the counter, my bottom lip poking out. So what if my cat liked her better. “Here, Pollini,” I said in a monotone voice.

  My sister gave me a squinty-eyed look. To my amazement, the darn cat jumped up and ran over to me, purring loudly and rubbing up against my ankles. I looked at my sister, astonished.

  “See, he didn’t like that lame-ass name.”

  So from then on I called him Pollini, and we were much happier.

  It takes Pollini a little while to come around, so I picked him up, draped his snoozing body over one arm, grabbed my soda, and headed into the living room. I settled Pollini in the recliner and parked myself on the couch. All of the furniture in the house is Nana’s. Old-lady floral would never be my choice, but the stuff was in good condition and comfy.

  Before I could pick up the remote and spend my evening flipping through 152 channels of nothing on, my phone rang.

  I didn’t want to answer it. I knew it would be Captain Johnson. That’s another one of my nifty new tricks since the lightning strike and coma; sometimes I know things before they happen. That’s called claircognizance. It doesn’t happen often. I can’t control it like I can some of the other things I can do, but still, it’s handy to have when it happens. I let the machine pick up the call.

  “Rommy.” A gruff voice sounded throughout the room. “I know you’re there. Your mom said you left the shop thirty minutes ago and that you were heading straight home. If you d
on’t pick up your phone right now, I’m sending a patrol car to your house and hauling your ass down to the station.”

  Damn, ratted out by my mom. I hate it when she does that! I stomped to the phone and snatched it up.

  “Christ, Johnson, can’t a girl go pee in peace?” I lied.

  As always he got all blustery when I mentioned my bodily functions. I smiled at his discomfort.

  “Yes, well…I didn’t know you were in the can,” he told me.

  I snickered, letting him blunder in his apology. Captain Johnson is the ultimate cop’s cop. He’s never been married, and he’s never had any children. He had no idea how to handle me when I was seventeen, and now that I’m twenty-seven, he’s even more clueless. I gave it another minute, and then I took pity on him.

  “Whatcha want, Johnson?”

  “We’ve got ourselves a real problem here, Rommy,” he told me. “I’m gonna send one of my boys to your house. I need you to make this your priority. I’ve been authorized by the Chief to pay you a salary. Will your folks let you away from the shop for a few days, maybe even a week?”

  “A week?” I squeaked. “Johnson, you know I can’t let my parents run the store for that long. There won’t be any store left when I come back!”

  I believe I mentioned that I work for my parents. It’s not that I really want to; it’s just that over the years, they’ve become lax in their accounting and inventory. They almost lost the business. My sister and I stepped in to save the day, working together to get the shop if not in the black, at least in a lot less red. We knew my parents loved that shop, and it would devastate them to lose it. Dad would actually be a financial genius if he would stop using astrology to pick his stocks. He’s probably made and lost more money than I will ever see in two lifetimes, but that’s his thing, and Mom says we must be supportive.