By Familiar Means Read Online Free PDF Page B

positive, northern-lights-ish ripple of energy I’d surrounded myself with lifting slowly, like the curtain at the start of a play.
    The first thing I felt was warmth. It was relaxing, like settling into a hot bath. The air sparkled with a kind of suppressed excitement, or at least amusement. I felt it whisper against my skin, specifically, the back of my neck. I raised my hand and brushed it back.
    I swear upon my life, I heard somebody chuckle behind me.
    But I couldn’t have. Because Jake and Miranda were both in front of me, over by the bar. And they were waiting. I swallowed, and I tried to focus. I can’t say the real, present world went away exactly, but it did seem to retreat. The Vibe that surrounded me was more real, and more important, than anything else.
    â€œThis is a good place,” I said slowly. “This is the right place. Things are as they should be and will be.” My Vibe can mess with my ability to form comprehensible sentences. Maybe I should have warned them about that.
    â€œThere!” Miranda said. “I told you, Jake.”
    â€œOkay, okay, I give.” Jake threw up his hands. “You were right and—”
    The Vibe rippled; it swirled and it spread, like rings across the surface of a pond.
    â€œSecrets,” I said.
    â€œWhat?” they both exclaimed.
    â€œSecrets,” I repeated. “Secrets locked away, hidden, vanished, gone . . .”
    I could feel them. Deep in the swirling “water” I felt around me. The secrets were down beneath. They were up above. They were in the ceiling and behind the walls.
    Everywhere.
    My stomach lurched and I had to put a hand on the bar to keep from falling. I should have been scared—terrified, in fact—but I wasn’t. I wanted to know what was happening. I needed to know. To be known. Finally.
    Someone was laughing at me. I needed to know aboutthat, too. I needed to pick a direction, but how could I when the secrets were everywhere?
    There was a doorway below the stairs. I walked over to it and pulled it open. Another set of stairs led down into the dark.
    The Vibe was stronger here, bubbling up from the cellar.
    Some vague and distant part of my brain was telling me I should stop this. I might have, too, once upon a time. Now, though, my curiosity had a hold of me as firmly as the Vibe did. I liked this sense of accomplishment. I liked the feeling of being able to finally follow my Vibe instead of just being tossed around by it. I wanted to find out if what I was picking up on was real.
    In short, I wanted to know if I was right.
    If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have realized this was not necessarily any kind of a good sign.
    My fingers found the switch and snapped it on. Dim yellow light filled the stairwell. The steps were old and splintered and a little saggy in the middle. I couldn’t seem to muster enough worry to let that stop me.
    I was heading straight down the basement stairs, with Jake and Miranda trailing behind.
    The stairs creaked. My sneakers made hollow, thudding noises on the boards.
    â€œTake it easy, Anna,” said Miranda from behind me. “That last one’s kind of steep.”
    It was. I jarred my knee, and the Vibe shuddered.
    â€œHang on,” said Jake behind me. He must have flicked a switch, because a bare hanging bulb came on overhead.
    The chilly basement was made up of a pair of rooms with brick walls and floors. The one we stood in was being used as construction storage. Two-by-fours, white rectangles of Sheetrock, five-gallon plastic buckets and sacks of plaster of Paris were stacked against the walls along with toolboxes and coils of braided cable. An old utility sink from the building’s previous lives had been left in place and had half a dozen jugs of industrial-strength soaps and solvents stashed underneath it.
    â€œThis is going to be the kitchen,” said Miranda. “One of the reasons we chose the building