Excerpt of Cold Sight by Leslie Parrish

Thursday, 6:05 a.m.

Aidan McConnell awoke to the smell of gingerbread and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s scream.

The scream ended the moment he opened his eyes. The smell did not.

It took him a minute to place the scent, which had invaded his head and his dreams as he tried to grab some sleep just before dawn on Thursday. At first, in those early moments between asleep and awake, he assumed he’d been dreaming of some long-forgotten holiday visit to his grandmother’s house; her kitchen had always been rich with all the delicious aromas any sugar-deprived kid could desire. But when he sat up on his couch and realized the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of ginger and spice was truly filling his every breath, he knew he wasn’t dreaming.

He was connecting.

“Damn it,” he muttered, not wanting this, not now, not again. Not so soon after last night’s mental invasion. Bacon, for God’s sake. The reek of fatty, greasy bacon had seemed to permeate every inch of air in his house a few hours ago, and now it was gingerbread.

Forcing himself to focus on his other senses, he stared at his huge, antique walnut desk, which sat in the dead center of the room. Its surface was hidden as completely as the top of a freshly buried casket. Files, notepads, research books, his laptop—they consumed almost every inch of space. A few random items finished the job: A coffee mug that read, “Psychics do it when they’re not even there.” A colorful sand pail filled with pencils in varying lengths. A paperweight. An old-fashioned wind-up clock that dinged violently when the alarm went off.

Aidan stared, he focused, he thought about the coolness of the brass on the clock and the heft of the stone base of the paperweight and the way freshly brewed coffee tasted when sipped out of that mug. He thought of the thousands of doodled sketches he’d made with those pencils, trying to capture images he’d seen while mentally connecting with someone before they shortened and finally disappeared from his mind like a shadow at high noon.

It didn’t work.

Spice. Cinnamon. Sugar. But bloated, vile, thick and putrid like the remnants of a Thanksgiving pie buried in a garbage heap with rotting turkey and moldy stuffing.

He focused harder, rubbing the tips of his fingers across the grain of the leather couch, craning to hear the faint tick of that clock, staring at the desk, ordering his other senses to combine and smother the smell. But still the stench enveloped him. He could taste it now, the sting of too much ginger, the vile, rancid sugar melting on his tongue. His stomach rebelled.

Closing his eyes, he gritted his teeth, resorting to his oldest tricks against the familiar invasion into his psyche. He visualized a sea of sturdy cement building blocks. One by one, he began piling them up, erecting the psychic barrier between his mind and the one he was unwillingly connecting with. Building mental walls in order to protect himself wasn’t just an expression when it came to Aidan, it was pure survival. He’d have gone insane long ago if he hadn’t learned how to protect himself.