WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR I SEE ME, ORACLE 1
CHAPTER ONE
“There are zombies in Florida.”
I looked up from ironing butterfly patches onto my well-worn blue jeans just as Lina, the owner of the laundromat, plugged another quarter into one of the dryers in the bank she’d commandeered for the day. She was crazily talented at reading off her iPad and doing laundry at the same time.
We called it “the laundromat” because it didn’t appear to go by any other name. It was situated in the middle of Yachats, Oregon, though the coastal town was so tiny that there really wasn’t much of a middle to it at all. The underutilized laundromat got my business every Friday. I’d been going there weekly since Beau and I got into town. Today, I’d rented an old iron and an ironing board for an extra two dollars.
“Did you hear me, Sid?” Lina called out to her husband, who was doing some sort of paperwork behind the cash counter to my right. “Zombies in Florida?”
“That’s drugs,” he replied. “Weird drugs making people eat other people’s faces.” Normally Sid suffered from selective hearing, but apparently zombie-related topics were interesting enough to pull him away from his bowl of cheese puffs.
I dropped my gaze to the butterfly patches I was applying to the tear in the left thigh of my jeans. I’d already loosely darned and interfaced the rip from the inside. Beau had bought me the fuchsia, electric blue, and deep purple butterfly patches from Etsy because they were reminiscent of the butterfly tattoo on my left inner wrist. Also, money was tight, so patching jeans was way cheaper than buying a new pair right now. Not that I minded. I wasn’t big on the accumulation of clothing — or anything else, really. I was going to hand stitch the patches after I ironed them on, just to be extra careful. I didn’t want them peeling off.
“Drugs,” Lina scoffed as she crossed behind me and around the peeling laminate counter that held the squat cash register and not much else. She stole a handful of cheese puffs and settled back into her folding beach chair. “Who’d want to take something that makes them want to eat people?”
Zombies, huh? I knew that shapeshifters, werewolves, sorcerers, witches — and whatever Jade Godfrey was — existed. So why not zombies? Except, of course, it would be difficult for the Adept community — aka magical peeps — to keep flesh-eating zombies on the down-low. Yeah, I had figured out pretty quickly the Adept were big on secrets. Which made sense, since they were massively outnumbered by nonmagical people and all their pitchforks.
Sid didn’t answer. I could never figure out what he was working on all day. Yachats boasted a full-time population of six hundred and ninety people, all of whom probably owned their own washers and dryers. Even with the seasonal influx of tourists, the laundromat certainly didn’t do so much business that Sid needed to pore over the receipts with such attention.
I doubted, however, that he was the local pot dealer or anything. First, he just wasn’t the type — meticulous records or not. And second, weed was now legal in Oregon.
To be continued …
I SEE YOU (ORACLE 2) IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER.
RELEASING DECEMBER 17, 2015
