Read Angel Burn for Free Online

pants and a turquoise top. Her dark honey hair was pulled back in a pony tail, making her brown eyes even larger. I glanced down at her shoes. Prada. Next to them, my purple Converse sneakers looked even more “colorful” than the front yard.
    As I shut the door, I could hear the TV going in the living room, where Mom and her caregiver were. Aunt Jo wasn’t home from work yet.
    “I usually give readings in the dining room,” I said, starting down the hallway. “It’s back here.” Beth trailed after me, gazing silently at the kitten figurines and the bookcases stuffed full of Harlequin romances and floppy sad clowns, and the dozens of dusty decorative plates on the wall. Aunt Jo’s a collector as well as a hoarder. She practically keeps the Franklin Mint in business single-handedly. Seeing it all through Beth’s eyes, I suddenly realized that maybe the inside of the house wasn’t that normal after all.
    “Here,” I said, motioning for her to go into the dining room. It had two sets of French doors that you could close off, separating it from the rest of the house. I shut them while Beth gingerly took a seat at the dining table, looking as if she expected the chair to collapse under her.
    She cleared her throat, running her hands across the tablecloth. “So how does it work? Do you use tarot cards or something?”
    “No. I just hold your hand.” I sat down next to her and rubbed my palms over my jeans. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was. It wasn’t like I’d never done this before; I’d been giving readings since I was eleven. For the last year or so, I’d even been charging money for a lot of them, just to shut Aunt Jo up about how draining it was on her finances to have to support three people all by herself.
    Beth took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. “OK, well — here,” she said, and held out her hand. It was small and neat, with a tiny gold-and-pearl ring on one finger.
    I gazed down at her hand. Somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch it. God, what was wrong with me? I’d given readings for all sorts of people over the years, and I’d seen plenty of weird and disturbing and even frankly illegal things. Beth Hartley’s secrets were hardly likely to rank up there with those. But even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t the reason for my hesitation. I was still having that strange  . . .  premonition, or intuition, or whatever you wanted to call it.
    If I read Beth, it would change everything.
    Beth looked anxious. “Is something wrong?” she asked. Her fingers curled under her hand. “Please, Willow, I — I really need help.”
    I shook myself. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m just  . . .  being stupid.”
    Closing my eyes, I took her hand. It felt warm, oddly vulnerable. I leaned back in my chair and let go of everything I thought I knew about Beth, allowing my mind to simply drift. Almost immediately, images started to come, along with things that I just
knew
somehow — facts popping into my head as if whispered by unseen helpers.
    “You were walking in the woods last week,” I said slowly. “There’s a patch of them behind your house. You’ve always felt safe there — you know these woods really well, and it’s a good place to get away from it all, to de-stress.”
    I heard Beth’s faint gasp, her hand tightening in mine. And in my mind’s eye, I could see the Beth of last week, idly kicking at autumn leaves as she walked down a worn dirt path. This Beth was wearing sneakers, too, and faded jeans. Her forehead was creased; she was thinking about an English exam. She thought she had done all right, but what if she hadn’t? What if it had affected her perfect 4.0?
    Suddenly I knew that Beth was only perfect because she was too frightened not to be. The real Beth wasn’t confident at all. She was constantly driving herself, constantly afraid that she wasn’t going to get it right. I could actually
feel
her tension, knotting coldly in her