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  A Diamond in My Pocket

  The Unaltered series: book one

  by Lorena Angell

  Copyright © 2015 Lorena Angell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]

  Cover art designed by Lorena Angell and Luna Angell.

  Visit: https://lorenaangell.com for more information on upcoming books and other books written by Lorena Angell.

  Special thanks to:

  My family and friends for unending support and encouragement, my daughter Luna for her plethora of ideas and creativity, and to Larry, for believing in me—thanks, honey.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 - Olympic Dreams

  Chapter 2 - Paradigm Shift

  Chapter 3 - Shadow Demons

  Chapter 4 - Maetha and the Sanguine Diamond

  Chapter 5 - A Traitor Among Us

  Chapter 6 - Unwanted Abilities

  Chapter 7 - The One He Missed

  Chapter 8 - Nature’s Will

  Chapter 9 - Protector

  Chapter 10 - I Don’t Want To Die

  Chapter 11 - Questions Without Answers

  Chapter 12 - The Clearing and The Clans

  Chapter 13 - Sacrifice

  Chapter 14 - Unaltered

  Chapter 15 - New Beginnings

  Thank You

  Chapter 1 - Olympic Dreams

  I don’t understand what’s happening to me. Something strange and inexplicable is going on inside my body, and there isn’t anyone I can tell about it. I wouldn’t know where to start.

  I just crossed the finish line in first place for the 100-meter race. No one else is even close, I’m sure. I turn around to verify this and can see the other runners are still racing towards the finish line. The crowd has grown eerily silent. I glance up at the stands to find nearly every face looking in my direction.

  The other runners finally reach me and halt nearby, panting as they walk in circles to cool down while throwing suspicious glances my way. I watch the lips of a couple of the competitors and listen to their low whispers. They debate back and forth about whether I jump-started or not. The shorter of the two girls hammers her point home by asking why the starter’s gun didn’t fire twice to indicate a false start if that’s what happened.

  The answer: I didn’t leave the starting blocks before the other runners.

  Coach Simms jogs over to me with his clipboard papers flapping in the wind. His overly round waist bounces to and fro, throwing off his balance. “Calli! Wow! How did you do that?”

  I respond to Coach Simm’s question with the puzzled truth. “I don’t know, Coach.” I’ve never won a race before—and to win by such a long shot without feeling the least bit tired doesn’t seem right. I’m beginning to wonder if winning the race was all a weird dream. “What was my time?”

  Coach hands me his stopwatch and grins. The time shows 9.3 seconds. “Of course, this isn’t the official time,” he says. “I’ll find out what it was.”

  My brain struggles to grasp the incredibly fast time on Coach’s stopwatch. It has to be a mistake, I think.

  We are ordered off the track so the next race can begin. Coach Simms and I walk towards the bleachers where my personal belongings set in a pile. As we reach the bleachers, one of the officials pulls Coach Simms aside.

  I climb the stairs towards my half-frozen bottle of water, winding through the gaps between fellow athletes. Their stares of question and suspicion prickle my skin. They probably think I’m on steroids.

  I’m not a track star or a spectacular athlete in any sense of the word. I tried out for the team last season in my sophomore year because of the encouragement of Coach Simms, who is also my algebra teacher. I figured it would be better for me to join an extracurricular sport than to stay home alone after school. I am the youngest junior and, until today, I was one of the slowest on the track team. I haven’t performed very well. In fact, my best time for the 100-meter was 13.9 seconds, not 9.3. Looks like I’m not the slowest anymore.

  I pass through a group of senior boys and one of them teases, “Hey, Courtnae, wanna share some of your ‘speed’ with us?” His buddies chuckle. I don’t even know his name, and frankly, I’m shocked he knows mine. I sit down by my things and take a long swig from my water bottle. The boys are still staring at me—something I’m not used to—so I raise my water in a toast-like fashion, smiling half a smile, and drink some more.

  I’m doing my best to appear like I’m another tired athlete, yet I can’t ignore the sensations racing through my body. My muscles feel pumped and ready to run again, which is completely the opposite of how I usually feel after giving the 100-meter my all. Maybe Coach had been slow in starting his watch and I didn’t actually have such an unthinkably fast time—but that would mean the other runners were incredibly slow. I rub my face with my hand, trying to transfer some of the moist coolness from the bottle to my skin. Now would be a good time to awaken from this dream.

  Coach Simms climbs the bleachers and heads in my direction. I take another drink of water so my hands have something to do. Will Coach ask if I’m using drugs or steroids? He sits nearby, fatigued and sweating profusely from the climb. He looks like he could be having a heart attack.

  “So, Calli, what in the world did you eat for breakfast?” He grins, as if he’s come up with an original line to express his amazement.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “You broke the record!”

  “Oh?” I try to act surprised.

  “No, I don’t think you understand. You broke the record for the 100-meter. Well, I mean, it’s unofficial. We’ll have to hold an officially timed run.”

  “Excuse me,” a female voice breaks into our conversation. On the other side of Coach Simms stands the most beautiful, elegant woman I’ve ever seen. She has a kind of soap-opera look about her, with everything coordinated, right down to her manicured and polished nails. Not one hair on her head is out of place. I fleetingly wonder if she has a stylist who follows her around, primping her to look exquisite. “My name is Clara Winter,” she says, reaching in front of Coach Simms to shake my hand.

  I grasp her feathery-soft hand and shake it. “Calli Courtnae,” I respond politely.

  Coach reaches up to shake her hand too. “Gerald Simms, Calli’s coach.”

  She briefly shakes his hand, then focuses on me. “That was an amazing run you just completed, Calli.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Winter.” I try my best to sound formal. Years of introductions to my parents’ professional associates has taught me to do so.

  She takes a seat on the bench, her eyes never leaving my face. “Calli, I operate an athletic training facility in Montana called High Altitude Sports. After watching your performance, I want to invite you to come with me to train for Olympic qualifications.”

  I cough on my sudden inhalation of saliva. “Excuse me?”

  “Of course, we need your parents’ approval,” she continues, “but all your expenses will be covered. When would I be able to meet your parents? Are they here today?”

  My insides clench. Olympics? Montana? That’s a far cry from Northern Ohio. “My parents couldn’t make it today,” I say. “I’ll have to call my mom and see when a good time is. Both my parents are doctors and have pretty jammed-up schedules.”

  “I’m scheduling an offic
ial timing for Calli,” Coach Simms says, interrupting us, “so she’s going to have to wait to go anywhere.” He then goes back to accessing the internet on his smart phone.

  Ms. Winter ignores his comment and tries harder to sell me on her invitation. “Calli, there’s only a small window of time to qualify. Any delays will cost you four more years until the next round of Olympic qualifications.”

  “Do qualifications even work that way?” I ask. “I mean, I always thought the athletes who made it to the Olympics had also won other competitions. Besides, how do we know this race wasn’t just a fluke?”

  Coach interrupts. “Here, see this, Calli.” He excitedly shows me the statistics on the screen of his phone. “You broke the men’s world record with your time.”

  Ms. Winter asks, “Calli, are you taking any—”

  “No!” I cut her off. “I’m not taking steroids or any other illegal substance. I don’t even take a multivitamin.”

  “All right.” She holds her hands up as if fending me off. “I had to ask.”

  “If you don’t believe me, get a cup and I’ll pee in it.” My blood pressure seems to rise with my voice. Beautiful or not, she isn’t going to accuse me of cheating. Part of me wants to pee in a cup to see if anything can explain why I feel a deep molecular change within my muscles and bones. What’s wrong with me?

  Coach Simms says to her, “I should hear back sometime next week about setting up an official timed run.”

  “She’ll be in Montana by then,” Ms. Winter says confidently, which surprises me.

  Coach Simms frowns. “What about her studies?”

  “Our facility is equipped with teachers and tutors to keep the athletes current on their studies.” She turns her attention to me. “Calli, call your parents and see if we can meet tonight or tomorrow morning. Time is of the essence. Qualifications are only a few weeks away. I want to get you on a plane as soon as possible.”

  I retrieve my cell phone from my bag. I feel more than a little nervous as I call my mother’s office number and leave a message asking her to call me back.

  Coach Simms and Ms. Winter continue debating the need for another timed race. She is against it, while Coach Simms adamantly insists on holding one in Ohio, and he isn’t backing down.

  I stare off in the distance, watching the runners on the track as they strategically manage their strength and endurance while running the 1600-meter. My next scheduled race isn’t for another hour, yet my body and mind feel like I should get up and leave. A voice, not my own, sounds inside my head, saying I need to leave. I look around at the people nearby to see if someone has actually said those words. Plenty of faces are turned in my direction, but I don’t think anyone has spoken. I’m beginning to think I might be going crazy. Well, if that’s the case, I am in good hands.

  My mother is a psychiatrist and my father is a brain surgeon. One could say both of them work on head cases. I like to think of their work this way: one deals with the thought processes and the other deals with the brain’s functionality. So if I am in fact losing my mind, they’ll take care of me. They already did so once before, when I lost my hearing in middle school.

  Someone had rigged a bathroom stall with a firecracker, and I’d been the unlucky one to find it. When it exploded, the small, all-tile area amplified the noise so much the sound ruptured my eardrums. I still remember the intense pain. The agonizing waves felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into my ears. In a blink, my hearing disappeared. As my parents expected, I developed severe middle-ear infections. They were on top of my situation every step of the way. But even with all their combined knowledge and expertise, only so much could be done. I endured months of pain, injections, surgeries, and speech therapy. I had to be taught how to read lips in order to communicate. For a long time no one knew whether or not my hearing would return.

  I gradually healed over a year’s time but never lost my lip-reading ability. In fact, I still practice all the time to keep up my skills. My mother has said on several occasions that I can read lips better than anyone she knows. I don’t know how I learned so quickly, or why the ability came so easily to me. It just did.

  My mother advised me against letting my classmates know I could understand their whispers for fear they might take advantage of my abilities. She worried I’d become a circus act.

  “They may ask you to read lips that reveal secrets,” she told me. “Not many kids can do what you can, Calli. In fact, not many adults can either. Trust me, it’s better to keep this ability a secret as long as possible.”

  As soon as I returned to school, I picked up on conversations in the lunch room typical of the age range, and the cafeteria seemed noisier than before. Did you hear what she said? Do you know what I heard about him? I got so sick of all the gossip and backbiting on the lips of others, I had no choice but to bury my face in books. That’s how my interest with science and the medical field came about . . . well, besides hearing about medical stuff every night over the dinner table.

  Once I began reading and learning about how the human body works, I couldn’t get enough. I’m pretty sure I’ve read every book in the public library and off my parent’s bookshelf on the subject. My father often jokes I’ll only have to challenge the test at medical school and they’ll give me my doctorate. I know my parents are pleased their only child is interested in a career in medicine, but the interest is quite real on my part.

  My extensive knowledge of how the human body works brings a pressing question to the front of my mind. How can I have run so fast when I haven’t trained and built the necessary muscles to do so? This mystery will have to wait. I don’t want the same experience all over again with the 200-meter. The voice in my head encouraging me to leave apparently doesn’t want me to run either. I need to come up with a plausible excuse to leave. I look over my shoulder again to see if I can figure out who’s talking, telling me to go. No one is near enough to be the culprit. I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and massage my temples with my fingers. What’s happening to me? This isn’t the first time I’ve wondered why I’m so different than other sixteen-year-olds, but this is the first time I’ve heard “voices.”

  My cell phone rings, revealing my mother’s number on the screen.

  “Hello?”

  “Calli, you called?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you improve your personal time?” she asks excitedly. She’s been actively following my personal time for the 100- and 200-meter all season.

  “Yeah, Mom. I won!”

  “You won? What was your time?”

  “9.3 seconds.”

  I expect to hear some kind of exclamation—or a thud, due to fainting—instead her voice is calm.

  “That is definitely an improvement.”

  Huh? That’s it? I figure my mother must be preoccupied and my incredible running time hasn’t registered.

  “Yeah, it is,” I reply.

  “You’ll call me with your time for the 200-meter, won’t you?”

  “Um . . . Mom, a woman has invited me to go to a training facility in Montana . . . to train for Olympic tryouts.” I scrunch my eyes shut. Saying the words aloud sounds so unbelievable.

  “Excuse me? Is she with you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give her the phone so I can speak with her.”

  I hand the phone over to Ms. Winter. “My mother wants to talk to you.” She takes the phone and begins talking to my mom.

  I think about my mother’s inattentive and unfazed reaction to the news about my time for the 100-meter. That’s so not like my mother! Learning my time was 9.3 seconds should have made her shriek or something. Where are all the usual questions, especially concerning the strange woman who wants to take me to Montana? And why is this woman here in Ohio, at a high school track meet, looking for Olympic athletes?

  After speaking for a few minutes, Ms. Winter hands the phone back to me.

  “Your mother is coming to pick you up. We will the
n go to her office so we can discuss my invitation.”

  That sounds more like my mother. She isn’t about to let me get in the car with an unknown adult. She would rather drop everything and come get me herself. I can’t help but smile . . . now I won’t have to invent a lie to get out of the 200-meter.

  “Hold on. She can’t leave yet,” Coach Simms says. “She still has another race.”

  Ms. Winter calmly replies, “You can tell that to her mother when she gets here.”