Paige stared at me the whole time, a grim look on her face, as if she knew exactly what I was experiencing. Maybe she did. After all, I’d used my Gypsy gift to find her phone. Maybe Paige had figured out what I could do, how I could see and feel all the things that people tried to hide.

All the terrible, terrible things.

I don’t know how long I screamed, but eventually I slipped off the wooden bench and hit the cold cement floor, the hairbrush still clenched in my fingers, my knuckles just as tight and white around it as Paige’s had been. I tried to let go of the brush and found that I couldn’t—and I couldn’t stop screaming either.

White spots started to flash in front of my eyes, then black ones. Eventually, the black spots bled together and turned into a solid wall. The wall toppled over, slamming into my mind, and I welcomed the crushing darkness.

The low, steady beep-beep-beeping woke me. I frowned. What was up with my alarm clock? It didn’t sound like that. And why was my bed suddenly so hard and lumpy? And the sheets so stiff and scratchy? I felt like my brain was stuffed with cotton, but slowly, the day came back to me. My suckitude at basketball. Changing in the locker room. Talking to Paige. Picking up her hairbrush. Seeing what her stepdad was doing to her.

A whimper slipped out of my throat before I could stop it.

“Easy, Gwen. You’re okay now. You’re fine, baby.”

A warm hand stroked my cheek, and a soft wave of love and concern washed over me, like a fleece blanket wrapping around me and keeping me safe from everything—including the horrible things I’d seen today.

“Mom,” I whispered, recognizing her gentle touch.

I opened my eyes to find Grace Frost leaning over me. My mom had the same features that I did—brown hair, pale skin, violet eyes—but she was beautiful in a way that I longed to be and knew I was not. Even wearing a simple black pantsuit, there was a, well, grace about my mom, an elegance that I just didn’t have.

“What happened?” I asked.

I sat up and realized that I was lying in a hospital bed, wearing a paper-thin gray gown covered with purple polka dots. Plastic tubes snaked from my left wrist over to some machines that beeped out my heart rate and other vital signs. Off to my right was an open door. Beyond that, nurses walked up and down a drab hallway, while patients attached to IVs shuffled along behind them.

“You had an epileptic seizure,” my mom said. “At least, that’s what the doctors think.”

I shook my head and winced as a dull ache started throbbing behind my eyes. “It wasn’t a seizure. It was my Gypsy gift. It just . . . I just . . . freaked out.”

Concern filled my mom’s eyes. She was a Gypsy just like me, which meant that she had a gift like me. In my mom’s case, she knew if someone was telling the truth or not just by listening to their words. Basically, my mom was like a living, breathing lie detector. Yeah, her magic made it hard on me whenever I wanted to get away with something that I shouldn’t. Still, my mom’s Gypsy gift came in handy, especially since she was a police detective. My mom had dedicated her life and her magic to helping people. She was the bravest person I knew, and I wanted to be just like her.