Free More Than an Echo (Echo Branson Series) by Linda Kay Silva Page A

effectively. Meditation is a huge key, but it must be done effectively. Many people don’t know how to meditate the correct way, and there is definitely a right way for our purpose.”
    Who would have thought it would take me two months; two long, grueling months just to learn how to meditate. For a while there, I thought I was just slow. Come to find out, energy cannot easily be called upon or contained without the proper mental approach. It just took me awhile to get to that point. It wouldn’t be long before I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get it, either.
    After my first week there, Tip returned to the Bayou from Atlanta with another student. His name was Zack and he had also just come into his powers.
    Only his powers were not empathic in nature. Zack was a TK, or a telekinetic. Tip referred to him as a mover; someone who could move objects using the energy from his mind. Zack, a twelve-year-old boy from Savannah, Georgia, was a redheaded boy with freckles and a bad haircut. Tall and lanky, you just knew kids teased him all the time.
    Soon I realized it was a mistake to tease someone with out-of-control telekinetic abilities. A TK is a very powerful being, indeed, and I saw how powerful he was the moment he arrived.
    When Zack stepped off Bones’ boat, he was just like I had been: disoriented, exhausted and on the edge. I could feel his tender emotions and fear as he got off the boat and looked around. As he started up the steps, he lost his balance, and when Tip reached out to help him, Zack, out of fear, put his arm out straight toward Tip knocking her to the ground without ever touching her. It was the most amazing thing I had seen in my life. From then on, Tip gave him a wide berth, and sometimes when Zack would leave the room, Tip muttered under her breath, “Spoon bender.”
    I would find out later what that meant.

    Shielding was, by far, the hardest lesson I had ever learned. I don’t know why I thought it was something I could learn in a day or so, but boy, was I wrong. This was the single most important skill Melika had to teach me. Without it, without being really efficient at erecting it, maintaining it, stabilizing it and lowering it without incident, my chances to live out a semi-normal life were slim-to-none. I wanted a life. No, I wanted a normal life insomuch as I had never had one. I’d been in and out of so many foster homes.
    Until I came to the Bayou.
    Every day was different on the Bayou. The weather changed on an hourly basis, the creatures were unlike anything else I had ever seen, and the river itself seemed to change on a whim. I loved it. I never saw myself as a naturalist, never gave much thought to the world around me. I paid very close attention to the people around me. You did that when you lived in the ghetto. It was ghetto back then. We didn’t pretty up the ugly nature of the ghetto with euphemisms like inner city or ’hood. It was the ghetto.
    You can spray gold flecks on a dog turd and it would still be a turd. So, when I lived in turdville, I paid really close attention to gangs of every color, drug dealers of every race, prostitutes of every shape, and pimpmobiles of every make. For your physical safety in the ghetto, you paid attention or you paid a price.
    Out in the Bayou, you did the same for the same reasons. I learned to love the sound of the ’gators as they slid off the muddy banks. They made a distinctive sound in the water that no longer frightened me. There were hawks whose calls were music to my ears, and insects whose nightly serenade sent me to sleep.
    And then there were the various characters who came and went. There was the French-speaking woodcutter, a grocery delivery woman with only one eye, and a gardener of sorts who had a boa wrapped around his neck.
    And then there was Bishop.
    Bishop was Melika’s very colorful mother, and it was her powers that had eventually brought the family from the West Indies to a plantation in Georgia. When she was