Second Chance: Charlie Holiday, #2

By Bradley Charbonneau

Magic only has to be right once.

 

Or twice.

 

One time might have been a coincidence. Lucky.

 

But the second time was undeniable.

 

Something magical is happening to Charlie Holiday and he doesn't have the foggiest idea what to do about it.

 

Has he been called to save the world? Maybe they got the wrong guy?

 

Bradley has the gift to teach while entertaining! -- Grady Harp, Amazon Top 100 Reviewer

 

In "Second Chance," Charlie Holiday is slipping deeper into the world of the paranormal, the supernatural, and a world that he doesn't understand or believe.

 

But has one thing going for him: he's open to changes in his life.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bradley Charbonneau
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201339166

Bradley Charbonneau

The following is an excerpt from the foreword to Bradley's upcoming book "Every Single Day" (available Oct. 17, 2017). "He no longer resembled the mopey dejected "former writer" I'd known. He became unstoppable. A machine. It wasn't just about the writing, either. It was a deeper transformation. He became much more confident and bold. He was inspiring and even intimidating in some ways. He wasn't the same person anymore. He took risks and wrote books and closed his business and moved his family halfway across the world. He's done so many things I couldn't imagine "2012 Bradley" doing. That he couldn't imagine actually doing. I barely recognize my old friend these days, and I'm glad.  He realized his dream and became a professional writer. This book is only a small piece of the proof of that." -- John Muldoon, excerpted from the foreword to "Every Single Day"

Book preview

Preface

He came to life in Florence. Now what might have been a single magical encounter has arrived in his (so-called) real life.

I feel like I don’t have control anymore. He arrives in my life, the author, I just write it down. I have to. I don’t have a choice.

That’s how I feel about Charlie Holiday.

In Florence, he set foot into the wild and I knew there was no getting him back into his cage. Or, well, cage is a little harsh. Back into the life he had previously known.

Because that previous life he had been living was not the life he knew he was born for.

That life was, how can I put this, one dimensional and he somehow knew there was more. He didn’t know what the more was (or why or how or when or who) but he just knew.

In Florence, he was first introduced to it.

In Utrecht, it’s becoming real.

Or was his previous life real and where Utrecht begins is the beginning of another life, a different level, another plane he previously didn’t know of.

If it’s all the unknown, how can he expect to know where to go next.

So many questions. So few answers.

Charlie Holiday doesn’t know. I don’t know. It seems like Lorena knows. A bit. At least more than us.

This is why I write. To learn. To discover. To get to the other side of the unknown.

Join me? Join Charlie?

Here we go, ready or not!

Science has to be right all of the time. Magic only has to be right once. Or twice.

The kids, taxes due, a work project, and no time for emerald eyeballs of snaking green.

There was a part of him that figured that the odd encounter in the subterranean cavern of a Florentine café was just a one-off experience and something told him that he should just chalk it up to an overactive imagination combined with too much red wine and €6 ice cream cones.

'Just let it go,' he said to himself once in a while when the images of that woman came back to him. 'It was just a fluke.'

But then there was another part of him, although smaller, in fact, more like a splinter in a toe, that just couldn't let it go.

After Italy, life slid back into normalcy and the wriggling receipts and fiery orange eyes fell back into his memory just like the busy Florentine streets and the Venetian waterways. It all streamed together and after just a few short weeks, he was no longer sure which was a photo for the photo album and which happened in that café and, at some points in time, he questioned whether or not it all really happened at all.

Was it all a dream? Maybe it was an intense meditation session? How could he know? And how could reality get so mixed up with something as important and real as that woman in the cellar so quickly?

When daily life consumed his time, none of it seemed to matter much anyway. There were still twenty-four hours in a day and Li still needed to be woken up to go to school and Lu needed to be reminded every morning that he was still in school. It was tax time and if there had been any doubt about an alternate reality, financial spreadsheets snapped that streak of luscious illusion like a twig in the forest.

No, he could safely say that the blue ink of the receipt was just a fluke, a one-off moment of weakness where he let down his guard and let, well, something in.

Do you have something like a chai latte? he asked the Dutch woman as she approached. For some reason, they rarely had menus and maybe you're supposed to know what you want. But a good portion of the fun of eating or drinking in a café is seeing what they might have, discovering something new, and not just ordering what you know.

Yes, well, something like it, she searched her mind for the explanation. It is a milky drink and has turmeric. She waited for his response, but his thoughts immediately went to World War II and wasn't there a poison called turmeric?

I think you'll like it if you like chai, she continued as his thoughts were on dark and dank cellars with Germans killing themselves.

Arsenic. Sounds like turmeric. Probably not on the menu.

As his thoughts wandered back to World War II Germany and he realized he wasn't at all sure it was arsenic and not cyanide and he made a mental note that he could use a little history refresher, his mind switched from the day-to-day rush to something of a more fluid stream.

Just like a storm can subside almost instantaneously, our minds can go from a hurried state of daily affairs to a flow state of rest and creativity in just a few moments.

While he was sidetracked and somewhere behind enemy lines decades previous, he absently looked around the outdoor café and his eyes fixated on a woman casually sitting in the far corner of the terrace. She had a book in front of her that she held upright and it all would have been a regular woman reading her book if her eyes were pointed towards the words on the page and not directly laser beamed into his .

He could not look away. He even did that dorky move where you try to pull your head in another direction, but your eyes won't move. You can try this