Dangerous Destiny: A Night Sky novella (2 page)

And it seemed to break whatever spell Hobo Girl was under, because she abruptly turned and quickly walked away.

“Apology accepted!” I called after her, not because I wanted us to be friends, but because it occurred to me, after looking into her eyes, that I probably didn’t want to be on this girl’s shit-list.

Chapter Two

The
redheaded
girl.

I
know
her.

Know
her
from
inside
the
dreams.

Inside
those
terrible, murderous, bloody dreams. She’s there, running through that barn. I’ve seen her—terrified, her eyes filled with fear. I’ve heard her—screaming, her voice mixing in an awful chorus with all those other girls. Little girls.

Oh, God.

Make
it
stop. Can’t. Can’t make it stop.

Please, God.

That’s what one of the little girls keeps saying, in the dream that is not just a dream. The dream that is more than a dream.
Please, God.

But
I
know
better. I know that no one can help her.

No. There is no escaping this. This is fate. This is destiny.

And
now, this redheaded girl—her name, I knew it when she spoke to me—Skylar. Sky is here in real life. In real time. Right in front of me, like an apparition. Like a ghost from an awful, unavoidable future. And she’s like me! And we’re both like the little girl who prays and prays and still bleeds out in the end.

Blood
as
red
as
mine, as red as Sky’s.

She’ll die too. Just like all the other girls. Just like me. For I’ve seen the future in my dreams and it is so.

But
then, all in a rush, it’s clear.

Sky
is
like
me. Special. Wanted. Greater than. And soon to be hunted like an animal, and dragged to that barn to die. And it’s my job to save her.

It’s my job to change her fate, just like I’m changing my own.

There’s only one way to win, to keep them from winning. And I know, with a sudden, intense certainty, what to do.

I
need
to
kill
Skylar, too.

Chapter Three

“Mind if I sit here?”

The kid in the wheelchair looked up at me in surprise, his mouth full from a bite of a ginormous meatloaf sandwich. He glanced around at the unusually populated quad and saw that my usual table was occupied, before looking back at me, his eyebrows raised.

This outdoor lunch area was an unspoken no-hate zone, unlike the cafeteria with its also unspoken but heavily enforced rules about who could sit where, when. Until I could figure it all out, I was keeping my distance.

The fact that the lunchroom smelled terrible reinforced my decision. One whiff from the doorway on my very first day in this paradise, and I kept walking—outside to this quad where the stoners ate their brownies and cheese-puffs, or stretched out right on the brick pavers to nap like cats in the sun.

And, truth be told, the quad wasn’t all that bad. Five teal-painted metal picnic tables had been arranged about the grounds. Some were set beneath the shade of large, manicured palm trees, while others peeked out into the open, for the sunbathers who wanted a full-on roast. The pretty pink bricks spread all the way to the long line of cafeteria windows, each of which were floor-to-ceiling and tinted just enough so that the students eating inside were visible to outsiders as a collection of teenage silhouettes. Two smaller tables were in the corner, right between the outside wall of the auditorium and the perpendicular lunchroom building.

All last week, whenever I came out here with my brown bag lunch from home, I heard the refrain, as if sung by Kermit the Frog:
The
stoners, the black kid, and me.

The black kid was also the kid in the wheelchair, and frankly, he was the only one of
both
unique subgroups in this otherwise generically white-bread high school. And, unlike me, with my
new
girl
status,
his
labels were never going to change.

All last week, we’d assumed a kind of détente. The black kid had pulled his wheelchair up to
his
table—the one in the corner—and I, too, sat alone at the small table next to it, head down as I focused on my e-reader. And since the stoners were pretty solidly in their own worlds, that left the quad in a state of near-silence, which was fine with me.

But today, on Monday-crummy-Monday, obnoxiousness occurred. Hobo Girl McCrazyPants had parked herself in my regular seat, which meant that all of the tables had at least one inhabitant when I arrived. And after this morning’s weirdness on the sidewalk in front of the school, I wasn’t going to get within conversation range of
her
.

That left me sitting with the stoners or…“Please?” I added as I smiled, just a little, to show the kid in the wheelchair that I came in peace.

The boy smiled back, taking care to keep his mouth closed while he finished up his admirably huge bite. After washing his food down with a gulp of soda from the can in his cup holder, he made an appreciative “Aah” sound.

He was in band with me—that was the only class we shared. He played first trumpet while I was in the back with the third clarinets. I should’ve sat first chair, too, but because I was new and the musical pecking order had been established long before I’d arrived, I was going to finish out my junior year of band playing whole note As and B-flats, and counting rests.

Thanks again, Mom.

“Knock yourself out,” the boy told me, returning his attention to that sandwich. I watched enviously as a huge dollop of what looked to be hot sauce dripped out between the bread and onto the top of the table.

He was sitting where he always sat, his chair parked at the end of the corner table. I tried not to drool too obviously as I took the bench that put my back against the brick wall, instead of the row of windows. This way, I was still perpendicular to the wheelchair kid, yet I could monitor Hobo Girl, who’d finally noticed my arrival. She was now watching me with her crazy intensity on heavy-stun.

Meanwhile, my new luncheon companion didn’t offer any conversation—not even an introduction—as I pulled my own sandwich out of my bag. So I went first. “I’m Skylar.”

“Calvin,” he said, adding, “
Jesus
.”

Yeah. My lunch tended to be worthy of an entire hymn sung to a higher power, begging for salvation. Today, it was a sad-looking, flattened half-sandwich composed of Mom’s favorite gluten-free bread, a liberal but nasty-ass slice of Tofurky, and organic, aka puke-worthy, lactose- and egg-free mayo. With hydroponically grown Bibb lettuce, as if that made it all okay.

“Yum,” I said and took a bite. Meanwhile, Calvin’s sandwich continued to smell as good as it looked. But he’d set it down on the open wrapper in front of him.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s
not
okay—that food-like or rather food-
ish
substance you’re eating. Lemme guess, New Girl, your mom is a health-food freak.”

He got the
freak
part right. “My name is Skylar,” I repeated, saying it loudly enough for Hobo Girl to hear it, too. She was still staring at me, obviously listening in.

“Uh-huh,” Calvin said, although I wasn’t convinced he was ever going to call me anything other than New Girl. “So what brings you to beautiful Coconut Key, where—congrats—your mere presence lowers the town’s median age to seventy-four.”

Okay,
that
made me laugh. Clearly I wasn’t the only one here who’d made note of the overflow of elderly neighbors.

“Yup,” I told him. “Kinda the way you make this high school ‘desegregated,’ and ‘richly diverse’ like it says in the brochure.” I gave the words air quotes, and as he looked at me, his eyes narrowed slightly. And with that, I knew that there were two things nobody here at the esteemed Academy ever talked to this kid about—his skin color and his wheelchair.

That is, of course, assuming anyone talked to him at all.

“Of course, the brochure also claims the school is attended by descendants of European royalty,” I pointed out. “For all I know, that’s thanks to you, too. There’s something about you that screams, I don’t know, maybe…” I squinted at him, studying his face.

He was a rather lovely shade of milk-chocolate brown, with dark chocolate eyes, a someday-soon-to-be-handsome face that still held a little too much baby fat, and a fro-hawk that revealed he’d spent far more time than I had in front of the bathroom mirror this morning. “Swedish prince…?” I concluded.

He laughed in genuine amusement, exposing the straight white teeth of a kid with rich parents, which was no surprise, considering this was an expensive private school. “Shhh!” he said. “I’m incognito.”

“I won’t tell,” I promised, adding, “Your Grace.”

And now he was looking at me as thoroughly as I’d looked at him. “You’re a junior, right?” he asked.

I nodded. “And you’re…” He looked to be about fifteen, but the freshmen had their own band so I guessed he must’ve been a little older. “A sophomore?”

That got me another narrowing of his eyes. “I’m seventeen,” he informed me.

“You’re a senior?” I realized.

“Junior,” he corrected me. “Just had a birthday.”

I’d already heard the muttered gossip about how this boy had ended up permanently in that chair as a result of some terrible accident, back when he was younger. He’d probably lost some school time while recovering from whatever had happened. I toasted him now with my Tofurky. “Happy birthday,” I said, adding, “Nice wheels. Was the awesome chair a special present?”

Calvin laughed again. “No,” he said. By acknowledging his chair, I now had his full attention. “You know, I’m pretty sure we’re neighbors. I saw you this morning at the bus stop. You moved into old man Beattie’s house, right? That’s about a block and half from me.”

I shrugged as I glanced over at Hobo Girl. She was still listening in, and I wasn’t all that happy about having her find out where I lived. “I don’t know whose house it was, but it’s actually kind of new, like, relatively recently built and…” I realized that Calvin’s
old
referred to Beattie himself. “Wait. How old was old man Beattie?” I scrunched up my face. “Did he, like,
die
before we moved in there?”

“No, no!” Calvin said through his laughter. “Nothing like that. The family sold it when he moved in with his son and daughter-in-law. I think they live up in Connecticut somewhere.” He glanced at me. “And it’s not so bad here in paradise, once you get used to it. Sunshine, beaches, blue sky, palm trees…”

“Humidity,” I finished for him. “Swamp butt, heat rash, sunburn…”

My pessimism cracked him up. “So where exactly are you from, New Girl? Where is this mythical, fabulous place that’s exponentially more awesome than beautiful Coconut Key?”

“Skylar,” I told him again. “Actually, I’m from Connecticut, too.” I went general despite his
exactly
, figuring he wouldn’t know Guilford from Madison or even Hartford.

“That’s a weird coincidence. Mr. Beattie went north and you came down here. Kinda cosmic.”

I shrugged.
Cosmic
wasn’t the word I’d use.

“So, you’re a Yankee,” Calvin concluded. “You love the seasonal changes, enjoy the cold. I give you eight months, tops, before you start shivering when the temp hits 65 degrees. It happens to everyone. So why the move mid-school-year?” He changed the subject without a beat. “Your dad work for StarSurge or something?”

“What’s StarSurge?” I asked.

“When NASA went private—” he started, but then cut himself off. “Obviously, if you don’t know what StarSurge is, then your dad doesn’t work there. Mine does.”

“It’s just me and my mom,” I admitted. “And you’re half right. We moved down here because she got a job—which is stupid because she had a
great
job in Connecticut, only suddenly we’re here and I’m in this stupid new school, completely without friends, and…” I cut myself off. “I’m sorry. All my crap seems like…total crap, compared to…”

Calvin had gone very still as he watched me, as if waiting to see if I’d say it.

So I did. “Life in that chair.”

His smile lit his face. “It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s kinda great to never have to worry about finding a place to sit,” he told me. “Plus,
I
don’t have to ride the bus.”

“Unlike
some
of us at this table,” I agreed, smiling ruefully back at him.

“Answer this quick,” Calvin said. “Would you rather spend ten hours in a car with a man with extreme flatulence—”

“What?” I laughed out loud.

“Or ten minutes in a porta-potty that’s been used by a basketball team with the runs?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Ten hours with Mr. Flatulence,” I told him decisively. “Car windows can be opened. I will survive.”

Calvin nodded thoughtfully. “Good choice.” He picked up his sandwich, carefully dividing what was left into two segments as he added “Don’t worry, New Girl, you’ll be riding in style before you know it, with all the new friends you’re gonna make here. You’re funny. And refreshingly honest. And pretty, if you’re into the whole skinny redhead thing, which, sorry, I’m not. Speaking of junk in the truck, or lack thereof, might I offer you half of my outrageously delicious sandwich, so you don’t have to eat that bullshit what-the-fah your mother gave you for lunch?”

“Oh my God, yes,” I said, grabbing for it and taking a bite. It
was
hot sauce on that meatloaf, and it was awesome. I said the rest around a full mouth. “Thank you, Your Grace! I was starting to think you’d
never
ask.”