Dangerous Destiny: A Night Sky novella (9 page)

“Smell
what
?”

I looked at Calvin. “Seriously, the fact that you can’t smell it is kind of disturbing.”

But he shrugged. “All I smell is my own sexiness,” Calvin said.

“Well, I’m sorry to report that your sexiness smells like crap. Literally.”

I could hear my mom bustling around in the kitchen, and Calvin tapped me on the arm, smirking. He mouthed the word “mic-ro-wave,” and I rolled my eyes.

“Guys, Sasha’s room is the second one on the right,” Mom called.

“I know, Ma,” I replied in a singsong voice, my impatience cutting through. I had only been in Sasha’s house about a
billion
times before.

As we walked past Carmen and Edmund’s bedroom door and down the hallway toward Sasha’s room, the sewage stink became stronger. I kept my sweatshirt sleeve up to my mouth and nose, swallowing hard to keep from gagging.

Calvin looked at me quizzically. I turned the knob to Sasha’s room.

Instantly, the foul odor was stronger. I coughed violently into my sleeve, my eyes watering desperately.

“Are you okay?” Calvin asked. “Hey, where’s her bedroom light? I can’t see a thing.”

I used the hand that wasn’t covering my face and found the switch on the wall.

The room filled with light.

There was a flash of movement, and I quickly turned to the window, where I saw some kind of creature, barely more than a shadow. Long, gray, gnarled limbs, one leg hanging over the open windowsill… One grossly oversized arm clutching a teddy bear…

“Calvin, oh my God!” I squeaked, and covered my face instinctively, as if shielding my eyes would somehow keep me safe.

“What is it?” Calvin barked, visibly spooked. “Skylar, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“You didn’t see that?” When I took my hands away from my face, the ghoulish figure was gone.

“See what?” Calvin’s expression was ten percent concern—and ninety percent irritation. “Are you
trying
to scare the hell out of me?”

I shook my head, pointing an insistent finger at the open window. Sasha’s lilac chiffon curtains fluttered dreamily in the wind.

Someone had
been
there!

“I saw some…thing,” I said.

“Like Sasha?” Calvin asked, and anxiously moved himself forward to peer out over the sill.

I couldn’t bring myself to get as close to that window as Calvin did. Something in my very core told me that whatever I had seen was dangerous.

Evil.

It sounded dramatic, but there was no other word to describe it.

“Definitely
not
Sasha,” I said, shuddering, and took a few steps closer to Calvin…and the window. “But it was holding her teddy bear, whatever it was.”

“It?” Calvin shook his head. “There’s no one out there, Sky. You sure you didn’t just see a shadow and get freaked?”

I was sure. Wasn’t I? But the screen was in place. I frowned. “Well, I’m definitely freaked, Cal. I know that much.”

I could hear Mom in the other room, still moving things around in her search for Sasha.

Calvin nodded. “It’s freaking me out too,” he admitted, his tone grave. “All of this is.”

I finally mustered enough confidence to walk toward the open window. Peering outside through the screen, I saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Hibiscus bushes lined the outside of the house, the red flowers dripping with rain. An old rope swing that Edmund had hung for Sasha a year ago creaked languidly in the breeze. The backyard was otherwise empty except for a few older sculptures that Edmund had decided didn’t make the cut for the front lawn.

I shrugged, suddenly exhausted. “I’m seeing things, I guess.” But I didn’t believe that. I’d seen…something.

“You’re not covering your nose anymore,” Calvin noticed. “Did it finally stop smelling like dooky in here?”

I sniffed. He was right. The terrible smell of sewage
was
gone… It didn’t make sense.

Nothing about this made sense.

“You guys doing okay back there?” my mom called from down the hall.

“Just fine,” I called back.

“So the
it
you thought you saw was holding a teddy bear?” Calvin continued, glancing around the bedroom.

I nodded. “Sasha’s bear. The white one with the chewed-up nose.”

Calvin looked skeptical. “You saw the state of the bear’s nose, but you don’t know if you saw a person or an
it
?”

“I don’t know, Calvin,” I said, giving in to my annoyance while trying to remember exactly what I’d seen. It had been just the flash of an image, like a low-res YouTube video, playing on an even worse Internet connection. “It was vaguely female. Kind of a she-ish, witchy it.” I started sifting through Sasha’s unmade bed, looking for the teddy bear in question. “What I
do
know is that Sasha doesn’t let go of that bear for a second when it’s dark outside.” I looked under the bed. “It’s not here.”

Whoever had taken Sasha had snatched her up quick, stopping only to put the screen back in the window—if that was, in fact, the way they’d taken the little girl from the house. Not only was the bear missing, but her bed was a tangle of purple and pink sheets.

If it were up to Sasha, she wouldn’t leave her bed unmade for more than thirty seconds upon awakening.

“And look at her dolls,” I realized.

“Do I have to?” Calvin shuddered as he glanced at the shelves where Sasha kept her collection. “I hate those things,” he said. “I wouldn’t sleep with them watching me. I’d spend the whole night making sure they weren’t gonna do some evil while my eyes were closed.”

“I’m not asking for your opinion about them,” I said as patiently as I could. “I’m pointing out that everything’s out of place. These dolls are all mixed up. Some are upside down…”

Calvin knew that in Sasha’s world, this would be unacceptable. I’d told him that one of the things we’d done on Sunday was alphabetize the emergency contact list that her mom kept on the fridge. Whoo-hoo! Par-tay, Sasha style!

I continued, “And yeah, maybe Sasha fought back when whoever grabbed her, grabbed her.” I shook my head as I looked around. “But nothing else in the room is knocked over. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Okay, so if Sasha didn’t mess up the dolls, who did?” Calvin asked. “For the record, if I’m executing a home invasion with the intent to kidnap a child, I’m
not
gonna take the time to rearrange her freaking freaky dolls.”

I agreed. But those haunting images from my dream popped back into my head. I thought about Sasha’s eyes—how they’d looked empty as she’d leaned against the car window.

I rubbed a tired hand over my face and sighed. “Cal, I’m gonna tell you something, and you’re going to think I sound crazy.”

“Girl, I thought you were crazy from the jump.”

I gave him the side eye. “I’m serious. I know it’s going to sound completely unreal, but I can’t
not
tell you.”

Calvin nodded. “Okay.”

“I had a dream this was going to happen.” I frowned. “Sort of.”

Calvin looked amused. “Like a premonition?” he said, and I could tell immediately that he wasn’t taking me seriously whatsoever.

“I guess.” I sat down on Sasha’s bed, sighing. “It’s hard to explain. Right before Carmen came to our door, I was having this nightmare. And Sasha was in it. She was walking down this deserted highway in the rain. I think—no, I
know
that she was in danger.”

Calvin wheeled close and draped an arm over my shoulder, pulling my head playfully into his armpit. “You’re like Old Mary One-Eye, the palm reader who lives underneath the highway overpass—but cuter.”

“Dickweed.”

“I love you too.”

“I’m serious,” I said, pulling free and looking up at Calvin. “Why would I have a dream about Sasha right before she disappeared? I feel like maybe I know more than my conscious mind will let on.”

Calvin shook his head. “You had a bad dream. It’s a coincidence.”

I didn’t quite believe that.

“Tell you what,” Calvin said. “When they find Sasha—after you’ve gotten some good, uninterrupted sleep—we’ll ask
her
if any part of your dream actually came true.”

“Do you really think they’ll find her, Cal?”

“I
know
they will,” he said, his voice so rich with conviction that I almost believed it myself.

“I
so
hope you’re right,” I said.

Chapter Three

The next two days were seriously surreal—and this was
well
before Friday’s after-dark run to the Sav’A’Buck in Harrisburg.
That
fabulousness was still to come.

Calvin and I both took Tuesday off from school to search for Sasha in the daylight, while the rest of the neighborhood watch rapidly waned. It was creepy, seeing people who had been standing outside with flashlights and umbrellas just hours before as they bustled into their cars and SUVs for a normal workday as if nothing were different. Old Mr. McMahon, two houses down, whistled as he mowed his lawn.

Even the sun was shining again. It seemed, honestly, as though the entire world was giving Sasha the finger.

Wednesday meant it had been long enough since Sasha’s disappearance that the police could finally become involved. My mom had delivered an exhausting number of diatribes about
that
. She could still remember the days when a missing nine-year-old got immediate attention from the local police. But it had been decades since anyone gave a crap—or had a fully staffed police force.

She remembered too when a thing called Vurp had been the major way people communicated. Phone calls had video, not just audio the way they did now. She could go a full
hour
on how the infrastructure in Florida had corroded to the point where we were forced to resort again to voice mails and text messages.

But she was the one who’d moved us here from Connecticut. (And I could go and on and on about the injustice of
that
.)

When my alarm went off at six thirty on Wednesday morning, I pressed Snooze once and stared at my ceiling, wondering if I could get away with another day of absence from school. I wasn’t done searching for Sasha, even if everyone else was. I knew that even though the police could now be “involved,” they wouldn’t find Sasha, either.

“You’re going to be late for the bus!” Mom called, rapping briskly on my closed bedroom door.

I exhaled heavily. Guess school was on my schedule. Reaching over to my bedside table, I picked up my old-fashioned alarm clock and pressed the off button on the back. I’d had the alarm set on the loudest ringer. Being a deep sleeper, I needed the equivalent of a fire drill to wake me, and this old clock was
loud
.

Throwing my legs over the edge of my bed, I resolved to continue the hunt for Sasha that afternoon. There would be time after school to keep searching. Calvin and I had at least four hours of decent daylight after our last class.

As I showered, thoughts of Sasha popped into my head.

She had been the only person who was kind enough to bring a welcome basket over to our house when Mom and I moved in.

I quickly towel dried my messy red mane of hair before shoving it into a ponytail.

Then, wrapping a towel around my body, I went back to my room and started the search for an outfit.

The jangling alarm from my clock cut through the air unexpectedly. I jumped, startled, and jogged over to the bedside table to shut it off again—I must have pressed the snooze button twice by accident—and stopped short.

The clock wasn’t on my bedside table anymore.

Huh?

The ringing continued. I checked on the floor beneath my bed, and it wasn’t there either.

Listening more closely, I realized with ever-growing confusion that the alarm was coming from my walk-in closet.

Heart beating hard, I opened the closet door and stepped inside. In the far left-hand corner were my pairs of sneakers and shoes. Opposite that was where I kept my dirty laundry in a messy heap. The ringing was coming from underneath that.

Scooping up jeans, T-shirts, and mismatched socks, I sifted through the clothes, and I found my alarm clock at the very bottom of the pile.

Turning it off, I crouched there in the silence.

Finally, I stood up, hiking my towel more securely around me.

“Mom?” I called.

Nothing.

I walked over to my bedside table and set the alarm clock down where I had left it earlier. Then I stepped out into the hallway.

I hadn’t gone far when, on second thought, I backed up into my room to look, hard, at my bedside table.

The clock was still there.

Just
checking.

“Mom?” I called again.

“Skylar!” Mom exclaimed. “What are you still doing in your towel?” She emerged from her room, clutching a mug of hot coffee in her perfectly manicured hands.

“Were you just in my room?” I asked.

Mom sighed. “No, I wasn’t anywhere near your room, Sky.” She fluffed her freshly styled hair anxiously with one hand, keeping a firm grip on her coffee mug with the other. “You’re going to be late for school!”

I shook my head. “Why did you move my alarm clock?”

Mom looked absolutely exasperated. “Skylar Reid! I wasn’t in your room! Stop with the crazy questions. Go get dressed! The bus is going to be here in”—she checked her silver watch—“three and a half minutes!”

I frowned. If Mom hadn’t moved my alarm clock, then who had?

“Come on!” she prompted me. “Mush, mush! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

• • •

I got outside just in time to give my mom the impression that I’d caught the school bus. Then I rounded the corner and hopped into Calvin’s car.

“Question of the day,” Calvin said, adjusting his rearview mirror and making a sharp right down Main Street toward Coconut Key Academy. “Would you rather have one giant pimple on your face or a trillion tiny ones?”

I rolled my eyes. “Really?”

“It’s the question of the day,” he said insistently. “What would you prefer? Saying
neither
is not an option.”