Dangerous Games (8 page)

And then I noticed a guy dancing with us. He was older than us, maybe eighteen, hot and sweaty, dressed in a muscle shirt that showed off his ropey physique. ‘Hey girls,' he said, ‘you don't have a drink.'

‘We're fine, thanks,' I said.

‘I can get you something,' he said, not to be put off. ‘What do you want to drink?'

‘Do you have anything soft?' asked Soph.

‘We must have. I'll go see what I can find.'

He disappeared into the crowd and came back a few minutes later with two large plastic cups, filled to the brim with a mysterious dark liquid.

‘There you go,' he said, handing one to me and one to Soph.

‘Thanks,' Soph said. We both took a sip.

‘What is this?' I asked.

‘It's punch,' he said. ‘Don't you like it?'

My parents made punch at Christmas time. It had ginger beer and soda water and pineapple juice and bits of fruit in it. ‘No, it's nice,' I said. ‘I just wondered.'

‘Well, we've got tons of it so drink up,' he said, and winked. ‘Enjoy the party.'

And he moved away into the crowd.

‘Wasn't that nice?' Soph said. ‘Didn't he seem like a nice guy?'

I wasn't quite so sure about that, but I nodded anyway.

‘When did you say Draz was coming?' I asked.

‘Soon,' Soph said.

And we went back to dancing. The room got hotter and we got hotter and Soph and I swigged at our big cups of punch and the longer I danced the more I began to feel kind of loose and fun and free, although it was starting to get a little harder to keep my balance. After a while I noticed that the guy who'd offered us drinks before was edging towards us again.

‘Hey girls,' he said. ‘Great party, huh?'

‘Sure is,' I said.

He tucked himself in next to us and began to dance. ‘Hot in here,' he observed.

‘It is,' Soph said.

‘How would you girls like another drink?' he suggested.

I had nearly finished mine, so that seemed like not a bad idea. ‘Sure, why not?' I said.

He smiled. ‘Don't move,' he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

‘Isn't that nice of him?' I said to Soph.

‘Very nice,' Soph said.

I finished off my first drink and so did Soph, and after a minute or two the guy came back with another two plastic cups, full to the top with punch.

‘Here you go,' the guy said, smiling broadly, handing them over.

‘Thanks,' I said, and took a sip.

‘Aren't you having any?' Soph asked.

‘I'm sticking with beer,' he said.

We danced for a while and the movement of the crowd seemed to keep jostling the guy until he was practically on top of us, and although Soph and me kept edging away from him he seemed to keep edging closer, until eventually we found we were pushed up so hard against the sofa that it was difficult to dance without toppling over onto the sofa cushions. It began to dawn on me that I wasn't quite so sure I liked having this guy dancing so close.

And as soon as I identified that particular feeling, my whole mood seemed to lurch from happiness and freedom and looseness and pleasure to an anxiety that began to escalate rapidly into fear. I was in a place I didn't know, with people I didn't know, and there was no sign of Draz, and I had no way of getting out of there, and a guy I didn't know kept invading my personal space and showing no sign of going away again, and I didn't know how to make him go away, and I was hot and wobbly and – ohmigod, was I
pissed
? But how had that happened?

I needed to talk to Soph. Urgently.

‘It's getting hot in here, isn't it?' I said.

‘Really hot!'

‘Maybe we should go outside for a while,' I urged.

‘Sure, okay!' Soph was radiantly happy, unaffected by the cloud of fear that had descended on me.

‘We might go and get some air,' I said to the guy.

‘Good idea,' he said, smiling easily. ‘I'll come with you.'

He was not going to be shaken off that easily then.

The three of us headed out the back once more. The party was getting louder and the night was getting later.

‘So do you girls have boyfriends?' our persistent friend asked.

‘Of course we do,' Soph said.

‘Where are they tonight?'

‘They're coming later,' Soph said. ‘They had to work.'

‘Oh yeah? What do they do?'

‘They're cops,' Soph said.

The guy just laughed. ‘Right.'

‘Soph,' I said, ‘do you know where the bathroom is?'

‘I'll show you,' the guy offered instantly.

‘That's okay,' I said, ‘I think we can find it. Come on, Soph.'

The guy reached out to her. ‘Hey, don't both go. Why don't you stay here and talk to me?'

‘Don't you know girls always have to go to the loo in pairs?' I said. I grabbed Soph's arm and hurried away from him.

This time, to my relief, he didn't follow us. I hustled Soph all the way through the house and out into the front yard.

‘I need to go home,' I said.

‘Why?' Soph asked. ‘That guy? He's harmless.'

‘I think I'm drunk.'

‘Really?' Soph considered the question. ‘You know what? I reckon I might be too.'

And she started to giggle.

‘I thought we were drinking punch!' I wailed.

‘Meliss, does this look like the sort of party where people drink non-alcoholic punch?'

I had to admit that it didn't. In the front yard alone there were two people arguing, four people snogging, fifteen people smoking, and one person vomiting, and there were approximately three thousand empty bottles and plastic cups rolling around in the wintry garden beds. It was not at all the kind of party where non-alcoholic beverages were served. Actually, it looked more like the kind of party where the police would be turning up any minute.

‘I want to go home,' I said.

Soph looked put out. ‘But we only just got here.'

I looked at my watch. It was almost eleven o'clock. ‘We've been here for hours,' I said. ‘Are you sure Draz is coming?'

‘Of course he is. Why don't you come back inside and dance?'

‘I'm tired,' I said. ‘My feet hurt.'

Soph looked mutinous. ‘All right,' she said. ‘Wait here. I'll go and get us something to drink.'

‘Not punch!' I said.

Soph disappeared and came back a few minutes later with two more plastic cups. One was filled with water. The other, I saw, was full of punch.

‘May as well enjoy myself while I can,' Soph said, and gulped down a big mouthful.

We sat there on the front steps, silently resenting each other. Soph, I knew, thought I was being a big baby and spoiling her night. But I didn't care because I thought Soph was being pretty damn insensitive. Hadn't I just
had a big fight with one of my closest friends? I was feeling emotionally fragile and she didn't even care.

At 11.27 Draz appeared with a pack of mates and a guy who could only be his brother, the fabled Miro. Miro looked just like Draz, but with muscles and a goatee and better skin.

‘Hey!' Soph squealed, and jumped into Draz's arms.

At 11.29 they finished snogging.

I was on my feet straight away. ‘Sorry to do this,' I said, ‘but I really need to go home.'

Soph looked at Draz, and I could have sworn I saw her roll her eyes. ‘Meliss's not feeling very well,' she said. ‘Can we take her to Celeste's place and come back?'

Draz looked extremely unwilling, but then one of his friends returned from a scouting expedition down the back to announce that they were out of beer.

‘Can we drop Soph's friend on the way?' Draz asked, turning to Miro.

‘Beer first,' Miro said. ‘Then we drop her friend off.'

I didn't care about detours, as long as I wasn't at the party anymore. I'd had enough. My head was buzzing and my limbs felt fuzzy and I could feel something tickling my wrist and when I looked down I saw that it was my bracelet and its eyes were glowing green. I had too many feelings moving around inside me tonight, too many feelings and too much punch, and as Draz and Miro and Miro's mate and Soph and me piled into Miro's car I felt like one of those little buoys they put out in the ocean to measure the size of the waves – and the waves were starting to get bigger and bigger, and the little buoy that was me was being
tipped and tossed and half-submerged, and the waves just kept rising and rising and rising.

Miro sat in the front with his mate. I sat in the back with Soph and Draz who were writhing around together like a pair of eels. The stereo was so loud I could feel my brain throbbing. Miro's only words to me were: ‘Whatever you do, don't spew on the car seats.'

Miro drove like he was playing a computer game – fast, reckless, all screeching turns and elaborate steering wheel manoeuvres – while we hunted for a drive-through bottle shop that was still open. As the clock ticked down towards midnight Miro got more and more tense and began to drive faster and faster. When we finally found a bottle shop it was closed.

‘Let's just go back to the party,' Miro's mate said. ‘There's one more place that might still be open,' Miro said.

‘It won't be,' Draz said.

‘It will!' Miro insisted.

And off we went again. Miro was driving like a rally driver now. It was beginning to dawn on me that he was not particularly sober. As we screeched around one particularly sharp corner and nearly collected a taxi, I went from being over it to being terrified. Miro was a maniac. We were all about to die. I held onto the car door until my knuckles turned white.

The waves were sloshing right over the little buoy in the ocean now. My head swam with too many thoughts, too many feelings: the weirdness between me and Soph; the argument with Ben; Finn and the way he made me feel and my excitement and my guilt; the guy with the
punch; this nightmarish car trip; and Draz, with his dismissive look and his contemptuous sneer and the mysterious hold he had over my best friend …

I could feel my spine tingling as shivers ran up the back of my neck. Adrenalin was coursing through my body and my powers were rising to defend me. And then it was as if the thinking part of me simply switched off and some other part – the destructive part – took over. Something wild and chaotic was unfurling inside me, the desire to strike out and shatter and smash, to tear the fabric of the world apart, to rip things up and toss them high in the air and see where the pieces fell. My powers started to lift and my hands, entirely of their own accord, checked that my seat-belt was fastened, and then they checked Soph's. Destructive energy raged and roared inside me and Miro began to accelerate into a turn – and in my mind's eye I saw one of our big fat tyres explode so that the car began to spin right across the road, spinning and spinning until it slammed into something big and heavy and solid so that the whole driver's side was crushed like a piece of paper and Draz and his brother were crushed along with it, and the car hurtled to a stop and we were free at last, me and Soph were free of Draz forever – but then I saw Soph staring at me, her face pale from the glow of the streetlights, and she screamed, ‘Melissa don't!'

And as soon as Soph called out to me, Miro's foot came off the accelerator and jammed on the brake and we came to a screeching halt as he yelled, ‘Not the interior! You can't spew on the interior!'

And as soon as he said it I
did
want to spew, so I threw
the passenger door open and sagged out, still trapped by my seat-belt, and vomited into the gutter – and I felt my powers discharge in a great giddy rush, blasting forth destruction like a huge toxic plume, and with them went all my feelings of rage and confusion and guilt and fear until there was nothing left inside me.

But Draz was safe. Miro was safe. And the car interior was safe.

I spat into the gutter and wiped my mouth, exhausted, drained, nauseous.

‘Oh man,' Miro said. ‘You chicks can't hold your drink.'

‘Could we just drop her off and get back to this party?' his mate said.

I sat up and turned to Soph, a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. She was staring back at me, her eyes wide with horror.

‘I didn't –' I began.

But the words died in my throat. Because I knew what Soph had seen for the first time. She'd seen what the Queen of Evil really looked like.

T
hings got a little blurry for me after that, but somehow I ended up at home in my own bed, rather than at Celeste's place. I think I insisted. I'm a little vague on details.

I woke up the following morning with a putrid headache and sent an apologetic text to Soph, but she didn't reply. Emerging from my bedroom, I had to explain to my parents what I was doing home when they thought I was safely at a friend's place. (‘We had an argument. It was stupid. I don't want to talk about it.') I sent Soph another text an hour later, and another one after that. But by two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, I decided I was going to have to face the truth: Soph was no longer speaking to me.

Every time I thought about what had happened the night before I got a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. I had been ready to kill them all: Draz and Miro and Miro's mate, and maybe Soph too. If she hadn't worked out what I was up to in the nick of time (how had she, by the way? Was it when I checked the seat-belts? Yes, that must have been it) the police might still
have been picking us out of the wreckage. And not for any good reason either – it wasn't like Miro was holding us hostage or I was genuinely in fear for my life. No. I would have smashed them all to bits because I was tired and emotional and a little bit drunk and I couldn't stop myself.

That's the worst part of having powers of destruction: once you really let them loose they get bigger and bigger until there's destruction flying halfway round the world and there's nothing you can do about it, you're causing cyclones and toppling third world dictatorships and whipping up epidemics and sinking container ships and wiping out species of insects in Borneo without ever intending to –

And you know what? Once it really gets going, and the power's flowing through you,
you don't care
. Because
it feels fantastic
. You know it's wicked, you know it's evil, you know it's wrong. But it feels too good to stop, and so you just keep spewing destruction until you're spent.

And that's what Soph had seen in the car last night. Not just the destructiveness, although that was bad enough. She'd seen how deeply, wickedly, horribly
satisfying
it was to tear things apart.

It wasn't that Soph hadn't known about my powers – in fact she was the first person I'd told. (The
only
person I'd told.) In the beginning I'd been worried that having a friend with awesome destructive powers might freak her out a bit, but she'd been fine about it. In fact, she'd thought it was kind of cool – and potentially quite useful.

But now that had all changed. Soph had seen me use
my powers before, but I don't think she'd ever seen the ferocity, the cruelty, the not-caring. The object of my destruction didn't need to deserve it, they just needed to be in the way. For the first time, Soph had realised that if she pissed me off, there could be consequences. Serious consequences. And last night we'd gone perilously close.

I could see it from her point of view, I really could. Why would you take the risk of being friends with someone who could turn you into a smoking pile of ashes the first time you crossed them? It'd be like hanging out with a white pointer shark. No matter how tame it was, and no matter how well you got along, you had to know that eventually the shark was going to take a bite out of you, because it couldn't help itself. It was in its nature. Like destroying was in mine. Why would you get into that in the first place? Better to just run a mile, while you still could.

I vowed I would never let myself get into that state ever again. The alcohol was partly to blame – it was hard enough keeping my powers under control as it was, and adding booze to the mix made an already slippery slope steeper and slippier – but I wasn't going to let myself off the hook. I didn't ever want to do things like that to anyone, especially not to my friends. Maybe I had no choice about being a destroyer. But I had a choice about what kind of destroyer I was going to be.

I was definitely going to have to lay off the punch from now on.

I wished I could call Ben up and get his take on it (Had he tried mixing alcohol with his powers? Did he
know why they were such a potent combination? And what did you do when your best friend was suddenly afraid of you?) but I didn't think it'd be such a good idea. I'd sent him a text too. He hadn't replied.

My two best friends were no longer speaking to me.

The television news that night was full of disasters. An oil tanker had run aground off the coast of Scotland. There had been flash floods in the Philippines. An airline had gone bankrupt, leaving thousands of happy holiday-makers stranded, their plans ruined. A truck had jack-knifed on the freeway and spilt butter in every direction. The traffic was banked up so far you could just about see it from space. And my favourite batsman, on tour on the other side of the world, had broken his finger in a freak accident in an ice-cream parlour and wouldn't be able to bat for the rest of the series. I couldn't be absolutely sure my powers were to blame for all this, but as I watched them unfold one by one on the telly I felt a little stirring of recognition, as if I had somehow unwittingly had a hand in them.

I slunk off to bed, not wanting to see any more possible evidence of my evil-doing. All those Scotsmen washing seabirds and scrubbing rocks with toothbrushes, all those Filipinos sitting on rooftops or wading through brown swirling water clutching a few heart-breaking possessions. The world was chaotic enough without any help from me, but I had made it just that little bit more cruel, desperate, difficult and uncomfortable.

And I had to face Soph at school again the next day.