Destiny (Vanish Book Four) (4 page)

The sky was starting to darken; the clouds
were slowly rolling in. The sun peeked through while it still
could, leaving us with a slight shimmer of light for the time
being. I heard thunder in the distance, getting louder with each
thud. The others didn’t notice; the waterfall was too loud, and
they were too busy having fun.

“Hey, guys, it looks like it’s going to
storm. You might want to get out,” I called over to them.

They swam to the shore and got out, but not
before it started pouring. Dante and I jumped up and took our
blanket into the tent.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to
everyone else. My mind was wrapped up in other things, but when
Cooper ran up to our tent in a panic, I realized something was
wrong.

“Lily is missing,” he said. “I don’t know
when the last time I saw her was… I don’t know how—”

“Okay Cooper, when was the last time you
remember seeing her? Even if it wasn’t
the
last time, it
will help. Come on, think,” I urged.

“I—I don’t know, Allison and I… we found a
cave behind the waterfall…” he began, sounding embarrassed.

I unzipped the tent and got out. I asked each
person if they had seen her leave. None of them had seen a
thing.

“Okay, Dante and I will go look for her. You
guys stay here in case she comes back.”

“No, I think more people should go. We don’t
all need to stay here and wait for her,” Cooper argued.

“Okay,” I said, keeping it cool, but inside,
I was panicking. If they went out there, they would find the two
guys that we killed. We needed to be smart about this, and we
should have hidden the bodies. “You’re right. You and Allison go
that way, Annabelle, Rose, and Grace will stay here and wait for
her.”

We headed toward the spot where we were
earlier. We didn’t have any time to waste, but we needed to hide
the bodies. Dante was thinking the same thing; we went without a
word. I imagined two deep holes. Then, I imagined one of them in
each, and the holes filling with dirt. Next, I imagined a bush
covering where they were buried.

There was a bolt of lightning that lit up the
area completely, and then, I heard a scream. We ran in the
direction that it came from. Dante managed to get about ten feet
ahead of me.

As we got closer, I heard a cracking sound.
I’d never really heard anything like it, and before I realized what
it was, it was too late. I stopped running and looked up in horror
as a giant tree came plunging toward the ground—toward me. I took a
deep breath and closed my eyes. It would be over any second.

The next thing I knew, I was laying on the
ground a few feet away from the fallen tree. Dante was on top of
me. I felt a sharp pain in my arm. I looked at it, there was a huge
gash. I wasn’t certain, but it looked like I could see the bone. I
gasped, and Dante looked down at me.

“What?” he asked. I raised my arm, but the
gash was gone. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s gone,” I said, staring at my arm in
awe. “There was a huge cut, but it’s gone.”

We didn’t have much time to speculate, before
Dante could say another word, there was another scream coming from
the same direction. We got up, climbed over the tree, and started
running again.

The urgency of the scream made Dante pick up
his pace—I was glad he did. I couldn’t keep up, and we needed to
get there as fast as we could. At first, he got a few feet ahead of
me, but only moments later, I could barely see him through the
trees.

There was another scream, it seemed to come
from a different direction. In fact, it seemed to be a different
matter altogether. The first scream was shrill, but this scream was
blood-curdling. I didn’t know if Dante had followed the new path or
had carried on searching in the direction of the first scream. I
tried to follow the second. I ran blindly in what I could only
hope, was the right direction.

I tripped on a root and went tumbling to the
ground. This turned out to be a good thing, however, because when I
looked up, a giant fireball passed over my head.

I looked in the direction that it came from
and saw a small group of people standing in the distance. They were
watching me, and one girl had a flame burning up from her
fingertips—so she was the one who tried to kill me. I figured it
was an accident, but I couldn’t be too careful. It was obvious that
this group of people had powers, but I wondered what they were
doing here.

“Hey, is your name Scarlett?” One of the
girls asked.

“Why?” I wondered.

They came closer, eyeing me as they walked.
They had a certain look in their eyes, all the same. It wasn’t
hate, or malice, but determination.

“Because,” one of the boys said. “If you’re
Scarlett, we’re going to need you to come with us.”

“Why?” I asked again, as if it was the only
word I could find.

“Can you feel it?” Another boy said with
glee, ignoring my question. “This is the beginning of something
greater than we could have ever imagined.”

“Exactly what are you talking about?” I
asked.

“If you come with us, the new Alliance can’t
turn us down.”

“Oh gee, that is so very generous of you. But
if I am Scarlett, and if you knew anything about Scarlett, you
would know I took down the Alliance. Also, if you really wanted me
to join you, I don’t think you would have just tried to kill
me.”

“You took them down to make room for bigger
and better things. Those fools could never execute any of their
plans. The people behind them—brilliant, but the Alliance we’ve all
come to know, not so much.”

“Well, I’m not Scarlett, sorry,” I
shrugged.

“That’s a lie,” a girl in the back chimed
in.

“We’re lucky we have you Mel, our little
human lie detector.”

They all turned around to praise Mel for her
fine work, but they made a mistake. They left me with a very small
window of time to escape, and I took it.

I ran through the trees getting whipped in
the face by branches. The speed I was running at was incredible. It
made it hurt that much worse, when someone grabbed on to me and
dragged me aside. I felt like I had whiplash, and it was like the
world was spinning underneath me. I looked up at the face of my
captor. I’d know him anywhere—Skylar.

“Let me go,” I demanded.

“Shh, they’ll find us,” he warned.

“Why are you helping me?
If
that’s
even what you’re really up to.”

“I have my reasons; you may think of me as
evil, but not everything is categorized so easily.”

“You are evil, pure evil,” I spat.

“I could say the same about you. Is that
blood on your shirt fresh?”

“You have no idea, so before you go—”

“Precisely what I was trying to get across to
you. You can’t just go judging people based on the one time that
you’ve met them, right?”

“Well, I guess not, not usually anyway, but
with you, I think I’ll make an exception.”

“Fine, do what you want,” he said, “but I
think you’re going to be needing my help very soon.”

“And how will you help me?” I asked.

“There are a lot of ways that I could help
you,” he began, “there are lots of things you don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“How to make your energy last longer. You
have figured out what you need to do to survive, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I sighed.

“Have you ever thought that maybe there isn’t
just one way that life is supposed to go?” he asked, changing the
subject.

“No—I don’t know.”

“I mean, a lot of people know that if you can
share your powers with someone else, you’re probably meant for each
other, but I don’t believe that’s always the case.”

“I’m not going to sit here and chat with you;
I need to find Dante.”

I ran out from behind the trees, running in
the same direction that I began running in. There was no doubt that
Dante was looking for me. I didn’t want him to run into the group
that I had just had the pleasure of meeting. I heard someone
scream, but it wasn’t a scared scream, no, it was more of a ‘hey
look over here’ scream, and I did.

When I looked, I saw one of the girls from
the group with a strange-looking knife in her hand. The handle
looked as if it was made of glass. The girl smiled and in one swift
motion, flung the knife in my direction. It came hurling at me,
spinning around in circles as it made its way to its destination. I
stood there frozen.

If I couldn’t move, it looked like it would
hit me right between the eyes. Then, something blocked my vision;
it was someone’s hand. I heard a ripping sound as the knife met the
hand, and tore through the flesh right through to the other side
where I could see. The handle filled up with a blue liquid that
started to glow.

I looked up to the face of my savior. I was
expecting Dante, but what I saw instead, was Skylar. He took the
knife out of his hand and stashed it away in his pocket. Then, he
started dragging me away.

“Now do you believe that I want to help you?”
he said as he grimaced with pain.

“I do,” I concluded; I sounded confident,
sure. “I just don’t know why.”

“There are a lot of reasons, not all of them
can be explained right now,” he said as he grabbed the blade from
his pocket.

“I’ve never seen a knife like that,” I said,
making conversation.

“You haven’t?” he laughed, amused. “Well, I
have a feeling you’ll be seeing a lot more of these.”

He grabbed the blade right in the middle and
started to twist it. He made sure to stay away from the edge. After
a few twists, the blade came off, leaving the handle full of liquid
exposed.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Killing two birds with one stone,” he said.
“I’m really surprised you’ve never seen one. They’re for killing
people and taking their powers all at once. Now, if that wasn’t
enough convenience, everyone is starting to figure out that this is
the best way to take what doesn’t belong to you. This is the only
way that I know of to get the powers in their purest forms. That
leads to more powerful people.”

“What do you do with it?” I wondered.

He looked down at the handle. It looked like
there could have been as much as six ounces of liquid in there.
When I got a closer look, I could tell the liquid was much thicker
than I thought. He closed his eyes and drank it like a shot. His
hand started repairing itself before my eyes, only seconds later,
the wound was gone.

“This is why you need my help; people are
learning far too much about our way of life. Ways to be stronger,
faster, better in every way.”

“Okay, I’ll admit that sounds plausible, and
thank you for… that. But I can’t honestly believe you have no
ulterior motive in this. I don’t know if it’s innocent or evil, but
I just can’t be a part of it.”

“You are a part of it, you and everyone else
that helped take down the Alliance. It doesn’t matter what
strengths they have, what powers. What matters is they are all a
part of this. They are all part of the evolution of our kind, and
that, well, that makes them almost as desirable as you.”

“Why? Why us? If these people want to create
a new Alliance, then they can do it by themselves, and leave me out
of it.”

“Well, you don’t always get what you want,
now do you?”

“I need you to leave, if anyone else sees
you, they’re going to feel threatened. They remember the past,
everything.”

”Yeah, well, so do I,” he mumbled. “While not
much has changed, I’m not who you think I am.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I turned my
back to him. I looked back over, and he looked—sad. “Give me your
number,” I sighed. “I will call you… if I ever need to.”

“Thank you,” he said.

He handed me the number, leaving little room
on the paper for me to grab onto. He held onto it for a minute; it
seemed like he was unable to let go. Finally, he did and he looked
down at me with something in his eyes. They burned into mine with
an intensity I didn’t have the time to focus on.

I nodded, “now go.”

He ran off at an incredible speed, probably
another benefit of drinking his powers. I didn’t understand it, but
nothing in this world seemed to make much sense. I only had to walk
about fifty feet before I found Dante, and the screaming
girl—Lily.

“You found her,” I sighed with relief. “What
was going on? Why was she screaming?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Look at her face;
she’s in shock.”

She stood there motionless, with her hands
balled up into fists. Her eyes were open wide, but it was like she
couldn’t see anything. She just sat there, staring blankly at a
tree.

“Let’s get her back to camp, I’m sure it’s
nothing,” I lied.

Though I had no idea what was wrong with
Lily, in the back of my mind, I had no doubt that something had
happened.

“Where were you?” Dante squinted as he looked
over at me.

“I was—” I paused for a moment; I wasn’t sure
if I wanted Dante to know the truth behind what had just happened.
“I tripped,” I shrugged, and the lies kept coming.

We made it back to camp just as Cooper and
Allison returned. Cooper was happy to see that we found Lily, but
he was concerned about how she was acting.

He ended up deciding to just take her home.
We all offered to go with them, but he insisted that we stay and
have fun. Dante and I went into our tent to talk for a while. I
didn’t feel tired at all, but that also meant no dreams. Usually I
would be glad to be free of them, now I only wanted a heads up for
what was to come.

“Something strange is happening, I can feel
it,” he said.

“I know; I can too,” I said.

I contemplated telling him about the group in
the woods. For all I knew, they were a bunch of high school
students looking for nothing more than something to do, and forming
the new Alliance was just this weekend’s conquest.