Dust and Roses: Book Two of the Dust Trilogy (2 page)

 Lacey, the self-proclaimed queen
bee, needed her worker bees to survive. Usually Lacey traveled with three
minions, but since Bailey Benson, my former best friend was no longer with us,
Lacey had an opening that needed to be filled. Imani would have fit in
perfectly.

Lacey liked to choose her girls so that
everyone in her clique had a completely different look. Lacey was blond with
green eyes. Marley Madden had flaming red curls and Trista Pimentel’s hair fell
in long chocolate waves down her back.

We were in biology when Lacey first
approached Imani. That day Imani wore a fitted leopard-print shirt dress,
purple leggings, and black knee-boots. Super chic. I was distracted by the fact
that our regular biology teacher, Ms. Melcher was still missing and that her
replacement, Mrs. Lang, had no clue what she was doing. Mrs. Lang was deep into
a one-on-one debate about the validity of evolution with Mary-Kate Youngblood,
while the rest of the class looked on, glassy-eyed. We’d witnessed this argument
between the two of them so many times. Ms. Melcher would have never forgotten
that she had twenty other students in the room like Mrs. Lang did. The debate
was just getting heated when I noticed a commotion beside me.

Lacey, as usual, was paying Mrs. Lang no
attention. “You should totally sit with us,” Lacey told Imani, who was
desperately trying to copy someone’s notes from the previous week’s lessons. I
could only imagine how hard it had to be to transfer in the March of your
junior year. There was so much to catch up on. I wondered what had caused her
family to move so late in the school year.

Imani shrugged, flipping a page in the
borrowed notebook. “Thanks for the offer but I don’t really do the girl-cliquey
thing. Just not my style.”

Lacey’s jaw dropped. She had been
expecting Imani to leap for joy at the chance of becoming a bee. She hadn’t
been prepared for rejection. The feeling was probably foreign to her. Lacey
composed herself quickly and laughed it off. “You’re new here, so I’m sure you
don’t know how any of this works, but Trista, Marley, and I are the most
popular girls in our class.” She was speaking to Imani as if she were stupid.

Imani kept writing, unimpressed. “I’m sure
you are. Still not interested. Thanks.”

Lacey’s green eyes flashed in my direction
and it was only then that I realized I was grinning from ear to ear. I turned
away quickly, pretending to read from my biology book. I waited for Lacey to
throw a jab at me, but she never did.

After class, Imani and I reached the
classroom door at the same time. She smiled at me so I figured it was okay to
talk to her. “I hope you know you just pissed off Satan herself.”

Imani waved her hand dismissively. “I’ve
handled worse. She’s so not my type of girl.” We filed into the hallway and
joined the sea of students headed to their next classes.

“Yo, Dust. Don’t get the new girl dirty,”
Ranson Duvall yelled from across the hall. He was the male version of Lacey,
only less tolerable.

I rolled my eyes and ignored him like
always. Coming back at him wouldn’t end well. He’d make a public spectacle out
of me and no matter how lame his insults were, the crowd would laugh.

Imani gave me the side-eye. “Your name’s
Dust?”

“No. It’s kind of a nickname. Lacey gave
it to me freshman year so it’s what everyone calls me.”

 “Why?” she asked, frowning.

I hated explaining it because it sounded
so horrible when I said it out loud. Lacey had named me Dust because dust was
insignificant. Worthless. No one paid attention to it. Dust was nothing.

 It bothered me at first, but
recently I had embraced the name because I realized it could mean other things
that were pretty awesome. I didn’t have to accept Lacey’s definition. What did
she know? She had absolutely no idea what I was really made of.

“My name’s Arden.”

Imani looked me up and down. I thought
she’d take one glance at my floor-length homemade dress and dismiss me, but she
tossed her braids over her right shoulder. “That’s pretty.”

“Thanks. Your name’s pretty too. Anyway,
you can sit with me and my friend Fletcher at lunch if you want.” I figured it
was a long shot that someone so cool would want to eat with us, but it wouldn’t
kill me to put the offer out there. “We always sit outside at the picnic
tables. The ones farthest away from the school building under the willow tree.”

“Cool. I’ll meet you there,” Imani replied
before we went our separate ways. I thought she might have just said that to be
nice, but she had actually shown up. After that, Imani fell right in with
Fletcher and me as if she’d been there all along. I didn’t even have to explain
Fletcher to her, like I did with other people. She just got him.

Although Fletcher would always be my best
friend, Imani was different. Fletcher and I were both outcasts, so that had
drawn us together. We didn’t have anyone else. Imani, on the other hand, had
options. The beautiful, mysterious new-girl-in-town could have been friends
with anyone, but still, she’d chosen me.

Things were starting to look up for me.
Just a month ago, I’d only had one friend. Now I had two.

Once Fletcher met up with us, we started
home. Fletcher always walked me home even though he lived in the other
direction. Imani’s house was nearest to the school, so after we dropped her
off, we headed toward mine.

We strolled silently for a moment and I
caught myself staring at Fletcher. I couldn’t get enough of looking at that
gorgeous face, but the purple bruise underneath his right cheek, tarnished its
perfection. At least his eye and lip had healed. I touched the bruise with my
thumb and he flinched.

“How come it’s not going away?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Fletcher was like me, not Human. The bus
incident happened almost two years before. I hadn’t known Fletcher then, but when
I’d confronted him about what I seen, he’d cut himself with a knife and healed
immediately. I knew then that Fletcher was some kind of miracle.

Fletcher Whitelock was the world’s most
perfect guy. He had pale skin, full pink lips perfect for kissing (I knew from
first-hand experience), and shaggy amber hair that always fell into his eyes.
He had a good heart, but he could never love me the way I loved him. He’d told
me so himself.

Fletcher looked like a Human, but he was a
Walker. That meant he could make himself transform into either an owl, a wolf,
or a snake. As incredible as that sounded, it was tame compared to what I was—a
Bandigo. The only one in existence. I was a mixture of a Banshee, or Death
Fairy, and a Wendigo. One was only a tiny bit less terrifying than the other.

I hooked my arm around his. “Aren’t you
curious about why you’re not healing the way you used to?”

He took a sudden interest in his sneakers.
“Not really.”

Fletcher not healing immediately concerned
me, but what bothered me more, was that Fletcher didn’t seem to care. Something
was wrong and he was in denial.

We stopped in front of my house. Fletcher
wasn’t allowed to come inside because my parents didn’t like him or his family.
I wasn’t even supposed to be hanging out with him, but they would never stop me
from doing that. Fletcher shivered, which was strange considering the warm
March weather.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He looked up at the sun and squinted.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just got a chill.”

I looked at my house. Everything was still
and quiet as if no one was home. “That locker didn’t open by itself.”

Fletcher squatted to study a line of ants
moving along the sidewalk. “I know.”

“I thought about it and then it happened.”

“I know.” Fletcher was still focused on
the ants, so I couldn’t read his expression. I wished he would look at me.
“Arden, Ranson is a testicle, but you can’t kill him.”

Something tugged at my heart. What kind of
person did Fletcher think I was? “I’m not going to kill him. I haven’t even thought
that. I just wanted him to stop messing with you.”

Fletcher stood again, but he didn’t look
at me. He stared at our mailbox, which was a tiny replica of our home. “Okay.
I’m just saying. You know you of all people have to be careful what you think.”

“Got it,” I replied, not bothering to hide
my annoyance. Fletcher had no idea what it was like to be me—to know that my
thoughts might actually kill someone someday.

 He pushed his hair back and turned
away from me. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”

“Yeah. See you.”

I watched him hobble down the sidewalk and
back up the block. I didn’t know what was wrong with Fletcher, but I had the
sickening feeling that he was hiding things from me again.

Inside, the house was quiet. Normally Mom
would be waiting to ask me twenty-one questions about my day, hoping I had
behaved like a normal person, but lately when I got home she would be out, or
locked in her room busy with something. The closer I got to transformation, the
more my family seemed to avoid me. I couldn’t say that I blamed them. Every day
I lived, I was a step closer to becoming a Wendigo.

I couldn’t think of anything worse than
that. I’d seen Wendigos up close and personal. They were disgusting creatures
with the head of a wildebeest, visible ribcages that revealed yellowed-decaying
bones, and large gruesome hooves with blade-like claws. Wendigos moved hunched
over, with their fur-covered hands dragging on the ground. Long, gnarled
antlers grew from its head like sinister-looking tree branches.

A gnawing feeling tore at the pit of my
stomach. Never-ending hunger. Fletcher said it was because my body had an
appetite for one thing only—Human flesh. Eating that would be the only way to
stop the hunger pains but I’d starve to death before that happened.

The place was spotless as usual, thanks to
Mom and the cleaning lady who came in a few times a week. I headed straight to
the pantry and grabbed a jar of olives. Olives and beef jerky were my snacks of
choice. I craved meat and bitter, salty things. The taste of sweetness made me
feel ill. Cookies, ice cream, candy—none of those things belonged in my body,
so it would reject them immediately. Sitting at the kitchen table, I unscrewed
the lid and fished a few olives out. A
thump
came from upstairs. Mom was
home.

Moments later, she bounced into the
kitchen, pushing her wavy blond hair behind her ears. She wore a tight fuchsia
jogging suit that showed the results of her daily visits to the gym. Mom tried
her best to look perfect at all times. She was cute as far as moms went.

“Hey, hon. How was school?” Her ocean-blue
eyes looked everywhere but at me.

“Fine.” Generic questions deserved generic
answers.

I looked nothing like Mom because she
wasn’t my mother. Not my birth mother anyway. Another baby and I had been
switched at birth. My parent’s real daughter was Rose. She was somewhere in
California flitting around being perfect.

“I made a new friend,” I added. Mom hated
the fact that I wasn’t like her or my younger sisters, Paige and Quinn, who
seemed to be born perky and popular. I was an oddball who didn’t have a social
bone in me. Crowds and parties were never my thing. Doing something quiet with
the few people I liked was good enough for me.

Mom eyed me skeptically. “Did you really?
What kind of friend?”

What kind of friend? She asked the
question as if I might have made friends with a caterpillar or something.

“Not a creature, Mom. A real friend. A
Human.” I’d wanted to tell her about Imani earlier, but I had to make sure our
friendship was going to stick and that Imani wasn’t going to ditch me once
she’d found a better group of friends.

Mom stopped fiddling around like she was
looking for something in the cabinets. We both knew she wasn’t trying to find
anything. Finally, she sat across from me at the table, folding her hands in
front of her. She actually looked me in the eye. It had been ages since she’d
done that. “Tell me about this friend.”

“Her name is Imani Hughes. She’s really pretty
and a lot of fun. Her family just moved here from Texas.”

“Huh,” Mom said and I could tell this bit
of news had escaped her. Usually she and her friends knew everything that went
on in Everson Woods, but the Hughes seemed to keep to themselves.

She narrowed her eyes. “What do her
parents do?”

The answer to that question could make or
break your social life in our town.

“Her mom sells stuff from home for some
makeup company, I think, and her dad’s the new police captain at our precinct.”
My family and I were very familiar with the police department. We’d dealt with
them plenty in the past few months. “He got transferred. That’s why they
moved.”

With the killings and disappearances in
Everson recently, the police department felt it needed to shake things up. The
mayor was also worried about how the attacks would affect tourism, not that
people were lining up to vacation in our town. There were a few
bed-and-breakfasts and several hotels, though. I thought the people who decided
to waste a trip on boring Everson Woods, deserved whatever crappy time they
had.

I couldn’t tell if Mom was impressed or
not. She loved cosmetics and a captain was pretty high up on the police ladder,
so maybe she was. Mom pushed her hair behind her ears again. “Well, I can’t wait
to meet Imani and I’m glad you’re trying.”

For some reason Mom thought my lack of
friends was due to my lack of effort, but that was just not the truth. I was
almost tempted to remind her that the last person she encouraged me to be
friends with turned out to be a deranged lunatic who tried to kill me.

“I was talking to Rhonda Youngblood this
morning at the gym. I think her daughter, Mary-Kate, would be a great friend
for you. You should ask her over sometime.”

I liked Mary-Kate a lot, but just the thought
of hanging out with someone that perfect made my stomach hurt. I felt
inadequate just passing her in the hallway. Mary-Kate was our class president
and number one in everything. On top of that, she was gorgeous and super nice
to everyone. I’d never seen her have an imperfect moment.

“There’s nothing stopping you from having
more friends. You’re just as pretty as any of those popular girls, Arden.”

“I know, Mom.” I never thought I wasn’t
pretty. That wasn’t the problem. It was not knowing how to act and just not
fitting in with the normal people. I was no good at that. That was the reason
Fletcher and I fit perfectly together. He was no good at normal either.
Somehow, Imani and her normalness, fit in with our weirdness. A small part of
me was waiting for her to show us that she wasn’t so normal after all.

The first couple of days, I’d had my guard
up with Imani. The last girl friend I had, was not who I thought she was. I had
known Bailey since the second grade and up until a couple of months ago, I had
no idea that she was a creature. Fletcher assured me that Imani was Human. He
could tell from her scent.

I pushed the olives away, weighed down by
thoughts of Bailey. Mom hated that I ate so many olives and I wanted her to be
proud of me sometimes, so maybe I would start eating them less. “Everything’s
going to be okay, Mom. I’m going to fight this.” I knew my transformation was
something she worried about all the time, and even though it wasn’t my fault, I
felt guilty. I wanted to set her mind at ease.

She nodded but she didn’t look like she
believed me. “I know. I know you want to and you can try, but this isn’t cancer
or some disease, sweetheart—this is just . . . different.”

My mom and sisters were Human, so they
didn’t understand. They had no idea what I was going through.

I would have appreciated a little more
encouragement from my mother, but she was right. I had two entities living
inside me—Banshee and Wendigo. One of them was destined to come out by my
eighteenth birthday which was only seven months away. A Banshee could predict
death. A mature Banshee could cause death with just her thoughts, she could
even receive warnings of other people’s deaths. A few months ago I had seen a
purple and black cloud around my biology teacher, Ms. Melcher. The cloud was an
omen only I could see. Shortly afterward, she disappeared and hadn’t been seen
since. Fletcher was sure she was dead, but I thought she could still be out
there.

The house remained quiet until my sisters
came home, then it came alive with the sounds of televisions, blaring music,
and jibber-jabber about school days. My relationship with my sisters wasn’t
very sisterly. I was seventeen so having some distance between myself and
ten-year-old Quinn and thirteen-year-old Paige was to be expected. But it was
more than that. We had nothing in common. Ever since the girls learned the
truth about me, they had become more standoffish than usual. I didn’t think we
would ever be close.

My sisters were blond and blue-eyed just
like Mom. They fit together perfectly.

Paige entered the kitchen and headed
straight for the pantry without acknowledging me. She grabbed a bag of Chips
Ahoy and settled down on a barstool at the kitchen island. “Mom, the spring
dance is coming up and I need a dress.”

“Let’s go shopping this weekend. We’ll
make a day of it,” Mom called from the living room, where she filled out a
field trip permission slip for Quinn. Mom loved to take the girls shopping.
That was one thing she never did with me because I always made my own clothes.
Dresses specifically. Long dresses with frilly sleeves and sashes that looked
like they belonged in another time period. I always added pockets so I wouldn’t
have to carry a purse. Wearing homemade dresses to school was a sure way to get
made fun of, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel right in anything else. I
wouldn’t be uncomfortable just so people would like me.

Paige eyed me as she bit into a cookie.
“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said back. I didn’t know what
else to say to her. School dances weren’t my forte so I had no big-sister
advice to offer her.

“You should come dress shopping with us,”
she mumbled with her mouth full of cookie.

I shrugged. “I probably won’t.” But she
already knew that. Her invite was just going through the motions. I guess I
should have appreciated that she even did that.

Paige looked down at the package of
cookies, wide-eyed. “O.M.G. Dress shopping. No more cookies.”

That comment hurt my heart a little. I
wanted to tell her that she was being silly and to go ahead and eat the
cookies, but I knew she wouldn’t listen to me anyway. We’d had that
conversation before. She’d only point out how she could count each of my ribs
so I had no idea what I was talking about. Paige wasn’t as thin as me, but she
didn’t have any weight to spare.

She watched me for a moment, put the
cookies back into the pantry and then rushed upstairs as if she couldn’t bear
to spend another second in my presence. Quinn, the brains of the family, came
into the kitchen and grabbed a juice pouch from the fridge.

“Hey, Quinn.”

She jumped as if she hadn’t seen me there.
“Oh, hi. I—I gotta go do my homework. Big project due tomorrow. Huge!” Then she
sealed herself up in her room for the rest of the afternoon. Mom found a reason
to spend an hour poking through boxes in the basement, even though she hated
being in the basement and when Dad came home, he gave me a quick peck on my
forehead and then holed up in his office to make a conference call. That was
normal for us. Completely normal.

That night as I crawled into bed, a scraping
sound came from the hallway. I opened my bedroom door to see where the sound
was coming from. Someone, probably Dad, had pushed my great-grandmother’s
antique armoire in front of my door, blocking me in. It usually stood against a
wall in the center of the hallway. That was new. Without a word I shut the door
and dialed Fletcher.

“They’re barricading me in my room like
some kind of prisoner,” I told him as soon as he answered.

“They have to,” he told me. “Don’t take it
personally, but they have to protect themselves. I told you, when I first went
through the changes my parents made me sleep in a cage.”

He was right but I still felt insulted,
like they didn’t trust me. “I know. But it just seems unfair. I’ve never hurt
them. They could have at least told me first.”

Fletcher was quiet for a moment. “Do you
want to hurt your family, Arden?”

What kind of question was that? “Of course
not!”

“Then let them do what they have to do.
It’s the only way they’ll be able to sleep at night. They need to feel safe.
Put yourself in their shoes.”

“Okay,” I said before hanging up. It
wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear, but it was what I needed to hear.

Before, I thought my parents might have
been lowering their guard when they’d cancelled the rest of my therapy sessions
with Dr. Scarlett. While it had been a relief at first, I realized they hadn’t
done it because they thought I was getting better. They stopped the sessions
because they were afraid of Dr. Scarlett learning my secret.

 I listened to my father on the other
side of the door. His voice sounded muffled because of the armoire, but still,
I heard every word.

“I’m sorry, honey. It’s nothing personal.
I have to do what’s best for everyone.”

I didn’t bother with a reply. I buried
myself under my covers and prayed for the animal part of me to fade away.