Hunted

The Perfect Weapon:
Adri Paige can visit people inside of their dreams, where they are defenseless.

The Ultimate Spy:
Adri's power lets her ferret out anyone's secrets and even influence their waking actions.

The World's Biggest Prize:
Adri's power comes with a price. Dark forces hunt her, hoping to bend her gifts to their purposes.

The Real Problem?
Adri needs to make it through high school without letting anyone around her figure out her true capabilities—all while crushing on a guy she knows is probably trouble.

Copyright 2013 by Dean Murray

I
had a headache again, but that was pretty much the case all of the
time. I was almost used to my brain trying to work its way out
through my ears, so that couldn't have been the reason I opened my
stupid mouth.

I'd
hated Janessa for a long time and managed to keep my mouth shut, so I
was pretty sure that wasn't the reason either. Maybe it wasn't either
reason, maybe it was both of them together combined with a couple of
other things that were so small that I didn't even realize they were
bothering me, but I wanted to get up from my table and go tear
Janessa's hair out by the roots.

Normally
I'm not even the slightest bit violent. Unlike my sister, Cindi, I've
pretty much made it through school by keeping my head down and
ignoring other people as much as possible. You'd think in a school
with a student body approaching five thousand that it would be easy
to get lost in the crowd, but I'd had to actively work at staying
anonymous. It was almost like there were so many kids attending our school
that anybody could find a clique without even having to try.

Janessa
and her friends talked crap about pretty much everyone in the school
most days, but today it was getting to me like it never had before.
Maybe it was the way that she was leading a smear campaign against
Jackson, one of the new guys who had just moved into school. It
wasn't that she didn't like him, she was doing it to make sure that
none of the other girls would date him.

Once
she finished sucking her current boyfriend dry then she'd be able to
move in and redeem Jackson's social image by dating him. It was
beyond shallow, but she'd invented a kind of social cold storage for
future boyfriends. Given how oblivious I was to most things in
school, if I knew about it then everyone else in the school did too.

Janessa
was bad, but the people who let her get away with it were nearly as
terrible, and the whole thing was making my headache even worse than
normal.

"…and
I was like seriously? Not only can I do a better back handspring than
you, I'm going to ace our history test, at which point you're going
to turn over your spot on the homecoming committee to me."

Janessa's
voice was like an icepick shoved into my brain. It didn't seem to
matter what I did or how I sat, I could still hear her as well as if
she were sitting right next to me instead of at the next table over.

"…I
know, right? She's still complaining that I had to have cheated
somehow. She totally can't deal with the fact that not only am I
hotter and more talented than her, I'm also smarter."

I
couldn't help the snort of disbelief that made its way out of me.
Maybe if I'd kept my head safely buried in my book I would have been
able to pretend like it hadn't been in response to Janessa, but I
looked up at the same time and she locked gazes with me.

"Did
I say something funny, chubs?"

My
fists clenched tight at the despised nickname, but I didn't actually
want to get into a yelling match with her so I dropped my eyes back
down to my book and hoped that she'd just let it go.

"That's
right, you lame nerd. Next time don't forget your place."

Seventeen
years of life had conditioned me to let the comment go, to turn the
other cheek and just be glad that I had less than two years left in
this hellhole, but this time I found myself looking back up and
glaring at her.

"Yeah,
you said something funny. You're kind of forgettable so I can't quote
it exactly for you, but I think it boiled down to the fact that you
tried to use the words 'talented' and 'smart' in a sentence that
included you as the subject."

She
was on her feet now, which should have been an alarming development,
but somehow I was standing and instead of backing away from her, I
was actually moving towards her too.

"You're
forgetting who you're talking to, chubs. You're getting above
yourself and I'm glad that it gets to be me that puts you in your
place."

I
could see it in her eyes. Normally Janessa and the rest of the
cheerleaders, my sister included, ruled the school with an iron fist,
but she was scared—not that I'd hurt her, but that I'd say what
everyone else had to be thinking.

"You
didn't ace your history test, you paid Richard Parsons a hundred
bucks to steal the answer key for you and everyone knows it."

Janessa
yelled something about me spying on her as she threw herself at me,
but somehow I managed to give as good as I was getting. The neckline
to her cheerleading outfit ripped with a satisfying sound that
brought excited whistles from some of the bystanders who'd gathered
around us within seconds of the fight starting.

She
slapped me hard enough that I saw stars, but it wasn't enough to stop
me. I punched her in the eye, which hurt my hand a lot more than I'd
expected it to, but the blow nearly knocked her on her butt. A second
later she scratched me on the arm, so I tackled her and scratched her
across the face at which point two of the football players who'd been
watching decided that they'd better break us up before somebody lost
an eye.

Janessa
was yelling that she was going to kick my head in for ruining her
outfit as the guys pulled me off of her, but I was suddenly less
worried about her than I was about just how much trouble I was going
to be in with the administration. The assistant principal had already
made it to the study hall and he looked even more pissed off than
normal.

**

It
turned out that he was pissed off, but I got the feeling that his ire
wasn't directed at me as much as it was at Janessa. He read us both
the riot act and then sent her home to get some new clothes and me to
the school psychiatrist's office. Mrs. Bauer left me cooling in one
of the hard plastic chairs outside her office for nearly two hours
before opening her door and gesturing me inside.

"Okay,
Adri, what gives?"

I
shrugged as I sat down on one of the battered wooden chairs in front
of her desk. "What do you mean?"

"I've
been reading your record and this is the first time that you've
gotten into any kind of problem at all. Your grades are above
average, but nothing spectacular and until today I couldn't even put
your face and name together. You're not the kind of girl who ends up
in my office for having a knock-down-drag-out fight with one of the
cheerleaders."

"I
don't know. I guess I'm just getting tired of the way that Janessa
and her friends lead such a huge double life."

"They
are cheerleaders, sweetie, it's practically a job requirement."
She waved my protest away. "I'm not saying that it's right, but
it's hardly like it's a new development, so it can't be the root
problem behind today's little outburst."

I
shrugged. "I really don't know. It was just one of those things,
I guess. She was talking about how she aced her history test but the
whole school knows that she cheated on it."

Mrs.
Bauer shook her head. "I know this is hard to believe, but I
spend more time actually talking to the kids in this school than
anyone else here. By the time that 'everyone' knows something I've
usually known it for at least a couple of days. I hadn't heard
anything about this before you yelled it in study hall, and neither
had any of the half dozen other kids who've been in my office in the
last two hours."

She
leaned back and rubbed her eyes like she wished that she'd been able
to go home when school ended rather than having to stay after and
deal with one more problem kid.

"You're
related to Cindi Paige, aren't you?"

"Yeah,
so?"

"So
Cindi is on the cheerleading team, and from what I've been hearing,
she and Janessa are rivals. They are both sophomores and Janessa
having won a spot as a flyer has to have rubbed Cindi the wrong way.
Isn't it possible that you did all of this as a way of helping Cindi
out, of taking her rival down a couple of notches for her?"

I
didn't mean to laugh, it just kind of exploded out of me.

"You
obviously aren't as well informed as you think you are. Cindi and I
hardly talk to each other. If I was going to get into a fight for
someone, I can pretty much guarantee that it wouldn't be for Cindi."

"Are
you sure, Adri? Maybe you don't even remember Cindi telling you about
her suspicions that Janessa had cheated, maybe you didn't set out to
start a fight with Janessa, it just kind of happened."

I
shook my head. "That part is right, I didn't mean to start a
fight with her, but this honestly has nothing to do with Cindi or
anyone else."

Mrs.
Bauer closed her eyes for a couple of seconds and then sighed. "I
can't make you tell me the truth, but
I
would be lying if I
said that I wasn't disappointed. I have dozens of kids come through
my door every day who are basically beyond help. I do what I can, but
after more than twenty years doing this I've learned that it
ultimately comes down to whether or not the kids I'm working with
want to be helped. I can give the ones who want to change the tools
that they need, but there's not a darn thing I can do for the kids
who are determined not to change."

I
felt like she was waiting for me to respond, but I didn't know what
she was after so I just shrugged.

"Adri,
whenever a new kid comes through my door with a record like yours I
usually get excited because those are the kinds of kids who generally
just need a little help to get back on track. You need to think about
your life and what you're doing with it because right now you're
coming across as one of the kids I can't help."

She
dashed off a note and handed it to me without looking. "You're
going to get in-school detention at the very least, but I'm
recommending that the administration not come down too hard on you
this time. You know where the door is."

A
few seconds later I was standing outside of her office a little
bewildered at just how quickly she'd gone from interested and
supportive to cold and uncaring. I looked up and down the empty hall
and wondered if I dared go home now, but the sound of someone
clearing their throat brought me around to find that Cindi had been
sitting in a chair waiting for me.

"So
you got in your first fight, huh?"

"No
need to look so smug about it, Cindi."

She
shrugged and picked up the stylish black messenger bag that Mom and
Dad had finally purchased for her a month ago just so that she'd give
them a few minutes of peace. It had taken two months of her begging
and I'd spent the entire time hating the fact that she was making
them buy her yet another expensive accessory that she didn't need.

"I
wouldn't say that I'm smug, more like I'm just astonished that
something finally brought you out of your shell enough to notice
other people."

"Very
funny. What are you doing here anyways?"

"I
figured that there wasn't any reason to let a good catastrophe go to
waste. I called and told Mom that you'd been in a fight and that I'd
stay to walk you home. She agreed, which meant that I got to stay
here and talk to my friends for nearly as long as if I'd had practice
today. Thanks for that, by the way."

I
wanted to hit her on the arm as hard as I could, but I settled for
just frowning at her. It only took a second for the frown to slip
though as I realized just how much more violent I'd become lately.