Tattoo #1: Tattoo (3 page)

The word echoed in my head for a moment. Sacred. "Maybe," Annabelle said, lifting the thought out of my head before I'd even put it into words. "Maybe there is something sacrosanct about the tattoos" I wasn't surprised that my thoughts sounded smarter when Annabelle said them. When she'd moved back to the U.S. in the seventh grade, she'd used such big words that the rest of us hadn't been able to understand her. We figured it out eventually. That was when Annabelle had stopped talking to anyone but us. Delia flipped her hair behind her shoulder. "As great as this superpower talk really is, I think we have some other issues to deal with, like the fact that this Mango Mermaid polish really needs three coats to achieve the tone I'm looking for" Some people panic in a crisis. Delia painted her nails. "Or maybe I could frost them," Delia said. "If I paint over them with a thin coat of Misty Madness." She brushed one hand over the fingertips on the other, lost in her musings on the perfect nail.

No one but me saw the flash of blue-green light from... To fight, to live We two of three bestow this gift... I shook my head to clear it of the now-familiar words. Delia gawked at her hand. After a moment, she spoke. "Wow. Just wow" "What?" Zo, Annabelle, and I asked at once. Delia held up her right hand. "Notice anything different?" she asked. The hand looked normal to me. "Your `wow, just wow' has something to do with your nails?" Zo flopped back down on the bed. Delia held her other hand up next to it. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the nails on her right hand were a different color from the nails on her left. "Slightly frosted," Delia said in a shaky voice. "Like I just painted over them with Misty Madness" "Can you do it again?" Annabelle asked, her pen flying rapidly over the paper as she spoke. "Can you change the color of the other nails?" Delia ran her right hand over her left. "Misty Madness," she said out loud. Again, I saw the faintest hint of blue-green light roll in a wave off the tattoo on her stomach, and Delia beamed as she held up her newly frosted left hand. "This," she said, "is so cool" "So," I said slowly, "I have the power to start fires, Annabelle's psychic, and Delia can change her nail polish color just by running her hand over it?" Something about that last power didn't seem quite right. "Maybe it's not just the nail polish color," Delia said. "Maybe it's any color" With a grin, she held her hands up to her head and ran them both down her hair. "Blond," she said, and as her hands passed over her thick locks, the hair turned blond, from the roots down. Delia turned to look in the mirror. "This is so not me," she said, and the next instant, she was chang- ing herself back. Without a word, Annabelle walked over to my computer and turned it on. "What are you doing?" I asked her. "I'm going to try to find out what sort of telekinetic power would allow Delia to change something from one color to another," she said simply, as though this was the kind of thing she did every day. "Telekinetic?" I asked. Just because Annabelle could see into my head didn't mean I could see into hers, and I was having trouble following her, which freaked me out, since I considered myself com- pletely fluent (or close to it) in Annabelle--gestures, big words, and all. "A mental power," Annabelle explained as her fingers flew over the keys. "I can use my mind to read the minds of other people. Bailey, you can use your mind to start fires, and Delia can use hers to change colors and " Annabelle glanced at Zo with an apologetic smile. "I'm sure your mind does something," she told Zo. I bit back a smile. Zo picked up the pillow Delia had tossed at her and with artistlike precision, sent it flying into the side of Annabelle's head. Annabelle rolled her eyes. "I didn't mean it that way," she said. "You don't have to be so sensitive" Zo? Sensitive? "Yeah, right," Zo said, and then she wrinkled her forehead and continued speaking. "I'm sorry, cousin," she said in a muted voice. "That was inappropriate and uncalled for" Zo looked down at her shoes, and Delia, Annabelle, and I all stopped what we were doing and stared at her. "Inappropriate?" I asked. Since when had anything been inappropriate in the world of Zo? "Cousin?" Delia squeaked. "Since when do you call Annabelle cousin?" "I so did not just say that," Zo said. "Why in the world would I say that?" "You even had a little Annabelle tone to your voice," Delia said. "Totally weird" As soon as the words left Delia's mouth, silence fell over the room. Zo had spoken with Annabelle's quiet, understated tones. "You!" Zo said, pointing a finger at her cousin. "You put those words in my mouth, didn't you? How did you do that?" Zo glared at Annabelle. "I knew I'd never call you cousin on my own" "I didn't mean to," Annabelle said meekly. "Honestly, Zo, I didn't. I didn't even know I could" "It's okay," Zo said, softening her tone at the look on her cousin's face. "You didn't mean to, and I did overreact a tad bit" I stared first at Annabelle and then at Zo. "Tad bit?" "Damn it, A-belle," Zo yelled, somewhere between reluctantly amused and thoroughly exasperated. "Stay out of my head" Annabelle sat there for a few seconds, saying nothing. "I'm not sure I can," she said finally. "But I'll try" I looked at Annabelle, and a silent communication passed between us. I hadn't meant to set Alexan- dra's shoe on fire. Annabelle hadn't meant to put her words in Zo's mouth, just like she didn't mean to eavesdrop on every conversation I had with myself inside my head. To fight, to live

We two of three bestow this gift... ��� "Two of what three?" I muttered out loud, trying to forget the words I couldn't help but remember. No answer. Meanwhile, Delia was having a great time with her newfound power. "Do I want to wear mocha or pearl?" she mused under her breath. With a swipe of her hand, her fashionable white shirt darkened to a creamy light brown. Delia brought her hand back down, and the shirt turned white again, with just a bit of shine. Back and forth her hand went as she debated. "Mocha or pearl? Mocha or pearl?" " `Transmogrification,' " Annabelle said out loud, reading the word off my computer screen. " `The ability to transform one type of matter into another type of matter.' " She paused. "If I'm reading this right," she said, wrinkling her forehead, "if Delia has transmogrification, then she should be able to change surface characteristics, like color, but she should also be able to change the form itself" "Turn one thing into another?" Zo asked. She stared morosely down at her foot. "Stupid foot tat- too," she muttered. "Delia can change stuff, and I've got a whole lot of nothing" "Hold on for just one second," Delia instructed. "Are you telling me that I could just wave my hands over, I don't know, a piece of paper and turn it into a Coach purse?" "There's a chance that your power is limited simply to color," Annabelle said, still totally in aca- demic, chart-making mode, "but I haven't come across any such--" Delia cut her off. "This is officially the best day of my life," she said. Without another word, she charged over to my trash can and picked up a gum wrapper. "Baby blue cashmere socks," she said, running her other hand over it. Blue-green light surged out of her palm, wrapping itself around the wrapper, vibrating with words that only I could hear. To know, to feed- To change, l'S�dhe The next thing I knew, Delia was holding a pair of baby blue cashmere socks. "I love my life," she said. "Anyone else want anything? I think I'm going to make myself a dress like the one Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars last year" "Maybe you shouldn't," Annabelle said, biting her lower lip. "What if there's a side effect we don't know about?" "You have got to be completely insane," Delia said. "I've got the magic touch, and there's no way I'm not going to use it. The way I see it, the fashion gods are smiling down on me" Delia turned back to the trash can, and an instant later, she collapsed on the ground. "Delia!" "Just a little dizzy," Delia said, rolling over onto her back. "That's all" "You feel like you've run a marathon," Annabelle said, tilting her head to the side as she lifted the thoughts out of Delia's mind. "Using the power takes a lot out of you. Much more than mine does for me or Bailey's for her" Delia curled up into a ball with her new cashmere socks (formerly a gum wrapper) still in her hand. "Totally worth it" "That's what you say now," Zo said, "but when Bailey's mom comes in here and starts fussing be- cause you look sickly, maybe those socks won't look so good" "You're just bitter because your foot tattoo didn't pay off the way my girly stomach tattoo did," Delia said. Delia was never too tired to argue with Zo. "You can't stand the fact that I--" Delia's words were cut off by a knock at the door. "Come in," I said. Delia pulled her shirt down over her stomach to conceal the tattoo the second be- fore my mother walked in. "I just came to see if you girls wanted a snack before I go to bed," my mom said. She paused and looked down at Delia. "Are you feeling all right, sweetheart? You look a little pale" Immediately, my eyes flew to Zo, and sure enough, the tattoo on her foot flashed like a strobe light in front of my eyes, leaving my ears ringing with words I'd heard before. To see, to feel To stand upon the ancient Seal "That's it," I said the second my mom left. "To see" "What's it?" Zo asked. "See what?" "Your power," I said. "Remember the thing with the lime green miniskirt? I mean, what are the chances that Alex would be wearing a corduroy lime green miniskirt and wanting to try on a pair of hot pants right after you said somebody would?" Delia looked like she was about to start calculating the fashion probability of that happening, so I plowed on before she could interrupt. "And then this thing with my mom. You knew she was com- ing" " `Premonition,' " Annabelle read off the website. " `A precognitive power in which the seer knows or sees the future before it occurs.' " "That's it?" Zo asked. "Annabelle does her funky mind control thing, Delia can turn trash into jew- els, Bailey sets stuff on fire, and I sometimes know some little insignificant event is going to hap- pen before it does?" For a moment, we were all silent. Why? I thought. Why could we do these things? Who was coming? What had begun? Even without touching the tattoo or remembering what I'd heard, I couldn't banish the questions. "This sucks," Zo said. "Why couldn't I have been the one with the fire?" "Impulse control?" Annabelle suggested. She shuddered, and I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not. "It's probably a good thing that Bailey's the one with pyrokinesis" "Pyrokinesis," I repeated, remembering the feel of flames surging through my blood. "Sure," Zo said, "rub it in. And you probably won't even set the trash can on fire" "Don't set the trash on fire," Delia said immediately. "Do you know how many pairs of shoes I could make out of the contents of that trash can?" "Trust me," I told Zo. "You're the lucky one. I mean, I actually set someone on fire, Annabelle could probably make someone walk in front of a moving car if she wanted to, or make them say something awful to someone, or who knows what else, without even meaning to, Delia's probably going to transmogrify herself right into a coma, and we don't even know what's going on" Annabelle's eyes widened. Apparently, she hadn't even thought that perhaps her mind control pow- ers weren't limited to speech. Delia yawned. "It's a definite possibility," she admitted sleepily in reference to my coma comment. "But I'll be the best-dressed comatose person you've ever seen" Annabelle flipped through the notes she'd made, cross-referencing a couple of the pages. "You're right, Bay," she said finally. "We don't know why or what we're supposed to do or how we can keep from hurting people. All we know is that this all somehow goes back to the tattoos and to the two voices you keep hearing" "So what do we do?" I voiced the question that everyone in the room was thinking. "First off, you should write down everything you hear, Bailey," Annabelle said. Now that we were in her domain, she was more than happy to take charge. More charts. I could practically see Zo thinking the same thing, and with her new psychic powers, Annabelle had to have heard us both, but she plowed on. "Tomorrow, we go directly to the source" The rest of us looked at one another. What source? "The woman who sold us the tattoos," Annabelle said, jotting one final note down in the margins of her paper. "If anyone knows anything about the tattoos, it would have to be her" Delia sat up. "You know what that means, don't you?" she asked, a gargantuan grin spreading across her face. "What?" I asked. "Tomorrow morning, we're going back to the mall" Onbekend That night marked a first among our Friday-night sleepovers. I was normally the first or second one out, but that night, while everyone else slept, I stared up at the ceiling from my sleeping bag on the floor. What if whoever was "coming" came while we were sleeping? What if I had a nightmare and burned the house down? For that matter, what if Delia turned the whole house and all of us into some kind of massive Jimmy Choo? For all I knew, Annabelle, who was asleep on the floor next to me, might well be in the process of unintentionally turning the whole neighborhood into zombies who said things with muted voices while staring at their shoes. "Isn't it fabulous?" Delia murmured into her pillow. She was an infamous sleeptalker. "Tr�s chic" My eyelids drooped, and I rolled over onto my side, telling myself sternly to keep my eyes open. Until I got a handle on this fire thing, I was determined not to fall asleep. So, of course, thirty seconds later, I fell asleep. I heard the waterfall before I saw anything. The air hummed with it, the sound of water falling on stone saturating the silence of the room. I opened my eyes and realized that I didn't remember clos- ing them. I stared up at the ceiling. Not my ceiling. There was water flowing there, from one side of the ceiling to the other, and then down the walls and onto the floor. My hands went to grab my sleeping bag to pull it over my eyes, but instead, they hit cold stone. I sat up and realized that I wasn't in a sleeping bag at all and that, given the freaky overhead waterfall thingy, that shouldn't have come as a surprise. I ran my hand over the stone beneath me. Its surface was smooth, but every so often, my hand would run across some kind of indentation. It took me a moment to realize that something had been carved into this stone. I stood up and backed away, anxious to get a look at the whole thing. It was round and raised slightly above the rest of the floor. As I backed off the stone carving, I felt grass underneath my feet; wet grass on a pleasantly warm summer day. "It's always summer here, when we wish it to be summer. " That voice. I knew that voice. Feminine and soft, but so powerful. So old. The owner of the voice laughed. "No lady likes to be told that she's old, child," she chided. I squeezed my eyes shut. This was not happening. "Not even an immortal lady," a second voice added. This one was low and deep, and no less horri- ble or less wonderful than the first. "Immortal?" I squeaked, and then I cursed myself. My eyes were closed, I was trying to convince myself that this wasn't happening, and yet I talk to them? Brilliant. "Look at us, child" I didn't want to, but the voice was so beautiful, so awful, that I couldn't help myself. Slowly, I turned around, and after a deep breath, I opened my eyes. The woman's hair was such a dark shade of red that I was only half sure it wasn't black. It fell in thick waves, past her shoulders and down to her waist, and it shined so much that had the room been pitch black, she could have lit the entire thing with the light of her hair. The same kind of light came from her eyes, which were so blue I could barely stand to look at them. The man beside her had hair darker than hers, black with a blue shine to it, and he had the same dis- armingly blue eyes. "Immortal?" I asked again, and a million other better questions ran through my head. Where was I? Why was I here? Who were they? Why did they keep talking to me? What did they want from me? "Rest easy, child," the woman said, plucking my fears and questions from my head with ease. "We are not here to harm you. You are safe in this place. For thousands of your years, this place has re- mained pure and untarnished by violence. For now, it is safe" She gestured to the round, carved stone on the floor. "The Seal," she said softly. "It protects this place from those who would do it, and your world, harm" This chick was saying "harm" just enough to make me nervous. She stepped forward and took my hand in hers. Her skin was soft and slightly cool, like the stone seal itself. "I am Adea," she said. "He is Valgius. We must speak quickly. We cannot bring our world into your dreams for long. "To answer your questions: We are not immortal. Someday, hundreds of thousands of your years from now, we will grow old. We could die before then should great harm come to us or the balance, and through the balance, the Seal, but we have lived for tens of thousands of your years. To you, our life span may seem immortal, but that is simply your word for a very long time. "You're here because we've brought you and because you brought yourself. You are here because of the blood" "S�dhe blood," I blurted out, remembering their voices in my head when I'd first seen the tattoos. "We are S�dhe," the man said simply. "And we need your help" And just like that, the dream was gone, and I was staring up at my ceiling, my forehead drenched in sweat and the tattoo on my back throbbing as if someone had stuck a knife into it. "Breathe, Bailey," I told myself. "Just breathe" Easier said than done. The echo of the man's voice in my head was so loud, so overpowering, that nothing, not even the need for oxygen, could overcome it. We are S�dhe, and we need your help. "Shee," I said out loud, trying to match the way the slightly accented voice in my head pronounced the foreign word. "Sheeeeee" "Bailey?" Annabelle sat up in her sleeping bag and looked at me, her brown hair mussed and her eyes sleepy. She paused, waiting patiently for me to fill her in. "Don't you know?" I asked. "I mean, can't you do your " I made wiggly finger motions next to my forehead. "Can't you do your psychic thing and just lift it from my head?" Annabelle wrinkled her forehead slightly and stared at me with solemn brown eyes. "I can't see any- thing. Something about a dream, but that's all I'm getting" She paused. "You know, I don't think I ever knew exactly what you remembered the voices saying. I only ever got your thoughts on what they had said" Pulling her legs to her chest, she laid her chin on her knees. "It's like I'm one step re- moved," she said. "I can't access anything directly about the voices, only that they scared you and that you're confused" She reached and touched my hand lightly. Finally remembering to breathe, I exhaled and blew my hair out of my face. "Scared and confused is a total understatement," I said. "I had this dream, and " As Annabelle leaned forward to listen, she cast a quick but longing glance in the direction of the notes she'd made earlier that night. "You want me to write it down, don't you?" I asked. Biting her bottom lip and shooting me an apologetic look, she nodded sheepishly. A bit light-headed and with my back still throbbing, I stood up and tiptoed around a sleeping Zo to get to my desk. After turning on my desk lamp, I grabbed a sheet of paper out of my printer and a pen out of the drawer and began writing down everything I remembered. Adea, I wrote down. The woman's name stuck in my mind, and as I wrote it, I could hear her voice, gentle but commanding, serene but desperate. What was it about their voices? They were so... So not human. I scribbled down a really lame description of the woman's voice and her glowing black-red hair, and then I moved on to the man. What had Adea said his name was? I closed my eyes, trying to remember. With a surge of pain from my lower back, the name came to me. Valgius. I wrote it down and stared at it. Had I even spelled that right? Was it a j instead of a g? What kind of name was Valgius anyway? I tapped my pen lightly on the desk. What else? The Seal. When I'd opened my eyes
in the dream, I'd been sleeping on some sort of circular etched stone. Adea had called it the Seal, capital S, and she'd said something else about it. This time even my aching back didn't provide me with the answers. The dream was becoming foggier and foggier, and though I could picture the waterfall overhead and Adea's painfully blue eyes perfectly, I was losing the rest of it quickly. Adea had said I was safe there, something to do with the Seal. I scrawled this down onto the paper, feeling stupid for not remembering more. Finally, I added two last items to my makeshift journal entry. "Blood of the S�dhe," I wrote, and seeing the word "S�dhe" written down surprised me. That was how you spelled it? And how did I know that? Had the knowledge just been shoved into my head with Adea's words? Or had I always known? Always. I shook my head and wrote one more thing. "They need our help," I said aloud as I wrote. "Help doing what?" I glanced back over my shoulder at Annabelle. She said nothing, and for a moment, I wished that I'd been given her power. Sometimes it was so hard to tell what Annabelle was thinking, and now she had a VIP pass into all our thoughts. "I'm thinking that we can do this" A-belle obligingly filled me in. "Whatever it is they need help with, whoever it is that is coming. You, me, Delia, Zo ...we can do this" She looked away for a mo- ment and then took the paper gently from my hands. Even though the only light was the moon shin- ing through my window, Annabelle promptly began color-coding. I wasn't even sure how she'd found her highlighters in the dark. "But what about the purple?" Delia said loudly on the bed, her eyes still closed. Annabelle and I stifled a giggle. Delia was so going to hear about this in the morning. "Goodnight, Bailey," Annabelle said, putting the paper away and squeezing my arm once before she lay back down in her sleeping bag. "Night, A-belle" For a long time after that, I lay there, curled up in my sleeping bag, listening to the sound of the blood pumping through my veins and the wind outside my window. Know you, the wind howled. Know you. I was so close to the edge of a dream that I could barely make out the words, and before I could wonder whether I was already dreaming or not, I fell into a deep sleep, the sound of the wind and my pounding heart fading into the background. My last conscious thought was to wonder why Adea and Valgius had said nothing about the mysterious "she," whoever she was, and why I had not thought until now to ask. "Your hair looks like moonlight" On some level, I knew I'd been here before, but his voice was so low and sweet that I pushed the thought out of my mind and laid my head on his chest. "Moonlight," Kane said again, and with gentle fingers, he brushed my hair out of my face. This time, I brought my hand up to touch his, and for the longest time, we just touched fingertips. Slow- ly, his hand worked its way down my arm, and then we were dancing. We moved as one, our bodies close together, swaying to music that I almost recognized. "I've wanted this for so long," I told him softly. I almost couldn't remember ever wanting anything else. This time, he moved his hand to my face and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. "I know," he said. "Know you" He moved his lips toward mine, and when he spoke again, I could feel his breath on my face. "I've always known you" And then, he was gone. Onbekend "I'm telling you, Bay. We've got four permits. Five if you count the fact that I have two because my first picture was so hideous that I told them I lost it and got another one. Five permits ...that's like two and a half licenses. At least" I stared back at Delia. She couldn't honestly believe that I'd let her drive my mom's car, could she? "I doubt it," Annabelle said, answering my unasked question. "You doubt what?" Zo asked suspiciously. "I wish you two would stop it with the silent talking" Zo was still a little bit grumpy that I could set things on fire and she just got vague feelings about lime green miniskirts. "Delia, you're not taking my mom's car anywhere. We're not taking my mom's car anywhere. We ei- ther walk or we catch a bus, but we're not driving to the mall" Delia snapped her fingers. "Silly me," she said. "Did I forget to tell you that I got my license? It's in here somewhere..." She fiddled around in her purse. After a few seconds, she bit her bottom lip, and green light filled the purse. "Here we go," she said, handing me her permit, or at least handing me the item that had been her permit five seconds ago, before she'd done her little change-y mojo on it and turned it into a license. "And you turned sixteen when?" Annabelle asked, a bemused expression on her otherwise serious face. "A couple days ago" Delia laughed lightly. "You know me, I don't like to make much of a fuss about little things like birthdays" "Four months and three days," Zo reminded her. Delia kept a running count of the days until her sixteenth birthday and had since she was eight. "Two days," Delia corrected automatically. She sighed heavily. "It was worth a shot" I wrinkled my forehead. There was no world in which any of us would have bought the fake license. The scary thing was, arguments like that worked for Delia all the time, no matter how ridiculous they were. Just not with us. Such was the glory of being Delia Cameron. Delia's eyes sparkled with mischief. "Want me to turn your permit into a license?" she asked. It was a very tempting offer. "Later," I said. "For now, we have to find a way to the mall" Delia stuck out her lower lip in an exaggerated pout. "Let's just walk," Zo said. "What's the good of living within walking distance of the mall if you don't actually walk to it every once in a while?" "The feeling you get just from knowing the mall is close by," Annabelle said as the four of us grabbed our purses and made our way out the front door. Zo and I stared at Annabelle. "Delia's an- swer, not mine," Annabelle clarified. "I had a dream last night," I blurted out as we made our way across the street. Something about be- ing around the three of them made me want to spill my guts and then some. "A Kane dream?" Delia asked knowingly. "Was he hot? What were you wearing?" "No, not a Kane dream," I said. I could feel the goofy grin spreading over my face just from saying Kane's name. "Well, I actually did have one of those, too, but that wasn't the dream I was talking about" I glanced over at Annabelle. "I dreamed about the voices I've been hearing" Even though I knew they believed me about everything, I still felt like I sounded absolutely nutso. "I mean, I dreamed about the owners of the voices" I paused. "I think they're real" Silence. Absolute silence. We walked for a while before I spoke again. "They said they needed our help. They didn't say why, but I think we have these powers because of them" It was all really fuzzy in my mind, and it was getting so much fuzzier as I said it out loud that the inside of my mouth practically felt as if it was growing fur. "Do they have names?" Annabelle asked, always the one to ask the right questions at the right times. "Adea," I said. "And Valgius" "Why are you whispering?" Zo asked me dryly. "Is it top secret?" I so wasn't in the mood for sarcasm. "Don't make me set you on fire," I said. Zo cracked a grin and snorted. "You wouldn't even set the trash can on fire," she said, slinging an arm around my shoulder. "That's why I love you" We'd been friends for so long that sometimes I forgot Zo had a sweet side to her. It only took her about five seconds after she'd slung her arm over my shoulder to slip me into a headlock. "Admit it," she ordered, laughing. "You love me, too" Delia rolled her eyes. I elbowed Zo in the stomach. In retaliation, she ruffled my hair. "Watch out, Zo," Delia said, laughing despite herself, "Bailey bites" Annabelle and Zo lost it, and I made the mistake of giggling with hair in my face and ended up with a mouthful of hair. "Huh," a voice I so didn't want to hear right now said. "Bailey bites?" Zo let loose of me, and I straightened up and stared in horror at the owner of the voice. Your hair looks like moonlight. Kane sat behind the wheel of his black SUV, looking down at us with his perfectly gorgeous eyes. Why was it that whenever Kane saw me in real life, I was always stuck in some kind of awkward position? In the past twenty-four hours, he'd seen me sprawled across the ground and in a headlock, choking on my own hair. And now he thought I bit people. It was official. The love gods hated me. And wanted me to suffer. And... "Don't worry, Kane," Delia said with a wicked grin. "Bailey doesn't bite hard" My mouth dropped open. "Delia," I hissed. Kane laughed out loud. "I don't bite too hard, either," he said. He paused for a microsecond, staring at me, and my cheeks burned. No burning! I thought frantically. The last thing I wanted to do was set Kane on fire. Somehow, I was pretty sure that would take playing hard to get a little too far. I breathed in, forcing my blush down. "You ladies need a ride somewhere?" Kane asked. "Hallelujah, he has a car," Delia said. "We'd love a ride" Annabelle interpreted Delia's response. Thirty seconds later, I was sitting in the front seat, with Delia, Annabelle, and Zo squeezed into the back behind us. "Where you guys going?" Kane asked. "The mall," I replied. "Always a good choice," he said, and I couldn't decide whether he was making fun of us or being serious. I opened my mouth and then closed it again. What was I supposed to say? He was Mr. Important, and I was Bailey, Queen of Nothing. "Are you going to the dance on Monday?" Delia asked from the backseat. She never had any trou- ble talking to guys. "Probably," Kane said. "Bailey's probably going, too," Delia replied. She was clearly a girl on a mission. I turned around in my seat and glared at her. First she makes me sound like I'm into biting people, and then she practically throws me at him? I was going to kill her. I was so going to kill her, and all that would remain would be a pile of designer clothes covered in Delia ashes. I stared out the window, determined not to look Kane in the face. Obviously, he hadn't thought too