She smiled at me then, and her teeth were fangs that were dripping with blood and I recoiled, but the dream shifted again, and I was back in the closet, crouched in the darkness, my heart pounding.
But I was only there for a moment as the world slanted again, and this time Rochelle was leering at
me
, her hand on my jean-clad butt as she said, “If you want, I can show you. Give you the hundred-dollar tour.”
It was almost as awful as Sasha’s bloody fangs, but my sleeping brain made another sharp turn and I was back in the closet, where suddenly, I heard a noise to my left.
It was muffled. But it sounded like footsteps. On the other side of the wall—or door…?
There was a door to my left! The wood was smoother, and
yes
! I clasped the doorknob. It was old-fashioned and made of glass—smooth and cold beneath my fingers. Using both hands, one on top of the other, I muscled the knob to the left and then to the right. But it didn’t turn.
It was, of course, locked.
The footsteps were getting louder and I started to shake with fear.
Another dream shift. And now I was in the kitchen with Rochelle and Garrett, who cheerfully said, “
Here’s
Cal! Thought we’d lost ya, buddy!”
And here came Cal, wheeling into the room. “Yup! Here I am! With more flowers! ’Cause you definitely don’t have enough of
those
now!” Except instead of flowers on his lap, he held a big cardboard box. He reached in and pulled out first one and then two of the cutest puppies I’d ever seen. They were pitch-black with long, droopy ears. Cal held them both up à la
The Lion King
—speaking of classic animation. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise, since unlike Dana, I often watched Disney to de-stress.
Rochelle leaned in to me and whispered, “I’ll cook them into a delicious, savory stew that you can lick off my body.”
What?
Ew!
Boom
, I was back in the closet, and instantly I could smell it.
It hit me like a right hook to the nose. The stench of sewage—something I’d unfortunately become quite familiar with over the past several months.
You already know that my G-T powers allow me to smell emotions. But I can also smell a complete
lack
of emotion—which is also known as evil.
That sewage smell? You guessed it. Evil. Big-time.
The footsteps grew even louder, and then they slowed. My heart pounded in my chest as I realized that the evil I was smelling came from whoever—whatever—was standing outside that door.
Was I dreaming this through Jilly’s eyes
?
If that was true, then the person on the other side of the door was most likely Rochelle. In real life, I hadn’t gotten close enough to smell her.
But in the other part of this nightmare, I had. Her perfume was disgusting but sewage free.
I stuck my nose into the crook of my elbow and took a deep breath, trying to filter out the awfulness as I continued to shake with someone else’s—Jilly’s?—fear.
Still thoughts. Still thoughts
…
And then? The door swung open, and the light from the outside room blinded me—for just a moment.
“You piece of
shit
!” the voice roared…and it
definitely
wasn’t Rochelle who yanked me out of the closet and tossed me onto the ground like a piece of trash.
It was a man. A big man. And he had a belt.
“You ready to stop acting like a selfish little piece of lying
shit
?”
But my heart was thumping hard in my chest, and maybe I’d misheard the man’s words. I could see his face looming over me as I lay on the ground, helpless.
The first blow was excruciating.
As the belt came down and hit me on the rib cage, I tried to howl, the agony searing through my entire body like a shock of electricity. But the pain was so profound, I couldn’t even find it in me to make a noise.
I didn’t even know if I was breathing.
“
You little shit!
” the man bellowed again, and I tried my hardest to focus on his face. He was around my mother’s age…with a tattoo of a… Was it a cobra on his forearm? Bald. Black V-neck T-shirt. Jean shorts. Scarred and scab-covered knees.
Still thoughts…Still thou—
Thwwwwwaaack!
The belt hit me again, this time on the side of my neck. The air I’d been holding in my lungs swooshed out of me with the force of the blow.
I wanted to inhale again, but the idea of pulling that terrible, noxious, evil air into my system again made my stomach churn.
“This time I’m gonna kill you!”
Just as the man raised the belt again, I heard the sound of my alarm clock—and, like a person pulled from the ocean to be saved from drowning, I charged out of the dream and woke up,
finally
able to scream.
And then? I sat there, in my bed, the incessant alarm sounding through the still-dark room, as I leaned forward, placed my hands over my face, and burst into tears.
————
“Skylar? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
Momzilla.
She’d obviously heard me scream, and now she was running down the hallway toward my room as if I were maybe being attacked by the vast collection of murderers, rapists, arsonists, muggers, and killer clowns who, in my mother’s imagination, lurked around every corner, eagerly waiting for me to set foot outside the safety of our house.
Quickly, I reached over and slapped off my alarm clock. Somehow, my G-T powers had triggered it to ring and wake me up. But Mom would certainly wonder why my alarm was going at… I looked more closely at the clock. It was 3:48 a.m. I wiped away my tears and smoothed my hair down before sitting up straighter in my bed and planting an absurdly fake smile across my face.
It was just in time, too. Because Mom did exactly what I knew she’d do—she swung open my bedroom door without knocking and bounded across the room. “What happened?” Mom exclaimed, looking distraught as she wrapped her bathrobe tightly across her front.
I shook my head, my smile still plastered from ear to ear like a moron. “Nothing, Ma,” I replied in my best nonchalant tone. I sounded shaky though. I couldn’t help it. I was still out of breath from the nightmare.
“But I heard you scream! Were you—”
“Dreaming,” I finished for her. “It was a nightmare. About…Sasha.”
It wasn’t
exactly
a lie, even though Sasha was, by no means, the star of that particular bad dream. That prize went to the man with the belt.
Was he a friend of Rochelle’s? Brought in to torment Jilly or to stand guard, make sure she didn’t use her G-T awesomeness to break free? Or was he the man who’d bought her from Rochelle? Probably not, because Destiny cookers kept rooms—or barns—filled with dozens of little girls. Unless Jilly was in some kind of solitary confinement…?
This dream was extra-cryptic, and I made a mental note to tell Dana and the gang about it.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Mom said, her voice soft and thick with emotion. “It makes sense that you’d have bad dreams about Sasha.”
“Yeah,” I replied, attempting to keep my tone casual. I really didn’t want a heart-to-heart with Mom right now. As nice as she’d been when I came back from saving Sasha—I’d only gotten a week’s worth of grounding for what normally would have been an entire decade of no social life—I still wasn’t ready for full disclosure. As much as I suspected that Mom knew, at least a little, about my Greater-Than status, neither of us had spoken of it. And I intended for it to stay that way for as long as possible.
Mom studied me, as if trying to read my thoughts. Thank everything holy that she wasn’t telepathic.
I was still giving her my best
I’m fine
cheesy grin, and I raised my eyebrows a little to send her a silent
Are we done here, ’cause it’s kinda sorta three in the morning
message.
Of course, Mom wasn’t just not-telepathic. She was also pretty dense. Instead of exiting my room and letting me settle back into a (hopefully) dreamless sleep, she just sat there on the edge of my bed, smiling sadly back at me and not making a move to leave.
“It was a lot that you went through,” she told me. “Seeing Sasha like that. I’m sure you need some time to process it all. I hope you’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do to make the healing easier for you.”
Process. Healing. Sasha.
It occurred to me then, as I was trying to hurry my mom out of the room in the middle of the night, that maybe I could simply ask her to set up a meeting with Sasha, instead of using my homing powers to track down the little girl. I knew Mom was still in touch with Sasha’s mother—I’d overheard them talking on the phone just a few days ago.
And, even without the elusive Morgan on hand to get inside Sasha’s head, there was a chance that talking to the little girl might help us in our search for Lacey. It was a long shot—but better than nothing.
Plus, as annoying as Mom tended to be about everything, she was offering to help.
Now was as perfect a time as ever to ask her for that help.
What’s the worst she could say?
Actually, I could think of a long list of cringe-worthy things that Mom would very likely say.
“We-ell,” I started, “Now that you mention it? I… Well, I think I have an idea about how to help myself…process and heal.”
Mom perked up so quickly and with such perfect posture that she looked like a prairie dog popping its head out of a hole in the ground. Somehow, I managed to keep a straight face. I tucked the sheets more snugly around my legs and studied the covers, as if what I was about to say was very difficult.
In truth, I was way past the point of needing to process and heal
anything
. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t any time in my life for
And how does that make you feel?
therapy. Because, as soon as one crazy, death-defying moment ended, I was on to the next before I could blink an eye. And, anyway, what had happened to Sasha had happened to
Sasha
.
I
wasn’t the one who had been hunted down, kidnapped, and held in a dilapidated barn with dozens of other helpless little girls.
I
was just fine.
But I needed to really milk it for Mom. I stuttered a little as I started. “I-I… Oh, it’s really hard to say. I just feel, more and more, like I don’t have…closure.”
Closure
was one of those extra-magic
talk about your feelings
words. Mom nodded understandingly and waited for me to continue.
“I think that if I could just see Sasha again—just to talk to her and see that she’s really okay—that I might feel better. The last time I saw her, she still looked terrible.” I shuddered. Which didn’t require acting skills on my part. Sasha
had
been a mess when Milo, Dana, Cal, and I had rescued her. All of those little girls—the ones we had managed to save—had been emaciated, eyes hollow and devoid, their heads shaved completely bald. Sasha had still looked like a concentration camp victim a month later, during my first and only visit.
Mom sighed deeply, and I braced myself and waited for the inevitable lame excuse for why I wouldn’t be allowed to visit Sasha.
Instead, to my utter astonishment, Mom slapped the tops of her legs in a gesture of determination and then stood up. “I’ll call Sasha’s mother in the morning. I’m sure we can arrange something.”
Momzilla actually said
yes
?
This was almost too weird.
But then again, maybe it wasn’t. First Cal and Garrett had started getting along—or at least tolerating one another. Then, Milo started doing his freaky
I need space
thing. And now, Mom had said
yes
to something I was certain would get a resounding
no
. What was next? Was Dana going to start writing poetry or expressing her feelings through interpretive dance?
I covered up my surprise with a smile and reached out to catch and squeeze my mom’s hand. “That would be awesome,” I said. “Thanks, Mom. You’re great.”
And I honestly meant it.
Chapter
Twelve
“Get your ass in here, Bubble Gum,” I heard Dana call out the moment I stepped into Cal’s house.
Apparently I was the last to arrive—the entire gang was already here. We’d made plans to meet this morning, to debrief.
Although truth be told, Dana and Calvin had already exchanged a flurry of texts in which we’d reported last night’s failure up in Palm River. In return, Dana had reported that Rochelle’s so-called plans for the evening had apparently been to watch endless amounts of reality TV and kill two bottles of white wine before falling unconscious and snoring on her couch.
“You’re late,” Dana continued as I came into the playroom. She was crouching behind the table that held Calvin’s video and gaming system, beneath his flat-screen TV, messing with some wires and cords. Cal had his chair right behind her. He was looking over her shoulder, micromanaging.
“That one,” he said. “No no nuh no—the red one. The
other
red one.”
Milo was on the sofa, and when our gazes met, he started to stand as if to come over and give me a hug. But then he stopped—as if he’d thought better about touching me—and my heart sank. Apparently, he still hadn’t had enough space.
“Good morning,” I announced to the room as pleasantly as I could muster. “I’m late for a very good reason.”
“’Sup,” Garrett said, coming out of the little bathroom. “I just took a dump that looks
exactly
like a manatee.”
“Looks?” Cal said, on top of the details as usual. “As in present tense, looks? Dude, no one wants to see it, so go back in there and flush,
right now
.”
Garrett turned back around, grumbling, “Well, if I
hadn’t
saved it, then—”
“No one. Wants to see it. Flush!” Calvin repeated, although he was laughing and shaking his head, like the football player was merely zany, like Garrett was the Gilligan on our private desert isle rather than the douche that he’d long ago proven himself to be.