Dana shook her head. “Cal signed up willingly. The point here is that whether you knew it was Calvin or not, that was
not
the right time to stop and have a freaking chat!”
I shook my head, exhausted and angry, but also tremendously relieved. I turned to look at Milo, who was still standing slightly behind me. The important thing was that he was safe.
I didn’t think the moonlight was bright enough for him to see the tears that were brimming in my eyes, but he reached out and took my hand and our connection immediately clicked on.
I’m so sorry.
His thoughts immediately filled my mind.
I love you.
I kind of laugh-sobbed as I nodded and squeezed his hand.
I love you, too.
I had to let go of his hand, or I would’ve started to cry. And I was
not
going to cry in front of Dana. She was my friend, yes, but these days she felt more like my worst frenemy.
She was still stomping around, trying to turn this farce of a so-called test into a teaching-and-learning moment. “You know, Bubble Gum, if you’d waited for me—your teammate—you could have given me the command to move him.” She pitched her voice higher. “
Dana, zap the monster!
And I would’ve…” She nodded, her brows furrowed in concentration, and we all watched her use her powerful telekinesis to blast Calvin’s chair high into the air. He whooped like he was on an amusement-park ride, and she twirled him a few times before she gently set him down on the other side of the clearing. “Done that.”
“Oh, snap!” I heard Cal call from the distance. Then, “Hey, can I come back now?”
Dana’s grin flashed and then faded so fast, I might not have seen it if I wasn’t looking directly at her. But then she nodded again, lifting Calvin back through the air and placing him in the exact spot where he’d been before. Along with Calvin came the return of Dana’s scowl, as she once again tried to stare me down.
But I held her gaze and lifted my chin as I stood my ground. The biggest
fail
here was hers. “Dana, you made me believe that Milo was in
serious
danger! I honestly thought he was going to be killed!”
“That’s exactly what I was going for!” Dana insisted. “A truly emotional response from you—so that you could learn to perform under pressure. Hell, if I’d had someone train
me
this way when I was first honing my skills…? I’d be
thanking
them, not
bitching
about it.”
Bitching.
Bitching?
Once again, Milo took my hand.
She doesn’t understand
, he told me through our telepathic connection. “Let’s talk about this later,” he told Dana, even as he silently told me,
After Lacey was taken and Dana’s father was put in jail…it’s been hard for her to let herself love anyone
.
He’d met Dana in a really shitty foster home when they were both in their early teens, after her dad had been convicted of brutally murdering her little sister, Lacey. But Dana had recently come to believe that Lacey was still out there, somewhere, held prisoner by horrible people but potentially still alive. And this knowledge was making her extra crazy. We were all trying to be considerate of her feelings, but tonight she’d pushed me too far. And to call
me
bitchy, to boot?
I was thinking in emotional whirlwinds rather than clear sentences, but Milo caught the gist of it anyway.
Still thoughts.
He sent what had become our calming mantra back to me, even as he told Dana, “It’s late. Sky needs to get some rest. We all do.”
Dana looked from Milo to me to our tightly clasped hands, and she scowled. It bugged her that we could communicate this way—she said it was rude, like whispering in someone’s ear at the dinner table—so we tried not to do it so blatantly in front of her.
But right now, I didn’t give a crap. I held tightly to Milo as I glared back at her.
“Whatever,” Dana said impatiently. Then, as she turned away, she said more quietly, “What a disappointment.”
I felt a pang at that, and I realized that at least part of me felt bad about letting her down. I wanted to be a warrior—in many ways, I longed to be more like her. But at the same time, I was still so angry at what she’d done. The two feelings battled their way through my chest in the form of a solid lump that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried.
“Well,” Cal said as Dana stomped off down the trail on the other side of the kiosk, opposite from the way we’d run in. I knew from a brief telepathic blast from Milo that Calvin’s car was strategically hidden about a quarter mile away, near another hole in the fence. I also realized that Cal’s robot suit really was unwieldy. He wasn’t rolling along the root-covered path—Dana was using her TK to float him along behind her. He turned to look back at me. “I know it was a little too real for you, Sky, but I gotta confess,
I
had fun.”
Fun?
I heard myself make another one of those vaguely sob-like sounds. I was still so upset, I just wanted to get away from
everyone
. I wanted to go home so I could be completely alone to curl up in my bed and cry…
And yeah, I’d sent that thought straight to Milo. I felt him realize that I’d lumped him in with the generic “everyone” I wanted to get away from, and then I caught a very solid wave of his own distress.
Skylar, if I’d known she wasn’t going to tell you this was just a training exercise, I never would have agreed
—
I know
, I thought over him.
I really do know that. I was just so scared—I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.
Holy crap, had I actually thought that aloud? Well, no, of course not aloud, but I’d certainly expressed my feelings in an orderly, easy-to-understand sentence with a verb and a noun, instead of the messy and wonderful wave of emotion that Milo and I swirled around in when we shared our precious and too-infrequent private time.
I pulled my hand away from him to cut our connection. I didn’t want to be
that
girlfriend, needy and terrified, desperately clingy and relentlessly weepy.
But Milo’s eyes were intense as he grabbed my other hand and stopped to pull me gently in front of him. We stood facing each other for a moment as he held my gaze.
You will never. Ever. Lose me. I promise.
You can’t promise that
, I told him, fighting to keep my tears from escaping. But I couldn’t do it. I could feel them start to roll down my cheeks. If Dana were there, she’d have been yelling “Fail! Fail!”
Yeah
, Milo told me.
I can.
I shook my head. He couldn’t promise that the same way
I
couldn’t promise that someday
I
wouldn’t be grabbed and made to disappear the way that Dana’s sister, Lacey, had. I was a Greater-Than, as were both Dana and Lacey, and there were lots of very bad people out there. People who would harm and enslave us, and use our blood to make a dangerous and addictive drug called Destiny—if they discovered our powers.
I would find you
, Milo told me as we stood there in the silence of the night.
You know that, right? If they take you, I will find you.
His face hardened, and I couldn’t help but shiver. My boyfriend was sweet and gentle—with me. But he’d survived a terrible childhood that I still didn’t know all that much about. Somehow, despite our telepathy, he managed to keep those thoughts and memories walled off from me.
He added,
But no one’s taking you anywhere. As long as I draw breath, I won’t let that happen. That I can promise you, Sky
.
And
that
I believed. Milo would fight to the death to protect me. And to protect Dana, too.
She’d vanished down the trail with Cal, but now she backtracked and tossed a key ring with a jangle and a thump into the dirt at our feet.
It startled me, and I jumped apart from Milo, quickly wiping any traces of tears from my face.
But Dana had already turned and started walking away. “Take her home on my bike,” she commanded gruffly, and then vanished again into the shadows. She didn’t bother to ask if I remembered where we’d left her motorcycle. She knew that I did. She also knew that I hated riding it, even with my arms wrapped around Milo’s waist. The only thing that had gotten me on it earlier was my need to find him as quickly as possible.
“Shit,” I muttered.
As we both looked down at Dana’s keys gleaming in the moonlight, a breeze swept Milo’s long hair into his angular face—a beautiful face so familiar and dear to me, even though we hadn’t really known each other all that long. He pushed his hair back and pulled me into another embrace as he smiled at me—just enough to make his dimples appear.
I’ll walk you home
, he told me.
And come back later for the bike.
It would take us an hour to get to my house on foot, another hour for him to get back here…
It’s okay
.
And despite all of the craziness of the past few hours, and all of the craziness that had occurred in my life before tonight—and there had been a
crap
load of crazy in my seventeen years so far on planet Earth—despite all of that, I knew that as long as Milo was with me, it
was
okay. It was and it would be.
So I took a deep breath, pulled Milo with me into the shadows of that fugly snack kiosk, and kissed him with all the passion of a girl who’d just thought the love of her life had come back from the dead.
Little did I know that this latest deadly round of craziness was only just beginning.
Chapter
Two
“We need to load up on ammo before we start this party,” Cal said as he steered his car into the gas-station parking lot.
“Good call,” I agreed, glancing into the backseat at the collection of multicolored water pistols stacked in an ungraceful pile. Only a few of the guns were filled, but I could hear the water sloshing around inside the plastic as Calvin went over a speed bump and then turned his car into a parking spot near the pay machine for the water hose. “I mean, even if our weapons
are
more Fisher-Price than Smith & Wesson.”
“Girl, it’s far less to do with the weapon and more with the person wielding it.” Cal nodded to me, since I was the person who’d be doing any wielding. “Plus you’ve always got the advantage, ’cause no one knows who they’re dealing with until it’s too late.” He gave me his best super-villain cackle as he tried to smile ominously, but it just turned into one of his world-famous toothy grins.
I responded with a snort. “Yeah. Right. I’m
soooo
deadly.”
I’d learned a few months ago, the hard way, that the objects I could move with my mind had to have a high water content, or no go. I could move people, true, but only if I imagined them as walking sacks of H2O, which wasn’t always easy to do.
Which was why, even though Cal and I were both still tired from last night’s training-exercise-slash-disaster, and even though our private school was out for three whole weeks of winter vacation, we’d both gotten up at our usual way-too-early time to train.
Every morning before dawn, even on school days, Cal helped by standing guard while I worked out my Greater-Than skills, which included running superfast and practicing control over my limited telekinesis.
And because that training involved what Calvin referred to as
cah-razy shee-it
like running three-minute miles while keeping the waves at the beach from reaching the shore, I had to be careful to train privately, in a secluded place where no one could see me and start shrieking,
Look at the freak!
Dana had been right about at least one thing last night. There were plenty of nasty-ass bad people living in this broken-down, messed-up world who would come after me if they found out I was a G-T with super abilities.
And she was also right about the fact that they would hurt or even kill my family and friends to get to me and my Greater-Than super-blood. And that scared me most of all.
I had to be ready for anything and hone my powers to the best of my still sadly limited abilities.
So, Cal and I had done our training thing this morning as usual, then gone home and showered. We now were on the verge of heading out of our wealthy, gated community of Coconut Key, in southwest Florida, and into the destitution of neighboring Harrisburg.
We were scheduled to meet Dana and Milo near the old Lenox Hotel at eleven o’clock, which meant we had to be relatively swift with our “ammo resupply.”
That was why I looked over as Calvin hit the button to unlock his car door.
“Hey. I wouldn’t complain if I were you,” he told me. “Your abilities are greater than any normie around…and way more impressive than anything
I
could ever do.” He glanced pointedly down at his wheelchair-bound legs. “Anyway, Dana’s gonna be there, so refilling the guns is really just a precaution.”
But as last night had reminded me all too well, Dana wasn’t infallible. “Don’t you mean
your High Goddess Dana the Magnificent
? She of pure sexy sexiness, for whom you, her lowly minion, would gladly lay down your life?” I teased him, adding, “I got this.” Meaning, no need for him to take the time to get out of the car.
But Cal pressed another button, and the wheelchair ramp slid out from the driver’s side, gently nudging his chair out of the car and onto the ground. “
Lowly minion
sounds about right,” he said with a grimace that made me realize I’d struck a nerve. “Fill ’er up. I’m getting the
other
ammo.” He nodded toward the store’s adjoining CoffeeBoy.
I didn’t know what to say. “You’re not anyone’s minion,” I blurted as he started to wheel away. Although we didn’t talk about it all that often, I knew he had a huge crush on Dana, but he was convinced she’d never go for a guy in a wheelchair. “I was just kidding. You know that, right?”