Blackfin Sky (16 page)

12

Sundays were always busy in Lily’s diner, and today it was exactly what Sky needed – even if she did have to put up with every customer staring at her, open-mouthed, when they realised it was her.

She had expected to wake in the morning full of aches from her ordeal the previous day, but she felt absolutely fine. Sky had no clue what had happened down in the grave with dirt raining down on her that could take away the hurts she’d sustained. She remembered curling in a ball, feeling her injured wrist throbbing, and going light-headed with the pain. Or had it been something else which had made her light-headed? She was almost certain that there had been a flash of lightning, like something breaking open in front of her, and then she’d felt herself fade…

Sky wiped down the coffee maker for the seventeenth time and sighed. She really needed a break from thinking about everything. Just for one day, she would have normality.

The bell rang to announce that another order was ready, and Sky went over to collect it.

‘Table six,’ Deano lisped through the gap where his front teeth should have been, then winked at her through the hatch from the kitchen. His eyes were a mismatch – one brown, one pale blue – and today he wore the blue on the right.

‘Thanks, Deano.’

Sky carried the food over to the table in the corner of the diner. Jared sat alone in the booth, and smiled when he saw her.

‘Oh, hi. I thought I saw you working back there. How are things?’

Sky set down the plate in front of Jared before answering. ‘Is this you
not
asking about the whole being-buried-alive thing that happened yesterday?’

He smiled and held up his hands. ‘You got me. Want to sit for a minute?’

Sky glanced back towards the kitchen. The lunchtime rush was pretty much over, and they wouldn’t miss her for a couple of minutes.

‘I’ll let you steal some of my chips?’

Sky slid into the booth opposite Jared and grabbed a chip from his plate. ‘I s’pose I can join you for a little while.’

Jared picked up his burger, looking at it from different angles like he wasn’t quite sure how to attack it.

‘Deano makes a mean burger,’ Sky said, watching as he took an enormous bite. She grabbed another chip and waited while he chewed.

A glimmer of orange caught Sky’s eye, and she turned in time to see Miss Schwarz walk into the diner. Sky watched as she scanned the faces in the booths, obviously looking for someone. Their eyes met for a moment, and Sky waved. Miss Schwarz just stared back at her, like she’d seen a ghost.

‘’Sgood.’ Jared swallowed his mouthful and took a drink. ‘Who was that?’

Sky looked from Jared to the spot where Miss Schwarz was standing, but she was gone. ‘Oh, just my science teacher. She’s been a bit weird since I came back.’

‘I bet you’re getting a lot of that.’ Jared nodded as he chewed another bite of his burger. ‘So, you went to see the old gypsy woman.’

Sky nodded, putting the pieces together. ‘Was that you out in the woods with the torch? Your VW?’

Jared tipped his head to one side while he chewed another mouthful.

‘My van, yes. I saw tracks and figured I’d move my van in case I got reported for trespassing. But it wasn’t me with a torch. Was someone else there with you?’

Sky heard the pointed note to the question, but wasn’t sure what it meant. ‘I went with a friend.’

He sucked his teeth as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘And did you get the answers you wanted?’

She studied his face, the serious line of his mouth. The jewellery in his lip and nose matched his steely-grey eyes, as though he was making a statement that he hid nothing. As much as there was something a little pushy about Jared, Sky could admit that she liked him. But that didn’t mean she would share the things Madame Curio had told her, not with someone who was almost a total stranger.

‘She didn’t say an awful lot, no.’

‘Would you like me to come with you to speak to her again?’

Sky wiped her hands on her waitressing apron. ‘Why would you do that? And why would you being there help?’

Jared held up his hands. ‘I just thought it might be worth a shot, that’s all. And I’m not working today. But whatever, that’s cool.’

Sky slid out from the booth, then paused.

‘Just give me two minutes to tell my mum I’m leaving, and I’ll be right back.’

Of course Sky wouldn’t be telling her mother
where
she was going, or with whom, but Jared already knew that.

She knew Sean had football practice on Sunday afternoons, so he wouldn’t get her text until after dark, by which time Sky had every intention of being back. So as she called through the hatch to her mum, Sky hit send, so at least someone would know where she had gone – just in case.

Going back to see M Curio. I’m ok, Jared’s with me. Call u l8r.

As they neared the spot where Sean had bent the bars of the iron fence, Sky saw that someone had already been and bent them back the other way. She stopped short.

‘What’s up?’ Jared had been strangely quiet on the walk up the hill, and now turned to see what Sky was looking at.

‘We went in through the fence last time, but it’s been blocked off again.’ She looked down at her heeled boots. ‘And no way am I climbing over in these.’

Jared laughed. ‘I bent the bars back a few days ago. Don’t want people sneaking into my woods whenever they feel like it.’

Sky gave him an arch look. ‘
Your
woods? You’ve lived in Blackfin for five minutes.’

‘True. But I do live in there, so I keep trespassers like you out as much as possible. I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’

‘Wait, you mean you actually
live
in there, in your van?’

Jared sighed. ‘You make me sound as bad as the old gypsy.’

‘You kind of are.’

They carried on that way until Jared halted at the gates and fished a key from his jeans pocket. He picked up the shiny padlock holding the chain in place and opened it with a click. The gates swung open without a sound, as though they had been recently oiled.

‘How the hell do you have a key?’ Sky stood outside the gates still, her mouth open.

He grinned. ‘Broke the old one off and replaced it with a new one.’

Sky shook her head, even as she entered the gate and pushed it closed behind her. ‘Old Moley won’t be happy.’ Jared clicked the padlock back into place.

‘He hasn’t noticed in the last three months, so I doubt he will anytime soon.’

In daylight, there was nothing very terrible about the woods at all. Sky was beginning to enjoy the fresh, piney scent on the cold air, the snapping of twigs and rustle of fallen leaves under their boots, when they came to the clearing. The trees thinned to nothing around the church where the earth had been too traumatised by the fire sixteen years earlier to allow anything new to grow – although that couldn’t really be true, of course.

A burning crackle greeted them as they rounded the corner of the church and found Madame Curio huddled next to a small fire, her tartan toga wrapped around her. From the mangled state of the tree lying diagonally through the ruin, it was obviously Madame Curio’s primary source of firewood.

She looked up as Sky and Jared approached, but gave no other reaction to their presence.

‘Madame Curio, do you remember me?’

The old woman rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, yes. What do you want now?’

‘May we sit with you?’ Jared practically shoved Sky towards her. Sky glared at Jared, then sat on the log facing Madame Curio. ‘You saw what happened to my friend here the night she was meant to have died—’

‘Not
meant to.
Did. But not this one, the other.’

Jared sighed. ‘Yes. That night. Can you explain exactly what happened?’

Madame Curio narrowed her eyes at Jared. ‘I suppose I could. For a smoke.’

‘Sorry, I don’t smoke.’

Her mouth puckered like a cat’s rear end. ‘You did not come with the best bargaining hand, did you?’

Jared reached into the pocket of his jacket. ‘I have ten quid that says otherwise.’

The old woman’s eyes lit up. ‘Give!’

‘After you’ve told Skylar everything she wants to know.’

Like a pouting child, Madame Curio sat back and slammed her arms folded across her chest. ‘Told her. They chased her and she jumped off.’

Jared almost fell off his perch on the log. ‘
Who?’

‘Four of ’em. Growling.’

‘Wait,
who
—
’

Jared cut off Sky’s question. ‘You’re sure about this?’

Something about Jared’s angry tone made both Sky and Madame Curio jump.

‘He’s very rude, isn’t he?’ Madame Curio leaned forward and whispered dramatically. ‘You are the product of both your parents, Skylar. Your gift is like Severin’s, and not.’

Sky watched the old woman’s eyes glaze over, as though someone had drawn a curtain over her mind and she was now closed for business.

‘Is that it?’ Jared appeared more put out by the abrupt end to the conversation than Sky was, and his interest in helping her was starting to feel a little too intense.

‘Come on, we’d better go. It will be getting dark soon.’ Sky stood, swiping the loose bark fragments from her coat.

Jared stood too, then turned to Madame Curio. He had just pressed the ten-pound note into her hand when she shrieked and leapt to her feet.

‘You’re his! HISSSSS!’

With a dexterity uncommon in thousand-year-old women, Madame Curio climbed the rubble behind her and stood in the empty shell of the window casing, pointing at Jared with a shaking finger.

‘You belong to
Gage!
’

Jared blanched.

‘Wait, Jared – what does she mean?’

But Jared didn’t answer Sky’s question. With a glare at Madame Curio, he strode back the way he and Sky had come.

Sky didn’t know what to do.

‘And you can bugger off, too!’

The decision taken out of her hands, Sky gathered her coat around her and went running after Jared.

Sky’s phone started ringing the moment she stepped through the iron gates. Using her teeth to remove her glove, she answered it.

‘
Hurro
?’

‘What’s wrong? Where are you?’

Sky took the glove from her mouth with her free hand and signalled to Jared that she’d be a minute.

‘Nothing’s wrong. I’m just on my way home. Are you okay?’

There was silence on the other end of the line while Sean took several deep breaths. ‘I was worried something had happened to you.’

Sky swallowed guiltily, trying to hide her blush as she turned to face away from where Jared was waiting. ‘I was going to call as soon as I got home to let you know I’m okay.’

Again, there was a long silence. ‘Who is Jared, anyway?’

‘He works with my dad at the garage—’

‘I know that, Sky. I mean, who is he
to you?
’

Sky’s heart banged against her ribcage. Was that jealousy in Sean’s voice? It was hard to tell over the phone. ‘Just a friend, Sean. Hardly even that, really. I’ve only met him a couple of times.’

A long silence followed. ‘After everything that happened yesterday, you didn’t think it might not be the best idea to go sneaking into the woods with someone you
barely know
?
’
Sky had never heard Sean sound really angry before, but she gathered this was what it sounded like. ‘This town is full of
freaks,
Sky! You can’t trust any of them—’

‘Freaks like me, you mean?’ Sky’s pointed question cut Sean dead in the middle of his rant.

‘Sky, I didn’t mean—’

‘I’m going to hang up now, Sean. I’ll see you in school, I suppose.’

Sky’s eyes became hot with tears. She rubbed at them jerkily, not letting them fall. Of course Sean would dump her in with the rest of the weirdos in Blackfin. The town was a part of her make-up, would always be, but it wasn’t that way for Sean.

She switched off her phone and shoved it into her coat pocket before hurrying to catch up with Jared.

‘Let’s go.’

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and Sky glared at him through eyes filled with tears she refused to let fall.

‘Just dandy,’ she huffed. ‘But what did Madame Curio mean back there? Who is Gage?’

Jared didn’t look at Sky, just shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’