Haunted Destiny: A Midnight Dragonfly Bonus Short Story (5 page)

Two

No one moved. Through the crisscross of flashlight beams they all looked at me, as if some massive gauntlet had been hurled at my feet.

Probably because it had.

Challenge glimmered in Jessica’s eyes, but it ran so much deeper than the mattresses. They were just a prop, everyone else the audience. This was about her, and me. And Chase.

Actually, it was all about Chase.

She was staking her claim, daring me to make a move. I was supposed to back away, to run, giving her the satisfaction of scaring me away. Not from the house.

But from Chase.

Open door number one; open door number two. Life was about choices. Take a different path—dream a different dream. Even the road not taken led somewhere.

I’ll never know what would have happened if I’d just turned and walked away.

But I’d never been very good at that.

Determined not to buckle, I stepped deeper into the room—and saw. Lightning flashed in from a cloudless sky, replacing shadows with a harsh silver light. And in that one cruel flash, everything came into horrible focus.
Filth littered the warped wood floor. Some kind of greasy grime coated the windows. Dark copper smeared against the walls. And on the mattresses, something really red.

A single pink flip-flop lay upside down.

A cell phone in the corner.

On the bed…

I gasped.
The girl lay limp as a rag doll, long legs barely covered by short denim shorts. And the hair, long, dark—

I recoiled, tried to breathe. My throat burned. My chest hurt—

“Jesus.”

I grabbed onto the oath, the familiar voice, used it to pull me back. Somehow I managed a forceful blink, returning the shadows to the room and revealing everything exactly as it had been: Jessica and Amber crouched among the candles by the mattresses, a scowling Drew a few steps away, Bethany hovering close to Chase, Pitre beside me. They all stared as if I was crazy.

There’d been no lightning. Not for them.

Only for me.

“You’re eff ’in cold as ice,” Pitre muttered.

Only then did I realize he’d grabbed my hand.

I yanked back from him, willing the stupid images to clear. There was
no
light in the room,
no
blood.
No
knife on the floor.

I wasn’t lying discarded on the bed…

Nonsense,
Gran had told me the first time she’d found me frozen by that horrible, invisible lightning.
It’s all nonsense.
Shaken, I’d buried myself in her arms and clung to her, held on as tightly as I could.

I missed having someone to hold onto. Aunt Sara was awesome, but it wasn’t the same.
She
wasn’t the same. She didn’t know.

She couldn’t.

Gran had made me promise to never speak of what I saw.

“A nice shade of pale, too.” Amber smirked, exposing me with her flashlight. “What’s the matter? See a ghost?”

Say something!
I told myself.
Don’t stand there like some kind of freak.

“Maybe,” I said with a hint of smart-ass I didn’t come close to feeling. Forcing my own smirk, I kept my eyes on the girls, absolutely refusing to look at Chase. It was bad enough that I could feel him watching me.

“Don’t
you
feel it?” I played innocent, crossing my arms to fend off the shiver I felt—but they did not.

“Feel what?” Bethany asked, and the real fear in her voice made me feel kinda bad. I didn’t look at her, though. Because looking at her would mean looking at Chase. “The cold.”

Pitre laughed. “Sorry, babe, but it’s hot as hell in here.”

“Like a meat locker,” I said, edging closer to the mattresses. “Like on those ghost-hunter shows.”

Jessica pushed the hair back from her face, rolling her eyes. “Uh-huh. That’s why my shirt is sticking to my chest.”

No, but heat and humidity weren’t the reasons either. Buying clothes a size too small…

But I wasn’t going to go there.

“Wait a minute.” Amber closed her eyes and opened her arms in welcome. “I think I
do
feel something.”

Bethany edged closer to Chase.

“The candles, the mattresses,” she purred, opening her eyes. “It’s
perfect
!”

“Perfect?” I echoed.

Through the play of shadow and light, she literally glowed. “For a séance! We could do one, see if there really are ghosts here.”

Around my throat, a nonexistent scarf pulled tight.

“Anyone got a lighter?” she asked, kneeling to pick up a candle.

“I-I don’t think this is a good idea,” Bethany said.

But her sister joined Amber, lining up the votives in two little rows. “Come on,” Jessica said. “Don’t you have anyone dead you want to talk to?”

The wave of grief hit so hard, for a second I couldn’t breathe.
Mom…

It was a weird time to think about a woman I didn’t even remember. But New Orleans had been her town, and sometimes I’d swear I could feel her…

Was she here? Would she come if I called?

Driven by something I didn’t understand, I ignored the heaviness in my chest and approached the altar of mattresses. They were old, dirty…stained.

Going down on one knee, I leaned in for a better look, counting to ten before twisting toward Jessica. “I dare you to touch it.”

Gran hadn’t been much for television or movies, but she’d been a mean poker player. Early on, she’d taught me the beauty of the bluff — and the rush of calling one out.

The surprise in Jessica’s eyes felt good. Beautiful and popular, the oldest child of two rich doctors, she was one of those people so used to calling the shots, it never occurred to her that sometimes the tables could get turned. “Touch it?”

Something dark drove me. Challenging Jessica was not the smartest way to get accepted, but she’d started the game. And when you started a game, you had to be prepared to play.

“The blood,” I said as the others bunched closer. “I dare you to touch it. I mean, if we’re gonna have a séance…”

Pitre laughed. “Yeah, babe,” he drawled in what I’d learned was a Cajun accent. “Touch it.”

Maybe it was the way he said “touch”…or maybe the way he said “it”…but daggers shot into Jessica’s eyes. I just knew she was going to tell Chase to make Pitre leave.

Instead she glanced at her BFF, then looked down to where I crouched.

“If I do,” she said quietly. “What will
you
do?”

I think that was supposed to scare me or make me back off. And while little warnings did ping through me, I wasn’t going to be the one to back down. “Clap?”

Someone gasped. Bethany?

It was Amber who spoke up first. “Truth or dare,” she answered before Jessica could. I wondered if she realized the way her fingers closed around the silver cross dangling from the chain at her neck. “If Jessica takes your dare, you
owe
her.”

The room got crazy quiet. The stillness vibrated.

Walk away.
That’s what common sense told me. This was Jessica and Amber’s territory. I was the outsider, the newcomer. I had no way of knowing—

“
Trinity
.”

Chase’s voice, the tense undercurrent, stopped me.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

But I did. “I’m not afraid.” Yeah, that was so a lie.

Jessica got down beside me, whispering, “
Maybe you should be
,” before leaning over the mattresses. She made a show of lifting her hand toward the copper stain, then lowering her palm to the center of it. She held it there, the beam of her sister’s flashlight highlighting the contrast between the black polish on Jessica’s nails and the pale skin of her fingers.

“Happy?” she asked.

That wasn’t exactly the word I would have chosen. My eyes met hers, but I said nothing. I didn’t need to. We both knew the game we were playing.

“Give me your flashlight.”

My heart slammed—I didn’t need to look down at my death grip to know my knuckles had gone white.
Game,
I told myself.
Game, game, game!

But the buzz no one else heard rang like a bullhorn in my ears.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Amber asked.

“That’s enough—” Chase started.

But I cut him off. “What if I’d rather a truth?”

I’d grown up believing smiles were reflections of happiness. Smiles made you feel good. Smiles held warmth, love, compassion.

Jessica’s held none of that. There was only triumph. “Then a truth it is.” Her voice was very quiet.

“
Jessica.
” Chase broke toward her and took her hand, yanked her to her feet. Away from me. He led her to the corner—the same corner where I’d seen the discarded cell phone.

There was an edge to his voice, sharp, angry, but the words were lost to me. He stood stiff and rigid, like he wanted to drag her out of there. But his girlfriend held her head high, letting her perfect hair fall down past her shoulders. Her black tank top had ridden up, exposing the intricate chain of Celtic crosses tattooed to her lower back. A tramp stamp, Aunt Sara called them, but despite how much Jessica irked me, I thought it looked pretty cool.

“Trust me,” I heard her whisper as she pushed up to give him a quick kiss. Then she was crossing back to me, standing so close she looked down at me.

“Who in this room,” she began in a measured, singsong voice, and suddenly I so knew where this was going, “do you most want to hook up with?” I saw Chase frown as she added, “—and what,
exactly,
do you want to do with him?”

I felt myself still as her words slipped around me like a slow, insidious snake. I’d asked for this. I knew that. I’d issued the first dare. I’d requested a truth.

But that one was far too venomous to indulge.

Mouth dry, I looked up at Jessica. Everyone else faded from my awareness.

“I’m not here to hook up with anyone,” I said, pushing to my feet. It was better standing. At least that way, she wasn’t looking down at me. In flip-flops, we were pretty much eye-to-eye.

“
Most,
” she repeated. “Who do you
most
want to be with?”

There was absolutely no winning with that question. So I returned to her dare, and held out my flashlight. “A dare for a dare,” I said as my cell phone buzzed.

Jessica’s hair fell into her face. It was sticky now, no longer quite so shiny. “Sorry, Trin,” she said, taking my flashlight and letting it fall to the ground. “You already got your do-over.”

Which meant I was left with the one thing I could never give. Mind racing, I looked through the shadows to Chase, saw the horribly still way he stood watching me. The worry still lurked in his eyes, but something else gleamed there, as well. Something that shifted the roar within me to a hum.

“You better check that,” he said, with absolutely no emotion in his voice. “Unless you want your aunt to freak and call the cops.”

The virtual lifeline fell into the silence like an unexpected gift. He was right. There were only two people who could be texting me, and I knew it probably wasn’t my friend Victoria. She was with her boyfriend, and Lucas didn’t like it if her attention slipped elsewhere.

Downstairs, wind blew through the broken windows, but up here it was as still as a cemetery on a cloudless night, and ten times as hot. I could feel everyone watching as I slid the BlackBerry from my pocket and flipped it over. Sure enough, Aunt Sara had texted me. Three times.

Not sure how I missed the first two.

I’ll be home round midnite.

The first message had arrived a little after eleven. We’d still been in the Quarter.

Home now…will wait up n case u forgot key.

The second had come shortly after twelve.

Worried, Trin. Let me no u r ok!

That was the most recent, sent at 1:16, and even though my aunt and I were little more than strangers linked by blood, the thought of her worrying made me feel bad. Plus, her ex was a cop. The last thing I needed was for her to send him out looking for me.

“Hang on,” I said as I keyed in my response. I was pretty slow compared to everyone at school, but I was getting the hang of it. There’d been no reason for a cell phone on the mountain.

Everything OK. With friends. Home soon.

Only a few seconds passed before her response:

U sure?

I could hear Jessica and Chase arguing in the corner as I typed out my response, but couldn’t make out their words. Drew had positioned himself behind Amber, with his hands on her hips. Pitre hung back, watching.

Y. Chase is here.

Aunt Sara liked Chase.

Good. CUITM

See you in the morning. I recognized that one. I returned the phone to my pocket.

“Any day now,” Jessica said, still draped all over Chase. I couldn’t see his face, but the press of their bodies gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. And suddenly I wasn’t sure why I cared whether or not these people liked me. Chase had really been the only one…

Abruptly I shifted my focus to the right. “Amber,” I said, and seemingly on cue, Bethany’s light found her sister’s friend on the far side of the mattress. Drew, not much taller than she, still stood behind her. “I most want to be with Amber.”

I loved the flash of surprise in her eyes. Maybe she and Jessica weren’t as untouchable as they wanted everyone to think.

“Amber?” Jessica scoff ed. “But—”

“And as for what I want to do with her…” With a deliberate smile, I let the words dangle. “I’m thinking a dare.”

My words fell into dead silence, save for the slow, labored breath of the room itself.

“
Now we’re talking,
” Amber whispered, and over the scratch of a branch along the window, I would have sworn I heard Jessica growl.

“What,” I started, dragging the word out for effect, “…were you doing…after the football game last Friday night—”

Just like that, the room quit breathing.

“—in the backseat…” Hesitating, I toyed with one of the small silver hoops at my ear. I’d never actually played the game, and while I’d wanted to make Amber squirm, the way her mouth worked made me second-guess myself. I would have sworn she was silently begging me to stop.