Night Sky (27 page)

Frowning, he spit a piece of gravel out of his mouth before he spoke.

And said, “Sasha who?”

I don't remember walking to Calvin's house.

I remember that the police left as quickly as they had arrived, taking Edmund away with them.

You would think that at least
one
of them would have checked to see if I was okay, considering the fact that they were bringing Edmund into custody under the assumption (albeit false) that he had kidnapped and murdered a girl.

But they all pulled youies in the middle of the road and raced away, sirens blaring, leaving me alone and disoriented on the sidewalk.

Next thing I knew, I was letting myself into Calvin's house and walking toward the sound of video games coming from the family room in the back.

It wasn't until I was standing there, swaying slightly as I stared into the shocked faces of not just Cal, but Dana and Milo too, that I realized Dana's motorcycle was parked out in the driveway.

“Skylar, what happened?” I heard Dana ask.

I dropped my backpack onto the floor with a thud as she and Milo both rocketed out of their seats, practically throwing themselves at me. And I must've still been both freaked out and overwhelmed, because my backpack launched itself up off the floor and orbited me in a quick, tight circle, as if protecting me from impending attack.

Dana and Milo both stopped short.

“Are you all right?” Milo asked, as Dana said, “Breathe, Sky. Just breathe.”

“And maybe you should sit down,” Calvin added. “Or go into the bathroom, pronto, if you smelled the smell again. Are you going to—”

I cut him off as I sank down right there, onto the tile, grabbing my backpack from the air and hugging it close as it struggled to get free. “Edmund came back. The police arrested him.”

“Ah, shit!” Dana sat down on the floor next to me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “There was nothing that I could do. I saw him, and I was trying to talk to him, but he was…acting really weird and… Someone must've seen him and called the police because there were all these cop cars, and…” Maybe Calvin was right, and I was going to throw up. I swallowed hard. “It happened so quickly.”

Dana followed her own instructions and breathed deeply, in and out several times, as if willing herself to be calm, even as my backpack stopped fighting me and became fully inanimate again. “Okay. This isn't the end of the world. We can still—maybe—get to him. Ask him questions. We're just going to have to get creative.
More
creative.”

But I shook my head. “Even if we do manage to visit him in jail to ask him questions, he's not going to be able to answer them.” I told them what had happened—my vision, my oddly worded question, and Edmund's disappointing answer. “He doesn't even know who Sasha is.”

I could feel Milo's eyes as he watched me will myself not to cry. “You're bleeding,” he said.

I looked down, afraid for one horrifying second that I'd leaked through Kim Riley's gym shorts, but he was looking at my knee. It was a mess—I hadn't skinned it that badly since I fell off my bike back in sixth grade.

It didn't hurt—until I noticed it. “Ow,” I said, but then added, “I'm fine. It's okay.” I looked at Dana, who was quietly grim. “I'm so sorry.”

“You did your best,” she said gruffly.

But I wasn't sure of that.

Dana looked impatient as she ran her hand through her hair. “What did he look like?” she asked me. “Edmund. Was he in bad shape?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was really bad. His clothes were torn and filthy—bloodstained. And he was bald—his head was shaved.”

Milo looked at Dana, who nodded.

“Exactly like Lacey's dad,” she said. “The shaved head. All of it.”

“Really?” Calvin said. “Well, damn. That's eerie.”

“The worst part,” I said, “was the look in his eyes. It was like someone had wiped Edmund out—like he was a body walking around, but there was nothing inside. I don't know. It's hard to explain.”

Dana was quiet as she nodded.

“I'm making sense?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“That's exactly what happened with her—Lacey's—dad,” Milo said.

“So did he ever remember…anything?”

Dana looked horribly sad. “Yeah,” she said. “Eventually he did. Remember his daughter, that is. Beyond that, no memory whatsoever, starting the night she was taken, the night he went missing. It's like those few weeks just got wiped clean.”

“Doesn't that happen when people experience really traumatic events?” I asked. “I've heard of that before.”

Dana scoffed. “Please, Bubble Gum. You really want to chalk it up to PTSD?”

“I don't know,” I said. I knew from the shrink that Mom had sent me to after the accident that PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, could happen when a person had been through a horrible event. It was a coping mechanism, and it sometimes involved memory loss. I didn't have it—at least not that particular symptom. I remembered the accident a little too clearly. “What else do you think it could be?”

“The drugs they gave him,” Dana said. “Or some kind of memory wipe.”

Calvin was skeptical. “Like in
Men
in
Black
?” he asked. Will Smith was one of his favorite old movie stars.

“Like, I'm going to trespass into your mind and erect a bunch of blocks so that you can't access certain memories,” Dana told him. “They're still back there, but you can't reach 'em, so it's as effective as a wipe.”

“Come on,” Milo told me, holding out a hand to help me up. “Let me help you clean that out.”

Without thinking, I reached for him, even as Calvin asked, “You can do that?”

…never let you get hurt again, I promise you that.

“Whoa!” I said, because Milo was suddenly there, deep inside my head. His hand was warm and solid too, and as he pulled me to my feet, he was looking directly into my eyes, and I suddenly felt much,
much
better.

It was impossible not to smile at his ridiculously bold statement as he pulled me into the wheelchair-accessible bathroom that was right off the playroom, even as I heard Dana answering Calvin. “No, but I've heard rumors about Greater-Thans who can. I've been trying to learn how to do it.”

“Oh, really,” I said out loud to Milo. “And how are you going to pull that off?”

Milo smiled too and hit me with,
I
know. It's an ambitious goal. But I grew up watching
Star Wars
, and that whole “Try not. Do or do not” thing resonated.

“The word
try
is not in your vocabulary, huh?” I said, even as Dana spoke over me, saying, “With relentless training.”

She and Calvin had joined us in the huge bathroom, and she was answering my question because of course she thought I'd been talking to her.

Milo and I both turned to look at her at the same moment, and I realized that I was standing there, grinning foolishly up at him as I held his hand.

I let go of him, fast, suddenly feeling a whole lot worse again as Dana narrowed her eyes at me. “Okay. What the hell.”

“Milo was just being nice,” I started, because the last thing I wanted to admit was that I had a crush on Dana's boyfriend.

But then Milo spoke up from where he was now rummaging in the linen closet, getting out a towel and a washcloth. “I didn't tell her.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You didn't…?”

“Tell her,” he said again. He set the towel on the sink counter as I realized Dana's WTF hadn't been about my holding her boyfriend's hand, but rather her astute awareness that Milo and I had been having a partially telepathic conversation.

“Why didn't you tell her?” I asked as Milo turned on the sink faucet and washed his hands before soaking the washcloth.

“Tell me what?” Dana exclaimed.

“Milo and Skylar can read each other's minds when they touch each other,” Calvin interjected.

Dana took a deep breath and laughed it out. “Are you serious?”

“I'm serious,” Milo and I said at the same time. But then he looked from me to the toilet and added, “Close that and sit.”

“Or it's the Ouija board trick,” Cal added. I glared at him as I sat, reaching up to take the washcloth from Milo. I could clean out my own skinned knee. I wasn't a five-year-old.

“I wanted you to have a chance to explain it,” Milo said to me. “You know more about what goes on than I do. I don't share your gift.”

My knee stung, so I pressed the washcloth against it as I looked at Milo and then at Dana. And I shook my head. “
I
don't know what goes on. I just know that I've never been able to hear anyone's thoughts before, but I can hear Milo's.”

“And he can hear yours too?” Dana said. She looked pissed that Milo had waited to tell her about it—and equally amazed that it was even possible to pull off what we had done. “That's freaking… Wow. I mean, that's something.”

I frowned. “I think I have to work harder, maybe practice more, because I tried to get into Calvin's head too, and I couldn't. For some reason, it only works with Milo.”

Milo was hovering, and I knew—even without reading his mind—that I wasn't scrubbing at my knee with sufficient force. But as I lifted the washcloth to look beneath it, it was red with blood.

“The fact that it could work at all with a normie,” Dana said, “is pretty unbelievable.” She held out her hand to me. “May I?”

Milo took the opportunity to take the washcloth from me and rinse it in the sink, as I grasped Dana's hand and…

Nothing.

The silence was broken only by Calvin's heavy sigh of weary long-suffering, and I shot him a warning look. This was
not
the Ouija board trick, and I knew exactly how to get him to believe us.

“I got nothing,” Dana finally said, letting go of me.

Milo was there with the rinsed-out washcloth, and I took it from him again.

“There's soap on it,” he said, which of course made it sting even more.

“Turn on the water,” I told him, “and then go out of the room with Calvin and let him whisper something to you, and then come back in and…” I looked at Cal. “Milo and I will do our
not
-Ouija-board trick, and I'll tell you what you said.”

Calvin gazed at me. “Turn on the water—and sing,” he countered. “Loudly.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”

Dana watched as the water went on, and Milo followed Calvin out into the Williams's family room. She shut the door behind them, turning to look at me as, from the other room, Calvin shouted, “Sing,” adding, “Loudly!”

I sang the first song that popped into my head, which was, oddly, an old nursery rhyme that my mother used to sing to me when I was little. “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”

Dana was looking at me as if I'd grown a second head. But instead of berating me for being remarkably uncool, she said, “You
do
know that song is about catching the plague or some kind of violently awful disease and dying, right?”

I didn't know what to say to that, but then I didn't have to say anything, because Cal and Milo came back into the bathroom.

And Milo was going to come over and touch me, which made my heart beat harder—one, because I was an idiot, and two, because the last thing I wanted him to do was to get hit by a slew of uncontrolled and giddy
I'm crushing on you
thoughts. Or—God forbid—have him catch a whiff of that dream I'd had about him last night.

The one where he'd given me that Hollywood-blockbuster-worthy kiss.

So I braced myself, forcing a smile as I held out my hand in much the same way Dana had held her hand out for me. But Milo was still all about cleaning out my knee, and instead of taking my hand, he knelt next to me and took the washcloth.

He looked up, watching me through thick-lashed eyes, and placed a hand around the back of my calf to steady me. I inhaled at the sudden, abrupt contact. But then I laughed, because the words that he'd thought at me were… “Beam me up, Scotty?” I repeated.

“Holy shit,” Calvin said.

Dana looked confused. I guess she didn't watch much ancient cult TV. “What does—”

“It's from
Star
Trek
,” Calvin said. “Captain Kirk actually never says it in the show, but it's… Never mind.”

“Are you satisfied?” I asked him.

“I am,” Dana said. “It's freaking impressive to be able to establish a telepathic connection with a normie…? I've heard it's been done with two Greater-Thans, but…”

She kept going with her explanation, but I didn't hear her, because Milo was thinking at me, things like
This
is
gonna
hurt. I'm so sorry, but I gotta get the dirt out. …and skin is so soft, lips were even softer… Don't think about that, don't think about that, don't think about—

He pressed down with the washcloth on part of the scrape that still contained grit and dirt, and a tiny sound of pain escaped from me—I couldn't help it. He looked up at me, his eyes filled with apology, and right at that moment, I must've lost what little control over my subconscious that I had, and I flashed—in brilliant and vivid Technicolor—into a memory (eidetic, of course) of part of last night's dream.

The part where I was kissing Milo.

He pulled his hand away from my leg—fast—as if I'd burned him.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud, because we were no longer connected. “I'm so sorry!”

“No, no, that was my fault,” he countered, even as he scrambled farther away from me, nearly leaping to his feet. “I had this…crazy dream last night, and I'm so sorry.”