Wicked (12 page)

I pick up a half full water bottle that’s been rolling around my floor for weeks and hand it to her.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way. It’s just the idea of Mia thinking I’m knocked up makes me insane. Besides, Gage and I haven’t done anything exciting yet,” I exude all the necessary disappointment as I flop down next to her.

She downs the water bottle before tossing it over near my shoes.

“That could easily be remedied. Just take control of the situation. Gage is a guy, and he’s not blind, I mean look at you. He’s got one hot girlfriend. I think all you have to do is light the match. Once that fire gets going, it tends to get out of control real quick.”

Light the match. I make a mental note. It practically goes hand in hand with my mother’s advice of handing out the invitation. Maybe I’ll combine the two?

“So you going to Chloe’s party?” she asks, rubbing her hand over her stomach.

“For sure. And you?”

“I’ll probably be too busy puking my ass off.” She closes her eyes in exhaustion. “That’s what I do now. Besides, I can’t freaking stand her.”

“Really?” I’m not sure I believe this. I’m not sure I believe anything Brielle says.

“Really,” she assures. “So what happened with you and Gage? He’s like her right hand man ever since she got back.”

“She’s blackmailing him.”

Her head ticks to the side. “No surprise there.”

“So are you going to tell Dudley it’s not his baby?” I ask.

“And ruin an easy A? I think not.”

“Brielle! Are you still working for him?”

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t make it five minutes without gagging from the stench of all that horse crap. I’m back at the bowling alley, kicking my feet up and texting, where I belong. Plus, Logan can care less if all I do is hang out in the bathroom. He thinks I’m cleaning it.”

“Nice.”

Chloe mentioned in her diary that she set in place one perfect BFF. It’s got to be Brielle. I shouldn’t have her in my room, or my life.

“Well?” Her voice spikes in frustration. “What’s she blackmailing him with?”

Brielle’s hair is spilled out on the pillow like a series of thick crimson snakes. Her eyes glint out like a broken green bottle, and her skin’s bled free of all color.

“I shouldn’t have asked you here,” I whisper mostly to myself. Her not liking Chloe is probably just a lie. “Sometimes I wonder why you and I are friends.” An unexpected swell of emotion rattles the last few words out of me as I hold back the urge to cry.

“Skyla.” She sits up. “What the hell’s going on? Come here,” her voice softens as she pulls me into a hug. “You’re insane if you think we shouldn’t be friends. We’re better than friends. I think of you like a sister.” She pulls away still holding me at the shoulders. “And I’m going to have your brother’s baby.” She pats her stomach. “See? We’re practically family.”

“Does Drake know?”

She shakes her head. “I’m telling him tomorrow night. But, anyway, why are you going to Chloe’s party if she’s trying to snatch Gage away from you?”

“I’m going to try and kill her.” I watch Brielle’s face for the slightest trace of loyalty.

“You might have to kill Michelle, Emily and Lexy to get to her. She’s in the bitch’s protection program.”

“I don’t mind offing the bitch squad.” I narrow in on her. “In fact, I plan on racking up quite a body count.” I spit the last word in her face.

***

An electrical storm brews outside leaving a sizzle of brilliant white light crackling through our world every few seconds. The electricity went out an hour ago, and both Mia and Melissa went to bed with flashlights. I can’t stop thinking about Brielle, and how trustworthy she might be. Logan sprouts up in my mind like a weed. Should any Count be trusted no matter how much evil he has flowing through his bloodstream?

A shadow emerges by the bathroom door, and I jump back into the corner of my bed.

“It’s me,” Gage whispers as he strides on over.

He slips off his shoes and crawls in next to me.

I don’t bother with words—words might lead to Logan or Chloe—and I plan on taking care of Chloe myself tomorrow night. Instead, I press in with a welcoming kiss and wrangle him closer until it feels as though I’m going to push right through him. I plan on lighting that match to see if I could start an unquenchable fire.

“I missed you.” I snuggle into him, taking in his clean soapy scent.

“I missed you, too.” He circles my neck with kisses, and it lights me up from the inside.

“So tell me how to get rid of you-know-who,” I whisper directly into his ear in the event Holden is lingering around like the perv he is.

I thought we could ask my dad for the next viable corpse. Give him the body of some 90 year-old man with a grenade for a heart. He twitches his brows, impressed with his own solution.

“Would your dad go for that?”

We’ll see.

“OK.” I track my finger along the inside lip of his jeans.

“So I talked to Chloe today,” he says it low as though he wished he didn’t.

I let out a sigh. A rumble of thunder explodes overhead and shakes the window so violently I fully expect it to explode into the room.

I don’t want to talk about Chloe, not now, not ever.

“So, what happened?” I pull up on my elbows and take him in. Gage is made up entirely of shadows, drawn in by charcoal lines, hair that lends itself to the night, eyes that explode with glitter like a freshly shaken snow globe each time they move.

“I drew some boundaries. Let her know I wasn’t going to touch her, hold her hand.”

“Nice.” I lean in and reward him with a kiss.

“She’s got Nevermore.”

“What?”

“I guess Tad turned him over to an animal shelter, and the Bishops had a leg band put on years ago in the event something like this happened.”

“Is she giving him back?”

“What do you think?” He gives a bleak smile. “She put him in a giant cage and locked him up in her room.”

“Crap. She’s stealing everything from me.”

“Funny. She said the same thing about you.”

My blood boils just thinking about it, so I change the subject. “Mia thinks I’m having your baby.” I stray far away from the subject of me clawing Chloe’s eyes out tomorrow night.

“Oooh,” he moans with a smile. His dimples ignite like two black dots, and his teeth flash through the night like lanterns.

“It’s not me who’s pregnant. It’s Brielle.”

The smile fades off his face.

“It’s not mine,” he teases. “That’s pretty wild.”

“Are we going to have babies, Gage? You know, one day?” I lean into his arm like a pillow. I like feeling his warm flesh beneath me, feel his blood flow through his thick chord-like veins right under my temple.

His head comes down next to mine, and we sit and listen to the night detonate like a series of cannons igniting—echoing above us.

“I think life should surprise you that way.”

“So you know? You’ve seen them?”

Lightning flexes in and out of the room like an electrical current gone wild.

Gage answers with a searing kiss that never seems to end.

That night, I dream in kisses. I dream of Gage, and a perfect brood of identical little boys with black hair and cobalt eyes in a line that goes on forever. I turn around and standing behind me is another line of little boys, each one a doppelganger of Logan. They call out to me, pull at my clothes—my hair. I try to tell the blonde boys I can never be their mother, that I have another destiny, but they tell me I’m wrong. They tell me that deep inside my soul I know it’s true.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Debt Threats

In the morning, I hold out a lock of hair and brush it over and over as I veg out in front of the fragmented mirror. That dream tunneled into my brain and has been replaying itself over and over like a horror movie. First of all, I don’t plan on having two hundred boys. Second of all, I’m never letting Logan near my baby making station, so it doesn’t seem fair that his evil Count spawn are harassing me in my sleep. I pause and put down the brush. There’s got to be a way to pull him out of my heart, extract every fiber of Logan Oliver from my being. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to Gage, to have him haunting me in my dreams—my waking hours.

Gage. He’s driving me to Chloe’s resurrection party tonight. Once I pluck Chloe bald and cull her eyes out, we should totally go out and celebrate after.

“Dad’s here!” I hear Melissa squeal from the hall.

A rash of thumps and screams erupt as Mia and Melissa run down to welcome Tad home.

It is sort of my fault he almost committed harry kerry in front of his own children, so I head on out.

I see Drake coming out of the center bathroom sniffing at his hand.

“Gross,” I mutter.

He motions for me to come into his bedroom. It’s loaded with rumpled clothes all over the floor and a musky odor that I try not to inhale all the way.

“What?” I’d flop on the bed, but I know what goes on there.

“I’m gonna break up with Brielle tonight.”

“What?” My eyes spring open. “You can’t break up with her.”

“Yes I can. She’s always cranky and bitching and moaning like everything that’s wrong is all my fault.”

“Well maybe it is.” It so is.

“It’s not. And she’s got like this viral stomach flu and she keeps coming over when I asked her not to. I hate puking. It’s like she wants to get me sick on purpose. Who does that?”

“Right.” Stomach flu. “Well make sure you listen to anything she wants to tell you first. You know, in case she wants to break up with you or something. She did mention there was something important she wanted to say tonight.”

“Cool.” Drake nods into this, looking more than mildly pleased with my line of thinking. “Thanks for the heads up,” he high fives me. “It’ll be way easier than me doing the dumping, plus she won’t care that I’ve already got Emily lined up to replace her.”

“What?” I’m like my own echo.

“Yeah, and she won’t think I was cheating.”

“Lovely.”

***

Drake and I amble downstairs where Mom has already laid Tad out on the sofa, limp as a paper bag.

“It could take weeks to heal,” my mother moans as she puts a tray of his favorite foods together in the kitchen.

“Months,” Tad corrects sounding more than all right. “I’ll have to go from crutches to a cane just to keep the pressure off my insides.” He plucks a two-liter bottle of soda off the floor and takes a swig right out of the container.

“We’ll have to put off baby making a few weeks,” my mother confides to everyone within earshot.

Really? Must we go on like this?

Sprinkles speeds in, and runs a series of wild laps, barking the entire time to keep us apprised of his exact location.

“Someone catch that hairless rat.” Tad cranes his neck to get a better look. “I’m having the animal shelter pick him up in the morning.”

“You are not.” Melissa snatches him up in her arms.

“He ran right underneath me, and I almost carved my initials into my heart on my way out of this planet. He’s a menace and a medical trauma waiting to happen.”

“He was up in my room the entire time,” Melissa drops a kiss between his ears.

“Nice cover up ‘lissa,” Tad balks, “glad to see your older sister has been rubbing off on you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I want to say, it’s nice to see him back to his own hateful self, but that would probably just prove his point.

“See, Lizbeth? Bad behavior spreads like a contagion. The next thing you know, they’ll be sneaking off with their boyfriends and staying out all night in a barn of all places.”

“Oh, so we’re back to that again,” I fold my arms. I can’t wait to see his face when Drake produces his mini me in exactly six months.

“Yes, we’re back to that again.” He flicks on the TV.

“You’re wrong. I happen to be a great role model.” OK, so maybe that was a teensy little lie.

Tad struggles to turn in my direction. “Girls, whatever you see Skyla doing, do the opposite. That oughta keep you safe.”

A choking sound emits from my throat.

Mia cuts me a sly grin. “So,” she starts in slow, “if Skyla is such a bad influence…” She walks over to the center of the room where both Tad and Mom can see her. “Maybe there should be an incentive program for those of us who have some dirt on her.”

“What?” I’m really beginning to dislike that word, almost as much as I’m beginning to dislike Mia. She’s seriously gunning to dethrone Chloe as bitch of the century.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mom carries over a tray loaded up with triple bypass written all over it. Hey, maybe its Tad, Mom’s trying to kill with her cooking?

“I kind of like this,” he adjusts himself to a sitting position. Not even a wince of pain, it’s like he’s faking it, only I saw the blade go in myself. “I say we toss out an award and field what comes our way.”

“What about Drake?” I ask indignantly.

“Turnabout’s fair play,” Mom chides.

“Only, I’m clean as a whistle,” Drake says before pouring the milk straight into his mouth waterfall style.

He wishes.

“Fifty bucks if the info’s valid and punishment worthy.” Tad pops open a bag of chips. “Our kids are going to police themselves.”

I look over at Mia who’s smiling like a lunatic, and yet I know she’s impotent.

Drake gargles in the background with white foaming bubbles shooting out of his mouth. And he’s going to wish he were impotent, very, very soon.

It would be so easy to sell him out for fifty dollars, but I’d hate to set another one of my bad examples. I glare openly at Mia from across the room.

“Skyla?” My mother shakes her head in disbelief. “Just keep out of trouble, and you won’t have problems with anybody ratting you out.”

Right.

Tad unfolds his newspaper. “Something tells me I’ll be out fifty bucks by the time the weekend’s over.” He looks back at me. “Isn’t that right?”

I turn around and leave the room.

I’ll have to speak to Holden about working on his aim.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Odd but True

A light drizzle escorts Gage and I all the way down to Emily Morgan’s house. It is one seamless grey night, devoid of color and shadow, just a continuous stretch of two-dimensional gloom that castrates the life out of the world.