Origins: The Fire (7 page)

Mom peered over her shoulder and spotted me. I could see fear in the wide blue eyes behind her rain-splotched glasses, in the way she stabbed a finger toward the door.

“Outside,”
she mouthed.

I clenched my jaw and shook my head, even though squeezing air into my ever-tightening lungs had become tricky. No way was I leaving her here, to deal with…
whatever
…on her own.

I must have had my determined face on, because she didn’t bother with a second hopeless attempt to send me fleeing. Instead she motioned me toward the stalls on the right side of the corridor, while she crept to the left.

She leaned her upper body into the open window of the first stall, looking for what, I didn’t know. But her paranoia was contagious. Feeling wound up enough to explode at the slightest sound, I peered into the first stall on my side.
Gentle Jim’s quarters. When the big roan gelding saw me, he lumbered over and nosed me in the forehead, hoping I’d slip him a carrot from my pocket. The stall was empty except for him. Leaning over, I quietly grabbed his tin feed bucket and a steel-clipped lead. Just in case. Not my first choice in weaponry, but they were better than nothing.

I checked the next two stalls. Nothing but groggy horses.

Clank.

Loud. Just like I’d heard it before. Coming from the row of stalls around the corner.

Mom’s head whipped toward the noise. I tiptoed across the concrete floor, dodging unswept pieces of hay but ignoring the growing collection of grit and other unsavory substances on the balls of my bare feet.

As soon as I was close enough, Mom grabbed my head with one firm hand. My heart galloped as she pressed her mouth close to my ear. “I’m going to check it out,” she whispered. “Wait here. If you hear anything, run.”

I tried to shake my head, but her grip tightened, pressing me even closer. Her breath hissed between her teeth and collided with my earlobe, which I swear was already jumping from the
thud-thud-thud
of my pulse. “Mila. Please.”

As soon as she let go and rounded the corner ahead, I took off on stealthy feet after her, clutching my makeshift weapons like they were swords rather than random barn utensils.

When I reached the corner, I noticed the first three stalls
in the next corridor had their green-barred windows tightly shut. Empties. There were a lot of those, space vacated by the boarders who came when the Greenwood family was actually in residence. Mom stalked past them. She moved so quietly, so smoothly, that her blond ponytail barely bobbed behind her.

She was only three stalls from the end of the row when we heard it again.

Clank.

Our heads swiveled as one toward the last stall on the right. My breath hitched in my throat. If there was a crazy stalker or horse thief in there, he or she could probably hear my heart slamming against my rib cage by now.

But under the rapid-fire beat of my heart lurked something else. An anticipatory tightening of my muscles, an unshakable determination to help Mom.

No matter what.

I traced Mom’s careful footsteps as she picked out a silent path that led to that last stall. I watched while those slender, capable fingers wrapped around the handle, squeezed, and eased the door open.

Maisey let out a startled whinny when Mom leaped across the threshold, Maglite poised for action.

The long black flashlight lowered an instant later.

“What the…?” I heard Mom say as I leaned into the stall. Maisey was the lone occupant.

My heart decelerated to a gentler rhythm while I scratched the mare’s soft muzzle. Meanwhile, Mom performed an itemized inspection of the stall’s contents, running her hands along the walls. She stopped on the feed bucket attached to the wall.

Slipping farther inside, she reached over and pulled the bucket away from the wall, then pushed it forward.

Clank.

“Silly girl. Was that you, playing with your bucket? Mrs. Greenwood warned me about that.” Mom said, her laugh flowing like water; the easiest, purest laugh I’d her from her in ages. The sound released the tension from my limbs, like a valve had opened up and drained it all away. Part of me wanted to join in. The other part worried. This type of reaction, it wasn’t Mom. Had Dad’s death finally sent her over the edge?

But when Mom slipped her arm around my shoulder and smiled at me, I gave in to the laughter, pushed aside the niggling voices.

Like a squirrel, I felt compelled to store every spare scrap of affection I could find. You never knew when winter would strike and make the scraps scarce again.

It wasn’t until we reached the barn door that Mom’s smile slipped.

I followed her gaze and realized what she was thinking. “I’m sorry I left the door open. I was in a hurry and forgot.”

Her brows lowered at that news. And then she laughed it off. “Actually, I’m relieved it was you. This time,” she tacked on hastily. “You need to be more careful in the future.”

The thing was, I was pretty sure I had closed the barn door. But as we ran from the barn back to the house, the tiny lie felt worth it. There was no sense in making Mom worry unnecessarily. I mean, despite her obvious jitters, we were in Clearwater. What could possibly happen here?

The question I should have been asking myself was, how had I possibly heard Maisey banging her feed bucket from so far away? But the thought didn’t even occur to me. Not until it was way too late.

SIX

T
he next morning, I felt the happiest I had in weeks. My newfound camaraderie with Mom made my smiles come easier and the hallways seem less overwhelming. Kaylee snapped her fingers just as we reached her locker. “Shoot, I left my economics book in the car—I wanted to try to study for that quiz during homeroom.”

Yesterday’s weirdness seemed to have blown over. I hadn’t mentioned her little freakout, and in return, she hadn’t brought up mine.

“Do you want me to go with you?” I said, just as the warning bell rang.

She speed-walked toward the main door, fast as her two-inch heels would allow. “No, you go ahead,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll only be a second.”

I settled into my usual spot in homeroom. Even though I purposely tried to ignore the students already in class, apparently that was too big a challenge for my analytical brain. Five boys, three girls. None of them Hunter.

I smiled at all of them anyway.

I busied myself digging a notebook out of my backpack. Still, I sensed Hunter’s presence several seconds before he dropped into Kaylee’s spot next to me.

“Hey,” he said in his soft voice, those blue eyes fixed on me beneath a sweep of messy hair.

“Hi.” Nervous flutters kicked up inside me. Silly. He was just a boy. Okay, not entirely true. He was a boy who Kaylee happened to like.

Kaylee, who’d be back any second, expecting to sit in her spot.

Nervous flutters or not, the boy had to sit somewhere else.

Just then, Hunter dropped his backpack on the desk and laid his head against it. Closed his eyes.

My heart softened into what felt like a big, mushy pile of goo. He looked so tired, young even, with his dark eyelashes fanning across the tops of his cheeks. His mouth softened, too. I had a sudden yearning to trace that lopsided top lip with my finger.

Whoa.

I was so caught up in that crazy thought that the footsteps
I’d heard clanking in the hall didn’t register at first. The kind of clanking made by high-heeled shoes.

Oh, no.

I straightened. “Hunter, you need to—” The final bell cut me off, as did the tiny gasp I heard from the open doorway behind me.

Kaylee stood there, freshly glossed lips parted in surprise. She took two steps toward her occupied desk before pausing to smooth her purple tunic dress uncertainly, gaze flitting from Hunter to me.

“Kaylee, hey! Hunter was just hanging out here for a sec—” I started only to be cut off again, this time by Mrs. Stegmeyer.

“Ms. Daniels, please take an empty seat if you don’t want to be marked tardy,” our homeroom teacher said over the top of her magazine.

Kaylee’s gaze lingered on her usual spot for a millisecond longer, prompting me into action. “Hunter,” I whispered. His eyelashes swept open. The task of kicking him out of the seat became a hundred times harder under that sleepy blue stare. “Um, would you mind moving? This is where Kaylee sits.”

He sat up, glanced at Kaylee like he was seeing her for the first time, then swooped up his backpack and stood. “Yeah. Sorry,” he said. His sheepish grin was the best parting gift he could give, because I could tell it practically melted her
on the spot. He loped over to the empty desk he’d sat in last time.

She slid into the vacated seat with a huge sigh, while Mrs. Stegmeyer tapped her nails on the desk impatiently. “He warmed it up for me,” she whispered, pretending to fan herself with a notebook. “At this very moment, I’m being warmed by Hunter Lowe’s body heat.”

A huge wave of relief hit me, prompting a louder giggle than I intended.

“Girls, please. It’s time for the announcements,” Mrs. Stegmeyer admonished.

Sure enough, the intercom screeched, followed by the overly peppy voice of our student council president.

I listened absently to news about an upcoming car wash fund-raiser while I whispered to Kaylee. “He just sort of…sat down. Uninvited.”

Though, truth be told, I hadn’t exactly fought him off with a stick.

She waved her hand. “Please. It’s fine.”

Fine, everything was fine.

“Girls…shhh!” Mrs. Stegmeyer tapped her lips and glared.

But as soon as the teacher looked away, Kaylee leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Really, don’t worry. Nothing wrong with a little healthy competition.”

What?

“Kaylee,” I started. Only to be interrupted by the loud whack of the manila attendance file as it slapped the desk.

“Last warning before I separate you,” Mrs. Stegmeyer said, her drawl thickening the way it did when she was upset.

I slouched into my chair and kept my mouth shut the rest of homeroom. But Kaylee’s comment spun through my head, over and over again.

Healthy competition? Over Hunter?
I didn’t like the sound of that, not one tiny bit.

SEVEN

K
aylee’s decrepit old truck bounced us down the dirt road, away from Clearwater High. Between the tires crunching over uneven terrain and the ancient engine’s stuttering roar, the noise level was pretty high. Inside the cab, though, the silence was deafening. Kaylee clutched the zebra-striped steering wheel cover and refused to acknowledge me, her gaze directed straight ahead.

“Kaylee, I swear—I had nothing to do with Hunter transferring into my English class.” Of course, I’d been pleading my innocence for the past ten minutes, and none of it had yet to make a dent in Kaylee’s stony expression.

So much for her “healthy” competition.

I sighed and looked out the passenger window. From far off on the hillside, I saw flickering black strands slap
a gleaming mahogany neck. The gorgeous stallion threw his head again before rearing up and launching his massive body into an explosive gallop.

Horses. Horses were one of two things that had kept me from losing my mind when I first moved here.

The other thing was Kaylee.

I peeked at her face again, but her usual smiling mouth remained tight and silent. I couldn’t remember a single ride in this truck without a soundtrack of relentless Kaylee babble to make me laugh. Not until now.

A perfect image of Hunter’s face, with his careless fall of soft brown waves framing a pair of intense blue eyes, crystallized in my head. Stupid. Picturing him right now only made this harder. But, even if Hunter Lowe was the most interesting thing to happen to Clearwater in, well, ever—at least since I’d lived here—a silly crush couldn’t take precedence over a friendship. That wasn’t the kind of person Mom had raised me to be.

I needed to put a stop to this. I wanted babbling Kaylee back. After all, she was the only thing that had kept me from being a complete outcast at school. Surely I owed her for that.

“Look, this is ridiculous. We shouldn’t be fighting over some guy…just because he’s not into Carhartt and partying down by the river,” I added, to lighten the mood. Though there was much more to Hunter than that. Something about
the quiet way he studied me with those blue eyes when I talked, like he really cared about what I was saying, made the rest of the world just melt away.

And I needed that right now, the world melting away. But not at someone else’s expense.

I thought I saw Kaylee’s death grip on the wheel relax, just a teensy bit. Springs creaked as she adjusted her position. But no smile.

“I’m not sure, Mila,” Kaylee said, finally glancing my way. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“Look, I swear—I did not tell him to switch to my English class. You can ask him, if you don’t believe me.”

While I would have loved to believe that he’d transferred because of me, he’d told me the move was solely based on his desire for a more ambitious reading list.

She released the wheel with one hand to smooth the neck of her aqua cowl-necked sweater, one of her amazing-do-it-yourself creations. “Please. He’d think I was an idiot.” But her voice didn’t hold quite the edge it had just moments ago.

She peeked at me, nibbling her lower lip. Then her shoulders deflated. “Though I’m doing a pretty good job of acting like one on my own, aren’t I?”

“Hey, me too,” I said. Not thinking so much of Hunter as I was that time when I’d grabbed her arm.

Her smile was timid, not the carefree Kaylee smile I was used to. Nevertheless, I’d take what I could get.

“So, let’s just—wait! Oh my god, there he is!” Kaylee yelled.

For an instant, my logic deserted me. No…she couldn’t mean…

My eyes flew open as the brakes squealed. I turned my head, searched for the object of Kaylee’s pointing finger. Confusion hit first, followed by a flood of disappointment. Hunter. She’d meant Hunter.

Of course she had.