The Second Sign (15 page)

“I don’t know. I just know that she’s in
danger.”

He leaned over and bumped his head on the dashboard,
fighting the urge to plead with his sister to leave, leave this
place. But another part of him was anchored to it, anchored to
Gabby, and he didn’t understand any of it.

“Okay, stop it,” she snapped.

Her face shimmered behind the veil of tears that
wanted to spill. “Now, Jenna,” he managed.

The sun hid behind rolling, thick, gray clouds. Rain
began to fall in slow drafts, and Jake wondered if he’d ever get a
chance to see the sun again.

Deceived...Big Time

Gabby woke up to rain slipping across the glass pane
of her bedroom window. Naite had given her twenty-four hours. The
clock on her nightstand reaffirmed the presence of the sun.
Still morning.
Her body ached and her mouth was parched, a
reminder that she still lived. She wanted to sleep the day away.
Her leg throbbed as if warning against it, so she got out of bed
slowly, undressed, and jumped into the shower.

The tattoo swirled around her ankle and edged its
way up her leg just under the knee in a sequence of swirly letters
and hieroglyphs. It seemed restrained to a portion of her leg under
her knee, but the script was in constant change. She thought she
could make out a bird. She wanted all this to be a joke. After
dressing and eating a piece of bread, she went out into the now
lightless day.

The Second Sign meant nothing to her. She regretted
not paying attention whenever Adler explained things to both of
them. Or when Max tried to get her to sit still to listen to his
own explanations as he tried to dumb it down for her. Max was the
smart one but he wasn’t here. Where in the world was Max? That was
the million dollar question. He couldn’t be dead. She would’ve felt
it, wouldn’t she? Adler would’ve called her. Someone would’ve told
her something.

Adler kept a library in the lake house with an array
of thick tomes. After getting caught using two thick books for
target practice with her daggers, Gabby had been warned to stay out
of the room. Alder had hand-picked reading materials she kept in
her room, but they collected dust. She’d never bothered to open
them. Gabby admitted that reading wasn’t her thing.

Opting for quick answers, she followed the trail to
Heather at the fairgrounds. The fortuneteller loved scaring the
kids that came to her tent, using her knowledge of dark magic and
the supernatural. Gabby’s situation couldn’t get any darker...or
weirder. Heather had to know what this meant, or at least point her
in the right direction.

Close to the rim of the wooden part of the
landscape, Heather’s tent had an extra illusion of being creepy.
And people loved creepy when they believed they were safe. Gabby
ran there and slipped through the sliver between the closed flaps
in the tent and shrieked when she saw Sarah, half-naked with a
boy.

“Gabby! Don’t you knock?” Sarah snapped.

Gabby whirled around as heat rose to her cheeks.
“Sorry.” She didn’t intend to leave. It wasn’t the first time Gabby
caught Sarah in a tangle of limbs under bed sheets with a boy. “I’m
looking for Heather, is she here?”

The boy, Jason, gave Gabby a sly wink and a low
growl. “I’ll see you at the Crossroads later?” He didn’t wait for
an answer and took off still buttoning his jeans.

The Crossroads was a run-down shack in the middle of
nowhere. A great place for kids to hide things, especially
themselves.

“You can turn around now.” Sarah frowned at her.
“When did you get back?”

“A few days ago.”

Sarah opened the canvas to let the air and the light
into the small space.

“Come,” Sarah said and lit a cigarette as she walked
toward the trailer she and Heather shared.

At eighteen, Sarah had been raped by her mom’s
boyfriend and came to live with her aunt, Heather. Sarah could pass
for someone in her mid-twenties, her face turned hard and her eyes
drawn into an eternal scowl. Gabby always made sure to have her
gloves when she came here. Desperate people were full of emotions
they couldn’t even grasp.

“Heather’s gone,” Sarah said, letting out a drag of
her cigarette.

“What? When? I thought she was getting better.”

A smirk crossed Sarah’s lips, and she let out
another drag before she dropped the bud and crunched it with the
soles of her flip-flops. “I mean gone as in she hightailed out of
here, jumped on a train, and took off to never-never land.”

Gabby shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“You are a piece of work. For a hard headed,
I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-please, you got a lot to learn.” Sarah
folded her arms across her chest. Something she did to hide her
emotions as if compressing herself toward her center would protect
her from evil. “She wasn’t sick, Gabby,” she began. “She made it
all up so you could help her make some cash so we could get out of
here.”

Another slam to Gabby’s chest forced her to take a
step back.

Sarah ran her fingers through her dark hair. Her
eyes mirroring the regret Gabby felt. Max had been right. He’d
warned her not to interfere with fate. It usually caused a ripple
effect unforeseen until it was too late. Gabby had never seen this
coming, which didn’t make her good in the fortunetelling department
either. She had interfered and someone else paid the price.
Betrayal was not a word she would use. It was much more than
that.

“And you knew.”

Sarah shrugged. “She told me about your freak-ness
when I got here. I didn’t believe it until you used it. Hell, I
don’t believe it and I’ve seen you in action.” Sarah smiled, her
eyes lit up as if impressed.

It made Gabby feel unusually normal instead of a
freak. Sarah had known and yet wasn't afraid of her. Gabby quickly
felt worse that she had inadvertently helped Heather get out of
town, leaving Sarah to fend for herself.

Gabby looked down at her hands, pulling the arm
warmers to cover her palms. She stopped wanting to know what people
thought and felt six months after she got the curse. People were
cruel, and Gabby’s choices ended up slapping her in the face. And
worse, someone else paid the price for it. Why did Max have to be
so cryptic? Why couldn’t he just tell her these were the
consequences of her actions? Why did everything have to be a
learning experience?

“If it’s any consolation, she left me, and I’m
family.” Sarah smiled. “Any chance you want the gig?”

Gabby shook her head. Words were useless. “Sorry,
Sarah, I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry too.”

Gabby scanned the girl’s features. Sarah Fitzgerald
had no one. Where was she going to go? “Listen, maybe you can help
me,” Gabby began, “I can pay you.” She knew it was the least she
could do to give Sarah a start.

Sarah cocked a brow.

“Just research. I need to know anything you can find
about a reference to the Second Sign.”

Sarah scrunched her brow. “Music. Movie maybe.”

“I don’t know. It could be anything. But I think it
may have something to do with spirituality.”

“Heather left a collection of stuff in storage. I’ll
call you if I find something.”

Gabby smirked. “Thanks.” She turned to leave but
paused and turned back to Sarah. “Hey listen, if you don’t have
anywhere to go, you can stay at my house.” She shrugged. “If you
can stand the freak.”

Sarah beamed. “That would be awesome. Thanks.”

“And be careful at the Crossroads. It’s not
safe.”

“I will.” Sarah lifted her chin and turned back to
the tent.

Gabby started feeling a bit better as she made her
way under the coolness of the thick drizzle toward home. Lightning
flashed across the lake where thicker, darker clouds loomed. The
rain threatened worse things to come.

Running through her usual route, through the thick
trees that rimmed the lake, Gabby heard sirens and voices echoing
out of the thicket. She craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the
figures approaching when she stumbled against something on the
forest floor. Lifting her hands in front of her face to lessen the
impact, she hit the muddy ground with a yelp. So much for her
stealth action. Miller, the town cop, was already standing beside
her when she stood up.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I live here.” She didn’t like Miller. His broad
shoulder and cinched face always made her feel...wrong. Just being
in his presence she was at risk of being caught doing something he
could use against her and put her away for life. She meant to
sidestep him and keep going when his eyes lifted beyond her
shoulder and his mouth fell open, leading her gaze to whatever
caught his attention.

Lying on the ground, face swollen but still
recognizable—Marty. Her once rosy skin was now deathly blue, her
lips the color of the deepest purple, her throat bloated. Dead.
Gabby’s mind swam with images of Naite turning into Marty. Naite
had warned her that her friends would pay the price. Gabby’s chest
tightened. Her breathing grew shallow, hard, as if all the oxygen
had been sucked out of the air. Strong arms wrapped around her,
turning her into warmth. Without even thinking, she dug her face in
that broad chest as her legs fell from under her.

“Cooper!” Miller yelled and another cop came into
view. “Secure the scene.” Miller didn’t let Gabby go. Instead, he
wrapped his arms under her knees and carried her out to the road.
“I don’t want you messing up the evidence,” he said, his breathing
even despite her weight.

At that point, Gabby couldn’t say a word to retort,
the image of Marty dead played over in her mind. Once they reached
the road, Miller released her, and she snapped out of the dark haze
to focus on his hard look as if he were trying to figure out if she
were a target he wanted to shoot.

“Well, get goin,’” he yelled and Gabby didn’t
wait.

She ran. This time she ran until she felt her heart
about to pop out of her ears. Home was a half mile away from The
Narrows where Marty’s body had been found. Another mile and her
body would’ve been flushed into the Atlantic.

Marty had told the cops that Gabby had nothing to do
with the fire that killed Kyle, despite Miller wanting to blame
her. Marty had been her friend. She had meant to call Marty to get
together, but she didn’t. Her chest heaved, risking combustion
while she wanted nothing more than to fold in on herself, to
condense into a particle of nothing, to cease to exist. Her clothes
were drenched, her hair plastered on her head, her gym shoes full
of mud and water, squishing as she approached her house. Lightning
lit the darkness, and she could’ve sworn she saw a shadow of a
large bird circling her house. She ran inside.

Max whipped around at the sound of the door
slamming. Their eyes locked and Gabby felt a battle wage inside
her. She wanted to hug him and hit him. She wanted to curse him and
ask for his help. Her mind rattled with the wind and the
realization that things were set into motion that she couldn’t
understand. But he could. He was an angel. Wasn’t God all-knowing?
Wasn’t he healer and executioner? Hope and despair? Life and
death?

“Gabby?” his voice was a soft light in the darkness,
the damned voice of influence. It meant nothing to her. It didn’t
touch her. It bounced off her flesh and recoiled back to him. She
felt it.

“Where were you?” She hated the sound of her voice.
She would not fold. She would not cease to exist nor give anyone
the satisfaction of hurting her. “Where were you?” she asked
louder, her hands two tight fists.

“I had to go upstate. I told you,” he said slow,
deliberate as if approaching a land mine.

“You didn’t show up last night. I thought you were
going to be here for me.”

His eyes broke from hers, leading her to Jenna and
Jake who were sitting across from him on the sofa, their eyes
boring into her.

Jake stood up and her heart almost did jump out. She
wanted to throw herself at him, to bring him close to her, to bind
herself to him. Instead, she returned her gaze to Max. Her breath
came in deep gasps now, heat enveloped her. “Do you know that Jake
had to save my life this morning?”

“Gabby—” Jake began.

She shot him a look that could kill and he closed
his mouth. She turned back to Max. “Did you know that?” She waited
for what seemed an eternity for any reaction from Max. She could
see his wings unfurling behind him, hazy, like looking through a
glazed window.

“No, I didn’t.” The muscles on his face tightened,
his eyes narrowed on hers for a moment before falling to the floor.
In that one moment, the world seemed to collapse on her. She was
drowning in a river of lies.

“Why didn’t you show up for our birthday? I thought
that’s why you sent me here. To make sure I don’t get into
trouble.”

Max opened his mouth but closed it without a
word.

This burned her even more. “Why weren’t you there
for me?”

“Gabby,” he said, his voice a shank drilling into
her brain. “I didn’t know...”

“Really? You don’t seem to know much.”

“How could I know that?” he defended.

“Well shouldn’t you be all-knowing. I mean, what’s
the point of being—”

“Gabby, enough!” another voice boomed behind Max.
Adler walked out of the kitchen holding a cake. The small, dark man
gave her a gaze that could kill. She pulled away from Max, biting
her lip and the words that wanted to reveal his nature. Water
pooled onto the slick surface at her feet.

“They found Marty’s body out by The Narrows today.”
She looked at Adler. “Did you know that?” She looked from Adler to
Max. Of course they knew it.

“I’m sorry, Gabby.” Max stepped closer. “I know she
was your friend.”

Gabby wiped away the water from her face and ran her
fingers through her hair. “I don’t have any friends.”