Wild Sky 2 (6 page)

As Cal parked in one of the many open spots, he glanced in his rearview, his eyebrows furrowed as he listened to Garrett.

“But then I see the remote. It’s fricking hovering there, right in front of the TV screen. Like, in mid-freaking-air.”

I swallowed hard.

Garrett paused, and for a moment, there was silence in the car.

“So yeah,” he finally said. “
That
happened. And I couldn’t keep quiet. I literally said
What the eff
. And Jilly heard me and spun around on the couch, looking all terrified and shit. And when she did that, the remote
flew
from where it was hanging there in the air and went back onto the top of the TV cabinet. It freaking
flew
. And she did that. She made that happen with her freak-show mind.”

“You’re certain of that?” Cal asked, because I was too busy trying not to throw up.

Garrett nodded. “She said it was called telekinesis, and that it was no big deal. But then she kinda proved that it
was
, because she begged me to not tell Rochelle.”

“Did you?” I asked, because
that
would certainly explain Jilly’s sudden disappearance. A mother who was an addict wouldn’t blink before selling her Greater-Than daughter to the nearest Destiny dealer—maybe in exchange for a half-year supply…? Oh Lord, poor Jilly!

“Hell, no,” Garrett said, and I could smell that he was genuinely offended. “I was already worried that Rochelle was treating Jilly badly. I mean, yeah, she’s a pain in the ass, but she’s small and Ro’s not, and…” He sighed. “I don’t know, Jilly always pretended to be bored or tough or whatever, but I could tell from the start that she was scared of her mother or her aunt or whatever the hell. As for Rochelle, she started out a mega-bitch, and like I said, whatever yoga or Pilates workout she’s doing, it’s not only making her hotter, but it’s making her meaner, too.”

I glanced at Calvin to find him looking at me. Rochelle was
definitely
using Destiny. My heart broke for Jilly, who was probably already dead.

“So will you help me find Jilly?” Garrett asked again. He smirked a little. “Who knows, with a little luck, maybe
she’ll
call your cell phone and ask to be picked up, too. Like Sasha. Right?”

I never would’ve thought dumb jock Garrett Hathaway would be the person to cry
bullshit
on a story that my mother and the police had swallowed whole. I was just about to deny, deny, deny, and then order him out of the car since we’d reached our designated drop-off spot, but before I could open my mouth, bullets started to fly.

Chapter
Four

I wish I could say I’d never witnessed a windshield shatter before, but I’d been in a terrible car accident a few years back, so I knew exactly what it looked and sounded like.

There’s a weird silence that happens immediately after something like that, in which everything seemed to occur in slo-mo. I forced my mouth to move.

“Gunshot!” I shouted, because I could see both Cal and Garrett looking wildly around, trying to process exactly what that noise was and what had just happened. “Bullet to car window! Over to the right.”

The broken windshield belonged to a beat-up sedan parked two slots down from us in the Sav’A’Buck lot. Someone had fired a gun, just once, probably from somewhere near the grocery store’s front doors, judging from that broken front window. Shards of glass made tinkling sounds as they careened off the front of the car and onto the pavement.

“Gunman at the store door, get down get down get down!” Calvin shouted, and I stupidly turned to look instead of diving onto the floor of his car, and he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me down just as the shooter must’ve flipped the switch from
one shot
to
massacre
, and the gun began going off, popping bullets through the air.

BOOM BOOM BOOM POP BOOM!

I braced for them to hit Cal’s car, covering my head as I prepared for a rain of glass, but the man with the giant gun must’ve been pointing it in a different direction, because I heard the ping of punctured metal and breaking glass, but it wasn’t from our car.

I could hear someone screaming—high-pitched and frantic—even as Garrett yelled, “
What the fuck! What the fuck!
Calvin, drive, what the fuck!”

“Don’t,” I told Cal as I closed my eyes and focused on that glimpse I’d seen before he’d pulled me to relative safety.

Single gunman.

Carrying…

A
big
gun. And something else…?

I focused on calling up the image, and yes, he was carrying something under his left arm, some kind of brightly colored sack, with his assault rifle tucked into his right elbow—this tall, broad man, maybe twenty years old, buzz cut, scar above his eyebrow.

That screaming—it had been a child’s voice. She was silent now, but I realized with a flash that I hadn’t seen a colorful bag but instead the cheerfully patterned clothing of a little girl. That man with the gun was abducting a little girl. And I bet I knew why.

“Gimme!” I said and reached back to grab one of the water guns from beside Garrett.

“Sky!” Cal exclaimed. “Don’t—”

I didn’t wait to hear what he thought I shouldn’t do. I’d yanked my hood up over my head, hiding my red hair and as much of my face as I could, and I was already out of the car and on the asphalt, heading toward the man who was still firing that gun. He was using it not to kill, thank goodness, but to keep the little girl’s family from following him.

I could see with just one glance that she was unconscious, as he tossed her none too carefully into the passenger seat of his shiny black Bimmer.

He had a nice car. And I was pretty sure I knew how he’d paid for it—by kidnapping little girls like this one, like Sasha, too, and selling them to the Destiny makers.

Mother. Effer.

“
Hey!
” I belted out. But my voice was buried beneath the cacophony of his weapon. I had to move fast, or he was going to get into his snazzy car and that little girl would be gone.

I took a deep breath and concentrated. Water versus bullets? Not normally much of a contest there.

But I could do this.

Couldn’t I?

Suddenly, I heard Dana’s voice in my head, shouting
Fail! Fail! What are you doing, Bubble Gum? You have no backup, you have no plan!

What
was
I doing? This was insane.

Still thoughts.
I closed my eyes and pictured Milo. I breathed him, I felt him, I heard him.
Still thoughts, Sky. Just let it go
…

And in that moment in which I was specifically
not
thinking about what I was about to do or what the consequences would be if I failed, I felt and then saw my enormous pile of plastic water pistols—there were sixteen of them total—shoot out from the backseat of Calvin’s car and through the passenger side window that I’d left open. They streamed toward me like metal particles toward a magnet.

Then, just as quickly, all but one—a little green one—swooped in front of me before lining up and hovering in midair, exactly as Jilly’s remote must’ve hung in midair in Garrett’s living room.

The little green plastic water gun zoomed over to the man with the real gun and smacked him in the face.

“What the hell…?” He fumbled his weapon as he turned to see me standing there—me and that collection of water guns—and his eyes widened.

“Holy shit, Sky!” With the noise from the assault weapon silenced, I could hear Garrett shouting, and I winced inwardly because he’d used my name.

But whatever he said next was muffled, and Cal’s voice rang out instead. “Hoshitski, look out!”

It was an intentional misdirect, and I tried to stand like a Hoshitski might, no doubt surly from years of being teased. I pitched my voice lower and ordered, “Drop it! Now!”

The gunman’s wide eyes narrowed, and we both knew he wasn’t going to drop his weapon, so before he could turn and kill me, I let loose my TK and blasted him. All of those plastic guns shot water from their barrels with the intensity of sixteen narrow but powerful fire hoses, and it sent the man down onto the ground so hard that I heard his head as it smacked against the pavement.

The gun he’d been holding clattered to the ground.

All of my weapons ceased water-fire and dropped onto the pavement in front of the unconscious shooter.

The silence that followed was eerie. I felt a little dazed, standing there with a single, silly-looking pink water gun still in my hand, staring at the downed man and his big
real
gun, and then over at the bullet-riddled storefront of the Sav’A’Buck.

“Hey!” Calvin bellowed. “Get back in the frickin’ car!”

But I wasn’t done yet.

Part of my relentless training with Dana had been in the safe handling of real weapons, and I dashed over to that ginormous military assault thing (clearly I’d slept through the chapter on identification of make and model) and carefully picked it up. I knew enough to remove the magazine, and I tossed it as far as I could across the parking lot. I unloaded the round that was chambered and ready to fire, too. It sprang out and clattered onto the pavement. I kicked it under a nearby car.

I could see the frightened faces of the little girl’s family as they finally dared to emerge from the Sav’A’Buck, and I shouted to them. “You’re safe, she’s safe, your daughter’s safe. Take this weapon, you can sell it.” I could tell with just a glance that these people—mother, father, older brother, and an infant—had next to nothing. They were skinny and shivering in the brisk morning air. “His car keys are probably in the front pocket of his jeans, you should take his car, too. Use it to get out of here.”

The nearly kidnapped girl’s brother was on the ball—his parents were still stunned. But he was maybe twelve, and he didn’t hesitate; he just reached in and found Gun Man’s key ring. I spoke directly to him. “Have your mom and dad drive north. All the way to Boston, or, once you’re out of Florida, head west, out to California. There are people there who can help you. But above all, make sure your sister hides her powers, do you understand me?”

The mother had started to cry as she dumped her baby into her husband’s arms in order to scoop up her almost-abducted daughter from the front seat of that Bimmer and cradle her in her arms.

“He didn’t hurt her too badly,” I reassured them. “He needed her alive. Now, go. Don’t stop, at least not until you get up to Orlando. There are places there you can sell a car like this for cash, too. No questions asked. But then get another car, a cheaper one, and keep going. Boston. Or California.”

The boy nodded, and I knew at least he was paying attention.

“Come on, Hoshitski!” Cal called out, still desperately trying to keep my anonymity. “We need to
go
!”

“Keep her safe,” I told the boy again.

I didn’t want to leave my arsenal behind, but there was no water left in any of the plastic guns, so moving them with my TK was a no-go. I scooped up as many as I could, holding out my shirt and using it to carry them in a kind of a sling as I ran back to Cal’s car.

Cal didn’t wait for me to close the door. He just backed up hard with a squeal of tires, and blasted out of the parking lot, leaving the Sav’A’Buck in the dust.

————

The first few miles, we all were silent.

Cal put us on the highway, heading back to Coconut Key. Still, he kept his eyes straight ahead on the road, driving with the intensity of a first-year driver’s ed student. His hands were at ten and two, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

I managed to slow my breathing down a little bit, after I realized that the one thing I
could
hear was the sound of my own rapid inhalations. Each time I took a breath, I heard something slosh, and I realized it was the windshield-wiper fluid under the hood of Cal’s car.

I finally got myself calmed down, only to hear Garrett laughing from the backseat. Not funny-ha-ha laughing, but an occasional
heh-heh
, like he couldn’t contain himself,
heh-heh-heh
.

I turned around to look at him, and he was gazing at me, his eyes very wide.

“
Heh-heh
,” he said. “So what else can you do?”

Alarmed, I looked at Calvin. “Oh my God,” I whispered as I realized exactly what I’d just done. “Did he see…?”

“Everything?” Calvin supplied a noun. “Oh yeah. Yup. Yes. He saw it all.”

Garrett released his seat belt so that he could lean forward and drape himself over the backs of our seats. “Can you fly?” he asked. “Do you think
Jilly
can fly?”

“Oh, shit,” I said to Calvin and then remembered, “Hoshitski.” Would it work? When that man woke up, would he start looking for a deep-voiced thug named Hoshitski or a red-haired girl named Sky? Although, when I looked back at Garrett, I realized we had an even more immediate problem. The school himbo had witnessed my G-T powers firsthand.

“I called Dana,” Cal told me. “On her burner phone.” When we’d first met her, Dana didn’t have a cell, but since our adventure in Alabama, she’d gotten a disposable. She didn’t use it often, and she replaced it frequently. Milo got one, too. Mostly, I think, so he could text me and regularly check in. “She and Miles are gonna meet us back in Coconut Key. At the Twenty.”

I nodded. The former multiplex theater at the long-deserted mall that was just on our side of the Harrisburg town line. That was where I’d first met Milo.

“God,” Garrett was saying, “what I wouldn’t give to have sex with a girl who can fly.”

“
Ew
,” I shouted. “That is not okay!”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “It would be
awesome
! Although, really, what I’d want is X-ray vision. Oh my God, do you have X-ray vision? Can you see me
naked
right
now
?”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Did you miss the part where we were nearly killed?”