by Clara Kensie
Finally Ember spoke. “What are you looking at?”
I saw nothing but a blue sky, a bright sun, and white clouds. There were no hovering, hateful Nightmare Eyes. “Just looking around,” I answered. “Getting to know the neighborhood.”
“Are you nervous for your first day?”
“Kind of. But I’m used to being the new kid. We moved a lot.”
“You must have a ton of friends all over the country.”
Bitterly, I shook my head. “It was too hard to make friends and lie to them, and then leave them when my family ran again. I couldn’t even tell them my real name.”
“Well, you should be okay at Lilybrook High,” she said. “You’re a lab rat. We all hang out together.” From one of the branches above, a little blackbird fluttered down to a pile of snow. Ember took off her mitten and wiggled her fingers at it.
“A lab rat?”
“A Lab Brat. Capital L, capital B.” She pulled something from her pocket—a baggie of birdseed. “The Agency for Psionic Research is also known as the Lab. So we’re Lab Brats. Get it?”
“Just being psionic makes me a Lab Brat?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“But do they know I’m…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the daughter of the Kitteridge Killers out loud. “…who I am?”
“I’m sure some of them know by now,” she said. “But you’re Tristan’s girlfriend. The Lab Brats will accept you.”
Just a few days ago, I didn’t even know I was psionic. And now, not only could I see the past with my retrocognition and communicate telepathically with my boyfriend, I had a group of instant friends.
Maybe, for the first time in eight years, school wouldn’t be so bad.
“The Lab Brats have to follow some special rules, though.” Ember crouched and poured some birdseed in her palm. “The neutrals think the APR is just a boring lab called the Northern Wisconsin Science Laboratory. We can’t let them know it’s specifically for psionic research. We also can’t let them know about our abilities, and we can’t use our powers against anyone or to cheat.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.” I’d still have to follow special rules and keep secrets like I had when I was living with my real family, but this time I’d be keeping those secrets along with a large group of friends. The Lab Brats. “It could even be fun.”
“It is.” Ember whistled, and the blackbird hopped over, confidently pecking a seed right from her hand.
“Is that someone’s pet?” I asked.
“Nope.” With her free hand, she gestured to the woods beyond the neighborhood. “He has a nest over there by Lilybrook Lake.”
“Do you feed him every day?”
“I’ve never met him before.”
An echoey, hollow bang came from the woods, muffled and far away, but loud enough to make Ember jump, and the bird flitter off. A gunshot.
“Stupid hunters,” she shivered. “This time of year they hunt wolves, rabbits, foxes… ” With the cuff of her jacket, she wiped her eyes.
“Poor defenseless animals,” I said. I could have cried myself.
We continued down the sidewalk, Ember kicking at snowbanks. “My friend Kimber and I? Last summer we used to hike around the lake to the hunting cabins. We’d spy on the hunters, and Kimber would use her psychokinesis to jam their guns so they couldn’t kill anything. One time, we did it to some hunters while they were eating by a campfire, and I told a couple of deer to go over and take the food right out of their hands.” She laughed, sweet and high. “The hunters tried to shoot them, but their guns didn’t work. They got so mad. It was hilarious.”
I had to laugh too. “I’d love to see that. You’ll have to take me with you next time.”
“When our parents found out, they said it was too dangerous and won’t let us do it anymore.” She grinned at me anyway. “Tristan told me that you’re a vegetarian.”
“I am.”
She nodded approvingly, like I’d passed a test. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “About you living with us, you know, because of who you are. Who your parents are.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I was. I was so sorry, so ashamed, of who I was. My shame burned through me, boiling and blistering.
“And also because of Melanie,” Ember added. “She wasn’t just Tristan’s girlfriend. She’s a backup singer in my band, and she’s one of my best friends. When they broke up, she was devastated. She still is. He didn’t get warning premonitions about her, but she felt safe with him. And Tristan’s got a huge hero complex. He liked protecting her. And now…” She shrugged, then pocketed the baggie of birdseed. “But Lyric, Aria, and Mac like you. And if they like you, I like you. You’re nice. And you’re living with us, so it’s kind of like having a sister. I guess that’s pretty cool.”
We grinned at each other. And just like that, I had my first friend.
❀
The fog trembled upon my first step into Lilybrook High School. The building had been updated several times over the years, so everything—the big windows, the tile floor, the blue lockers—looked shiny and new, but almost one hundred classes had graduated from this school. If I raised the fog too high, I would see every single person who’d ever walked these halls, and probably pass out. Same with bringing in the fog too low. If I was still neutral, I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming overwhelmed by visions or fog. But my whole life I’d wanted a psionic ability to be like the rest of my family, and now I had one. My retrocognition was a strength, not a weakness. It made me special.
And at Lilybrook High, it also made me a Lab Brat.
Taking a deep breath, I lowered the fog an inch, then raised it half an inch. Balanced. Perfect. I forced myself onward.
I was used to being the new girl at school and the curious looks that came along with it. This was the first time, however, that I could use my real name. The Nightmare Eyes slunk behind me, reminding me that I was the daughter of killers. I also felt my classmates’ eyes on me as the assistant principal led me on a quick tour.
“That’s Tristan Connelly’s new girlfriend,” a girl whispered as we passed, and pride exploded in me like a starburst.
I was taking a heavy course load, but I was looking forward to the challenge. When my family was on the run, my mother and father insisted that we maintain a steady B-C average so we wouldn’t attract attention. I’d struggled to earn those grades, but now that I knew my life wasn’t in danger, I should be able to concentrate on my studies. I could earn A’s, and I would welcome the attention. Maybe I would even get on the honor roll. When Jillian and Logan got here, they would soar to the top of the class. With his hypercognition, Logan would probably take all AP classes and graduate as valedictorian.
Quiet, stable, peaceful lives. Normal lives.
We were going to love this place.
I was a little disappointed that Ember and I had no classes together—she was a freshman and I was a junior. It was also too late for me to take Driver’s Ed, so I’d have to wait until next year for that. But otherwise, I was happy with my classes. I was especially excited about my first-period Explorations in Art class. I used to love to paint when I was younger, but my family didn’t have enough room in our getaway car to haul my paintings from hideout to hideout, and it was too painful to watch them burn. So I’d quit. But now, at Lilybrook High, I could finally take Art again. The potbellied, paint-splattered teacher, Mr. Vargas, even gave my pencil sketch of a leaf an impressed grunt.
I had to dash all the way across the building to my chemistry class, where I was assigned to partner with a skinny boy wearing a Maroon 5 concert T-shirt. Nice enough guy, but he barely spoke to me. I couldn’t even try to start a conversation with him. The Nightmare Eyes burned into me, and the fog rumbled around me, and I was concentrating so hard on keeping everything balanced against the visions that I didn’t hear a word the teacher said.
I tapped the phone in my back pocket to make sure it was still there. I missed Tristan—it f
elt like half of me was missing—but I was happy he hadn’t called. That meant he wasn’t having any warning premonitions about me. Good. The fog was looming, but I was in control.
In the foreign language hallway between second and third period, Ember and I almost bumped into each other. We giggled at our shared clumsiness before heading to our respective classrooms. But where were all the other Lab Brats? Ember said we all hung out together. If any of my classmates were Lab Brats, they didn’t tell me, and I didn’t want to risk lifting the fog too high to find out for myself. I kept my eye out for Tristan’s friend Nathan. I saw lots of tall boys, but none with dreadlocks.
Just after the bell rang for fourth-period geometry, a girl with the most beautiful hair I’d ever seen, long and shiny and auburn, slid into the desk in front of mine. She wiggled her French-manicured fingers at one of her friends. When the teacher started scribbling formulas on the whiteboard, the girl swiveled in her seat to face me, her eyes the color of coffee and cream.
Was she a Lab Brat? “Hi,” I said as cheerfully and as loudly as I dared.
Her gaze flitted down to my hoodie. Her lip curled up in distaste. And then she snarled, “Tristan broke up with Melanie for you?”
Before I could reply—not that I could get any words past the lump that had instantly appeared in my throat—she turned back around.
Why would that girl speak to me with such venom? Maybe she thought I’d manipulated Tristan into breaking up with Melanie. Maybe it was the way I was dressed. She wore shiny black boots and a pencil skirt with a ruffled white top. In Tristan’s enormous hoodie, I looked like a slob compared to her.
Maybe she knew who my parents were.
Please, please let her hate me because of the hoodie, and not because my parents are the Kitteridge Killers.
The girl turned her head, glancing at me over her shoulder. “It’s not the hoodie.”
I sank back in my chair and slid my hands in my sleeves. Whoever this girl was, she was telepathic, which meant she was a Lab Brat. She knew who my parents were. Ember said the Lab Brats would accept me simply because I was psionic, and because I was Tristan’s girlfriend.
But Ember was wrong.
In the cafeteria, I was jostled and propelled through the lunch line to buy my salad and milk, then scouted the tables for a seat. While my family was on the run, we had to sit near an exit in case we needed to make a speedy getaway. But now I could sit wherever I wanted. I spotted Melanie Brunswick sitting next to that telepathic girl with the auburn hair. Their table was half-empty, but although everyone at the table—the other Lab Brats, I assumed—looked straight at me, they didn’t wave me over.
Whatever confidence I had left drained from me like water from a sieve.
The tables near the back window were empty. I could sit there.
Everyone at the Lab Brats’ table watched as I walked by them. The telepathic girl put her arm around Melanie, like she was shielding her from me, and whispered something.
“Leave her alone, Winter,” Melanie mumbled.
I collapsed into a seat at an empty table and brought the fog in a little, to numb myself from the sting of the Lab Brats’ rejection. They were all looking at me, some emotionless, some curious, some judging. Except for Melanie. She just stared at her tray.
I pretended to ignore them. I concentrated on picking the green peppers from my salad, then acted like I was super-interested in reading a red flyer that was taped to the wall, promoting a blood drive. It said to contact Nathan Gallagher for more information. Maybe Nathan Gallagher was Tristan’s buddy.
I took the napkin from my tray to spread it across my lap. Under the napkin was a piece of paper, torn from a spiral notebook and folded into quarters. A note. Someone must have slipped it onto my tray when I wasn’t looking.
From my back pocket, my phone rang. ‘Wildflowers,’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Tristan’s ringtone.
He would only be calling to warn me about something. It had to be the paper on my tray. I reached to answer his call.
No.
I needed to know what that note said, and Tristan would only tell me not to open it.
Shadowy dread crushed me from all sides. Knowing I shouldn’t, but unable to stop myself, I unfolded the paper.
Scrawled with ink thick and red, the letters were designed to look like dripping blood.
KILLERS’ SPAWN
Heart pounding in my ears, my body grew hot, then cold. My phone rang and rang and rang.
I shot a glance at the Lab Brats. Cheeks pale, violet eyes wide, Melanie shook her head. Next to her, the auburn-haired telepathic girl smirked.
I shoved the note into my pocket. At all of my old schools, no one knew who I was, and I was glad. I didn’t want any friends back then. But now it was different. I wanted friends now. At Lilybrook High, I was no longer hiding behind an alias. I could finally have friends who knew me as Tessa Carson.
But Tessa Carson was the daughter of the Kitteridge Killers. Tessa Carson was Killers’ Spawn. Who would want to be friends with that?
My phone rang and rang, then finally fell silent.
My feet itched to get up and run, to get me out of this place and never come back. But no. I gripped my chair, digging my fingers into the seat, to keep myself from fleeing. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t run anymore. I would stay here, and I would not let a mean girl and her cruel note bother me. I had Tristan, and I had Ember, and I even had Dennis and Deirdre. That was all I needed. And if they rejected me one day because of what my parents did, I would have Jillian and Logan. As soon as I found them.
I stayed in the lunchroom, but when the fog came rolling in to numb me, I didn’t push it away.
❀
Get through the day. That’s all I needed to do. Just get through the day. Go to my locker, get my books, go to class. Go back to the Connellys’ and hole up in their guest room.
Clouded in fog, I headed to my locker after lunch. Taping a red blood drive flyer onto each shiny blue locker was a boy with blond dreadlocks held back in an elastic.
Nathan. Finally. Tristan was his best friend. He would accept me, at least.
I approached him with a smile. “Hi, Nathan? I’m Tessa. Tristan’s girlfriend.”
He did not smile back. Instead, he looked down at me with eyes the color of tarnished steel. “You were there,” he said.
“Where?”
A cell phone rang, but not with the ‘Wildflowers’ ringtone. It wasn’t mine. The heavy metal ringtone was coming from Nathan’s jeans.
Instead of answering his phone, he grabbed my arm and yanked me over to him. He dropped his blood drive flyers, and my book bag slipped off my shoulder and fell to the floor. Jillian’s ballet shoe! Logan’s sheet music! I tried to pull away to get my bag, but he jerked me close, his touch burning through Tristan’s hoodie.
“When my father died,” he said. “You were there.”
“Your father? I wasn’t—” My stomach plummeted and the world around me narrowed, darkened. Not another one. Not again. “Which one was your father?” I asked, defeated.
“Kip Gallagher. He was on the recruiting team that your parents attacked. Tristan’s dad, Melanie’s dad, and my dad.”
Tristan, Melanie, and Nathan. My parents had attacked their fathers, leaving two dead and one critically wounded. In their grief, the three of them had bonded. One had become Tristan’s girlfriend, and the other his best friend.
Until I came along.
“I was there that day,” I appealed to Nathan, “but I was outside, locked in Dennis Connelly’s car. I didn’t know what was happening inside my house. I didn’t know anything at all, until a few weeks ago.”
He squeezed my arm tighter and shook it. “I was nine.” He ground the words out through clenched teeth. “I was only nine years old when your scumbag parents killed my father. Do you know how they killed him?”
I did know. I’d seen it in a vision when I held my parents’ wedding rings while I was in the Undergrou
nd. I saw the murder weapon in my nightmares. It glittered and glimmered, sparkled and glowed.
“They stabbed him,” he rumbled over his ringing phone. “Your mother threw a knife at him with her PK, and when he tried to crawl away, your father stabbed him again. Multiple times.”
The air turned into a solid block of fog and I couldn’t inhale. “I’m sorry,” I squeaked. “I’m so sor—”
“It sickens me that you’re here.” In his pocket, his phone rang and rang. “Every time I look at you I have to be reminded that your parents killed my father. You shouldn’t be allowed to go to this school. You shouldn’t be allowed to live in this town.”
His hand, squeezing my arm, also pushed a vision into me: a young version of him, blond hair cut short, wearing a too-big black suit. Crying in a cemetery, beside a coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Next to him was a tall, grim, teenage boy, and on his other side, sobbing into a tissue, was their mother.
Then instantly, the image vanished, although I hadn’t lowered the fog. “Stop that.” His fury lashed at me like a whip. “Don’t you dare use your retrocognition on me.”
“Did you do that?” I asked, breathless. “Did you cut off my vision?”
His phone rang again. He released my arm to yank the phone from his pocket. “What!” he shouted into it. “…How did you… You get premonitions about her? Oh, that’s just great. …Go to hell, Connelly. Have fun with Killers’ Spawn.”
He thrust the phone back into his pocket and glared at me. “And you, Spawn, you stay away from my blood drive. No one wants your tainted blood. Not in that way, anyway.” He stormed away, his feet scattering the red flyers like leaves in the wind.
I dove to grab my book bag. Fingers fumbling, I checked that Jillian’s ballet shoe and Logan’s sheet music were unharmed, then sank to the floor. Sunlight streamed through the high windows, bright and blinding, reflecting on the lockers. The bell rang and students began flooding the hallway, stepping around me, but I didn’t move.
