“No, you’re not,” Dana said, even though he’d already sat up.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jilly said, shock in her voice. Garrett had caught her when I’d pulled her—or rather the fluids in her body—out of the closet. They were crouched down on the other side of Calvin’s toppled chair.
“Yeah, I’m really okay,” Calvin insisted, showing Dana that he wasn’t badly hurt by pushing himself onto his knees in order to right his wheelchair.
And that’s when I saw it.
The syringe, sticking out of the back of Cal’s neck, the needle stuck deeply into his skin like he was a pincushion.
“Cal?” I said.
“Dude, what are you doing?” Garrett chimed in. “I mean, look at what you’re doing!”
Cal looked down at the way he was using his legs to kneel there. “Whoa.”
“No. No no no no nooooo!” Dana wrenched the syringe out of Calvin’s skin and held it up to the light. It was completely empty.
Beside me, Milo’s face was ashen. I could barely breathe, fear squeezing my chest, but he managed to say the words I couldn’t get out. “Tell me he wasn’t injected with Destiny.”
Dana shook her head. Was that no Calvin wasn’t, or no, she couldn’t tell Milo that Cal wasn’t?
“Um, guys?” Calvin said, his eyes still wide as he looked around at us. “Guys? I’m feeling pretty freaking awesome right now. Um, was that…? Did I just…? Holy shit, I think I can…”
And then, without any further hesitation, my paraplegic best friend stood up.
As I watched, Cal walked over to Dana, pulled her up to her feet, and put his arms around her.
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this?” he whispered.
And she burst into tears.
Chapter Sixteen
Dana was sobbing.
That, in and of itself, was terrifying. On the crying front, the most I’d ever seen her surrender to was a tiny sniffle that could have been mistaken for allergies before she’d stomped away to be alone. She didn’t let her guard down in front of people. Ever.
And yet she was doing just that as she sobbed into Calvin’s shoulder, as the empty syringe she’d been holding clattered to the floor.
Calvin—who was standing there on his own two feet, without any assistance from Dana’s TK.
He’d walked over to her like he’d been doing it every day of his life. Like he was magically cured.
No, like he’d just been injected with a miracle drug that had fixed his paralysis…and also happened to be so addictive that the likelihood of his death from withdrawal was one hundred percent.
And that was why Dana was sobbing.
I started to cry, too. Because it was all registering now. I had tried to move Jilly. And I’d succeeded. Oh yes. I’d moved her, all right. I’d also moved everything else containing liquid, like the bag of plasma.
And the syringe.
It had shot through the air like a dart. I could picture it now. I’d dodged it right after the blood bag. It had all happened so fast, but that image of the flying D-dart was emblazoned on my brain like a terrible dream.
But this was real. It had happened. This was happening.
I’d just killed my best friend.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, but those three little words were the most inadequate in the English language. “I didn’t mean to—” But the words fell hopelessly short—so much so that I couldn’t possibly finish the sentence. I didn’t mean to inject Calvin with a deadly drug. I didn’t mean to shorten his already limited life.
Dana looked at me over Cal’s shoulder, but there was no anger in her eyes—only grief and utter hopelessness. I’d never seen her so defeated.
“It’s not your fault,” she told me quietly as she forced herself to stop crying. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It’s as much my fault as yours—I left that syringe on the counter instead of locking it back in the mini fridge.”
“Because you came to help me,” I pointed out. I’d fallen to my knees when I’d walked into the closet, and Dana had been right there, fast.
“Because of my nightmare,” Milo countered. “It’s my fault, too.”
“And mine,” Garrett chimed in. “We’re only here because I wanted to help Jilly.”
“And I didn’t duck,” Cal turned to face me. “So I’m just as much to blame.”
Everyone but Jilly was trying to make me feel better by taking at least part of the responsibility. But really, I had done this.
I realized then that the girl was busy sweeping up the mess from the broken lightbulb. And when she’d gone to the kitchen for the dust pan and brush, she’d gotten a bowl and a sponge, too. She’d already squeegeed up the biggest pool of blood from the tile floor where Dana had fallen after the plasma bag had hit her and broken open. When she saw me looking at that bowl of blood, she defensively said, “I have to make it look like the bag broke while it was in the lab fridge. If she finds out you were here, she’ll kill me.”
Perfect.
Jilly, whom Calvin had given his life to save, still didn’t want to be saved.
Dana had been staring at Calvin, but now she turned to look at Jilly.
“You,” she growled.
Jilly’s face flushed and she swallowed hard, taking a step back—which ironically put her back into her closet-slash-jail-cell.
“You’re going to have to stay here,” Dana told her.
“We can’t just leave her,” Garrett protested.
“Yes, we can,” Dana said.
Jilly looked like she actually might start to cry. But she nodded righteously. “Thank you,” she said. “All I wanted was for you to leave me alone.”
“We’re on it,” Dana told her. “Believe me.” She looked from me to Milo to Garrett to Calvin. “Jilly’s not our biggest problem right now. Everyone, help her clean up this mess. If she wants to stay here, this is where she’ll stay—for now. But if Rochelle comes home and finds this mess, yeah, she will kill Jilly.”
Garrett and I immediately got to work putting all those books back onto their shelves. Milo came over to help, but first he placed a steadying hand on a wobbly Cal.
Dana had broken away from their embrace, and Cal had been left standing there, shifting his weight from left to right and back, as if testing his legs.
“You okay?” Milo asked Cal, who nodded his response.
He was now staring down at his legs as if waiting for himself to fall to the ground, or maybe to wake up from this crazy dream.
“What now?” Cal asked. It might’ve been my imagination, but I thought I could actually see the blood vessel in his temple pounding. He was breathing heavily, too.
“Does it hurt?” I blurted, my voice cracking.
Cal looked up at me, surprise in his eyes. “What? Hurt? No! I feel… Well, I actually feel great.”
“We need to get Calvin someplace safe,” Dana said. She was helping put the books back, too.
“I can get my own self someplace safe,” Cal pointed out, marching a little in place as she picked up that tattered copy of Harry Potter.
“Dude,” Garrett asked Cal. “This is so cool. Are you a Greater-Than, now?”
Dana hit Garrett with the book.
“Ow!”
“He’s not a Greater-Than,” Dana told him as she put Harry back on the shelf. “He’s a fricking instant Destiny addict who, yes, will probably develop some freakishly uncontrollable powers before he dies a hideous and awful death.”
Cal nodded. “Well,” he said, “my life expectancy was shorter than most people’s anyway. He walked again at the very end—they can put that on my gravestone.”
He was trying to be casual, but I heard the quaver in his voice. “Stop it,” I said. “Both of you! There’s got to be something we can do to…to…fix this!”
/> There’s not. Dana didn’t say it aloud, but I knew she was thinking it, because there wasn’t. A Destiny addiction equaled death. Period. The very final end.
“We’ll go back to Calvin’s,” she said instead. “Do research, and figure out at least where we’re going to get his next dose of Destiny. He’s going to need more in about a week. Two weeks if we’re lucky.”
Calvin walked over to me—it was going to take me a while to get used to that—and he hugged me, patting me on the back reassuringly. It was weird. In the past, hugs from Cal involved my bending over his chair. I realized then that he was taller than me. That was weird, too.
“This wasn’t your fault,” he told me, but we both knew that it was.
“I’m going to fix this,” I told him.
Like Dana, Cal thought that was an impossibility.
Meanwhile, Milo was talking to Jilly, who’d come back out of the closet after dumping the bowl of blood into the lab fridge, along with the empty plasma bag. Garrett took the bowl and sponge from her, running it back into the kitchen to rinse it in the sink.
“We’re going to leave you here,” Milo told the girl. “But you need to promise that if we can locate your family and if we can figure out a way to keep them safe, you’ll let us help you break out of this place.”
Jilly laughed, and it made me wonder what she knew that we didn’t. “Absolutely,” she said. “But good luck with that.”
“Help us out. What’s your last name?” Milo asked again.
“Fuck you,” she said again, and pulled the door to her makeshift prison closed, using her TK to throw the bolt.
And that, really, was the final proof that she absolutely wanted to stay there. If she could lock the bolt like that, she could also unlock it to get out. When I turned to look at Milo, I could tell that he was thinking the same thing, and the expression on his face was an awful mix of anger and vulnerable pain. I wanted to reach for him and silently ask about his horrendous seven months (seven months!) of abuse as a child, but I knew that he’d pull away from me. He wouldn’t want to get into that here. We had no time—because I’d just killed my best friend.
“We can find her info on my dad’s office computer.” Garrett spoke up in the sudden silence, surprising us all by being extra-useful. “He has access to National Medical Records. Jill or Jilly with a twin named Ron and a brother named Jack? That should be enough data to get their last name and even a phone number.”
“That’s assuming they went to see a doctor in the past year,” Milo pointed out grimly.
Garrett shrugged. “I’m sure they did. With a three-year-old?” He wasn’t kidding. He honestly didn’t get it. In his world, people didn’t have to choose between a toddler’s visit to the doctor and their next week of meals.
Milo didn’t attempt to educate him. He just shook his head as he came toward me.
“I am going to fix this,” I tried telling Milo this time, and his eyes softened with both grief and sympathy. I knew he was in Dana and Cal’s camp. Like them, he believed that was an impossibility. He reached for my hand and sent me a wave of sorrow-laced Still thoughts, and this time I was the one who jerked my hand away.
Still thoughts weren’t going to save Calvin, but just maybe crazy, outrageous, outside-of-the-box thinking could come up with something that we’d missed. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my contacts as Dana said, “Let’s go.”
I found the number I was looking for and hit Connect as Calvin picked up his wheelchair and carried it out of the house.
————
“That’s a myth,” Dana said flatly.
“No,” Morgan countered. “It’s not.”
“So there’s hope,” I said eagerly.
Dana turned on me. “No, there’s not,” she said, biting off her words sharply. “Even if what Morgan’s saying is true, the last thing we need here is some stupid false hope—”
“It is true,” Morgan said. “I’ll say it again, more slowly, so that even you can understand, despite your anger issues. Two people, both male, both normies like Calvin, survived being detoxed from Destiny. It was dangerous—the treatment involved stopping their hearts and putting them into a medically induced coma—but they’re both still very much alive. And addiction free.” He turned to me.
“But as far as hope goes, darling,” he continued, “you might want to review that math before you start planning Calvin’s next birthday party. Only two people out of thousands have survived. Most don’t make it past the stop-their-heart part of the procedure, and the rest never wake up from the coma. So while Cal’s chance of dying from his Destiny addiction isn’t a hundred percent, it’s flipping close. Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine-nine.”
My heart sank as I watched Dana reach out and hold tightly to Calvin’s hand.
We were sitting in Cal’s playroom. His mom was still out of town, and his dad had left a note on the fridge saying he was pulling another all-nighter at the office.
And yes, as we were leaving Rochelle’s, I’d called Morgan and left a message begging for his help—saying only that we’d had an emergency, and that if he could come out here tonight, we’d pay him an extra thousand dollars. I had no idea where we were going to get the first thousand we were supposed to pay him for visiting Sasha—but the promise of a second had just fallen out of my mouth.
To my surprise, the G-T had actually shown up at Calvin’s door moments after we ourselves arrived. He rang the bell, and I’d checked the security cam to see him standing there in human form—fully dressed, thank goodness—in staid khaki pants and a muted blue polo shirt.
“I was already in town,” Morgan told me when I’d opened the door, “since the meeting with Sasha is scheduled for early tomorrow morning, and I’m really not a morning person.”
I was confused when he’d said that, because we’d left it that we were going to get in touch with him after the meeting with Sasha was scheduled, and it still hadn’t been scheduled. He just smiled as he walked past me into the house, saying, “Check your messages on your phone, Bubble Gum.”
And indeed, as I closed the door with my hip, I saw that I’d missed a text from my mom, who loved cutesy shortcuts: Mtg w Sasha 2morrow @ 8:30am!!! OK w U? Cn Cal drive U, I hve 2 wrk. ;-(
OK and TY sooooo much!!! :-) !!! I quickly typed back, responding with her mom-approved three-exclamation-point excitement, complete with many extra Os in so, in part to make up for her ridiculous lack of vowels. I looked up to glare at Morgan. “Did you bug my phone?”
Morgan laughed. “Yes, because your life is sooooo exciting,” he said, obviously sarcastically. “Trust me, darling, I wasn’t eavesdropping on you. I simply know these things.”
But that was when he spotted Calvin talking to Milo on the other side of the room, and he immediately stopped laughing—recognizing instantly that Cal was now a Destiny user.
“But I didn’t know that,” Morgan added under his breath. He glanced at me. “I assume this is your emergency? Funny, I didn’t take Calvin for the reckless type.”
I nodded, but then shook my head. “He was injected by accident,” I said.
“Nothing’s ever really an accident, is it?” Morgan mused as he studied Cal.
“This was.” We both turned to see Dana, and one look at the thundercloud that was her face was enough for Morgan to back down.
He nodded. “How can I help?”
“Aside from time traveling back a few hours and telling me not to let Calvin go with us into Rochelle’s house?” Dana said. She shook her head and lowered her voice. “We’re beyond help, but thank you for asking. That’s…very generous of you.”
Morgan glanced at me. “Sky offered me an extra thousand dollars to come here tonight. This is purely business.”
Dana shot me a WTF look, then shook her head in disgust. “Of course it is. What was I thinking?
”
“Morgan! How’re you doing, bay-bay?” Cal had spotted the Greater-Than, and he strode over and gave him a bear hug. “Welcome to mi casa.”
“You seem cheerful enough.” Morgan pulled back to look at him with narrowed eyes. He glanced at Dana and me. “Has drug-induced delusion already set in?”
Over time, Destiny gives users a deluded sense of superiority as it erodes their ability to empathize. It eventually even turns them sociopathic. As their powers increase, they begin to believe they’re invincible, too. Unstoppable and perfect. Better than—as opposed to Greater-Than—with absolutely no compassion for anyone.
That was when you got the D-addict who killed his or her own baby because they wanted a little quiet in the house. Of course, a jokering addict would add some serious crazy to their problem solving. A jokering addict might not just kill the kid to shut him up, but also cook and eat him for a snack.
But Dana answered Morgan’s question with a quick shake of her head. “It just happened. His first dose. It was only about an hour ago.”
“And he can already walk?” Morgan’s eyebrows were up. “That must’ve been some extra-potent D. Of course, everyone responds to the drug differently.” He turned to ask Cal, “Have you noticed any other powers? Aside from this intense self-healing that your body’s been doing?”
Cal looked from Morgan to me to Dana. “You mean, can I move shit with my mind? No. And believe me, I’ve been trying.”
“Don’t try too hard,” Morgan warned. “Let the D in your system do its thing on its own time.”
“Yeah, and when did you get your medical degree?” Dana asked Morgan, folding her arms across her chest as she gazed coolly up at him.
“About a year ago,” he told her, completely seriously. “And no, I didn’t attend an accredited university. It was purely self-study, so I’m only the equivalent of a medical doctor, but right now I’m all you’ve got.” He turned back to Cal. “You do understand how serious this is, don’t you?”
“I’m just living in the moment,” Cal said, nodding yes. “BTW, I feel great. You don’t know how shitty you feel until you realize you don’t feel shitty anymore. So I’m just going to enjoy that while I can, if that’s okay with you. Oh! We should dance. Who wants to dance?”
Wild Sky Page 21
