Wild Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Chapter Twenty

  We went to Dr. Hathaway’s office “to regroup.” That was how Dana put it.

  But we all knew she was hoping to convince Cal to attempt the dangerous detox procedure sooner rather than later.

  Milo took off on the motorcycle to check up on John Doe the bounty hunter. He’d left without kissing me good-bye, which had made me shake my head. Didn’t you recognize how glad I was that you shared those memories with me? I wanted to shout after his receding taillights. Don’t you know how much I love you?

  It occurred to me then, in a flash of clarity similar to Cal’s trick with the lights in the movie theater, that maybe Milo didn’t know. What if his shame was so powerful that it made him literally unable to feel anything else?

  But as we pulled into Garrett’s driveway, Dana asked Morgan, “How long will it take you to set it all up? The detoxing? From the moment Calvin says go.”

  “I haven’t said go,” Cal was quick to point out.

  “Maybe an hour?” Morgan said. “I’ll want to defrost another batch of instafreeze adrenaline to have on hand. Dr. Hathaway has some in his medicine fridge, but not enough.”

  Adrenaline was one of the drugs Morgan would use to try to restart Cal’s heart. After we killed Cal by stopping his heart.

  “Also,” Morgan added, clearing his throat, “I want to make a quick run to the hardware store.”

  To pick up chains, because he believed the leather straps on the OR table wouldn’t be enough to hold Calvin.

  Cal was oblivious about that little uncomfortable detail. “I thought we were going to Orlando,” he complained.

  “We were,” Dana told him, “but then you were a giant asshole.”

  “I said I was sorry.” Cal sounded affronted, but then must’ve realized that he could win Dana’s heart more easily with sugar than vinegar, so he added, “And I am sorry, babe. Right now I just feel so great. And I know you’re gonna try to talk me into letting y’all stop my heart, and since the purpose of that is to get the D out of my system, then doesn’t it make sense to wait until I have less D in my system? If Morgan’s right, it’s only gonna be a day or two before I start puking again, so why not let me have this time?”

  It was a compelling argument. Plus it was then that Milo called.

  It seems he’d lost track of our bounty-hunting John Doe. Milo was going to find the man—but until he did, he wanted me to go into deep hiding. Preferably somewhere outside Coconut Key.

  “Orlando’s outside Coconut Key,” Calvin pointed out.

  Which is how we found ourselves in Cal’s car on yet another road trip, when instead we should’ve been strapping my best friend to a table and stopping his heart.

  ————

  Dana and Cal did a sneak-and-peek of the huge warehouse’s perimeter, while Morgan, Garrett, and I crouched in the lengthening shadows beside the car.

  During the three-hour drive, Cal had pulled up a map of the area and we’d all studied it, although now that we were here, Garrett was still confused.

  “We’re at the back of the warehouse,” I told him, gesturing with my chin toward the door, where a feeble streetlight flickered to life in the growing darkness, its bulb popping and buzzing as it cast weak shadows across the deserted and overgrown parking lot. “This must’ve been an employee entrance. The front is the part with all of the cargo bays. You know, where trucks can pull right up and load in or out?”

  Those huge garage-like doors were made of battered, ribbed metal. As we’d pulled up and driven slowly past the address that Calvin had burped out, we’d all made note of the heavy padlocks that kept the three doors securely shut. There had also been a fading sign out front: “For Lease, 80,000 square feet in the Heart of Orlando’s Thriving WestPark Industrial Center!”

  It had been quite some time since the word thriving could be used to describe this industrial complex. In fact, ghost town seemed more fitting. As far as I could tell, out of five separate warehouses positioned around a giant truck-sized cul de sac–type circular driveway, only the largest—the Doggy Doo Good—was currently in use.

  “That’s the Florida headquarters for Doggy Doo Good,” I told Garrett as I pointed toward the only slightly brighter lights that came from the gargantuan DDG building two warehouses down from us. If we were at twelve on a clock, DDG was at four, with the burned-out hulk of a decaying and only partially boarded-up building between us. We couldn’t see more than the glow of DDG’s lights from here—but likewise, anyone over there couldn’t see us.

  I told Garrett, “We know that their trucks are used to transport kidnapped girls like Sasha to Destiny farms. And we suspect both the local police and the FBI are involved. At the very least, they’re looking the other way. See, after the thing with Sasha, we made some anonymous tips about the kidnapping ring using DDG’s trucks, and Dana watched them go into this very warehouse, but they didn’t find anything. So either the kidnappers knew the police were coming and moved the girls or…” I looked again at this seemingly deserted building that bore the numbers 5543. “Maybe they’ve been keeping the girls off-site but somewhere nearby, like, oh, say, here.”

  With five empty warehouses to choose from in this complex, the people who kidnapped G-Ts and sold them for their blood could stash those girls anywhere. The bonus was the distant but incessant echoes of dogs barking and howling. The Doggy Doo Good warehouse included a horrible puppy mill, and the noise of the dogs would no doubt hide any stray screaming and crying from the human victims.

  I caught Morgan gazing at the burned-out warehouse next door. “This is awfully familiar, Skylar,” he murmured. “Both the visual and the soundtrack. Sasha was here. Definitely.”

  “But that was months ago,” Garrett pointed out. “Wouldn’t Lacey have been sold to some creepy Destiny addict by now?”

  “Maybe it’s like what Jilly described,” I suggested. “Maybe they bring the really powerful, older girls back here—the ones who survive. And they get them healthy and back in shape before they send them out again.” But even as I said it, it sounded really unlikely. Most girls like Jilly probably died when the clients—their mistresses—jokered. They’d be lucky to survive. Or unlucky, as Jilly had implied.

  Garrett, however, must’ve thought that was possible, because now he was pondering other big questions. “Why didn’t you do your creepy morph-into-a-dog thing, instead of sending Dana and Calvin out into the void?” he asked Morgan.

  “(A) It’s not a void,” Morgan said. “It’s twilight. It’s spooky and shadowy, and spooky and shadowy is good when your goal is to not be seen. And (B) Doggy Doo Good has canine sensors outside the warehouse. I spotted them when we drove in. Trust me, I’ve learned to recognize them. They’re set to sound an alarm if a dog gets loose. So, don’t be a dog, right? I don’t know their range, and I didn’t want to accidentally set them off.” He looked at me. “They’re also probably set to sound an alarm if the sensors are triggered by small humans. Small females, around Sasha’s size and age…?”

  I nodded. Still, Morgan had given in a little too quickly when Cal had announced that he and Dana were going to surveil the warehouse.

  “You guys wait here,” Cal had ordered.

  There had been something about Morgan’s face as he’d clamped his mouth shut that told me he was actually hesitant to disagree with Calvin.

  Was the super-G-T seriously scared of my best friend, I now wondered.

  Morgan did his read-my-mind-without-actual-telepathy thing. “Not scared, darling. Cautious,” he said quietly to me out of the corner of his mouth.

  Still, it was enough to make me think. Hard.

  How were we going to convince a kind of scary Calvin to submit to the detox procedure? I just couldn’t imagine him volunteering to be strapped onto that operating table in Garrett’s dad’s office.

  And as Garrett went into Calvin’s car to get
his jacket—it was getting nippy—I whispered to Morgan, “Do you honestly believe there’s a chance that the detox will work, or are we just using it as an excuse to put Calvin down, like a rabid dog?”

  “Good analogy,” he said. “There’s no cure for rabies, either—and it makes dogs both terrified and insane. If your dog got rabies, wouldn’t you want to be humane?”

  It wasn’t quite an answer—and yet it was, and my heart sank. “But Cal’s not a dog,” I whispered back fiercely.

  “So we should treat dogs better than we treat people?” he asked, one eyebrow raised.

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t have time, but even if I had, I’m not sure how I would’ve answered that.

  But not only did Garrett rejoin us, but Cal and Dana also came running back to the car, their footsteps soft and quick on the pavement.

  “There are definitely people in there,” Cal said, sounding a little too gleeful, considering just how dangerous this was. If we got caught, Dana, Morgan, and I would be kidnapped and sold as slaves, while Cal and Garrett would be murdered where they stood. Of course, if we survived, we had Convince Calvin that we’re going to save him while really we kill him before he jokers at the top of our to-do list. In light of that, slavery and murder seemed almost acceptable.

  “Three people in a small room, here in the back,” Cal continued. “There was a skylight on the roof that we looked through, and we think we saw her.”

  “What? Her? You mean, Lacey?” I asked, looking sharply at Dana.

  Her face was impassive. “I’m not positive. We can’t be sure…”

  Calvin made an impatient sound. “It was her,” he insisted. “Seriously. It had to be.”

  “That girl—the second girl—was wrapped in a blanket, and we only saw her face for a moment,” Dana started.

  “But she looked exactly like Dana. Identical eyes,” Cal said. “Plus she was the right age.”

  Dana nodded carefully.

  “The second girl,” I repeated. Cal had said there were three in this back room. “Who’s the first girl? And who else is with them?”

  “This is where it gets extra crazy,” Cal said. “The first girl was April. For real, Sky. It was April, from school.”

  I frowned. “Wait. April April? As in, crazy April from last year?”

  Calvin and I had become friends under extremely stressful circumstances—to put it mildly. I’d been the new kid at Coconut Key Academy, and Cal and I had bonded over lunch—just in time to save each other from a disgruntled student named April who had started waving two very lethal-looking guns around in the middle of the school quad. The consensus had been that she was attempting to commit suicide-by-cop, and for some weird reason had decided that I should also die that day.

  Long story short, everyone had lived, but April had been arrested. I’d always assumed she’d been transported to some court-ordered psych ward. Although the mysterious circumstances surrounding that whole ordeal, and the ominous words April had whispered to me—You. You’re one of us—before the cops took her away, had recently made me wonder if April was a G-T.

  Cal nodded. “Yup. That April. But it’s weird. She looks…better than she did before. Like, not so crazy. Like she has her shit together. I dunno. That doesn’t make sense if she’s being rented out to Destiny addicts. Although maybe her last owner was nice—”

  “Cal,” Dana interrupted him.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Sorry. I forgot that Destiny addicts can’t be nice. My bad.”

  “Three people in the back room,” Morgan said, bringing us back on track. “I assume the third’s a guard?”

  “Looks like it,” Dana reported, “although I didn’t see any weapons. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one.”

  “The guard’s a woman?” I asked.

  Dana nodded. “Older woman. Midfifties,” she said in a tone that was carefully devoid of emotion. She sounded like she was reciting a laundry list. “Short, gray hair. Military apparel, but again, not visibly armed.”

  “How about the rest of the warehouse?” Morgan asked. “Anyone else there?”

  Cal nodded. “We couldn’t see inside, but Dana used her G-T mojo. She could feel that there’re a dozen people in the front of the warehouse.”

  Dana turned to me. “When we were looking through that skylight, we saw a series of pipes that makes me believe there’s a water source—a bathroom or a kitchen—in the next room over from where the guard is with the two girls. If we can flood that area fast, the three in the back will come out the back door while the guards in the other part of the warehouse go out through the doors in the front.”

  I nodded. That made sense. For at least a short time, April and the other girl—maybe, please God, it was Lacey—would be alone outside with a single guard. And us. One against five G-Ts plus Cal and Garrett were odds that I liked. Provided we could get the two girls into the car and zoom out of there before the twelve people from the front of the warehouse stopped us.

  Still, I glanced at Cal, remembering the last time I’d used my water-based TK to try to help. “You sure you want me to—”

  Dana cut me off. “Just do it.”

  ————

  It was a good thing that adrenaline was my best friend when it came to channeling my G-T abilities. Because at the moment? Adrenaline and I were having a serious bonding session.

  I could feel my heart racing as I pictured Dana’s helpless sister inside that warehouse, and my heart pumped even faster.

  It was now or never. I could sense the water inside that warehouse, too. A lot of it. I could feel the pulsing rhythm of the water traveling through the pipes, just as surely as I could feel my own blood working its way through my veins.

  Thum-THUM. Thum-THUM.

  All of these girls, taken and used—for what? Why did this need to happen to innocent people? Why did Cal—my best friend and one of the greatest people I’d ever met—find himself sentenced to almost-certain death because of greedy, selfish people like Rochelle? Why?

  I was ANGRY! SO ANGRY! SO! ANGRY!

  Maybe a little too angry, come to think of it.

  Water burst out of the pipes with such force that the first-floor windows exploded outward, sending shards of glass flying through the air.

  For a moment, my mind sent me back to that day in the school quad with April—the day that Calvin had saved my life and I’d saved his. The day that April had been taken away in a police vehicle. Windows had shattered on that day too.

  This time? I knew the destruction was my own doing.

  I took a step away and covered my head with my hands to keep any flying fragments from hitting me. Dana had draped her body over Cal’s, while Morgan shielded Garrett. Water roared out from the building and onto the pavement, picking up bits and pieces of debris as it dispersed into smaller rivulets on the slope of the driveway.

  The next sound was the back door as it burst open.

  Twilight had surrendered to true darkness, and the light from the open doorway illuminated the pitted ground. By now, Cal, Dana, Morgan, Garrett, and I were all tucked off to the side, huddled behind a rusted and long-forgotten blue mailbox, our figures blending into the dark outlines. Around our feet, water rushed and twisted as it seeped downstream toward the storm drains.

  “Careful! Step carefully!” It was the voice of the guard—the older woman, barely audible over the roar of the water. She held the door open, and I could see that her boots were soaked through as water rushed around her calves and escaped out the doorway.

  A teenage girl splashed through the doorway behind her, brown hair mashed against her wet face. Her T-shirt stuck to her chest, and she swung her arms wildly to keep her balance as the flooding water whipped around her legs.

  Calvin was right. It was definitely our old friend April.

  “Where’s Ell?” the guard asked her.


  April squeegeed her hair back from her face. “What? I thought you had her, Miss Aurora!”

  “I didn’t. I don’t!” They both turned to look back into the building.

  Dana drew in her breath sharply and said, “Lacey’s still in there!” She moved, as if to charge through the door and into the flooding building.

  But Morgan said, “Wait! Let me.”

  “Who’s out there?” the older woman demanded as both she and the girl turned sharply toward us.

  Meanwhile, Morgan had started…undressing? He pulled off his shirt and yanked off his jeans and his underwear, too.

  “Seriously?” Garrett said, but I knew what Morgan was doing, and I tried to help him.

  “Hold this,” Morgan said, thrusting his clothes into Garrett’s arms.

  He dropped into a four-legged position and, without hesitation, morphed into animal-mode. But this time, instead of a pit bull or a dachshund or even a Portuguese water dog, Morgan opted for a…horse?

  If we were surprised, I can only imagine what it looked like to April and her guard. An enormous horse—and I’m talking majestic white stallion—just suddenly appeared from behind a relatively tiny mailbox and galloped toward them.

  “What the hell!” April hollered. She pushed the guard out of the way as Morgan rushed into the building, his hooves clip-clopping and splashing through the flooded walkway.

  And that really should’ve been a clue. Along with calling the so-called guard Miss Aurora, April had just kept the older woman from being harmed. So…maybe Miss Aurora wasn’t a guard?

  But Miss Aurora was now completely spooked and probably believing they were under attack. She fumbled in her jacket and pulled out a small but deadly handgun as she moved toward our hiding place.

  Calvin either wasn’t paying attention, or he hadn’t done that particular math equation (respectful title of Miss Aurora plus April saving Miss A’s life most likely equals Miss A is neither a guard nor one of the bad guys), because before she could point the weapon in our direction, he let out an animallike growl and leaped onto the top of the mailbox. His movement was stealthy and graceful and terrifying as he extended his legs and balanced effortlessly atop the slope of the metal box. Dana and I stood up too, although something inside of me kept me from reaching out and touching him.