Dangerous Destiny: A Night Sky novella

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Do I look like I’m playing around?” I asked.

  He let out a steady exhalation and sat back in his wheelchair, folding his hands behind his neck. “I think you’re losing it,” Cal warned.

  “Okay, so then answer me this,” I insisted. “Why is it that the dolls in Sasha’s room were all messed up? And why is it that things in my room are being messed with too?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone’s been putting my stuff in weird spots. Like my cat poster.”

  Calvin snorted. “That jacked-up picture of the kitten hanging on a tree branch?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. “When I fell asleep last night, it was hanging on my wall, and when I got up this morning, not only was it not there, but it had been removed from the frame, rolled up, and stashed in my closet!”

  Calvin leaned forward and hummed the Twilight Zone theme. He wiggled his fingers in front of my face. “Whoever did it must be really tall to get into your room through the second-story window with no trees or ladders to climb.”

  “All right, fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Fine. Don’t believe me.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry,” he said, throwing his arm over my shoulder. “I know you’re upset. I won’t joke around anymore.”

  The news came back on with a completely different story. And we silently left the shop and got back into Calvin’s car.

  “I don’t know, Sky,” Calvin finally said as he pulled out of the CoffeeBoy parking lot. “Sometimes people just really suck. Plain and simple.”

  “I totally agree,” I said, “but I don’t think that Mr. Rodriguez is one of those people.”

  Calvin put his left blinker on, turning when the light changed from red to green. All of the disbelief was gone from his face, and now he just looked sad.

  “I know I’m right, Cal.” I’d just glanced down at my bitten fingernails, so I didn’t see exactly what it was that made him hit the brakes so hard that the car came to a sudden, lurching stop.

  The sound of our tires squealing was overpowered by the roar of a motorcycle engine. Apparently, we had narrowly missed hitting a bike.

  “Damn!” Calvin hissed, and we watched as the motorcycle driver pulled away in a flash of red leather and an opaque helmet. “People need to learn how to drive!”

  I watched the motorcycle get smaller and smaller as it moved farther from us, while I struggled to slow my pounding heart.

  We were okay. The biker was okay. No one was choking on their own blood, gasping as they struggled to breathe…

  And Calvin—who had only the vaguest idea why my mother had that stupid rule about my not being allowed to ride in a car with a driver who was less than thirty years old—had no clue that I was about to pass out from fear.

  “All right. I think I’ve had enough almost-heart-attacks for one day,” Calvin quipped with a laugh.

  “Don’t joke,” I said sharply, unable to keep myself from glancing nervously at Calvin’s chest, because I knew he had the heart health of a seventy-year-old man. “That’s not funny.”

  He stopped laughing.

  “Sky?” he finally said, watching the road as he drove—slowly and carefully this time. “Sometimes people suck. Things suck. A lot of it really sucks.” He glanced at me, his eyes so serious I had to look down. “And when that happens, after you’ve exhausted all your resources, the only thing you have left is laughter.” He pulled into the school and slugged his car into Park. “And in this life, I plan to laugh my damn ass off.”

  Chapter Five

  And then it was Friday.

  It was a normal enough school day, followed by more fruitless searching for Sasha, made worse by the fact that Calvin now believed what the police believed—that the little girl was dead, murdered by her own father.

  I’d had a typically strained dinner with Mom, then escaped to Calvin’s to watch a movie—after which we’d set off in search of chocolate to make those stupid s’mores. And we’d ended up taking that ill-fated trip across the tracks to Harrisburg.

  To the Sav’A’Buck.

  Previously, in Skylar’s weirdly messed-up life, she and her bestie ventured into a grocery store in a super-low-rent part of town, where they were threatened at gunpoint by a large-bosomed female contortionist wearing designer shoes. Facing a hideous and somewhat embarrassing death-by-crazy-lady, they were rescued at the last second by a height-challenged super-girl with a blond pixie cut, a red leather motorcycle jacket, and an industrial-strength death glare.

  Yeah.

  And as if all that wasn’t freakishly weird enough, after disarming and karate-chopping the crazy killer-clown-lady into submissive unconsciousness, Motorcycle Girl somehow knew my name.

  “Way to protect Tiny Tim here, Sky,” she’d said.

  I looked at Calvin and he looked back at me, equally disturbed—so much so that the Tiny Tim insult didn’t penetrate. Or maybe he was still too stunned to speak. I’m pretty sure I was in shock too.

  “What were you waiting for?” the girl asked me, genuinely annoyed. “A sign from God? News flash! She’s a little too busy with the real important shit to put in an appearance in this craphole.”

  She marched over to a stack of red plastic shopping baskets and yanked one off the top so she could…?

  Grocery shop. Seriously.

  There were quite a few things I wanted to do after nearly getting shot to death in the Sav’A’Buck by a murderous trophy wife from hell. Using the nearest bathroom so as not to add the awfulness of pee-pee pants to my swamp butt was high on my list. But food shopping?

  Motorcycle Chick inspected a little box of tuna before throwing it into her basket. And then she stepped over the former Little Miss Sunshine before heading to aisle seven, her biker boots click-clacking on the industrial tile floor.

  The rest of the store had completely cleared out by then, the shoppers and the store clerks stampeding through the front doors in a flurried panic. I could see people’s headlights through the windows of the store as they peeled out of the parking lot in a hurry.

  I still couldn’t move. I had to be in shock.

  Cal placed a shaky hand on my arm. “Dude,” he said, staring down at the security guard and the crazy lady as they lay unconscious in front of us. At least the guard was unconscious. I could see him breathing. But Little Miss Sunshine was not moving at all. “Dude.”

  Motorcycle Chick reemerged from aisle seven and headed back toward us. Her basket was already filled to the brim. I spotted at least six huge jars of peanut butter as she walked past us on her way to the deserted registers.

  “Hey!” I finally got my feet to move again as I followed her. I also managed to find my voice, but it sounded thin and tiny—as if I were Sasha’s age. “How do you know my name?”

  The girl looked up at me and said, “Oops,” before taking a wad of cash from one of her many pockets. She threw it onto the register. The tinny music from the overhead speakers echoed through the empty store.

  “Hey!” I said again.

  She didn’t pay attention to me as she swung herself over to the other side of the checkout counter. She picked off a couple of plastic bags and started packing her food. Only then did she say, “I’m in your class at school?” But she said it as a question, as if she knew I wouldn’t buy it.

  Cal spoke up from behind me. “If you went to our school, we definitely would have noticed you.”

  “Caught by the bullshit police,” she said without looking up. “And speaking of police, they’re gonna be here soon. The real ones. You should go. Girl like you doesn’t want to draw too much attention to herself.”

  “A girl like me?” I repeated. The heavy incredulity in my tone made me sound a little older now. Maybe twelve or even thirteen.

  “Don’t play games.” She double-bagged the pile of peanut butter jars and then knotted the bag with deliberate, almost aggressive precision. “I saw what you did with that Taser.”

  “I didn’t do anything
with the Taser. I mean, I tried to taze the crazy lady, yeah. But it didn’t work, obviously—”

  “I’m talking about your abilities.” The girl looked up at me then as she enunciated the word with four crisp syllables. Her eyes were the color of crystal, heavily rimmed with charcoal-colored liner, and I couldn’t look away.

  But then what she said sunk in. My a-bil-i-ties? The word made me uneasy. “I don’t know what you’re—” I started.

  “Your powers.” She nodded toward the woman on the ground behind me. “Tits McGee over there? She could smell it on you. Destiny addicts sense it sometimes, when they joker. Kinda the way one G-T can recognize another.”

  One G-T can wha…? I looked at Calvin and he looked back at me, equally lost. Clearly Motorcycle Girl wasn’t speaking some kind of Floridian street code that I, a nonnative, couldn’t decipher.

  “Was that even a sentence?” Cal asked her. “When Destiny addicts joker? What does that mean? Can you try again, please, in American English?”

  “I’m pretty sure that lady couldn’t smell anything over the disgusting fish stank,” I added, and now they both looked at me.

  “Fish stank?” the girl repeated, as incredulous as if I’d just announced that I pooped rainbows and diamonds.

  “And now you’re freaking me out,” Calvin said as he pointed to me. “First the weird sewage smell in Sasha’s room—”

  “You smelled sewage in Sasha’s room?” Motorcycle Girl demanded, skewering me again with those odd blue eyes.

  But I was the one who got up into her face—so much so that Calvin grabbed on to one of the belt loops of my jeans shorts to hold me back. “How do you know Sasha?”

  She looked away first, and when she met my eyes again, her expression was almost apologetic. Almost.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, and for the two seconds that it took her to say those words, I actually believed her.

  But then she took a bite of an apple that she’d left out of her tightly tied bags. Like this was the perfect time and place for a snack. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to eat again.

  “I know about Sasha because she was all over the news for, you know, her fifteen seconds of fame,” she said with her mouth full. “Hundreds of girls go missing every day, Red. I’m one of the few who cares enough to remember their names. That’s how I know Sasha. And Betsy and Clarice and Lacey and DeNika and—”

  “Did you take her?” I interrupted her, with all of the rage and grief from the past week making my voice quiver. “Do you have her? Give her back!”

  “Oh, Bubble Gum,” the girl said, shaking her head. “I wish it were that easy. And I swear to you, if I knew where she was, I’d tell you. But I don’t.” She sharply lifted her head then and said, “Police are on their way.”

  Only then did I hear it—sirens. But they were way, way in the distance.

  “I’d love to stay and chat some more,” she continued as she effortlessly lifted her two bags with one hand, apple still in the other, and started for the door, “but I gotta go. And I’ll repeat, FYI, that you and Wheels definitely don’t want to be here when the police show up. Not with your powers. That won’t go well.”

  Again with the powers, and again with that uneasy feeling in my stomach. Still, I laughed as we followed her. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  With lightning speed, she tossed her apple high into the air, then grabbed a heavy box of soup that was in a display right by the door, next to the ancient, broken Redbox machine, and flung it at Cal’s head. I reached out instinctively, grabbing the box in midair, right before it hit him in the face. I mean, right before. I could feel the tiny hairs on my arms tickling Calvin’s forehead. It was weird, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t been standing that close to him before she’d grabbed for the soup.

  “What the Hay-ell—” Cal started.

  “Nuff said,” the girl interrupted him matter-of-factly. She caught her apple before it hit the floor and took another large bite. “Don’t worry, Scoot. Skylar’s learning. You’re not gonna die. At least not today.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked Cal even as I found myself thinking about the alarm clock and the cat poster, as the girl’s crisp voice again echoed in my head. A-bil-i-ties…

  Cal, meanwhile, had narrowed his eyes at the girl now walking out the Sav’A’Buck door before looking up at me. “I’m fine,” he replied. “Except my cray-cray limit has maxed out.”

  I set the soup down on the floor before following the girl into the parking lot. I had to know more. “Hey! Wait!”

  Calvin kept pace with me. “Really?” he was muttering. “We really want more of this?”

  The girl had stopped next to a huge motorcycle—the only vehicle left in the lot besides Cal’s car—but now she turned to face us. She was still munching away on her apple.

  “I don’t get you,” I said. “So I caught the soup box. I can catch. I’ve always been able to catch. Big deal.”

  “It is a big deal,” the girl said as she stuffed the bags into the small back trunk of her motorcycle, then tossed the apple core across the parking lot. She kicked away the stand and climbed onto the bike. It made her look even more petite, but no less of a badass. “It’s a really big deal, Bubble Gum. If you’re not careful, they’ll come for you next.”

  And now it was the memory of that shadowy figure I thought I’d seen in Sasha’s room that made me shiver.

  Meanwhile, those distant sirens were getting louder.

  “Gotta go,” she said.

  “Wait!” I yelled as the girl started the bike’s engine. I could barely hear my voice over the roar. “Please!”

  Motorcycle Girl revved the engine before leaning forward and glaring at me with eyes so intense that, again, I couldn’t look away. “Listen to me. I’ll be in touch. But right now, get into your car, both of you, and drive away. You need to get the hell out of here. Now.”

  With that, the girl sped off on her motorcycle, leaving a cloud of dust and a whole crapload of unanswered questions behind.

  At the same time, a different question was answered.

  I looked down at Cal. He looked up at me and nodded. It was definitely Motorcycle Girl that we’d nearly hit and killed yesterday. Coincidence, or had she been following us?

  Neither one of us said a word as we got into Cal’s car. We “got the hell out of there” before the police arrived, because I’d had that little talk with Detective Hughes, and Motorcycle Girl was right. It hadn’t gone well.

  “I can’t believe you couldn’t smell that fish,” I said, finally breaking our silence as we headed back home.

  Calvin looked at me, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “Yeah. That’s what you can’t believe. A crazy lady with a gun, pulling out her own teeth, and Destiny addicts sense your powers sometimes when they joker,” he said in a very decent imitation of the motorcycle girl, “whatever the eff that means. Blondie knows both your name and Sasha’s—and you’re all about my clogged sinuses.”

  I reached for my bag, which I’d left on the floor of his car, and dug for my phone with its Internet access. Maybe we could answer some of these questions with a little help from Google. “Destiny addicts.” I nodded as I powered up my phone. “And joker. And what else did she say? G and T. Let’s see if we can find out what the eff at least some of this means.”

  • • •

  What had Calvin said? That his cray-cray limit had maxed out?

  Well, mine was now pinned. Plus that feeling of uneasiness had moved into my belly. Permanently.

  We sat in Cal’s car, pulled off to the side of the road and safely back in our neighborhood in Coconut Key, as we both used our phones and the intermittent Internet to attempt to understand what the blond-haired motorcycle girl had told us.

  A-bil-i-ties.

  “Destiny,” Calvin read, the screen of his phone almost touching his nose, “is the street name for an illegal drug, quote, a chemical compound called oxy-clepta-di-estraphen t
hat has not yet been approved for use by the corporate drug administration. Lobbyists claim it’s safe, although expensive. Says here it was developed to treat people with terminal diseases. Cancer patients with a month to live. One article says clinical trials have proven that it completely eradicates all traces of cancer in patients who’ve used it.”

  He looked over at me and there was something wistful in his eyes. “It makes users stronger, smarter, faster, literally younger. One doctor claims he gave the drug to a fully paralyzed patient, someone who needed a respirator to breathe after breaking her neck, and after a single dose, the woman was out of bed, breathing—and walking—on her own steam.”

  That was amazing. And now I knew what that look in Cal’s eyes was about.

  “What’s the catch?” I asked.

  “She died a day later,” he said. “Patient number two—a man in a similar condition—lived a little longer, but he jokered and killed the doctor before he died too.”

  And there was that word again. “Jokered?” I asked.

  “Urban Dictionary defines it as to succumb to illegal-drug-induced insanity, complete with super strength, inability to feel pain or compassion, and enhanced mental powers, à la a comic-book super-villain,” he told me.

  “So the drug’ll heal you,” I deduced, “right before it drives you insane and then kills you.”

  “Details, schmeetails,” Calvin said. “Destiny is also instantly addictive. On first use. You shoot up once, and you need to take it for the rest of your life. Or you die. It’s also ridonkulously expensive. About five thousand dollars a dose.”

  I laughed. “Seriously?”

  “According to the Internet,” Calvin pointed out. “Which means all of it might be an urban legend.” He smiled sadly. “Before I found the 5K-a-dose thing combined with the and-the-next-day-she-died thing, I was thinking, Huh, I might want to try this. You know, see if it could heal me.”

  “And be an addict for the rest of your life?” I asked, aghast.

  He shrugged. “I take blood thinners because my heart was damaged. I have to take them for the rest of my life.”