Night Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  It’s okay, Milo said gently.

  He was…gigantically stupid. But he was only part of the stupidity of that night. See, I should have been the designated driver, only my mother wouldn’t let me get my license. It’s beyond stupid. She thought she was—somehow—protecting me, but if I’d been in possession of Nicky’s keys… I exhaled hard. Anyway, the night was a disaster right from the start. Nicole and Mike had only been dating for about six weeks. It wasn’t a long time, but for Nicky, that was pretty much an eternity. She really liked him.

  Milo nodded. The song playing out in the club switched to one that he liked, but I could feel his attention still completely on me.

  Long, sad story short, she got pregnant. But when she told him—when Nicky told Mike—his response was to throw a party and not invite her.

  Oh, no, I felt Milo thinking.

  Oh, yeah. We found out about it—how could we not? And when we arrived, Mike was already making out with Jennifer Mills.

  It had been brutal, and Nicky had been devastated. We didn’t even have the opportunity to slink away, I continued, because as soon as Mike saw her, he took the whole thing public. He told Nicky, right in front of everyone at the party, that the baby couldn’t be his. That she was a big slut, that she’d slept with a million people—how about asking the rest of the football team if they were the father, blah, blah, blah. I laughed out loud, humorlessly. Thing was, Nicky had a reputation, but it wasn’t real. What she did with Mike was a really big deal for her. He was the first.

  I could feel Milo’s profound sadness.

  But nobody believed her. And Nicky freaked. She went running out of there, and I followed her. And I got into her car with her—I guess I figured that since I’d driven with her before when she’d been drinking… I felt Milo wince, and I added, And yes, I know that wasn’t smart. But on this night, of all nights, I knew she was sober so I got in, and I wish that I’d said, Let me drive, or God, even, Let me call my mom. I wish I’d known Dana back then, or…you.

  I knew my eyes were filling with tears, and I willed them dry, staring ferociously at my hands, held tightly now in both of Milo’s as the entire line shuffled slightly closer to the single-seater ladies’ room.

  Nicky was shouting at me, telling me to get out of the car. But I wouldn’t. I was afraid of what she might do. All I kept thinking was that I should’ve kept her from going over to Mike’s house. I should have stopped her. I should have known this would happen.

  Milo interrupted me then. It wasn’t your fault.

  Stop being so freaking nice! I shot back at him, then immediately wished that my tone hadn’t been so harsh. I’m sorry. I just wish I’d done something different. I wonder if she would have driven that fast if I hadn’t been in the car. But, finally she just took off, out of there.

  And I kept telling her to slow down, I continued, but I think she was trying to scare me. She was driving and crying and swearing, and I know you and Dana don’t think that I’m prescient, but Milo, I’m telling you that I knew. I knew—in those last few minutes—exactly when and where it was going to happen, but there was nothing I could do or say to stop her. I remember shouting at her, asking her if she really wanted to kill me too, and she…

  She’d called me a stupid bitch and said it was my fault for not getting out of the car when I had the chance.

  Milo placed his other hand on the side of my face, and I leaned into it, feeling his solid warmth and strength, and wishing with all of my heart that I could turn one of my powers into an ability to rewrite the past. Surely there was a Greater-Than somewhere who had the talent and skill to demand a do-over—and actually get one.

  She didn’t mean it, I told Milo, even though I knew he could feel my doubt. Maybe my friendship—maybe I—had meant so little to Nicole that taking me with her as she killed herself didn’t make her so much as pause.

  We were going too fast as we approached a curve in the road. I’d felt the tires slip, heard the screeching of burning rubber as we slid across the asphalt.

  Nicky had looked at me as she wildly spun the steering wheel, trying to keep the car in control. The expression on her face was one of pure horror, her mouth open in a silent scream as the car skidded sideways off the road. I shut my eyes, remembering the way the car started to roll—it was dizzying and terrifying, and it happened so fast that I don’t remember hearing anything. Not the shrieking of bending and tearing metal, and not even that one final glass-shattering crash as we slammed into the trunk of a very solid tree.

  The only sound I remember was a high-pitched buzz that faded as the world went black.

  Then, just as quickly, the blackness lightened into a white fuzziness…kind of like a TV when the cable goes out, and the high-pitched buzz came back, louder and louder, until it became an actual noise, and I realized it was a voice, screaming—and that voice was coming from me.

  I wasn’t in pain—at least not that I could tell. And Nicky was next to me, in the driver’s seat, her head slumped against the steering wheel. She had blood on her face, on her head, on her hands. There was so much blood—it was on me too. And I saw that a branch from the tree that we’d hit had come in through the broken window, and it stabbed into Nicky’s side like a long, jagged knife.

  I somehow pulled it out of her—at the time I didn’t know how I’d managed to find the strength, but now I knew I’d used my power. Except it was the wrong thing to do, because after the branch was out, there was even more blood. God, Nicky was even breathing blood—it frothed from her mouth and her nose—only she wasn’t really breathing. She was making more like a liquid gasp, the way I imagined it would sound if someone tried to inhale underwater. Her eyes were wide and white in her blood-streaked face. And she was staring at me like I should do something.

  But there was nothing I could do. Nothing! I tried to find my phone, to call 9-1-1, but I couldn’t find my bag. I searched for it, frantically, as I listened to her making those terrible, terrible sounds. Where was my phone, where was my phone, wherewasitwherewasitwhere—

  You’re okay. You’re right here. You’re with me. Milo interrupted the awfulness of the memory.

  I gasped, and as my mind returned to the present, I opened my eyes. I was with Milo, and we were finally next in line for the bathroom. The drug addict who’d wanted to be our third gave us one last, longing look as she went in and closed the door behind her.

  I saw all of it, Sky, Milo whispered in my head. I’m so sorry.

  I couldn’t do a thing. She couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t even find my phone…

  But Milo didn’t let me continue. He overwhelmed me with a mantra, coursing through my consciousness with the strong rhythmic beat of the music around us.

  Still thoughts. Still thoughts. Still thoughts.

  And I breathed in his warmth through his hand on my face, as the serenity of his thoughts worked to calm my own.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered, his mouth close to my ear. The noise of his voice was almost jarring after communicating purely through our minds.

  “I can understand why you’re dreaming about her,” Milo said.

  “Yeah, well.” I shrugged, as if trying to act nonchalant or detached now would do any good. He knew exactly how I felt.

  “What…happened after that?”

  My mouth was dry. Maybe after I used the bathroom, I’d treat myself to a soda. “Well, paramedics showed up—someone saw the accident and called for help. Which was a miracle. If they’d gotten to us even a few minutes later, Nicky probably would have died. She had a punctured lung. It was bad.”

  Milo nodded.

  “But it wasn’t fatal,” I continued. My voice was absurdly matter-of-fact, as if it was easier to talk about this in a tone that I might use to recite a grocery list. “We both went to the hospital. She stayed in the ICU for weeks. I was di
scharged that night.” I smiled bitterly. “Not a scratch on me. Of course.”

  That makes sense, considering who you are.

  Don’t you mean what I am, I shot back at him.

  I think of you as a who not a what, Milo told me calmly. How come Nicole never got a chance to apologize to you?

  I didn’t bother putting it into a nicely told story. I just let him see the whole ugly, sorry mess. My mother having a near heart attack as she came to the hospital to find me. Nicky’s parents, equally upset. The pressure they’d laid on me, as Nicky lay unconscious, to reveal the identity of the father of her child. The furtive and awful conversation I’d had with Mike in the hallway outside chemistry class, where I’d realized that he actually hoped Nic wouldn’t survive. The sudden news from my mother that we were moving—immediately—out of state. My trip to the hospital to visit Nicky, still in a coma, only to discover that she’d finally woken up—and that her parents had already shipped her off to some private facility in Europe.

  The official story was that she’d spend the next year “studying abroad.” But everyone knew she was simply being hidden away for the course of her pregnancy.

  She hadn’t called, she hadn’t texted, she hadn’t emailed. She hadn’t even sent me an old-fashioned letter.

  I suspected that she was never coming back.

  I didn’t blame her.

  “That must have been really hard for you,” Milo said quietly as he let go of me, cutting our telepathic connection.

  I looked up at him in surprise, but then realized it was finally my turn in the bathroom. Except it was more than that.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Dana. Down at the end of the hall. Loud enough to be heard over the music.

  No wonder Milo had let go of me, fast.

  “I’ll be right out,” I told them both and escaped into the privacy of the incredibly disgusting bathroom, locking the flimsy door behind me.

  Still, I knew that, even if I’d left it unlocked, I’d be perfectly safe. Because Milo—steady, strong, supportive, and sweet—would be waiting out there for me, ready to protect me.

  From everything but my own stupidly treacherous heart.

  —

  “Girl, you held me hostage for damn near forever!” Calvin tried to sound annoyed, but I knew that a huge part of him had seriously enjoyed the last hour in Pretense. As he sat back down in his wheelchair in the front seat of his car, Dana’s posture became visibly relaxed.

  “I had to,” she said simply. “Or else you would have interrupted what I was trying to do.”

  I tried not to slam the car door as I got into the backseat. “So now what?”

  “You were talking to some pretty shady dudes,” Calvin chastised Dana. “I was just trying to look out for you.”

  “I can hold my own,” Dana said. “Believe me.”

  “And as long as I’m complaining,” Calvin said, as he started his car with a roar. “The Macarena? I mean, seriously.

  Dana laughed. “You were awesome.”

  I repeated myself. Louder this time. “Now. What?”

  “Hey,” Milo said soothingly, reaching for my hand, but I snatched it away. I didn’t want to be soothed. I’d just spent an hour of my life getting us no closer to finding Sasha.

  And yeah, that was why I was pissed. It had nothing to do with being forced to spend quality time with other people’s boyfriends.

  “Now we go to Taj Mahal,” Dana announced.

  I closed my eyes and flopped my head against the high seat-back. “Seriously? We’re going to do that again?”

  “And again, and again,” Dana said. “Until your mommy says it’s time for you to go home. Tonight, anyway. If we come up cold, we’ll do your thing. But not ’til tomorrow.” She looked at Cal. “Take a left out of the parking lot, Scoot.”

  I sighed and kept my eyes closed—even though I could feel Milo watching me. And sure enough, he did the one-finger-against-my-elbow thing and our connection clicked on.

  Happy birthday to you, he sang in a not-unpleasant voice. Happy birthday, to you. Happy birthday, dear Skylar…

  I opened my eyes and looked at him and fist-pumped—“Whoo-hoo!”—and we both started to laugh.

  Dana turned in her seat to give us her WTF glare, and Milo took his hand away, digging in his pocket for another piece of gum.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Car needs food,” Cal announced matter-of-factly, breaking the too-tense silence as he drove us away from Pretense. Despite our ongoing failed attempts at finding any clues, Calvin was clearly still glowing from his vertical experience inside the club.

  I couldn’t blame him. But I also couldn’t keep myself from feeling extremely WTF-ish about this entire sniffing-out-the-sewage-smell-in-the-haystack approach. We’d spent the whole night wasting time. I mean, I appreciated Dana’s abilities and completely believed that she could use her mind-control powers to get vital information from nearly anyone—Percocet users notwithstanding.

  But it seemed more and more as if my mysterious sewage smell was not as common as we’d first believed—or that it was, possibly, unconnected entirely to Sasha’s disappearance. Maybe the traces of evil that I’d smelled out on the street and in the police station had merely been from fleeting evil-thought flatulence and not the result of someone completely, soullessly malevolent, like that old lady I’d envisioned exiting Sasha’s bedroom window.

  Regardless, I found myself feeling more and more frustrated as I thought about it, and I tried to remember all the times I’d smelled that smell. Surely there was some kind of pattern or commonality that I was missing. Kinda like what Dana had said about her sniff-out-the-Destiny-dealers approach. Find dealers who smelled like sewage, and then try to figure out what they all had in common, except… Maybe we were going about this back-assward.

  Calvin found a sign for a gas station and pulled into the lot.

  “I got this,” Dana said, and as she got out of the car to pump the gas, I found myself thinking about that list she’d made on the napkin at the Pizza Extravaganza and I sat up.

  “I need a piece of paper and a pen,” I announced, and both Calvin and Milo looked at me in surprise.

  Milo started patting his pockets as Cal reached into the cup-holder in the front and held up his phone. “You can use the note app on my phone,” he offered. “Since you’re obviously dying to start writing your novel.”

  “Shut up,” I said, except I didn’t really want him to shut up as I eagerly took his phone and clicked it on. I typed with my thumbs: “Times Sky Smelled Sewage” and then “1. Sasha’s room, night she went missing.” I backed up and made that a three instead, inserting “while babysitting for Sasha, Sunday night” as number one and “in nightmare before Sasha went missing” as two.

  Milo leaned forward to see what I was typing, reading aloud so that Calvin could follow.

  “Four was during a freaky daydream I had about the old-lady-thing climbing into my own window,” I remembered, as I typed it in. “Five was outside my house on the Saturday after we first met Dana at the Sav’A’Buck”—had that really been less than a week ago?—“right before Garrett came over to help look for Tasha…”

  “Six was when you barfed on the sidewalk,” Cal reminded me, “when Garrett stopped to offer you a ride.”

  Six was really in a dream I’d had about Sasha, but as I was making this list, I discovered that I wasn’t interested in the dreams and visions as much as I was in real-life instances of smell sensitivity.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Seven, the police station, when I found out Detective Hughes had died, and eight, right before the police swooped in and arrested Sasha’s dad.” I looked up at Milo and Calvin. “I think that’s it. Now we have to figure out what all these things have in common, in addition to the smell. And FYI, I’m deleting all of the dreams and visions.” I backspaced o
ver two and four, which left me with six different instances.

  “Police and police, for the last two,” Cal suggested, but I was already shaking my head.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “I know it.”

  “Why don’t you go down the list,” Milo suggested, “one at a time, and show me what you remember, starting right before you smelled the sewage. Maybe something will stand out.” He held out his hand, and I realized what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to share those memories with him telepathically, like we’d done in the club.

  Cal knew something weird was up between Milo and me, and he narrowed his eyes a little and said, “Or just talk through it, if that’s easier.”

  But I shook my head, and lord, I hoped it wasn’t only because the boyfriend-stealing monster inside me wanted to hold Milo’s hand, and that it wasn’t just a convenient excuse to say, “No, I think it’ll be more complete, more detailed if we do it this way.”

  I purged all kissing thoughts from my mind and just did it. Grabbed hold of his hand.

  And there was Milo, warm and familiar, inside of my head.

  Start with the most recent memory. I don’t know whose thought that was—it was possible we were both thinking the same thing. But I began with my recollection of the moments right before I smelled the sewage and spotted Edmund in the bushes near Calvin’s house.

  I was still upset from being scared that something terrible had happened to Cal. I was walking swiftly, and Kim’s gym shorts were thinking about giving me a wedgie…

  I hate when that happens, Milo thought.

  The sun caught the bedazzled collar of a sweet-faced little dachshund, who led his elderly owner on an equally decorated leash.

  I rounded the corner, and boom.

  Milo pulled me sharply back from the memory of the smell, and I opened my eyes to find him looking at me.