A Girl Called Dust (20 page)

Morning came too quickly, and I awoke to a
plate filled with some kind of potato cakes. They weren’t the best-tasting
things I had ever had, but I was famished. I longed for olives and beef jerky.
Maybe a slice of Mom’s pot roast.

Hollis came in about an hour after
breakfast.

“What’s the most important thing I need to
know?” I asked as soon as he stepped into the room. I couldn’t take any more of
the suspense. What I didn’t know was going to hurt me.

Hollis leaned against the door, watching
me. “You made a mess last night. I watched on the camera.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wes and Cadence came in earlier to clean
up after you before Father saw. If he thinks you can’t be controlled, he might
put you in the hole. He has to look out for everyone’s safety. Anyway, you were
crawling around the room, knocking things over, sending stuff every which way.
Barking and howling and kicking up all sorts of ruckus.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this, but I was
embarrassed that they had witnessed it. “I’ll have to thank Wes and Cadence
when I see them.”

“Anyway,” Hollis said as I joined him at
the metal table with the monitors. “The most important thing you need to know
about is the Gemini Curse.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a curse that hasn’t been implemented
for the past fifty years, but it’s come back because of the murders. It only
effects those of us who aren’t fully transformed, you know, under eighteen.
Everyone has a Gemini. Your Gemini is a Giver born the same exact time as you.
They’re your complete opposite. Your mortal enemy. As you get stronger, they
get weaker and vice versa. There’s no telling which way it will go. It’s like a
tug-of-war with fate. It picks one of you to win and that’s it. If your Gemini
grows stronger and starts to drain your strength, there’s only one thing you
can do about it. If you want freedom from this, freedom from changing and the
possibility of living in the sixth tunnel, you have to find your Gemini and
kill them.”

“What?”

“You have to kill your Gemini. You’ll know
them when you see them. Your hair will stand on end. Your skin will crawl. You
will get the taste of blood in your mouth. It’s an indescribable feeling.
You’ll just know.”

Hollis studied a monitor showing footage of
the woods. He jotted something down on a notepad. “The curse was first
implemented to help keep balance. To keep our population down. When you think
about it, with the curse, half of all creatures die, whether Giver or Taker.
But a long time before we were even born, a truce was called and the Curse was
broken. No one had to die, and no one was fighting to kill their Gemini.
However, that truce has been put in danger because of the Wendigo.”

I didn’t want to believe Hollis because I
could never kill anyone. “I can’t kill someone. Not even if I had too. It’s
just not in me.”

Hollis sighed, looking me dead in the
eyes. “You better get it in you. Keeping the Wendigo part of you controlled is
going to require strength. You’ll get that strength from your Gemini. Or you
can sit around and wait for your Gemini to kill you first. That’s always an
option.”

“Okay, this is a huge deal. Fletcher would
have mentioned something like that to me. He didn’t.”

Hollis snickered. “Fletcher Whitelock? In
case you haven’t noticed, Whitelock is an idiot. He doesn’t know if he’s coming
or going.”

“Don’t talk about my friend like that.”

Hollis narrowed his eyes at me. “You think
he’s your friend?” Then he stared harder.

“What?” I demanded.

“You love him. Don’t bother lying to me. I
know. You two are always together. I see how you look at him.”

I swallowed hard, hating the fact that
they watched us. “I don’t love him.”

“Liar.” Hollis grabbed the keyboard and
pulled it close to him. “Anyway, let’s see what lover boy’s been up to.”

He typed some numbers out, and the scene
on the monitor changed. Fletcher appeared on the screen, and my stomach felt
queasy. “What’s this?”

“A recording we took a few days ago.”

Fletcher was at a park, not the park in
our neighborhood—not
our
park, but one I didn’t recognize. He sat on a
bench looking around as if he were waiting for someone. “So, you guys just
watch and record all creatures?”

Hollis shook his head. “Not everyone. Just
the ones who exhibit suspicious behavior.”

“What’s suspicious about Fletcher’s
behavior?” Sure, Fletcher was weird, but I didn’t think the way he acted was
anything for them to be worried about.

“Well, for one thing, being friends with
you. Givers and Takers aren’t supposed to run around together the way you guys
do. You may not have known anything about this up until a few days ago, but
Fletcher did. There’s a reason he became friends with you. He’s keeping tabs on
you. Keeping you on his radar for some reason.”

The room began to spin. Fletcher was my
best friend. My only friend. I couldn’t bear to think that he had only been
pretending all this time. That he had an ulterior motive. That would shatter
what was left of the world I knew.

“Maybe he just enjoys my company.”

Hollis scoffed. “Sure.”

“He doesn’t have any other friends. He
doesn’t hang with anyone else.”

“That’s because we don’t need friends. We
have each other, family, and that’s it. Outside people are a waste of time and
energy.” Hollis pointed at the screen. “Look.”

A girl came into view. A perfect-looking
girl with thick blond hair that fell in soft waves halfway down her back. She
wore a fitted trench coat and tall boots. Fletcher hopped up from the bench
when he saw her. They embraced. After a moment, they pulled away and stared at
each other. Then the unimaginable happened. Fletcher pulled her in for a long,
passionate kiss. My heart stopped.

“Who’s that girl?” My voice came out like
a croak that embarrassed me immediately. I didn’t need Hollis to know how hurt
I was. I felt the way Fletcher must have felt the day I’d seen him get hit by a
bus.

“Some Giver. She doesn’t live here. She’s
from California. They take the train on weekends to see each other.”

I thought about all the weekends Fletcher
was nowhere to be found. “How long has this been going on?”

Hollis shrugged. “They were already seeing
each other when I started recording Whitelock five months ago, so who knows?”

I watched the two as the fairy-like girl
clasped her hands around Fletcher’s neck. She looked so comfortable, as if she
had done it a hundred times before. Like she belonged there. For all I knew,
Fletcher had been seeing her since before he’d even met me, and that’s why he
said he could never love me. Not because he was incapable but because he
already had a perfect girl who I would never be able to compare to. If this
girl was his type, I clearly wasn’t.

Fletcher had been lying to me since the
beginning. I’d always given him credit for not doing that. Whenever he didn’t
want to give me an answer, he would simply say he didn’t want to answer. He
wouldn’t lie.

Straightening my shoulders, I tried my
best to hide my devastation. It was the best acting I had ever done in my life.
“Why are you showing me this?”

Thankfully Hollis clicked the monitor off,
because I couldn’t stand to watch anymore. “Because I need you to understand
this guy is not your friend. He’s a Giver. They can never truly be your friend.
We share a world, but we were born to be enemies.”

I tugged at my hair. I did that when I was
nervous. “What about my father—”

“He’s your enemy too. He may love you
because he raised you, but when push comes to shove, he’ll choose his side over
you. He has too. We all have to. Anyway, you need to stay here and away from
Fletcher.”

“Why?”

“You are the only known Wendigo in the
area. They think you’re the one killing their people. He’s a Walker. They
protect. His job is to kill you.”

I stood and paced the room. I just
couldn’t be still anymore. “What do you mean killing their people?”

“Those teachers that were killed, they were
Givers.”

“What?” I had a hard time believing that
Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Chin weren’t Human, but that would answer the question of
why they were in the woods.

“Arden, Givers and Takers had a truce for
a number of years. After the massacre, we made a deal that we needed to work
together and that we wouldn’t bother each other. Now that Givers are being
attacked and killed, and also innocent people like your friend and her
boyfriend, they’re going to come after us. Most importantly, they’re going to
come after you because they think you’re doing it.”

My breathing quickened. “But I’m not. I’ve
never hurt anyone.”

“We know that, but they don’t. We’re all
the same to them. You’re a Taker. That means you’re guilty just for being
born.”

I sat back down. “If I’m not doing it and
all the other Wendigos are trapped down in the tunnel, who is killing people?”

Hollis shrugged. “Don’t know. There’s
another Wendigo out there that’s unaccounted for, and we need to find it.”

My mind swirled with thoughts, but the one
thing I wanted to do was talk to Fletcher. I needed to know why he had lied to
me and if he had only gotten close to me so he could kill me.

“I want to leave.”

“You can’t. Besides, that would be a very
bad idea.”

I didn’t care. “I have things I need to
do.”

“You belong here. You’re not going
anywhere.” Hollis flipped the monitors back on and flipped through random
tunnels as strange creatures walked up and down the screen. “This is your home
now.”

That wasn’t happening. I couldn’t fathom
the lair being it for me and never being with my family or going to school or
hanging out with Fletcher ever again. “No. I’m not in prison.”

Hollis frowned at me. “No one here is in
prison—well, aside from the beasts. We’re allowed out in the woods at night . .
. sometimes.”

“My father will come looking for me. He’s
an Angel, a Guardian Angel. If he needed to get into this lair, he could.” I
hated to play that card, but I needed out of there.

Hollis looked at me for a long time before
pulling his phone from the pocket of his jeans. “Let me see what Father says.”

He stood up and moved away from me,
whispering into the phone. After he hung up, he returned to his seat.

“So?” I asked.

“Father says we won’t keep you here by
force, but you need to understand that you’ll be in severe danger out there.
You can’t depend on Fletcher or your father to protect you because they play
for the other team. These creatures are strong and trained. You haven’t even
transformed yet, and they’ve been doing that for a few years. You wouldn’t
stand a chance against them.”

 “I’ll take that chance. I need to
go.”

Hollis looked as if I were making the
dumbest decision in the world. “Promise me you’ll come back tomorrow. You
haven’t been trained in smell. We need to teach you how to smell a creature,
how to tell whether they’re a Giver or Taker, and most importantly, how to
smell your Gemini. You can’t survive without that.”

I figured he was right about that. “I’ll
be back tomorrow after school.”

Just then a bell rang from somewhere above
us. “Seriously? Are we in the school?”

Hollis nodded. “Technically under it.” The
other times I had been at headquarters had been after school hours, so I hadn’t
heard a bell. I found it to be a huge coincidence that we were located under
the school and two of the four Wendigo victims had been teachers. Was there a
Wendigo loose in the lair?

Hollis showed me the way out. Down a long
hallway and through a door that opened up to the janitor’s closet. We waded
through buckets, mops, and industrial-sized bottles of cleaning products. “You
can’t tell anyone our location. Not your father and especially not your
so-called friend, Fletcher.”

“I won’t tell anyone. I’ll be back
tomorrow.”

Hollis opened the door for me. “Arden,
don’t do anything stupid.”

“Okay,”
I replied, but I couldn’t make any promises.

I waited for Fletcher at the corner after
school. I had missed another day, and I didn’t want to think about the work I
still hadn’t caught up on, but with all that was happening, schoolwork was the
least of my problems. I had to worry about turning into a beast and being
killed for murders I hadn’t committed. Above all that, a best friend who had
broken my trust and my heart.

Fletcher was so busy looking down at his
phone as he approached that he didn’t even notice me. I wondered if he was
texting his girlfriend.

I stepped into his path. “Fletch, let’s
talk.”

He looked up, surprised, and put his phone
away. “Arden, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with them.”

I noticed the venom in his voice when he’d
said the word
them
. “I needed to talk to you.” I glanced around at all
the kids walking home from school. Were some of them creatures? I had no way of
knowing because no one had ever thought to teach me. “Somewhere private.”