Origins: The Fire (8 page)
I grabbed hold of my fleeing composure while we bump-bump-bumped our way to the side of the road.
“Roll down your window, hurry!” Kaylee said, finger combing a few flyaway pieces of hair into order. Hunter was just turning to see who approached, his hands rammed into the pockets of black cargo pants.
I couldn’t prevent the rush of excitement at the sight of him. Even though I gave myself stern orders to play it cool. I cranked the old rotor window down, the one that stuck for Kaylee’s little brother and her mom but never gave me any problems at all.
Without the glass as a barrier, the smell of manure grew even headier.
“Hi, Mila,” Hunter said. As usual, I noticed the way his lopsided smile upturned his lips, the left side just a little higher than the right. When he tilted his head, the hood of his black long-sleeved shirt pulled loose, unleashing that
now-familiar tumble of brown waves. Waves that looked incredibly soft and practically begged for my fingers to run through them.
Okay, I really needed to stop. Kaylee and I had a deal.
I commanded my voice to sound nonchalant. “Hi, Hunt—”
“Hunter!” Kaylee squealed. “Hey, why don’t you come with us? We’re on our way to Dairy Queen, and you seriously don’t want to pass up one of the best things this town has to offer!” Kaylee leaned across me for a better view, forcing me to smash my head against the crunchy old headrest if I didn’t want to inhale a mouthful of her grapefruit-scented hair.
And wait…since when were we on our way to Dairy Queen?
I managed to wrestle my head out from behind hers. Hunter’s blue gaze immediately captured mine, searching. I got that the-world-is-fading sensation all over again. Despite my best intentions, I felt a goofy smile crawl onto my mouth. “Sounds good,” he finally said, still focused on me.
Meanwhile, Kaylee’s smile faded. She watched him watching me, and her eyes narrowed. This time, her excitement seemed forced as she bounced up and down on the seat, sending the springs into a squeaky chorus. “Yay! Mila, you jump in the back so that Hunter can sit up front, okay?
We don’t want to scare the new guy off by making him ride in the back of a pickup!”
Ha ha, very funny. “Good one, Kaylee, but how about I just squeeze closer to you?”
The edges of Kaylee’s mouth fell. She lowered her voice. “What, so that you can be all pressed up against him like a saddle on a horse?” she hissed.
Seriously? “You told me less than two minutes ago that you were acting like an idiot. Well, guess what? You’re doing it again,” I whispered back.
Kaylee glared at me before gesturing to Hunter. “Wait a second—Mila was just getting out. She wanted some fresh air, anyway.”
I gawked, trying to convince myself she was only acting crazy because Hunter had caught her by surprise. Later we’d laugh at her insanity.
Until she lowered her voice and said, “My truck, my rules. Get in the back or walk.”
Okay, so laughing wasn’t an option.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Out.”
More than anything, it was the sudden tension in my hands that made me open the door and hop out. I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t use them to grab Kaylee again.
Possibly around her neck this time.
When I leaped onto the grass before he could get in,
Hunter’s smile fell. “Are you leaving?”
“No, just getting in the back,” I said. Feeling like an utter moron at the surprised rise of his brows. “It’s, uh, nice to see the landscape from a different perspective sometimes.”
After letting loose with that little bit of ridiculousness, I clamped my big mouth shut and stomped around to the back of the pickup, climbed onto the dented rear bumper, and vaulted into the bed with a little more force than necessary. The stupid Chevy groaned.
“That’s crazy,” Hunter said. “Why don’t I—”
“Nope, I’m good. I like it back here. It’s nice.” It was much easier pretending when I didn’t have to look at him.
“Are you sure?” He sounded doubtful.
“Yep. Totally.”
After another few moments, the front passenger door whined its way shut. The truck started lumbering down the road.
I scrambled across the bed so I could slump against the cab. Never in a million years would anyone have forced me into the back of a pickup truck in Philly. It was almost barbaric. Not to mention illegal.
I stamped my foot on the bed, hard. So hard that I managed to chip the paint.
Served her right. Kaylee had a lot to answer for later. No wonder she and Parker were such good friends.
The truck gathered speed. I had to throw my hands up to
keep from eating my hair. The road noise was pretty loud, but I could still catch the conversation going on inside the cab. The back window must have been cracked.
“Are you sure she’s okay back there?” Hunter asked. I pictured him craning his head to look at me in the truck bed and kept my eyes on the trees fading behind us. He didn’t need to see me with my face all red from the wind or my hair flapping around like it was alive.
One of the first things I’d learned in Clearwater: no one ever looks good with truck hair.
“Oh, she’s fine. Like I said, she loves to ride in back. Must be a Philly thing.”
I glared at the tailgate.
“That’s right, she’s from Philly. When did she move here again?”
“About a month ago.”
“I’ve heard Philly’s got a great art scene. Did she love it there?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Even from the back I could hear the annoyance coating Kaylee’s words like the fine layer of dust that coated the truck bed, and now, by virtue of my new seating arrangement, my jeans. “Hey, here’s something fun that you can’t do in a big city like Philly…practice your drag-racing skills. C’mon, let’s see what old Butch here is really made of!”
And then the rest of her words processed. Drag racing?
Drag racing?
Had she totally forgotten me back here?
“Hey, Kaylee!” I was just reaching around to rap on the window and get her attention when the truck bolted forward. My body lurched and my palms smacked the metal bed. Kaylee’s whoop from up front was followed by an even bigger burst of speed. I grabbed for the side of the truck with my left hand.
My hair whipped my face as the truck went faster and faster, bouncing over the pockmarked road on less-than-optimal suspension. I could hear Hunter urging Kaylee to slow down, hear the thrum of the engine as she gunned it harder, and feel the truck accelerate. But under it all, I started to feel something new, something unexpected: a tiny thrill of exhilaration. The rush of embracing something dangerous started to eclipse the fear, sort of like when Bliss had taken me over that jump.
This was actually kind of fun.
The wind caught my gasping laugh and yanked it away as I slowly released my hand. Maybe this is what happened when you moved from big towns to tiny rural hole-in-the-walls…maybe it turned you into an adrenaline junkie. It was like my body was preparing for something it was meant to be doing. This really
was
fun. Great, even. I hadn’t had this much fun since—
The slide to the left was sudden. So was the hard jerk to the right that followed. My arm scraped metal…just
before I felt a surge of nothingness as my body went airborne.
One second I was flying, and the next, the scream tearing through my throat was silenced by the crushing impact.
I landed arm first on something sharp, felt a strange tearing sensation. Then I was tumbling. The world careened in a crazy spin as I bounced once, hit the ground again, and continued to roll. Tiny visual details repeated themselves—leaves, grass, blue sky—while I flipped around and around.
I landed at the bottom of the hill, staring up at a low patch of white clouds. Clouds of the stratocumulus type, if I wasn’t mistaken.
My lips moved, but no sound came out, my voice strangled by the same shock that glued me to the ground. Shock, that had to be it. What else could explain the fact that I was lying here, analyzing types of clouds instead of massively freaking out?
Other concerns ripped through my head. Like, what on earth had just happened? Why wasn’t I even the tiniest bit out of breath? Or—oh, god—why was I barely feeling any pain? Had I damaged my spine? What if I couldn’t walk?
Relief washed over me when I confirmed I could still wiggle my fingers and toes. So far, so good. I climbed to my feet, stunned to discover my dignity felt more damaged than anything else. I’d been unbelievably lucky.
“Mila!” Hunter’s sure strides quickened his descent
down the hill, Kaylee tripping after him as fast as her black platform boots would allow. That’s when the anger started to flare. “Kaylee Daniels, what is wrong with you? When your mom finds out, you are going to be grounded for life! You could have killed me!” I brushed at the grass clinging to my sweatshirt. Grass stains, I was going to have grass stains, I thought, somewhat clinically.
“Oh my god, Mila! Are you okay? I’m so, so sorry!” Kaylee sobbed, still several yards away. “Lie back down! You could have a back injury or something!”
Hunter raced to my side first. “She’s right, you need to sit down. Are you hurt anywhere?”
“I … I don’t think so,” I said. Which really didn’t make any sense, but I wasn’t about to complain. “But my left arm feels kind of weird. On the outside, above my elbow.”
“Here, let me see.” Hunter cradled my wrist and lifted the flap of shredded material that used to be my sleeve. Since I was watching his face, I saw when his expression morphed from concern to shock, saw his eyes widen. “What the…?
Mila
?”
This couldn’t be good.
“Is it really that bad? Or are you just the type of guy who gets all squeamish at the tiniest drop of blood?” I twisted to get a better look at whatever had turned Hunter into a frozen, gaping statue, just as Kaylee stumbled up.
“I was so scared—I was sure you’d landed on that rusted
hunk of metal and killed yourself!” she said, pointing at the mangled remains of a car door near the top of the hill. “Thank—” Her shriek accompanied the hiss of my inhalation.
“Mila? Oh my god, Mila!” she said. “What—what is that? Because it isn’t—”
“—blood,” I breathed at the same time.
All three of us stared at my arm. And stared. And stared. It was like none of us could believe what we were seeing.
My arm wasn’t bleeding at all. There was a huge, gaping tear in my skin, but no blood. No blood. No blood because instead of blood, a thin film of red had ruptured, allowing some disgusting milky-white liquid to leach from the wound and trickle down to my elbow.
And it got worse. Inside the cut, inside
me
, was this transparent tube with a minuscule jagged fissure shaped like a row of clamped teeth. And inside that? Something that looked like wires. Tiny silver wires, twisted like the double helixes we studied in biology.
No. No, no. I was hallucinating. I’d hit my head, after all, and I was hallucinating. That was the only explanation that made sense.
I snatched my arm away and glanced from Kaylee’s horrified face to Hunter’s shocked one. Of course, if I was hallucinating, so were they.
My hair whipped the air as my head shook side to side. I didn’t understand any of this. “I can’t… I don’t…this
is— Kaylee?” I lifted my hand, the one attached to my good arm, toward her. Only to watch her flinch away.
“Shhh, Mila, it’s okay. Let’s get you back in the truck,” Hunter said, wrapping a tentative arm around my waist. “Can you walk if you lean on me a little?”
“Hospital,” Kaylee blurted. “She needs to go to the hospital.”
My head shook faster. “No, no hospital! How can I go to the hospital, when…” We all looked at my arm again, and we could all fill in the rest. How could I go to the hospital when I was such a freak? When they’d ask me questions, and I’d have no answers? “No hospital,” I repeated grimly. “No, no, NO!”
“It’s okay, calm down. Kaylee? Kaylee! Could you help us out here a little? Come make sure she’s steady on her feet.”
For a second, I thought Kaylee was going to refuse. She looked ready to bolt. “Fine.”
She arranged herself flush with my side, her reluctance evident in the way her arm slipped around my waist without actually touching me.
As soon as he saw Kaylee had me, Hunter stripped off his black hoodie, revealing a thin gray shirt underneath. He carefully wrapped the hoodie around my wound. Unlike Kaylee, his hands were firm and steady. He didn’t so much as flinch.
“There you go, that should be okay for now.” He gently
tugged me away from Kaylee, wrapped a firm arm around my waist, and started leading me up the hill.
The ride home was as silent as the ride out had been. The entire way, Hunter cradled my hand in his and watched me with hard-to-read eyes. Eyes that were probably trying to hide his stark horror over finding out I was some kind of freak of nature, a horror that echoed my own.
Kaylee refused to say a word. Actually, she wouldn’t even look at us.
And all I could think was:
no blood.
By the time we pulled up into our driveway, I was desperate to escape, even as dread crept through my chest on spiderlike legs. Because if anyone had answers, it would be Mom. And while part of me clamored for those answers, a tiny part, deep inside, whispered that maybe I was better off not knowing.
I scrambled out the door before anyone could speak, mumbled, “See you later,” and tumbled into the late-afternoon air, a chill sweeping over me that hadn’t been present before. Because even if the tiny part was right, it didn’t matter. I had to know the truth.
As I rushed through the guesthouse front door, I told myself,
You’re blowing it all out of proportion, Mila. Mom will explain it, and everything will be fine
.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth if I’d tried.
