Dangerous Destiny: A Night Sky novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

keep her distracted…But my throat felt rusty and tight and my brain was jumping and racing from one absolutely wrong way to start this conversation to the next.
    Nice gun. Were you ten or eleven when you figured out the combination on your father’s lockbox?
    Open caskets are a tradition in my family, so do you mind not shooting me in the face?
    Aren’t you in my English Lit class?
    You said you were sorry—if you’re really sorry, just put the gun down and maybe I can help you…
    Yeah, that was the one to go with. But before I could clear the fear and dread from my throat and get my frozen mouth to move, April spoke. “That was good,” she said. “What you did. Clearing the quad. Thank you.”
    Wait, what…?
    “April, come on, just put the gun down,” Calvin said.
    Before I could ask why clearing the quad was good, I realized with a jolt of shock that not everyone out there had scattered. April and I weren’t completely alone. One kid hadn’t taken off and run for cover, despite my intentionally rude insults. It was, of course, my new friend in the wheelchair.
    Correction: My new stupid, idiotic, absolutely pea-brained friend in the wheelchair. Why hadn’t Calvin adios-ed like everyone else when he’d had the opportunity?
    Instead, he’d stayed and was intentionally inserting himself into this life-and-death drama.
    At the sound of his voice, April turned, aiming the gun at him, lowering the barrel toward the center of his mass in that chair.
    “Or at least let Skylar go,” he said to April, exactly at the same time that I said, “Calvin, get out of here!”
    With her gun pointed away from me, I was tempted to lunge at her, but Calvin was too close—there was no way she’d miss him if she pulled that trigger.
    April, meanwhile, was shaking her head, first answering Calvin with, “I can’t,” before telling me with the same tear-choked sorrow, “We need him to stay to make this work.” She turned again to Calvin. “But you have to back away. You’re too close.”
    Calvin was looking hard at me, but he moved his eyes to look at April, before looking back at me, then at April, then at me, then at April as he said, “I’m sorry, you want me to what?”
    He was obviously trying to signal me with that movement of his eyes, but I had no idea what he was saying.
    “Back away,” she repeated.
    He looked down at the coat around April’s feet and widened his eyes very slightly as he looked up at me.
    What was he suggesting? That we somehow try to trip her with her coat? Or maybe use it to stanch our wounds after she blew giant holes in both of us? I widened my eyes back at Calvin, who nodded at me, just the teeniest bit, and I suspected that he seriously wanted me to go for April while she had her gun aimed at him. I shook my head, the slight movement more like a twitch since April kept looking from Calvin to me and back again.
    “Come on, Ape,” he said as if that gun weren’t pointed at his chest. “You’re really going to shoot me?”
    Her face contorted and for one terrible second, I thought she would do it. But then she turned, swinging that barrel and pointing it at my head. “I said back! Away! Do it! Now! ”
    “Okay, okay! I’m backing away!” Calvin did just that, putting his motorized chair in reverse.
    “Keep going,” I told him, my voice shaking even as I held April’s tormented gaze. In the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens. The police were on their way, and I knew from the way that April shifted that she’d heard it, too.
    A new flood of tears filled her eyes, even as she squared her shoulders. “It won’t be much longer now,” she said, her voice back to a whisper. “They’re coming.”
    As she was speaking, Calvin had not kept going all the way into the safety of the school as I’d hoped he would. He’d stopped his chair a scant eight feet away from April, turning slightly so that he was directly facing her. As he turned his head to look over at me, trapped