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

time,” she said.
    Two more of Calvin’s fingers folded. Eight, seven…
    “This is it, Sky. I’m sorry,” April said as she used her left hand to draw the second gun, and I knew we were in trouble.
    But then, to my utter shock, instead of killing me and turning to kill Calvin, she handed me the first gun she’d been holding. Butt-first. My brain stuttered— what the hell? —even as my hand closed around the weapon’s handle.
    “No!” I heard Calvin shout from across the quad as he abandoned his countdown before he got to five and came rushing toward us. “Skylar, drop that thing! Now!”
    The world exploded.
    The cafeteria windows shattered, and I realized that the police had arrived and had opened fire at the girls, plural, who were holding deadly weapons, and one of those girls was me . I threw the gun down and it skittered across the bricks as I dived beneath the table to grab for April’s ankles, even as Calvin ran into her, hard. Her other weapon went flying out of her hands.
    She was screaming, “No! No! No!” as Calvin launched himself up and out of his chair and on top of her. I tackled her from my end, too, shouting, “She’s unarmed! The shooter is unarmed! We’re all unarmed! We’re safe! We’re safe! ”
    April was sobbing—she clearly didn’t feel safe. “No!” she kept sobbing. “No!”
    “Hands in the air!” a metallic voice shouted—one of the police officers had a megaphone. “Hands where we can see them!”
    I was on top of both Calvin and April, and I took one of her hands and pulled it out into view with both of mine even as Calvin did the same.
    “The shooter is unarmed! We are all unarmed!” Calvin and I were both still shouting a variation on the same theme, and although broken glass continued to fall out of the window frames, no other shots were fired. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard any shots—just the sound of breaking glass.
    “Don’t move! Nobody move!” the man with the megaphone shouted, and beneath me, I could feel Calvin’s relief.
    “Nobody’s moving,” he shouted back. “We’re unarmed and unhurt!”
    I turned my head, and in that brief instant, I was face to face with April. Her eyes were open and as she gazed up at me, she whispered, “Was that you? The exploding windows? The broken glass?”
    I stared at her, stupefied. “What?”
    “It might’ve been me,” she whispered, and before I could ask her how on earth she could’ve broken all those windows without firing either of her guns while being tackled by both Calvin and me, she added, “Kill me, Skylar. Kill me now! Please! ”
    She meant it. My heart stuttered and nearly stopped as I looked into her odd-colored eyes and realized she meant it.
    I didn’t say anything. What possible response could I give to “Kill me now”?
    And then I couldn’t say anything, because the police were on top of us, pulling me and Calvin off of April, and containing her as, again, she started to cry.
    The sound of all those booted feet crunching across the broken window glass seemed as loud and grating as fingernails on a chalkboard.
    “Are you okay?” Calvin asked me as a team of body armor–clad police officers carried both of us and his wheelchair into the safety of the deserted school.
    “I’m good,” I managed to say. There were sparkling beads of glass in my hair, but they were rounded, not sharp. “Are you?”
    “Oh, yeah. I’m great .” He let out a sound that was part laugh and part howl—the sound of a person who had just avoided getting shot by a crazy girl in his high school quad.
    Kill me, Skylar. Kill me now! Please!
    Unlike April, we were both very glad we’d survived.

Chapter Six
    There is an inevitable and awkward silence that follows a near-death experience and the immediate high emotions that follow. And I’m pretty sure that the awkward-ometer gets cranked up even higher when you’ve shared that near-death experience with an almost complete stranger you’d only just