Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) Read Free Page A

visitors—he unnerved her.
    It did seem suspicious that he would accidentally find Darley, given no one else ever has. Drayton, Middleton, and Magnolia are all accessed from the same road as we are, but their big signs are hard to miss. Darley isn’t marked, it sits down a different fork in the road, and vegetation grew over the once dirt-and-gravel path that connects us to the modern world long ago.
    The Philosopher doesn’t seem worried, though. No one is, and the boys are convinced our savior had the mystery man murdered before he got back to town. I don’t agree with them, not aloud, but it’s possible. We’re a secret. People do things—in the movies, at least—to protect those kinds of things. The people they care about.
    Even though the Philosopher cares for us, it’s never been clear whether he cares about us. His work, though… nothing is more dear to him.
    “I can’t forget about him,” Haint admits, finally appearing again as solid matter. She stands on one foot, then the other, biting her full bottom lip and casting wary glances toward the big house. “I don’t like him knowing about Darley. About us.”
    “He doesn’t know about us, though. He only met the Philosopher and the Professor, and they showed him around the parts of the house that aren’t full of medical equipment. Didn’t you say they told him they were preserving the property?”
    “Yeah, but…”
    “Well, what do you think could happen?”
    Despite my reassurances, my stomach clenches. Thinking about leaving is one thing, but the prospect of being torn away against my will, maybe separated from the Cavies, breaks sweat out on my palms. We all know what the staff says will happen if the real world, the modern world, finds out about us. About what we can do.
    They say that the world won’t understand. That out there different is bad, it’s dangerous, and people shoot first and ask questions later. That we’ll end up in government laboratories at best, tossed in some kind of mental hospital at worst.
    “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Like, the winds are changing. Sherman’s marching East.”
    “The Yanks didn’t burn Darley the first time. Maybe the plantation is magical, like Mole thought when he was little.”
    She snorts. “Too many Harry Potter books. He thought Darley was like Hogwarts, invisible to the unmutated world.”
    “Wouldn’t that be nice? To think that we’re special? That people would envy us our invitations here?” The memory of Mole, his little boy face twisted into a determined frown as he tried to convince us all we were witches and wizards, makes my heart ache even now.
    That was before they made him kill that damn chicken he loved so much. Before they learned he’s lethal. So many things changed for him that day.
    “ I think we’re special, Gypsy.”
    “You are, maybe.”
    “You are, too. If I can stick my arm through a wall, and Reaper can pull the blood straight out of a rat’s veins, and Athena can hear people chatting in the secluded gardens at Middleton, who’s to say there’s not more to what you can do, too?”
    It’s nice of her—of most of the Cavies—to take the time to reassure me I’m not worthless. Not Inconsequential. The truth is I am, and furthermore, I’m not sure that in the real world it would matter. They spend their days wishing they were more powerful, more different. I spend mine daydreaming about what life would be like had I never come here. If my brain and genome had never been mapped, I’d never come to the Philosopher’s attention, and I could have gone through life with a single strange quirk.
    Okay, I probably have more than one, but just the single big one.
    “You’re right,” I agree so she’ll go away. Her training session is about to start, anyway, and a brief birdcall a moment later verifies my guess as to the time. I smile at Haint, one of my best friends at Darley, and tip my head. “See you later.”
    “Later, Gyp.”
    She