Wild Sky 2 Read Free

instantly understood. This was a training exercise ?
    “Are you kidding me ?” I said.
    Dana ignored me as she stomped around and muttered choice words that started with F and ended in -ing .
    Calvin removed his helmet. And yes. He was grinning, although his smile started to fade when he saw the thunderous expression on my face.
    “Fail! Fail , Sky! This was not good!” Dana paced furiously back and forth in her bare feet as she plunged her hands through her short blond hair and glared back at me.
    “ Excuse me?” I exclaimed. “Not good ? You got that right! This was not good at all !”
    I sensed Milo directly behind me as he chimed in. “You didn’t tell her this wasn’t real?” he asked Dana. His voice was low, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t angry. The more upset Milo was, the quieter he got.
    I, however, got louder. “This was really just a game …?”
    “Of course I didn’t tell her. Why would I tell her?” Dana answered Milo before she stopped pacing and planted herself directly in front of me. “This was no game, Princess. This was a test. A pop quiz.”
    I could feel my jaw drop. “A pop quiz ?”
    “And you flunked,” Dana declared. “Miserably.”
    Calvin started giggling into his steel-encrusted sleeve. He always giggled when he was nervous or uncomfortable, so I forgave him.
    Dana, however, was a different story. She’d gotten me out of bed with the heart-stopping news that Milo was in grave danger—to give me some kind of twisted test?
    “First off”—she was still barking at me—“you didn’t acknowledge your weaknesses. This was a potentially highly dangerous situation, and you know damn well you suck at stealth. And you also know that I’m just as capable of being stealthy as you are not . Yet your master plan had us both circling the building. What you should have done was assign the task of perimeter sneak-and-peek to me , while you stayed put, which is your best shot at staying silent—although that’s questionable, too. Instead, by crashing through the brush the way you did, you put us all in harm’s way. Lover-Boy included!” Dana jabbed at the air in Milo’s direction.
    Milo opened his mouth as if to speak.
    “ Then you didn’t even stick to your shitty plan,” she continued, cutting him off before he even began. “Once you went all Rambo by making a run for it like you did—which I could hear, even from around the corner, P-effing-S: you basically turned yourself into a giant target. No, not a target, the target! You’re the target, Bubble Gum!
    “That is a truth that you must never, ever forget! If and when some nasty-ass em-effers grab Milo or Calvin or your mother or the sweet little old lady who lives next door…? They’re doing it to get to you ! So what did you just do here? You put a freaking bow on your head and gave yourself to them on a silver platter, special delivery!”
    “You’re, um, mixing your metaphors,” Calvin pointed out.
    “You not only didn’t stop to think about the bad guys’ motives or goals”—Dana ignored him as she continued to skewer me—“but you also didn’t take that butt-ugly truth a logical step further. Because if you had , you would’ve realized that if and when someone grabs Milo in order to get to you, once they have you, they’re not gonna just let him go, like thanks for your help, bro, here’s money for a cab . No! Once they get you, he’s dead. So congratulations, you just killed Milo!”
    She was right. To some degree. But I had to blink hard to keep my tears from escaping. I was still that angry that she’d let me believe that Milo was really in peril.
    And I might’ve muttered an apology for failing her little late-night class in Abducted Boyfriend Rescue 101, if she hadn’t piled on and continued her rant about everything I’d done wrong.
    “And what the hell was that with Calvin anyway?” Dana huffed at me. “You just stop in the middle of a clearing”—she gestured to the open space