Wild Sky 2 Read Free Page B

through the air and placing him in the exact spot where he’d been before. Along with Calvin came the return of Dana’s scowl, as she once again tried to stare me down.
    But I held her gaze and lifted my chin as I stood my ground. The biggest fail here was hers. “Dana, you made me believe that Milo was in serious danger! I honestly thought he was going to be killed!”
    “That’s exactly what I was going for!” Dana insisted. “A truly emotional response from you—so that you could learn to perform under pressure. Hell, if I’d had someone train me this way when I was first honing my skills…? I’d be thanking them, not bitching about it.”
    Bitching. Bitching?
    Once again, Milo took my hand. She doesn’t understand , he told me through our telepathic connection. “Let’s talk about this later,” he told Dana, even as he silently told me, After Lacey was taken and Dana’s father was put in jail…it’s been hard for her to let herself love anyone .
    He’d met Dana in a really shitty foster home when they were both in their early teens, after her dad had been convicted of brutally murdering her little sister, Lacey. But Dana had recently come to believe that Lacey was still out there, somewhere, held prisoner by horrible people but potentially still alive. And this knowledge was making her extra crazy. We were all trying to be considerate of her feelings, but tonight she’d pushed me too far. And to call me bitchy, to boot?
    I was thinking in emotional whirlwinds rather than clear sentences, but Milo caught the gist of it anyway.
    Still thoughts. He sent what had become our calming mantra back to me, even as he told Dana, “It’s late. Sky needs to get some rest. We all do.”
    Dana looked from Milo to me to our tightly clasped hands, and she scowled. It bugged her that we could communicate this way—she said it was rude, like whispering in someone’s ear at the dinner table—so we tried not to do it so blatantly in front of her.
    But right now, I didn’t give a crap. I held tightly to Milo as I glared back at her.
    “Whatever,” Dana said impatiently. Then, as she turned away, she said more quietly, “What a disappointment.”
    I felt a pang at that, and I realized that at least part of me felt bad about letting her down. I wanted to be a warrior—in many ways, I longed to be more like her. But at the same time, I was still so angry at what she’d done. The two feelings battled their way through my chest in the form of a solid lump that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried.
    “Well,” Cal said as Dana stomped off down the trail on the other side of the kiosk, opposite from the way we’d run in. I knew from a brief telepathic blast from Milo that Calvin’s car was strategically hidden about a quarter mile away, near another hole in the fence. I also realized that Cal’s robot suit really was unwieldy. He wasn’t rolling along the root-covered path—Dana was using her TK to float him along behind her. He turned to look back at me. “I know it was a little too real for you, Sky, but I gotta confess, I had fun.”
    Fun? I heard myself make another one of those vaguely sob-like sounds. I was still so upset, I just wanted to get away from everyone . I wanted to go home so I could be completely alone to curl up in my bed and cry…
    And yeah, I’d sent that thought straight to Milo. I felt him realize that I’d lumped him in with the generic “everyone” I wanted to get away from, and then I caught a very solid wave of his own distress. Skylar, if I’d known she wasn’t going to tell you this was just a training exercise, I never would have agreed —
    I know , I thought over him. I really do know that. I was just so scared—I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.
    Holy crap, had I actually thought that aloud? Well, no, of course not aloud, but I’d certainly expressed my feelings in an orderly, easy-to-understand sentence with a verb and a noun, instead of the messy and