A Beautiful Dark

anything I had ever felt was blooming in the pit of my stomach.
    “If you touch her, I’ll kill you,” I said, my voice rising. “You can’t take her from me! Not after you took my parents and Cassie!”
    The ground beneath us began to shake, and car alarms began going off. Raven’s eyes went wide. “It’s true,” she said in awe.
    “Leave me alone!” I cried. “Leave all of us alone!”
    Then the parking lot lights went out, and I was someplace else.

Chapter 36

    I t was a vast white landscape, like the Antarctic during a snowstorm. I couldn’t tell if we were indoors or out. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm. No breezes or gusts of wind blew through my hair. It didn’t feel like much of anything.
    Slowly, through a white mist, shapes began to materialize. The curve of an arch here, the angular edge of a step there. Figures were moving slowly. But I couldn’t make out anything other than the vaguest of shapes. I couldn’t even tell if they were human.
    The mist swirled around me. Whitening out everything else.
    And just as suddenly as I’d appeared in this place, I was back in the hospital parking lot, grasping the car door handle with both hands for balance. Facing Raven.
    “Oh my god,” she said. “This changes everything!” And then she was gone.
    Panic surged through me. Aunt Jo! I had to find her! What if Raven was on her way there now? What if that’s where the Order had set their sights next? Aunt Jo was in danger, and I had to find her, wherever she was.
    I felt around in my purse and dug out my phone. I pressed the number for Aunt Jo and the call went immediately to voice mail. “Dammit!”
    She was probably out of cell phone range. I called the office, and no one answered. They always had someone at the office to field calls in case of an emergency. They could always get in touch with Aunt Jo via satellite phone. So why was no one there?
    I jerked open the car door, slid in, and revved the engine, peeling out of the parking lot as I simultaneously riffled through my glove compartment for any maps Aunt Jo might have left in there. Where did she say she was? The Collegiate Peaks? I hadn’t been there in years, but I knew it was west, toward Denver. I gunned it toward the highway. What was I going to do when I got there? She was out in the backcountry. How could I find her?
    As I drove, my mind turned over everything I knew now. What people had told me over the years—and even as recently as today.
    The day I turned six years old, my father had been driving me and my mother home from my birthday party at the county fair in the next town over. It was raining, but everyone at the party had had the best time. Cassie, Dan, and I got to ride ponies, and all three of us were as dirty as if we’d rolled in the mud with the farm animals. It was my best birthday ever. I was so happy.
    On the drive home, Dad missed the exit on the freeway and ended up crashing into a Buick before he could reach the next turnoff. They found me in the backseat after they’d pulled my parents from the wreck. The car was totaled, but I didn’t have a scratch on me.
    Gurneys were everywhere. “Mom!” I called. “Dad!” My arms wanted to flail, but something was holding me down. I was okay, though. I wasn’t bleeding, and I didn’t even have scratches anywhere. No broken bones. The doctors and nurses were using words like miracle and amazing. I just wanted to see my parents. I was in a bed in a hospital room, just sitting there, eating red Jell-O, when they told me. “You’re alone now, Skye.”
    They probably didn’t say it exactly like that, but that’s how I remembered it. “You’re alone now.” That was before Aunt Jo, my mother’s best friend, adopted me. Before I moved into this house with her.
    In the car, with the trees and primary-colored road signs flickering by, I started. Alone. What did that word make me think of? You’re alone now, Skye.
    I wanted to wait until we were alone to share this with you.
    Devin. He’d said it just a few days ago, the night he tried to show me how to heal a flower. Raven was right. The Order did want to get me alone, didn’t they? They’d arranged for Cassie’s brakes to fail so she’d get into an accident—hoping to kill her and wipe out anything I might have told her. They’d fixed Jenn Spratt’s fall so that Aunt Jo would be the one to go out on extended trips, leaving me alone in the house while my fate came crashing down around me. The Order