Haunted Destiny: A Midnight Dragonfly Bonus Short Story by Ellie James Page A

little apartment over on Dumaine Street for about four months, but we’d been friends forever. Literally. Our moms had been best friends. Our birthdays were hours apart. If there was such a thing as a soul sister, Harmony was mine.
    And even if I hadn’t told her about the weird heaviness I’d woken up with, the invisible weight pressing against my chest, she would have known. Because that’s what Harmony did. She knew things.
    So did I.
    And yeah, having a best friend who could read your mind made things pretty fun.
    Most of the time.
    “Not the storm,” I said. That actually would have been cool. I was kinda strange like that. I loved tropical weather, the way the pressure would drop and the trees would bend and the rain would fly in all directions…
    “It’s more,” I said. “Something big. Personal.”
    Harmony reached for a tangle of blond hair and began to twirl it around a black-tipped finger. “Are you sure there wasn’t a dream, too?”
    I looked across the street toward the river, barely visible beyond big fountain and the levee. Harmony could read people, but I could read the future.
    “I can’t remember.” I’d tried. I’d closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing like my grandmother had taught me, trying to send myself back. Sometimes it worked, and I could sink back into my dreams and see a little more, understand better what was to come.
    The first few times it had freaked me out. Everyone dreams, and lots of people try to interpret all the crazy things that happen. But for them, dreams are just dreams.
    Not mine.
    At least not always.
    Some of mine come true.
    “Here,” Harmony said, and when I turned back toward her, I found her eyes glowing like emeralds on fire, with her white-blond hair hanging in an angel-like curtain against both sides of her face.
    In her hands, she held the Tarot cards.
    “Concentrate on what you want to know,” she instructed. “And shuffle.”

Chapter 2

    The weight against my chest pressed harder, and without even realizing what I was doing, I lifted my hand and brought it to the V of my gothic-inspired dress. There I closed my fingers around the smooth edges of the bronze dragonfly my grandmother had given my mother for her sixteenth birthday.
    I didn’t need to look down to know that the yellowy green crystal in the center glowed. I could feel the warmth seeping through my flesh.
    “Come on,” Harmony urged. “You know the drill. Shuffle, then separate them into three piles. I’ll take it from there.”
    She was right. I knew the drill. I’d seen Harmony and her mother do hundreds of readings.
    And I’d seen those readings come true time and time again.
    But I’d never let her do one for me.
    That was the thing about knowing. Everyone thought it would be cool to see into the future, and sometimes it was. But it wasn’t all about getting sneak peeks at what was going to be on a trig exam or the winning lottery ticket.
    Sometimes it was stuff you really didn’t want to know. Like when a little girl went missing and you had to tell her parents she wasn’t coming back. Or when you slipped into bed and closed your eyes, and saw yourself kneeling at a grave, sobbing, and you know one day your heart was going to get totally shattered.
    No. Knowing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sometimes it was better to just take life as it came. That way, you only lived things once, when they happened.
    Deep heavy stuff for sure, but even at seventeen, I’d learned that.
    “No.” Just the thought of touching those cards made me itchy. “I’m good.”
    Harmony rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding me? You’ve been a stress-case since the minute you woke up, saying something big is coming. That your life is going to change. That you can feel it.”
    Leaning closer, she gave me one of her mystical smiles, made all the more other-worldly by the too-dark red lipstick she always wore when working the Square. (She insisted I was going to have to wear it that