Night Sky by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

Mrs. W wasn’t going to be in school. And sure enough, she’d been absent Friday too. How had I known that? I hadn’t given it much thought before this, but it was weird .
    Abilities …
    No. If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that I wasn’t— was not —a Greater-Than. Whatever had happened last night with the hairbrush had been a fluke.
    Please God, let it have been a fluke…
    Mom took a sip of coffee. “All right,” she said, moving forward to kiss me on my cheek. I shied away, and Mom nodded. “Okay. Be careful today. I love you.”
    â€œI know,” I said.
    I felt her lingering in the room for another moment, and then she left without grounding me.
    Whoopee.
    â€”
    Trudging up to my room, I considered just going for a run and getting away from everything for a while. Maybe doing something normal would make me feel better.
    I sighed and pulled out my red-and-blue racerback sports bra and a pair of running shorts. I slapped on some sunblock and tied my hair up into a high ponytail.
    As I smoothed down a few flyaway curls, my gaze fell on the hairbrush on my bedside table. As far as I could tell, the brush—and the alarm clock and the cat poster—hadn’t moved since I fell asleep last night. I halfheartedly tried to move my hairbrush again, but it just sat there like…a hairbrush. Of course, I was tired and crampy and not very angry. I sighed, wondering about my hairbrush theory. Another good theory was that maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing, but I knew that I hadn’t.
    I had a sudden vision of the clock, the brush, and the poster all dancing together in my room like something out of Fantasia , swooping and spinning over my bed while I slept. It was definitely disturbing, but way less creepy than another sharp vision I suddenly had. In this one, the shadowy gray creature I’d imagined in Sasha’s room—the one who could’ve been a body double for the wicked witch from Hansel and Gretel —was climbing into the window.
    And this time the window was mine.
    The creepiest part was that the picture in my head was the mental equivalent of scratch-and-sniff, because I could smell it. That awful sewage smell from Sasha’s bedroom. It was there, faintly, in the back of my throat like a visceral memory, nauseating and dizzying and awful.
    The doorbell rang, startling me, and I jumped and squeaked. And just like that, it was all gone—the image, the smell, the sense of impending doom. Well, the sense of doom may have lingered, but I immediately laughed and made myself imagine that same gray witch-thing on my doorstep in the bright morning sunlight. In a Brownie uniform, selling Thin Mints.
    I clattered down the stairs to the front door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but Mom did a lot of her shopping online, and we received packages pretty regularly. I opened the door and…
    The front stoop was empty.
    Frowning, I peeked my head out into the morning heat. Nobody was there.
    â€œHello?” I called. No one answered.
    Across the street, a woman in a tennis outfit walked her three little dogs, all yipping gleefully on the ends of three long leashes. It was a beautiful, clear day, and the sun warmed the back of my shoulders as I stepped outside.
    So why was a chill running through me?
    I took another step toward the stairs so I could see down the street, all the way to the big palm tree in Sasha’s front yard.
    And that terrible, horrible stench of backed-up sewage—not distant and not a memory this time—filled my nostrils.
    Gagging, I dashed inside and slammed the front door shut, locking it with one swift movement.
    Why was I scared?
    Because something evil was out there. Of that I had no doubt.
    I sank onto the cool tile floor, dizzy and nauseated and needing to put my head between my legs so I didn’t yuke on Mom’s palm-treed welcome mat. But I grabbed for my phone, filled with an even