Kami Garcia - Dangerous Dream

My dad went to find Mrs. English in the parking lot, and I was actually relieved. I didn’t want to have to explain this new situation to him. I’d spent the last few years explaining plenty of stuff already.

When Lena and I climbed down from the bleachers, we made a beeline for the one person who had it coming.

Also the one person who couldn’t have cared less.

“Ridley, I swear!” Aunt Del had beaten Lena to the punch, which was what she looked like she wanted to do to her daughter—Lena’s infamous Siren cousin, and my best friend’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. A good bad girl , or a bad good girl , depending on the day.

Ridley Duchannes.

Del was already mid-scold by the time we walked over. And Ridley wasn’t having any of it. “Oh please. I love it how one little thing goes wrong around here and everyone assumes I’m to blame.” Ridley twirled a bright red lollipop between her equally red manicured fingers.

Reece rolled her eyes.

Ryan couldn’t stop laughing. “Did you see their faces?”

Ridley sat, legs crossed, looking like she’d stepped out of some kind of movie where the bad girl really didn’t have a heart of gold after all. Not even tin. There was probably a big, gaping hole between her lungs.

“What? She deserved it, that little snake.” Ridley’s red-lipsticked lips curved into a smile. “Takes one to know one. I barely had to do a thing. Those snakes wanted to be there. For her.” She whistled. “Talk about venom. That girl was positively lethal.”

Link put his arm around Ridley, pulling her up out of her seat. “That’s my girl.”

“Wesley Lincoln!” He looked up to see his mother frantically waving from the edge of the field.

“Gotta go,” he said with a sigh, kissing Ridley on the cheek. “You know how my mom feels when I’m in league with the devil.” Mrs. Lincoln had tangled with my family and Lena’s, and now she mostly stayed away. Which was probably why she’d stopped at the edge of the field instead of marching over here to hiss at us directly.

“And I wore my best horns today,” Ridley said, twisting her long blond hair around her finger. For a moment, I could’ve sworn the pink stripe in her hair was actually red.

It would have been Tunnel of Fudge, if Amma was still here. That’s what I was thinking as I lay in bed, sweating and staring up at my old blue ceiling. The cake at my graduation dinner. It should’ve been Tunnel of Fudge.

Instead, it had been three pieces of my Aunt Caroline’s chocolate pecan pie, and while it was good, it wasn’t Amma-good. I had to eat all three pieces, or my dad and Aunt Caroline would’ve known what I was thinking—that things were changing in Gatlin, and they changed more every day.

It was time to go. I never expected it to feel so strange when that time actually came.

When I was little, my parents didn’t ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. They asked me where I wanted to go. I said away . Then they bought me a map.

It was a natural reaction to life in Gatlin, South Carolina, I guess. Our small town was far enough from Charleston—or any civilization, for that matter—to feel like its own planet. And like any good astronaut, from the moment I could read well enough to study that map, I spent every waking moment planning exactly how I would get to use it. I had a box crammed with college brochures under my bed, and I always said I’d go anywhere, as long as it was at least a thousand miles from Gatlin.

Instead of a box of college brochures under his bed, Link had his plans plastered all over the garage walls, where his latest band, Meatstik, practiced. The bands Link worshipped, like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and the Rolling Stones, had already proven that all you needed to get out of any small town were big dreams and a band. Link had both. He also had Ridley, and a destination—New York City.

Thanks to Lena, I had spent enough time studying in the last two years to earn a scholarship somewhere I actually wanted to go.

Okay… somewhere not all that far from where she wanted to go.

What can I say? I’m a guy who loves his girl.

I’d go anywhere for Lena Duchannes, whose name rhymes with rain—whose birthmark looks like a Caster moon, whose hair curls when she uses her powers, whose green and gold eyes shine brighter than the sun.

She is the other half of me.

In the last two years, I’d figured something out—something I never would’ve believed before I met a Caster girl and fell in love; before I died fighting for our lives against Lena’s Dark Caster mother, Sarafine; and before I died the second time to save the world and the people I loved, and then fought my way back to them.

Happy endings don’t come cheap.

It isn’t enough to know you’ve found your soul mate, if you believe in that kind of thing. I do, because I have one.

You have to make it happen. You have to will the whole world to bend around you and the person you love. You have to kick fate in the teeth and poke fortune’s eyes out. You have to fight and claw and scrap your way to her side. You can’t let anyone or anything or any reason—supernatural or otherwise—stand in your way.

True love?

Fate?

Your future together?

To get there, it means refusing all the other crap the universe hands you. It means telling the Wheel of Fate to suck it and roll over someone else. It means not settling for any of the other endings you see coming.

It means holding out.

If Amma were here, she would’ve said it was all in the cards. But that was true only if Amma was the one reading them. She taught us that.

The rest of us had to make our own destiny.

Lena and I knew that better than anyone. Ridley and Link, they still had to learn it the hard way.

I guess that’s sort of where this whole story begins.

Wesley Lincoln never could’ve imagined being as whipped as his best friend, Ethan, not for one minute of his life. Not even back when he was a hundred percent Mortal, one bite and a whole quarter Incubus ago.

Things with Ridley weren’t like that. The two of them didn’t say nice things to each other; they fought. They didn’t look for little ways to help each other; they competed in one-liners and dares. They didn’t hold hands and go on errands and hang out with each other’s families. They made out like two lit firecrackers burning up oxygen off the same match.

Then they didn’t speak for weeks at a time.

It was hot.

Stupid, but hot.

When Rid walked into the room, Link got goose bumps. He didn’t even have to be looking at her. Just so long as he knew she was there. It was like he had some kind of radar that went off in the presence of that girl. Right or wrong. Good or bad.

Maybe it was an allergy.

A bad one.

Wait, is that a certain kind of whipped? Is that how it’s supposed to be? Like an infection? Poison oak or something?

Link didn’t mind about Ethan and Lena. They were like Bert and Ernie, and it was sort of sad to see Bert without Ernie. Those two fuzzy little guys belonged together, no matter what his mom had to say about it. And he had become used to having Lena around, especially during the time they had both lost Ethan to the Otherworld. Lena was like a little sister to him. A fuzzy little sister.

Ridley was something else.

None of it was easy with her. None of it was ever what it looked like at first. That’s what Link usually loved about Ridley. She’d claw your eyes out and then weep over the scratch marks. She was her own worst enemy and her own best friend. She made life so damn hard for herself, and everyone around her, that it was like a miracle, only in reverse.