Charmed Forces #19 Page 9

  Alyssa closed her eyes again and ran Natalie’s dream images through her mind like a movie. It was such a scary dream—but unlike the other girls, Alyssa didn’t pick up scary vibes from it, which seemed strange. She didn’t want to lead Natalie in the wrong direction, so she thought it over carefully. Did Natalie’s dream predict the future? Was Logan in danger?

  Alyssa didn’t sense any danger, so she opened her eyes and smiled, calm as a Buddha. “Don’t worry, Natalie, your dream is not a premonition. My new age book says dreams don’t usually predict the future. They’re more like a snapshot of your soul.”

  “A snapshot of your soul?” Candace said.

  “What in the world does that mean?” Natalie asked. “That I want Logan dead?”

  “Of course not,” Alyssa said. “Your dream doesn’t mean that Logan is dying—it means your feelings for him are dying. It’s kind of symbolic. Ever since you got to camp, you’ve been wondering if you want to get back together with Logan, right? So now your dream is giving you the answer. It’s telling you what you want, even if you don’t know it yet.”

  Sitting on her bed, Natalie leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “So what do I want?” she asked.

  Alyssa reached for a bottle of water she kept near her bed. “Well, I guess you don’t want to get back with him. Your feelings for him are dying.”

  “Feelings are dying,” Candace echoed. “That doesn’t really sound like Natalie.”

  Alyssa held up Amy as if that was all she needed to silence the unbelievers.

  “But . . . I’m not sure my feelings for him are dying,” Natalie said. “He’s been acting weird lately—very weird. But I was kind of thinking I still liked him, if he’d just stay still for a second and stop running away from me.”

  “According to Amy, you’re getting over him,” Alyssa said. “It’s a good thing. You’re ready to move on to something better, more mature.”

  “You sound like my mother’s therapist,” Tori said.

  “Now do me,” Sloan said. “I’m sleeping, and my mother comes into my room and wakes me up. She says she’s really an alien queen, and when I say I don’t believe her, she rips off her head! And underneath is this pulsing green blob! She really is an alien queen. By the way, did I wake up screaming this morning?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Tori said.

  “Alyssa, what does it mean?”

  “Um . . .” Alyssa wasn’t getting a clear signal from Amy about Sloan’s dream. Maybe her psychic center was getting tired and needed food. Or maybe Sloan’s dream was just too weird.

  “It means you’re mother is trying to tell you something,” she said.

  “But what is she trying to tell me?” Sloan said.

  “That she’s an alien?” Alyssa said.

  “Good call,” Chelsea said. “You really saw right through the symbolism of that one, Alyssa.”

  “Girls, we’re late for breakfast.” Mandy had been getting dressed while the girls described their dreams. No one else was ready to go. “We’re always late for breakfast. Let’s get a move on!”

  Everyone dressed quickly. Alyssa took her time. She needed to be the last one out. As soon as everyone left, she stashed Amy in her secret nook. Then she started up the path to the mess hall. Mandy met her at the mess hall door.

  “Alyssa, you’ve been lagging behind the group a lot lately,” Mandy said. “Please try to keep up with the rest of us. I worry if someone’s missing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alyssa said, not meeting her eyes. “I’m a slow dresser.”

  “Did you bring the amethyst with you?” Mandy asked.

  “Whoops,” Alyssa said. “I forgot.” And she really had forgotten about returning it. But it was too late to get Amy now. “I thought I’d find out who the owner is first and talk to her, to make sure it’s the same amethyst.”

  “All right,” Mandy said. She started for their table. “But don’t put it off.”

  “I’ll find the owner after breakfast,” Alyssa said.

  “Okay,” Mandy said.

  But Alyssa had a swim meet after breakfast, and then arts and crafts, and she got so caught up in weaving a new straw shoulder bag as a gift for Natalie that she forgot all about Amy. Or rather, she forgot to find out who the owner was. By the time she remembered, dinner was over and everyone was gathering near the fire pit for a campfire. Too late to do anything about it then.

  I’ll do it tomorrow, she thought. Whoever wants Amy back can wait one more day.

  Gaby sat around the campfire, singing her heart out, waiting for Alyssa to show up. At last Alyssa arrived, armed with marshmallows and several pointed sticks to roast them on. She passed the sticks to the girls sitting around her.

  “Whoo!” Alyssa said, pushing her hair out of her face. “It’s really getting windy!”

  “I’ll go look for more sticks,” Gaby said to no one in particular. She probably didn’t need to say anything; no one was paying much attention to her. Everyone was belting out the camp song.

  Gaby crept away from the fire and disappeared into the shadows. Time to make her move. The stars were perfectly aligned to put her plan into effect, she thought. Not that she knew anything about stars. It didn’t really matter, because when she glanced up at the sky, she couldn’t see the stars. The night had gotten cloudy. Another strong gust of wind nearly pushed her over.

  Once she was well away from the campfire, she turned on her flashlight. She groped her way along the path to the bunks. It was a dark night, and the whole camp was at the fire pit. No one would be in bunk 6B. No one would see what she was up to.

  She had considered telling Alyssa the dream she’d had that morning, but decided not to in the end. In the dream, Gaby met a man in a red cape near the dock. A heavy mist floated over the lake. The man held out his hand, and she gave him the amethyst. In return, he opened his cape and out stepped Donovan, like a prize. The man in the cape laughed devilishly and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  Gaby was glad she’d resisted the temptation to tell her dream. Who knows, after hearing a dream like that, Alyssa might have guessed that Gaby was up to no good. Some of the other girls in the bunk might have gotten suspicious, too.

  The coast was clear. The wind whipped up again, knocking a branch off a tree and carrying a metallic smell that Gaby knew meant rain was coming soon. She’d have to hurry. In the distance, she heard the voices of the other campers, boys and girls, little and big, singing a happy camp song. They sounded so innocent. Gaby felt a pang of guilt, but it was only a tiny pinprick-sized pang. What she was about to do wasn’t wrong, exactly. Alyssa would be mad if she knew about it, but that didn’t mean Gaby was a criminal or anything.

  Gaby burst into the cabin. At first she didn’t turn on the light, because she didn’t want anyone to see her. She was just going to grab the amethyst and go.

  She shined her flashlight on Alyssa’s bunk. Something was wrong. Alyssa’s bed was unmade, and something strange dangled from the wall in front of it.

  What was that? It looked like a string of flags. Gaby pointed her flashlight at it and stepped closer. Hey—those weren’t flags. They were panties. Her panties!

  She tripped over something. All their shoes had been piled on the floor in a pyramid. What was going on?

  No time to worry about secrecy now. Gaby needed to see. She switched on the overhead light and gasped.

  The room looked as if it had been ransacked by a bear. Clothes hung out of the cubbies in disarray. All the girls’ panties were strung across the room like party streamers. The beds were mussed; sneakers and flip-flops had been tossed all over the place. Two bottles of Tori’s nail polish lay broken and bleeding pink and orange on the floor near her bed.

  Gaby stepped toward the bathroom, afraid to look. Oh, no. The toilet was draped in an elaborate web of toilet paper. And on the mirror, in Chelsea’s favorite magenta lip gloss, someone had scrawled, You’ve been pranked!

  Amy, Gaby thought, her heart racing
. Had the pranksters found the amethyst? Gaby jumped up on Alyssa’s bunk and reached out the window. She felt for the nook behind the shutter. It was empty.

  Oh my god, she thought. We’ve been pranked—and Amy is gone!

  chapter NINE

  Tori nudged Natalie. “There he is—Mr. Death himself.”

  “What are you talking about?” Natalie was roasting a marshmallow, and Tori’s nudge had knocked her stick into the fire. Natalie picked it up, but the marshmallow was a flaming lost cause. “Look what you made me do.” Then she glanced up and saw Logan leading his bunk around the campfire. She knew it was silly, but after the scary dream she’d had that morning, she was glad to see him alive and well. Just the sight of him made her heart beat faster. How could Alyssa say her feelings for him were dying?

  “Was Alyssa right?” Tori asked. “Are your feelings for him DOA?”

  “I’m not sure,” Natalie said.

  “Why don’t you go find out?” Tori said.

  “Good idea,” Natalie said.

  She walked over to the spot where Logan had settled his ten-year-old charges. He was leading them in a gross-out song about olives and eyeballs. Natalie sat down on a nearby log. When the song was done, she said, “You know, olives and eyeballs really are a lot alike if you think about it.”

  “Totally,” Logan said. But as soon as she sat down, he shifted slightly away from her, as if she had the flu and he didn’t want to catch it.

  The little boys went off to find roasting sticks. A group of third-division girls sat down nearby and started making their own s’mores.

  “So how do you like being a CIT?” Natalie asked Logan. She knew it was a lame question, the kind of thing her mother would ask, but she didn’t know what else to say. Everything had gotten so strained between them.

  “It’s great,” Logan said. He looked away, keeping an eye on his campers. Natalie waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

  “Are they giving you any trouble?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “They’re a riot. They’re little devils, but they can be pretty funny.”

  Natalie laughed. “I heard about the puke incident. So gross.” One of Logan’s boys had sneaked a tub of hummus from the salad bar and filled the mess hall toilet with it to make it look as if somebody had puked. The hummus clogged up the toilet and the boys’ bathroom was out of order for a day and a half.

  She thought Logan would laugh, but he just nodded. “Yeah, that was a disaster. Dr. Steve really chewed me out. ‘You’ve got to learn how to keep them under control!’” He was warming up a little. Natalie could tell he liked talking about his campers. “They’re just mischievous. Secretly, I find their jokes kind of entertaining. But don’t tell Dr. Steve.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Natalie said, and at the word dream she shivered.

  Suddenly, a little girl sitting next to Logan screamed, “Ow! OWW! Something bit me!”

  Logan turned to help the girl. “Are you all right? What bit you?” She held out her leg for him to inspect, crying.

  “I think it was a monster!” she wailed. “Or an alligator! It could have bitten my leg right off!”

  Natalie peered over Logan’s shoulder. It was hard to see in the firelight, but all she could make out was a tiny red spot on the girl’s calf.

  “Shhh. You’re all right,” Logan said. “It’s just a bug bite. It might itch a little, but you won’t lose your leg—I promise.” He stood up. “I’ll go get your counselor and have her bring over some Calamine lotion, okay?”

  “Hurry up!” The girl was still crying. “It stings!”

  Logan hurried away without another word. Natalie waited a few minutes to see if he’d come back. She still hadn’t had a chance to find out how she felt about him. He was acting so strangely around her, it was like he wasn’t even himself. She didn’t know what to think. But the longer this went on, the more it bothered her.

  The little girl’s counselor arrived with lotion, but still no Logan. Natalie got up to return to her group. On the way she saw Logan with his boys, farther over around the circle. He’d moved them without saying anything to her.

  Maybe my feelings for him should die, she thought. It sure seems like his feelings for me are gone for good.

  “Whoa,” Alyssa said. “Did you feel that?” She was sitting around the campfire when a plastic marshmallow bag flew at her from nowhere, sticking to the back of her head. She peeled it off and it blew into the fire.

  “I felt it,” Brynn said, picking twigs from her hair.

  The wind was getting stronger now, blowing sparks from the campfire. “Sorry, kids, but we’re going to have to cut this short,” Dr. Steve called out. “Feels like a storm coming.”

  A counselor dumped buckets of water on the fire to douse it. Alyssa’s hair blew across her face. She could almost taste the rain in the air, an electric, mineral taste.

  “Everyone back to their bunks,” Dr. Steve said. “Batten down your shutters if you need to.”

  “All right, 6B,” Mandy shouted into the wind. “Let’s go.”

  “Hurry,” Chelsea said, plucking at her navy silk peasant blouse. “This top stains my skin purple if it gets wet.”

  Alyssa ran ahead without waiting for the others. She couldn’t help thinking of Amy in her nook outside the cabin.

  “Alyssa, come back!” Mandy shouted. “Wait for the rest of us!”

  Alyssa pretended she hadn’t heard and kept running. She wanted to bring the amethyst in safely before anyone saw her.

  The rain started before she got to the bunk, fat hard drops pelting down on her. Alyssa ran to the outside wall of the cabin. The shutters flapped and banged in the wind. She climbed over a row of shrubs and reached behind the shutter, hoping the darkness would hide her. She pressed her hand into the little nook where she kept the amethyst.

  No. Oh, no.

  She felt around again. Amy wasn’t there.

  Then she noticed the light was on in the cabin. Someone else was in there. Alyssa ran to the purple door and went inside.

  Gaby stood alone in the center of the room, staring at the mess. Cubbies had been ransacked. Panties hoisted like flags across the room, shoes all over the floor, everything a mess!

  “We’ve been pranked!” Gaby said.

  Their bunkmates, dripping and out of breath, crowded in behind Alyssa. “Holy panty raid, what happened in here?” Brynn cried.

  “Somebody pranked us while we were at the campfire,” Alex said.

  “But who would do that?” Priya said. “Everybody at camp was there.”

  Mandy took over. “All right, it’s no big deal,” she said. “Let’s get this place cleaned up.”

  “No big deal?” Chelsea said. “My stuff’s all over the floor!” She picked up a white tank top that now had a brown dust mark across the back. “Look at this! How could someone do this to us?”

  “My nail polish!” Tori cried. “Two bottles broken! My favorite colors, too.”

  “Is anything missing?” Natalie asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Mandy said. “It just looks like a mess.”

  “Something is missing,” Alyssa said. “The amethyst.”

  Everyone gasped. “Are you sure?” Valerie asked.

  “Totally,” Alyssa said. “I checked my hiding place and it was gone.”

  “Maybe we’ll find it on the floor somewhere,” Alex said. Everyone started picking up their things. Alyssa looked under her pillow, among her sheets, all over the floor, in the trash can . . . no Amy.

  “Did you find her?” Nat was refolding her clothes and putting them back into her cubby.

  Alyssa shook her head.

  “This rots,” Gaby said.

  When they’d cleaned up the whole cabin, Mandy called for lights out. But Alyssa couldn’t sleep. No one could. Outside, the wind howled and rain beat hard on the roof.

  “Who do you think pranked us?” Valerie said.

  “And why?” Tori said. “What di
d we ever do to anybody?”

  “I think it has something to do with the amethyst,” Natalie said. “It must. Amy is the only thing missing.”

  “But no one outside this bunk knows about it,” Candace said. “Do they?”

  The bunk was silent for a moment. “Did anyone tell?” Alyssa asked.

  “Not me,” said a voice from the dark.

  “Me neither.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “I’d never—”

  “Maybe someone heard about it somehow,” Brynn said.

  “Someone in 5C knows about Amy,” Alyssa said. “Because they put up that Lost poster.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe someone in 5C is looking for the amethyst,” Sloan said. “Maybe they decided to break into all the cabins until they found it.”

  “If they decided to break into all the cabins,” Candace said, “they sure picked the right bunk to start with.”

  “We may never know what really happened,” Valerie said.

  “Oh, we’ll find out,” Chelsea said. “One way or another. We’ve got the whole rest of the summer to figure it out.”

  “I hope it doesn’t take that long to get Amy back,” Alyssa said. “Or our summer could be ruined.”

  “Alyssa, don’t forget that the amethyst doesn’t belong to you,” Mandy said. “You were supposed to return it by now, anyway.”

  Oh. That’s right. But Alyssa felt as if Amy belonged to her. Alyssa was as attached to the amethyst as she had been to her blanket when she was little. Only more so, because her blanket didn’t give her psychic powers.

  “Time to get some shut-eye, girls,” Mandy said. “We’ll work on this mystery tomorrow. Good night.”

  No one said another word, but Alyssa could hear her bunkmates tossing and turning and sighing sleeplessly. It was disturbing to think that someone had rifled through all their things. And taken their most valuable possession.

  Alyssa obsessively went over the facts in her mind. Someone from 5C—the “real” owner of the amethyst, if that was true—might have ransacked the bunk. But Alyssa kept imagining the scene she saw when she first arrived at the bunk: Gaby, alone among the ruins.