February Read online

  I did. I understood the way she clutched the locket, like it was the final word from a lost friend. It was the way I held Dad’s drawings.

  ‘You lost your dad, too, didn’t you?’ I asked.

  Tears began to fill her eyes. She looked away without speaking … but I had my answer.

  I wasn’t lying when I said I knew how she felt. What kind of accident took the lives of both her mother and her father? I also knew that now wasn’t the time to try and find out.

  She remained silently turned away from me for a few moments, then she took the locket, opened it, and passed it to me. Inside were two tiny photos. One of an Asian man with black hair—whose intense eyes tilted up in the same way as Winter’s, and opposite that, a photo of a fair-haired woman who had the same delicate chin as Winter.

  ‘You look a lot like both of your parents,’ I said, turning the locket over.

  ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘It’s hard to look like one or the other when your mum’s so fair and your dad’s Chinese.’

  On the back of the silver heart were the delicately engraved words ‘Little Bird’ beneath a Chinese character.

  At that moment, her mobile rang again. She took the locket back, then walked away to take the call.

  I waited, wondering about her excitement at seeing the angel drawing, wondering what had happened to her parents. Did she have a connection to the Ormond Angel? Winter owed me a lot of answers but I knew I’d have to be very careful and patient.

  I couldn’t hear what she was saying but it wasn’t long before she was off the phone and back to me.

  She looked me straight in the eyes. ‘I’ve gotta go,’ she said. ‘He’s hassling me again.’

  ‘Sligo?’

  ‘Thank God for mobiles,’ she said. ‘He thinks I’m at home. Clearly he’s in a rage because you’ve disappeared, but he doesn’t suspect I’ve had anything to do with it. Thank goodness. He likes to think he can keep tabs on me. As if. If only he knew where I really was, and who I was really with!’

  ‘Listen,’ I said quickly, not wanting the opportunity to slip by. ‘I’ve got to find out about this angel. It’s really important.’ Even though I wasn’t sure about this girl, I could feel the excitement growing in me at the thought of such an awesome break—I could have been on the verge of finding out one of the secrets hidden in Dad’s drawings.

  ‘First, you’ve gotta tell me why it’s so important to you,’ she said. ‘You tell me that, and I’ll show you the angel I know.’

  This girl hung out with criminals and broke into other people’s houses. Was she telling the truth?

  Winter was already walking away before I realised she was leaving.

  ‘Hey! Come back!’ I yelled after her.

  ‘Only if you tell me why that angel is so important,’ she called out. ‘Why Sligo is willing to kill to get information about it.’

  I didn’t know what to say. If I told her about the Ormond Singularity and its connection to my dad’s drawings, she could go straight to Sligo and tell him everything. I really wanted to trust her, but what I did know about her was telling me not to.

  I jumped up and raced after her, catching her just before she’d reached the street a short distance away.

  ‘You’ve gotta tell me where I can find that angel!’

  She turned around and tossed her hair away from her face. ‘I don’t gotta do anything. No-one tells me what to do. You call me,’ she said, ‘when you’re ready to deal. Then I’ll consider it.’

  She turned and hurried away.

  ‘I don’t even have your number!’

  ‘Check your mobile, Callum Ormond!’

  I ran to my backpack and pulled out my phone. It slid open to a new screensaver. Winter by moonlight, complete with a new phone number in my contacts list.

  The birds were just beginning to call from the trees in the street as I crawled under the house and climbed up through the hole in the floorboards. The place smelled pretty foul and stuffy, so I opened the back door to get some fresh air inside.

  I hadn’t realised how starving I was until I started eating. I ended up ploughing through half a loaf of stale bread.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about whether I could trust Winter. I desperately needed to find the angel that she said she knew about, but I couldn’t bring myself to confide in her. I already had enough problems with Sligo and the woman who’d first abducted and interrogated me, who, for some reason, was stuck in my mind as a red-head. I couldn’t risk them finding out anything more.

  The little Celtic ring Gabbi had given me glinted on my finger. ‘Get well, little Gabster,’ I whispered, imagining her lying asleep in her intensive care bed.

  I pulled out my sleeping-bag and crashed.

  ‘Dude, you’re alive,’ Boges said after I answered my phone.

  ‘Only just.’

  ‘I was trying to call you last night, but you must have been out of range. What happened, where were you?’

  ‘Oh, long story …’ I sighed, sitting up and stretching. The car yard was already a long-ago hazy blur.

  ‘Nothing would shock me anymore. You could tell me anything and I’d believe it.’

  I could hear Mrs Michalko calling him in the background.

  ‘Crap, I’ve gotta get off, Mum’s coming,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop by as soon as I can, OK.’

  333 days to go …

  I’d spent the day holed up in the dump, trying again to make sense of the drawings and hoping for Boges to show up. I heard a couple of people talking and laughing as they walked by outside on the street, while I lurked in the dark, shifting about like a cockroach.

  My plans on visiting my great-uncle in Mount Helicon had completely fallen apart, thanks to Sligo, and while I really wanted to get out there and hopefully find some answers, I thought I was probably better off staying put for a few days.

  Winter’s mobile always seemed to be switched off, which was driving me nuts. What was the point of giving me her number if she was never going to take a call from me? I was sick and tired of having so many unanswered questions.

  Feeling isolated and alone, I wished I could go home. I rang Mum once and left a message on her voicemail just so I could hear her voice and she could hear mine. I told her I was safe and not to worry.

  I thought again of my little sister stuck in a hospital bed while security watched out for her fifteen-year-old brother … They needed to be protecting her from people like the psycho woman and Sligo, who were all determined to discover Dad’s secret and were willing to take out anyone in their path.

  It wasn’t fair: I’d done nothing wrong, but I was serving a sentence of solitary confinement, away from the people I needed to watch over. I just needed to stay alive long enough to solve Dad’s mystery.

  332 days to go …

  I kept waking up thinking I could hear Dad’s voice calling me.

  I tossed and turned, not quite awake, but not quite asleep either. Caught in that half-asleep state I could see the threadbare toy dog from my nightmares. It hovered in my mind, heavy and bleak. I’d had so many close calls lately that I couldn’t understand why or how this image could make me feel so uneasy. Storms at sea, sharks, being thrown in a car boot, almost drowning in oil—they were all terrifying things I could understand.

  My eyes flew open. Something had completely wrenched me from sleep. I strained my ears to hear a dull thudding that seemed to be coming from outside. Straight away I thought of Winter, handing me and my secrets over to Sligo.

  I crouched behind one of the boarded-up windows. Someone was definitely creeping around outside; I could hear their careful footsteps crushing the long grass.

  I spotted the hole in the floor and dived into it, quickly pulling the carpet back over my head. Buried in dirt and cobwebs, I strained to hear where the footsteps had gone.

  They’d stopped. Hunched under the floorboards I began crawling on all fours straight ahead towards the light and up behind the vegetation that grew around the front vera
ndah.

  I had to keep my head down low to avoid colliding with the sagging floor above. I cringed as my already-aching right shoulder slammed into a pylon.

  The light ahead suddenly shifted—disappearing behind a figure crawling towards me! Someone was under the house with me!

  Awkwardly, I started backing up. If I could make it back through the hole in the floorboards and drag something heavy over the opening, I’d be able to make a run for it. Unless there was someone waiting up there for me too.

  ‘Dude? It’s me!’

  Boges!

  ‘Cal?’ he asked.

  I peered ahead through the gloom under the house. As the dust settled I got a shock to find Boges’s round face peering right back at me, centimetres from my face!

  ‘Boges! Who else would be hiding down here in the dark?!’

  ‘You almost gave me heart failure!’ I continued.

  ‘Sorry, dude. There was a police van cruising the street and I thought this way would be safer. Nice place you’ve got here,’ he joked, wiping a sticky cobweb from his face.

  Boges laughed at himself as we both pulled ourselves up into the house.

  ‘Something smells damn good, for a change!’ I said, as he opened his bag and threw me a squashed paper bag of sandwiches and chips. ‘And they’re still hot!’

  ‘Yes, but don’t forget to eat your fruit, young man,’ he said in his best Mrs Michalko voice, tossing me a couple of apples and a banana.

  ‘Oh, thanks, Mama M!’ I joked.

  He pulled his laptop out last, and then we made ourselves comfortable on the floor and got stuck into the food.

  ‘What’s the latest on Gabbi?’ I asked.

  Boges stopped chewing. ‘No change. She’s still unconscious. “Serious but stable.”’

  Stable. That word made everything sound a little bit better.

  ‘And Mum?’

  Boges made an indecisive groaning sort of sound. ‘She’s kinda OK. I went round to see her last night. She was complaining about one of your dad’s colleagues—Eric somebody—saying how disappointed she was that he hadn’t been in touch with her.’

  ‘That’d be Eric Blair. He went to Ireland with Dad, but was working on another project.’

  ‘He might be helpful to us,’ suggested Boges. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘I spoke to him a couple of times on the phone, before passing him on to Dad, but that’s all. He sounds like a nice guy. Dad seemed to like him. But you’re absolutely right, he might be able to tell us more about what happened over there.’

  ‘Definitely. So this Eric guy’s in your mum’s bad books, and as for you, well … she’s still convinced you’ve had some sort of breakdown—that you’re reacting to all the bad things that have happened to you. She even muttered something about knowing this day would come, and then when I asked her to explain what she meant, she acted like she hadn’t said anything. It’s weird, dude. I don’t know, she just seems so … so vacant. It’s like she’s fighting something in herself, something that’s telling her you’re innocent. I told her you would never have done anything like that, I told her you were innocent, “Come on, Mrs O, it’s Cal”, and she just sort of patted my arm like she felt sorry for me.’

  Boges looked at me with a helpless face. He started scratching his head. It was like he knew I needed to know what was going on, but he didn’t want to be the one to tell me.

  ‘Cal, I tried to tell her that your fingerprints were only on the gun because you picked it up when we were at your uncle’s place, but it was useless. I could see she didn’t want to listen to me. It’s like she figures I’m making up stories to protect you, like I’m being stupid believing that my best friend is being wrongly accused. See, Rafe has said a few things about your “unstable mental state” and “recent aggressive behaviour” … and he’s convinced you attacked Gabbi and that you were the one that shot him. How can you argue with that?’

  ‘What’s wrong with him? Unstable? Aggressive? He’d better not be talking about that day in the kitchen! I was just trying to grab my mail from him when the stupid idiot fell over himself. I didn’t lay a finger on him. He lied about pinching the drawings then, and he’s lying about this too.’

  ‘But why would he lie about it?’ said Boges, more like a statement than a question.

  ‘I don’t know. I think he’s a loser and a liar, but I’d never hurt the guy.’

  Boges picked up a handful of chips. ‘Well somebody did.’

  ‘And whoever did that to Rafe also put my sister in a coma.’ I swore and kicked at the leg of a broken chair. ‘As if I would hurt them!’

  ‘I know, I know, my friend. Chill out. But for whatever reason, that’s what he thinks.’

  ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’ I put my half-eaten sandwich down. ‘He’s lying. And no-one will believe me. Except you. Adults listen to adults. A kid’s say means nothing.’

  ‘Dude, it’s not just a matter of his word. There’s the matter of your fingerprints on the weapon.’

  ‘Yeah, and like you already said, we both know how they got there. I just don’t get it. We know it had to be his gun if it had my fingerprints on it. Maybe he knew something bad was coming. He could have been carrying it with him for protection—oh, what’s the point,’ I said, frustrated with all the guessing.

  We both sat back, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘So … I’m afraid to ask …’ said Boges hesitantly. ‘What happened to you the other night—you said it was a “long story”?’

  I’d kind of been hoping he wouldn’t ask me that question. I sighed and gave him the rundown, starting with the casino explosion after we’d run away from security at the Liberty Mall carpark, and then through to being tossed like useless trash into the underground oil tank.

  ‘Trapped you in an oil tank!’ shouted Boges. ‘He was trying to drown you?!’

  ‘Hey, keep it down! Yes, an oil tank. I thought I was dead. The oil had fully covered my mouth and just when I was thinking this is it, someone turned off the pump and the tank stopped filling.’

  ‘Who? Who stopped it?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘A girl?! What?’

  ‘Her name’s Winter Frey. She says Vulkan Sligo’s her guardian …’ I could see Boges growing suspicious, fast. ‘Apparently he used to work for her dad, I don’t know how long ago. Her parents were pretty cashed-up but they both died in some sort of accident, and she’s been in the care of the Slug ever since.’

  ‘So if she’s with him, why did she save you?’ Boges wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I wanted to know the answer to that question too. ‘Maybe she just couldn’t sit back knowing I was about to die. She must have been watching it happen from a hiding place. I think she relies on him to get by,’ I continued, ‘but I don’t think she’s into his big crim lifestyle—you know, drowning teenagers and stuff. She reckons he’s on a serious mission to become acceptable—some sort of pillar of society.’

  Boges looked like he was about to choke after my ‘pillar of society’ comment.

  ‘I know,’ I continued, ‘what kind of pillar of society kills people … but Winter says Sligo believes the Ormond Singularity will make him famous. If he can work it out. I turned out to be a less-than-helpful source of information for him, but at least I know now that there are two criminal gangs chasing this thing. Winter says she’s willing to help me but I think she may be doing it to collect favours. Get people in debt to her so that she can call on them when she needs something.’

  Boges sat back quietly and listened as I explained the break-in to get Winter’s locket, and the claims she made in the park about recognising my dad’s angel drawings.

  ‘Do you believe her? That she knows where the Angel is?’ he asked.

  I remembered her shining face; that sort of thing can’t be faked.

  ‘I’m convinced of it. She really came alive when she saw the drawings,’ I said. ‘She promised she’d take me to see it.’

  Boges
had made himself comfortable on the floor near the wall, his round face serious again. ‘But she has an agenda of her own, wanting to know why the Angel is important to you.’

  ‘She saved my life, Boges. So I’m willing to take some risk on her—even though she’s one weird girl. She’s nothing like any of the girls we know, but I kind of like that about her. And, anyway, as we’ve said before, the Angel is important. Dad drew him twice, so I think she’s our best chance at the moment.’

  ‘She hot?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Winter. She’s hot, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s OK,’ I said, awkwardly. Normally I’d be pretty open with Boges about girls, but something made me want to keep that part of Winter to myself.

  Boges gave me a look. ‘Right. If she starts working things out we could be in real trouble. Be on your guard, dude. We don’t want another rival, or enemy, after the same thing. Especially not someone connected to that lunatic Sligo. You’ve already got two very dangerous enemies.’

  At least, I thought to myself.

  ‘Try her number again,’ said Boges.

  The mobile you have dialled is switched off. Please try again later.

  Boges opened his laptop. ‘No-one knows about this either. Someone chucked it out because it had stopped working, but it only needed a new power box,’ he said. ‘The motherboard was fine. But, before we start busting our brains on those drawings again, let’s get your profile underway.’

  ‘I already have a profile,’ I said gloomily. ‘At every cop shop.’

  ‘I think you should start a blog,’ he said. ‘An appeal to the public could be helpful.’

  ‘A blog? Like MySpace?’

  ‘Yeah. A place where you can try and get across your side of the story, and shut down all the crazy stuff the media’s saying about you. Nobody has to see you or know where you are. They can just read what you have to say and judge for themselves.’