Read Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) for Free Online Page B

the ceiling. “This isn’t helping us at all. What about the yellows?”
    “Not much better,” Ang said. “Hannah and Genevieve were the only ones who stood out as being weird, with their sudden love of your hair and your baking skills.”
    She giggled, and I snorted a laugh.
    “And it’s totally possible that Sophie put them up to it and it was all fake,” I said.
    “I still think we should do a test.”
    “The experiment?”
    “Yes.” Ang flipped to a new page and started jotting some notes. “I think we should keep making observations about the people who are acting weird. But we should also make a few more cupcakes or something with the blue and the yellow, and pick people to give them to.”
    “Are you serious? I can’t believe you want to do this.”
    “I know.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t feel good about it at all, but it just seems like we need to gain an edge here. I mean, we don’t know anything about these bottles, or the list of names, or Harriet Jensen. And … all this is kind of scaring me.”
    “So it’s like a necessary sacrifice?”
    “Exactly.” She narrowed her eyes. “But we need to be really careful, Corinne. I’m totally serious. We don’t know what we have on our hands here, and we don’t want to hurt anyone. We’re not going to be crazy about it, passing them out left and right. We want to affect as few people as possible. Okay?”
    “Okay, gotcha. We’ll be careful.” I wanted to roll my eyes at her patronizing tone. Ang sounded an awful lot like my mom.
    That night, after Mom and Dad were asleep and Bradley finally got home at, like, one in the morning (jerk), Ang and I made sure all the doors and windows were locked before we went to bed. I thought it would take forever to get to sleep because I was all keyed up about Harriet, the pyxis , and the list of names, but I was so exhausted that I fell asleep in minutes.
    When I opened my eyes, I was at the cove again.
    Just like before, the dirty gray fog billowed over the lake toward me. A scream of panic swelled in my lungs at the thought of the fog touching my skin. I glanced at the bonfire ring, but it was cold. I stared at it for a second longer than I should have, willing Mason to appear, like last time. But I was alone.
    I faced the fog and briefly wondered if I could protect myself by diving into the ice-cold lake and staying under water until it passed. But what if it didn’t pass? I’d come up gasping for air, and suck in a big lungful of—no. That wasn’t an option.
    Anger began to mix with my fear. Tapestry was my town, and the cove was one of my favorite spots in the whole world. I couldn’t let this disgusting, smoggy cloud putrefy the pure white beach or hundred-year-old Ponderosa pines.
    The fog was close enough that I could smell its gritty, rotting odor. I could smell it, so it must be creeping into my body. I gagged a little and swallowed hard, willing myself to not puke. Drawing a deep breath, fighting my gag reflex, I planted my feet in the sand, squeezed my eyes closed, and imagined a perfect, pure white light filling the entire valley, singeing the disgusting fog out of existence.
    When I opened my eyes, I saw the fog had stopped at the water’s edge and formed a swirling, gray wall fewer than twenty feet away from me. My heart leapt in triumph and I started to sag with relief. Then a figure began to form in the fog.
    I hadn’t stopped it at all. It had stopped of its own accord, and now some nightmare was taking shape and moving toward me. I tried to draw a breath to scream, to force myself to run, but what I saw paralyzed me.
    I couldn’t tell if the human-shaped figure stepping out of the fog bank was a man or a woman. But it had milky green eyes.

|| 9 ||
     
    THE NEXT MORNING, I told Ang about my nightmare. She was sympathetic and a little freaked out, but I could tell she didn’t get that it was somehow more than just a scary dream. Not that I blamed her. I just wished I knew