Fear (Gone 5)

Then he saw the smile on her face.

“Hey, don’t do that to me!” Turk cried.

“Then don’t ignore me,” she said. She hated the pleading sound in her own voice.

“I wasn’t ignoring you.” He sat back down, carefully inspecting for scorpions—as if it had been real.

Turk wasn’t the smartest guy, Penny acknowledged with a sigh. He was no Caine. Or Sam. Or even Quinn. Maybe they could ignore Penny, and not even treat her like a girl, and curl their lips in disgust at her, but not Turk. Turk was just a dumb punk.

Penny felt a surge of fury so strong she had to turn away to hide it. Overlooked, ignored, forgotten Penny.

She was the middle of three girls in her family. Her older sister was named Dahlia. Her younger sister was named Rose. Two pretty flower names. And a plain old Penny in between.

Dahlia was a beauty. As early as Penny could remember their father had loved Dahlia. He had dressed Dahlia up in all kinds of outfits … feathers, silky underwear … and taken hundreds of pictures of her. Right up until Dahlia started to develop.

And then, when their father lost interest in Dahlia, Penny had naturally assumed she would be the one, the beloved, the admired one. She assumed she would be the one posing, bending this way and that, showing and concealing, making little coy faces or scared faces, depending on what her father needed.

But her father had barely noticed Penny. Instead he’d moved past her to pretty little Rose.

And soon it was Rose starring in the pictures her father uploaded to the internet.

It was a few years before Penny came to understand that what her father did was against the law.

Then she had waited until her father was at work and she had taken his laptop with her to school and shown the pictures to some of the kids. A teacher had seen and called the police.

Her father had been arrested. Penny’s mother started drinking more than ever before. And all three girls had been sent to live with Uncle Steve and Aunt Connie.

Surprise, surprise, poor little victimized Dahlia and Rose—poor, pretty little Dahlia and Rose—had gotten all the sympathy and all the attention.

Their father hanged himself in his jail cell after other inmates had beaten him.

Penny had put Drano in Rose’s cereal, just to see how pretty she would be with her throat burned out. And then Penny was shipped off to Coates.

In two years at Coates she had not heard from her sisters. Or her aunt and uncle. Her mother had written her once, an incoherent, self-pitying Christmas card.

Penny was as ignored at Coates as she had always been. Until she began to develop her power. It came late to her. After the first big battle in Perdido Beach, when Caine had walked off into the wilderness with Pack Leader.

When he returned at last, ranting and seemingly insane, Penny kept her secret to herself. She knew better than to show Drake. Drake was ruthless: he would have killed her. Caine was softer, smarter than Drake. When at last Caine came back to something like sanity, Penny started to show him what she could do.

And still she was ignored in favor of Drake and, worst of all, that witch Diana. Diana, who never loved Caine, who always criticized him, had even betrayed him and fought with him.

In that terrible moment standing at the edge of the cliff on San Francisco de Sales Island, when Caine could save only one of them, Diana or Penny, he had made his choice.

Penny had endured pain like nothing she could have ever imagined. But it cleared her mind. It strengthened her. It obliterated what faint echoes of pity were still left in her.

Penny was no longer ignored.

She was hated.

Feared.

No longer ignored.

“You have anything to drink?” Turk asked.

“You mean water?”

“Don’t be stupid; you know I don’t mean water.” Water was no longer in short supply. The eerie cloudburst Little Pete had created still rained down. There was a stream running right down the street, all the gutters carefully blocked so that the stream ran all the way down and out through a gap in the wall to form a pool in the sand of the beach.