Stone and Secret (Nocturne Academy 3)

It wasn’t until I got up and went to splash water on my face at the sink that I noticed the change. After blotting my cheeks dry on the scratchy brown paper towels, I glanced in the mirror and let out a gasp.

Oh my God—I was hideous.

23

Squinty mud-brown eyes, completely different from my regular hazel color, stared back at me from the mirror. My hair, which had always been long and straight, was suddenly a snarled bird’s nest of no-color greyish-brown.

I’d shrunk about a foot too, which might not be so bad except now I had a hump on my back. A freaking hump! My nose, formerly reasonably straight, was crooked and had a wart on one side with three long, black hairs growing out of it.

Like I said—hideous.

But the weirdest thing was, you could still tell it was me. Something about the shape of my face still let whoever was looking know that, yup—that’s Emma Plunkett all right. Only now she’s somehow been uglified.

“No…no!” I muttered to myself in horror. “This can’t be real—this has to be a joke!”

I looked in the mirror over the other sink just to be sure.

No joke—I was butt-ugly.

I grabbed handfuls of paper towels, soaked them in water, and tried scrubbing my face, as though I could rub the ugly away if I tried hard enough.

It didn’t work. My skin just started looking red and splotchy where I rubbed it so hard. And it wasn’t like it was that great to begin with—I was actually making things worse, if that was even possible.

At last I gave up and threw the wad of paper towels in the trash. It was no use—I had changed and not for the better. And for all I knew, this might be a permanent condition. How was I ever going to change back?

The sauce—that damn purple sauce, I thought. That’s what caused this! I have to find out what was in it and if there’s some kind of an antidote.

And the only people who would know that were Bran and his family.

Reaching into my apron, I pulled out my phone, intending to Google them and see if I could get a home address. Frostproof was a tiny town but that didn’t mean everybody knew exactly where everyone else lived.

But while I was flipping through, I happen to see I had a new contact added—Bran. Somehow in the short time he had my phone on Monday, he had put his phone number into it.

Under other circumstances I would have been annoyed—how dare he do that without asking me? But right then, I was so grateful I could cry. With shaking fingers, I pressed the dial key and waited until he picked up on the third ring.

“This is Bran O’Connor,” he said.

“Bran,” I gasped. “It’s Emma. Please—you have to help me!”

“What? What is it—what’s wrong? Where are you?” he exclaimed, sounding instantly alert.

“I’m still at work – at the diner,” I said. “I tried some of that weird purple sauce you guys were eating. And it did… I don’t know what it did to me but I look completely different. I look awful. You have to help me!”

“You tried some of the Suva? But that shouldn’t have affected you.” He sounded like he might be frowning.

“Well, it did!” I exclaimed. “It affected me like crazy. I look disgusting!”

“You need to come to my house right away,” he said. He gave me a series of directions which I jotted down on a dry paper towel using a pen from my apron. “Come as soon as you can,” he said before hanging up.

I slipped out of the diner as quietly as I could, hoping Joey wouldn’t notice. If he asked me to come and do anything else before the diner closed… well I had no idea how I would explain my current appearance. But luckily he didn’t say anything as I called good night and left.

I just hoped that Bran could fix me! This was even worse than having the skink in my ear and that was really saying something.

24

Bran was waiting for me. He opened the front door almost before I could knock.

“You have to help me!” I exclaimed, the minute I saw him.

“Shhh – keep your voice down,” he hissed. “I don’t want my parents to wake up and see.”

“While I don’t want anyone to see,” I told him. “This is crazy. What’s in that purple sauce you guys were eating anyway?”

“Nothing that should have affected you,” he said grimly. “I thought you were human—or at least, mostly human.”

“Of course I’m human!” I said indignantly. “What kind of a thing is that to say?”

But Bran was shaking his head. “Apparently you’re not or the Suva wouldn’t have affected you this way. How much did you eat anyway?”

“Hardly any,” I said. “I just barely dabbed my pinky finger in it and put it on the tip of my tongue. Then I felt so sick I thought it was going to puke. I rushed to the bathroom and when I went to wash my face in the sink, I looked up and this is how I looked – which is awful!”