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That thought made me grab my nose. Nothing.
Seconds ago it was bleeding and broken.
“What’s going on?” I backed away, head whipping around. “How did I get here?”
How would I explain it? Any more wild stories about teleporting and magically healed wounds... and they’d send me right back to Sunny Breeze.
“No!”
Turning my back on Haris Day, I ran.
MY LUNGS BURNED. LEGSached. Stumbling to a stop, I propped against the wall, straining to catch my breath.
My feet carried me here on their own power. The memory in there both powerful and haunting. They took me to the one place I wanted to be for two years.
“Home.”
Lips trembling, I took in the boarded-up windows, foul graffiti, and faint marks in the stone where Mom’s sign used to be.
Irida’s Garden was gone.
With Mom gone and me locked away, there was no one here to run the place. All the plants and flowers my father planted, then my mother nurtured—gone. In one night, I lost the only thing I had of both my parents.
I traced the window board, imagining what it used to be on the other side.
Despite my friends’ lies and the cops’ suspicions, they couldn’t arrest me when there was no proof of a crime. Instead, they dumped me on the grandparents who cut off all contact with Mom when she married the penniless, jobless man she met in the park.
Grandma and Grandpa spent ten minutes listening to me ranting about three-headed dogs, snake women, and us needing to find out where the beasts took Mom before they rang Sunny Breeze and asked if they had an open bed.
I’d been living there ever since that morning when they finally had to discharge me... because it was my eighteenth birthday.
“Happy birthday to me,” I whispered. “I wonder what you had planned for us today, Mom. I bet it would’ve been wild, over the top, and perfect. I miss you.” Fingers skimming the brick, I walked around the corner. “I love... you...”
My brows snapped together. Sitting in front of our old side-delivery entrance was a package.
What was it doing there? Didn’t the boards on the window clue the delivery driver in? No one lived here anymore.
Crossing through the alley, I got a closer look at the package. A small, brown rectangle no bigger than the palm of my hand. It was clean and untouched by the elements. It was also still here, meaning it hadn’t been sitting there long enough to catch the attention of porch pirates.
I glanced at the label.
Aella Vanda
I bent to grab it and stopped. There were an infinite number of reasons I shouldn’t go around opening random packages. I got mountains of hate mail when Dina leaked my address at Sunny Breeze. I asked my best friend to visit, needing to see a friendly face who believed in me.
What I got was her spit in my face and the whole world finding out my own grandparents chucked me into a facility rather than dealing with me.
I was sent so many awful and disgusting things, I gave the staff permission to put my mail directly into the garbage. This would only be more of the same.
Picking it up, I carried it to the dumpster.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I whipped around. “Who’s there?”
“Stop your flailing around, girl. Look down. I’m in your hand.”
Frowning, I looked down. What was going on? There was nothing in my hand except—
