Blackfin Sky by Kat Ellis Page A

neutral, coasting it slowly down the slope of the driveway and halfway along Provencher Street before pulling over and starting the car’s engine.
‘Cam had her braces tightened earlier and it gave her a migraine. I heard your messages come through on her phone downstairs, so I checked them in case it was anything urgent. Lucky I did,’ he added, smiling. ‘Aunt Holly was getting curious about the beeps.’
‘Thanks,’ Sky said, reaching for the door handle. ‘And I’m sorry you had to sneak around…’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I was going to go home.’
Even in the dark Sky saw the exasperated look on his face. ‘If you want to go home, I’ll drive you there. But you said you needed to speak to Madame Curio. Does this have something to do with figuring out what happened to you?’
Sky nodded.
‘You could have asked me to go with you, you know. I want to help you figure this out.’ He gave her that crooked grin again. ‘I’m even wearing my climbing shoes.’
Sky laughed as he tried to manoeuvre one leg from under the steering wheel to show her and accidentally flipped on his headlights.
‘I really don’t need you to…’ A flicker of hurt crossed Sean’s face, and Sky reeled in her words faster than her father reeled in a twenty-pound, two-headed trout.
‘…show off your super-fly footwear, Sean.’ He sniggered, and Sky couldn’t help grinning back at him. ‘Looks like we’re going to the woods.’
The air had grown cooler, leaving ice crystals sparkling on the grass under their feet. Sky led the way, her coat skimming the ground behind her.
‘Isn’t your coat going to get in the way?’ Sean’s voice was unnaturally loud in the absolute silence of the woods. They hadn’t yet reached the fence where Sky had somehow lost her bearings on her previous visit, but the crab apple trees were beckoning not far ahead.
‘It was this coat or no coat,’ she answered. ‘My mum is kind of strict about what I wear, so she only lets me keep what she approves of.’
‘How come?’
Sky shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’ll just donate anything of mine she doesn’t like to Oxfam. Or one time, when I went down to the charity shop and bought back a pair of jeans I loved, she washed them in bleach. They were totally ruined.’ Sky reached up and wrapped her hand around one of the iron railings. ‘We’re here.’
Sean looked up at the iron spikes on top of the fence. ‘ This is what you were planning to climb over?’ He shook his head and unzipped his parka, then pulled out a metal jack. ‘Seriously.’
Sky watched as he used the jack – the same type as the ones she’d seen lying around her dad’s garage – to widen the gap between two of the railings. He kept winding it until the space was just about big enough for them to fit through.
‘You just happened to have a car jack hidden in your jacket?’
‘You mean you don’t?’ Sean looked up, his teeth visible in the moonlight as he grinned. ‘When you said we were going to the woods, I figured you had in mind that we were going to climb over this fence. Bringing the jack from the boot of my car seemed like the best way to make sure neither of us got impaled.’
Sean left the jack on the grass and squeezed through the gap he’d made in the fence, then reached back to take Sky’s hand. She followed Sean through, grabbing her skirt with her free hand to avoid tripping over it.
They walked on into Blackfin Woods, the trees becoming denser and denser around them.
‘Hang on a sec,’ Sky tugged on Sean’s hand, realising for the first time that he hadn’t released it after she’d squeezed through the fence, and fished her torch from her book-bag. A narrow beam sliced outward when she switched it on, dark shapes shuffling off into the shadows, chased away by the light.
Sky let her free hand drop back down to her side, cold inside her leather glove without Sean’s to warm it. Even in the middle of the woods, with creatures scuttling around their