Free Blackfin Sky by Kat Ellis Page A

was a forbidding place. The locals spoke of three great silver wolves being sighted beyond the boundary, but the students of Blackfin High didn’t believe those rumours. The truth was no doubt something far more probable – like the town council meeting there to hold séances under the full moon, or Old Moley using the woods to grow those sweet-smelling mushrooms he ground into his pipe when he thought nobody was looking.
Sky’s hastily booted feet cast echoes through the night, the spiked silhouettes of the treetops looming ahead of her.
She wrapped her coat tighter around herself, though the night wasn’t quite cold enough to leave frost on the ground. But being alone at midnight at the woods’ edge carried its own icy coldness, and Sky felt it.
As she rounded the last twist of road, Sky caught the glint of light on metal. It wasn’t coming from the black coils of the iron gate or the knifepoint tips topping the fence, but a brand new, well-oiled chain which barred all from entering.
She strode up to the iron gates, craning her neck to assess their height and the likelihood of being able to scale them unscathed. Many stories – no doubt exaggerated by cunning parents – had filtered down to Sky’s ears about kids who had attempted the climb, only to reach the point of no return and find the lack of footholds led to inevitable impalement. She looked down at her boots. They weren’t as ridiculous for climbing as sandals or clogs would have been, but the black twists of iron looked awfully slippery.
‘Maybe not,’ she muttered, wishing she had pressed Jared to tell her how he got inside the fence.
The air had cooled sufficiently for her breath to mist in front of her. She searched the darkness in both directions, looking for any obvious weak spots in the fence. None presented themselves, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Choosing on instinct alone, Sky turned to follow the stretch of iron railings leading off to her right. Allowing her left hand to trail along the cold metal, Sky began counting her footsteps in the dark.
‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine…’
The fence curved around as though hugging the woods, drawing them further away from the road. Though no street lamps lit the road edging the woods anyway, moving away from it was like stepping into an abyss. The trees seemed to lean forward in anticipation as Sky moved further along the fence, and she shrank away from them, no longer certain that the lightning trees were a myth.
‘Eighty-two, eighty-three…’
Skinny crab apple trees crowded in on Sky from both sides, their barren branches like children’s finger bones pointed down at her. With the toe of her boot, she kicked up a pile of leaves towards the nearest tree, glad that nobody was watching her for a change. But they hadn’t been watching her for months if they all believed she had died, had been buried under the clay soil to be eaten by worms…
‘One hundred and thirty, one hundred and thirty-one—’
She stopped as a flash of lightning split the sky, showing her the battered teeth of gravestones pegged into the meadow now before her. The forks of light seemed to swirl around her for a moment, like eels in water.
Sky spun in a circle, looking for the iron fence her hand had rested on just moments ago to try to gather her bearings, but could see it nowhere.
She was lost.
Sky stopped short. That couldn’t be right. She never got lost in Blackfin.
Except when you go missing for three months and everyone thinks you’re dead, she answered herself with a snort. But then lightning flashed again, almost close enough to touch this time, and with that same viscous quality.
Dizziness swept over her. She hadn’t been hit with a migraine this bad in months.
The nausea she felt was sudden and intense, and she braced her hands on her knees until it passed. When she looked up, she met the crooked grin of Blackfin Cemetery.
How the hell have I ended up here? The cemetery’s half a mile from the