Free Dangerous Creatures by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Page B

to get some sleep.” She wiggled out of his arms.
    “What did Necro say when we were comin’ to check out our room that got you so rattled?” he asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “You can tell me.”
    Yeah, right.
    A few minutes later, Link gave up. He disappeared to the practice room and Ridley was left staring up at the ceiling, wondering if this was her real punishment for that night at Suffer.
    She heard Link’s voice, and then a girl’s laugh.
    Supertramp. At it again.
    Moments later, the bass guitar began to thump, followed by the drums. Soon the crowd was chanting.
    Ridley pulled the pillow over her head.
    “Li-ink Floyd. Li-ink Floyd. Li-ink Floyd.” You couldn’t ignore it. Rid turned on her side.
    Could this night get any better?
    She didn’t bother to take off her shoes. She wanted to be ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. (It was already difficult enough to bolt in four-inch heels.) Plus, the mattress smelled like an old swimming pool. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place where you wanted to strip.
    Ridley fell into a fitful sleep, alone on a hard mattress, in a city full of threats and lies, while her boyfriend hung out with another girl.
    Only the dim green glow of her Binding Ring lit the way.

    The salty wind on her face felt good, tickling her like kisses. “The breeze is blowing the sunshine away, Reece.” When she looked up, she saw sunspots—and two small dark spots on the horizon. She rubbed her eyes.
    They were still there, past the palms, all the way down on the sand.
    “Look. What’s that?” Ridley sat up, still sucking on two sugar cubes that she had stolen from Gramma’s tea tray. In the fourteen summers she and her siblings and Lena had spent visiting their grandmother, she had never once been caught.
    “You mean who?” Her big sister, Reece, asked as she tied the back of her bathing suit even more tightly than usual. Because now they could see that the dark spots were moving, or more precisely, walking.
    They were two people—two dark figures following along the aquamarine shoreline of Bathsheba Beach.
    “Fine. Who’s that?” Rid’s eyes narrowed. She kept sucking, but now the cubes were so small that she could barely taste the sweetness anymore.
    “Lost Shorelings, probably. Why don’t you ask them yourself?” Shoreling was Gramma’s made-up word for all the curious folk who wandered up and down the sandy stretch in front of their house.
    One of the black dots was headed right into the startling blue bay.
    “We’re too far east for swimming. They’ll drown in the current. Someone should tell them.”
    “Mortals?” Reece shrugged. “Don’t look at me.” Though the Mortal and Caster populations of the island had mixed peaceably for centuries, the fundamental code seemed to be leave well enough alone.
    If you drowned, you drowned.
    Que sera, sera.
    “Fine.” Ridley hopped off the ancient wicker settee and started on the sandy path that snaked between beds of cliff grass down to Bathsheba Beach.
    “Hat,” yelled Reece from the veranda above, but Ridley just waved her off.
    The balcony that wrapped around Ravenwood Abbey, Gramma’s Barbados house, was carved of broad stone, a graceful contrast to the otherwise severe coastal cliffs beneath it. Their house had guarded the edge of the island—the bay, and Bathsheba Beach—ever since the sixteen hundreds. Ravenwood Abbey was even older than Ravenwood Plantation; like so many others, Ridley’s ancestors had stopped in Barbados on the way to the Carolinas, long ago.
    Hundreds of years of nothing ever happening , thought Ridley.
    That was a long, long time.
    Unless you loved spending hours memorizing family ancestral charts, maps of constellations, herb and garden journals, Caster histories. And the history of the Abbey, of course, which was why Ridley knew an encyclopedia’s worth of information about Gramma’s summerhouse. Reece and Ridley and Lena had studied everything but the actual Casts themselves, which