“It’s him,” she told Luke. “It’s him made me sick in the hospital room this mornin’.”

“How you know that?”

“Cause I felt the same way just now tryin’ to follow him into his daddy’s house.”

She’d sensed he was special, but she hadn’t known just how special.

“You think he’s got your other eye-shell then?”

“I’m willin’ to bet on it.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“I don’t know.” She rolled over and buried her face in her arms. “Let me think on it.”

She had no experience in this sort of thing. Sometimes she wished she didn’t have to make all the decisions. She was only twenty-three. Wasn’t being special and having a destiny enough? Did she have to lead too?

And worse was realizing that the man, the special one, might not be here for her…the way she’d been stopped dead at his doorstep tonight made her suspect he might be against her.

People against her paid a price, a high one, for treatin her bad.

Suzie Lefferts found that out. In spades.

After Semelee had experimented with her control powers for a while, she decided to put them to the test. She chose prom night. No one had asked her to go, of course. Like, big surprise. And guess who Jesse Buckler asked: big-haired Suzie Lefferts.

So Semelee had sat in her bedroom—another thing she’d discovered was she didn’t have to be on the beach to fly with her birds—and got together a flock of big fat seagulls and followed Jesse’s car from Suzie’s house to the prom. When they was both out of the car, she arranged the gulls into a low circle. As each one got near them it let loose with a big load of bird shit. Suzie started screamin’ as the big white globs landed in her hair, on her dress. Same with Jesse. They both jumped back in the car and drove away. Toward home, most likely. Semelee was sure Suzie wasn’t goin’ into the prom lookin’ like that.

Semelee lay on her bed and near split her sides laughing. But she realized how a few of her gulls hadn’t done their thing yet, so she chased after the car, droppin’ big white splotches all over Jesse’s nice new wax job. He kept goin’ faster, trying to outrun them, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Then a particularly big glob landed on his windshield. She saw the wipers come on but they just smeared it all over the glass. That was when Jesse missed the curve and smashed into the utility pole. The two of them’d been in such a rush to get away from the bombardment that they never buckled up. Jesse wound up dead; Suzie survived but with a broke neck. Doctors said she’d never walk again.