Hunt and Power. Stephen Hayes

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СКАЧАТЬ the party happening around us. David and Craig had apparently persuaded Felicity and Jessica to dance with them, while I could also make out Darcy and Jane in a far corner. Sebastian had latched on to Lena but I could see that she wasn’t happy about it; her eyes were darting all over the place, looking anywhere but at his face. I felt a little better that at least Peter was prepared to sit by me while all this was happening, but a few minutes later, that plan change when we were joined by a very flirtatious Kylie.

      “Hi,” she said, making eyes at Peter.

      “Hi,” we replied, me putting my hand over my mouth so as not to laugh.

      “Wanna dance?” she asked, addressing Peter. Clearly Kylie had no issue getting straight to the point.

      “I thought the idea was to wait ‘til the guy asks,” said Peter, but he looked amused as he took her hand. I bit back another laugh; Peter was rather short and skinny, and Kylie wasn’t a lot bigger, but she was dragging him away so forcefully that he lost his balance a few times, and she practically lifted him up to get him back on his feet. I wondered vaguely if James had seen that.

      I stood up, clutching my drink. I was going to have to make something of this party or I’d be on the point of a breakdown by the time I got home. Trying not to look at Tommy and Natalie, who looked like they were having the time of their lives, I walked along the bar, skirting around several people who I wanted nothing to do with. Then I spotted Daniel, who was heading off the dance floor toward the bar. I hadn’t seen who he’d been dancing with, but I hardly cared. He was alone now, and he could help me with my problems in ways none of the others could.

      “Hey man,” I said, nudging him as we reached the bar at the same time.

      “Hey,” he said, looking around at me. “Pretty good party after all. Enjoying it?”

      “I suppose,” I said, unsure whether he was referring to having fun or the fact that nothing had gone wrong yet.

      Whether it was because of his magical psychic abilities or simply because he was tuned in, he seemed to notice my unease, and said, “You okay?”

      “I need a bit of help,” I said. “I wouldn’t normally ask you to do predictions and stuff, but I don’t think there’s anything real dangerous about this.”

      I paused, feeling distinctly awkward asking this sort of advice from Daniel. Though I was sure he’d be able to give it to me, I’d never asked for his predictions on anything other than the project we were working on together in Media. Daniel didn’t seem fazed, though. He took a glass of coke from across the bar then sat back and sipped it for a moment.

      Finally he said, “I probably can’t give you the details you're after. The future’s never concrete, so I can’t give you enough information beyond any difficult decisions … and it seems like you’ve got a few of those over your head at the moment, right?”

      “Tell me about it,” I muttered darkly.

      “Yeah,” he said. He seemed to be deciding exactly what he should tell me, though I wished he would just tell me whatever he knew. But suddenly, seeing the look of concentration on his face made me realise: if he was using his psychic powers here, he was practically doing magic.

      “Don’t,” I said hurriedly, grabbing his arm. “You can’t do magic in here—”

      “Relax,” he said, shaking me off. “I’d be dead by now if mine counted.”

      I felt distinctly uneasy now, but Daniel’s next words jolted me back to the issue at hand. “You know that old saying, that it never does good to cry over spilt milk? My advice to you would be to move on from the opportunities you’ve missed, because chances are they’ll come back around later. Don’t brood on them, ‘cause it’ll only cause you to miss more.”

      “Ah,” I said, my mind ticking over. I thought I knew where he was coming from: Just because I’d missed out on Natalie, that didn’t mean I couldn’t still have some fun. “Cheers.”

      “Nothing of it,” he said, waving his hand.

      After that, we sat in silence, sipping our drinks. I had just finished mine when I saw Kylie and Peter dancing nearby on the dance floor, Kylie squeezing Peter like an octopus, Peter skipping around in a desperate attempt to both keep his balance and keep step with her. I had to bite back another laugh; really, Peter just seemed so unmanly sometimes, no matter how hard he tried.

      This made me remember where I’d seen Daniel coming from. and I asked, “So who were you dancing with before?”

      “Oh, Lisa,” he said, glancing sideways at me, then sweeping the floor with his gaze, perhaps looking for her again.

      “Yeah? She any good?”

      “At dancing? I suppose,” he said. “I don’t know; I was more worried about how badly I was doing to care what she was like.”

      I sniggered, then when Daniel looked at me, said, “Sorry. It’s just hard to imagine Lisa like that … I’ve always been used to her going on about schoolwork.”

      “Well … yeah, she’s a bit like that,” he conceded. “I’ve seen her more social before though, like last week, and our families have known each other since I came here. They live over our back fence.”

      “Do they?” I asked, my mind calculating. Lisa had been hinting for some time that she fancied the boy over her back fence, and we had deduced from a comment she had made that he looked like Marc. Now I realised that the boy was probably Daniel, though she had always made us think that she only knew him by sight. So what was this about their families knowing each other?

      We had to end the discussion before I could ask, because Lisa turned up beside us, followed by Amelia. They both looked refreshed, and I assumed they must have just come from the lady’s room. A few minutes later, Lisa and Daniel were back on the dance floor, though I saw Lisa throw a curious look at Natalie and Tommy as she passed them. That left me alone with Amelia.

      “You okay?” I asked her, noticing that she was watching Marc, who was now dancing with Stella, of all people.

      “Yeah, fine,” she said in a convincingly off-handed manner. “It’s not turned out too bad so far.”

      “Yeah, I suppose,” I said, but I found it difficult to drag my mind back to the Hammersons after what Daniel had said to me. Deciding it was easiest not to at this point, and thinking that this conversation was a mirror of my conversation with Daniel a minute ago, I said, “Enjoying it at all?”

      She jumped, as though suddenly realising I was onto her. “I … I suppose so,” she said. “I’m too tense to relax too much, really.”

      “Join the club,” I muttered, grinning in spite of myself. I knew that she was covering her displeasure over not having danced with Marc, and she was doing a pretty shoddy job of it. Apparently she had decided on the spot that her best bet was to make me think about other things to distract me, but I wasn’t about to take the bait.

      I was nevertheless caught off-guard when she said, “What about you, though? You’ve been up here the whole time.”

      “Yeah,” I said shiftily, staring intently at my empty glass. “I—I just needed a word with Daniel.”

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