Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) by K.C. Neal Read Free Book Online

what the dream meant.
    We went up to the kitchen, made ourselves toasted bagels with cream cheese, and carried our food back down to the basement. It was time to get started on our experiment.
    “So what’re we going to make?” Ang asked.
    “Maybe little cookies? Like, mini sugar cookies.”
    Ang nodded. “If they’re small, then people won’t want to break them in half and share them.”
    “Yeah, we don’t want anyone sharing them or saving them.”
    I rummaged around in the small kitchen area that my dad had built years ago, when he first started the café. He used to experiment a lot with dishes for the café’s menu, and the downstairs kitchen was like his laboratory. So, it was almost as if I had my own basement apartment. I used to have the third room upstairs on the main floor, next to Bradley’s, but when I got sick of sharing a bathroom with a gross teenage boy, my parents let me switch to the basement bedroom. I loved it. I had my own bathroom, though it was a tiny one with a pedestal sink and almost no storage space. I even had my own entrance, a door off the basement TV room that led to the back yard.
    I pulled butter from the mini fridge under the counter and set it out to soften, and gathered the rest of the ingredients, then joined Ang on the sofa.
    “So who should we give them to?” I asked. The experiment was her idea, so I figured she could suggest our victims.
    Ang held the steno notebook and my purple pen, which she tapped against her pursed lips for a few seconds. “I don’t think we even know enough to make informed decisions about who we pick. So I say we go random. Let’s just see who comes into the coffee shop during our shift on Monday.”
    “As good a plan as any, I guess,” I said around a yawn so big my jaw cracked. My nightmares were starting to seriously affect my sleep.
    I heard lumbering footfalls on the stairs and grimaced. Only Bradley would be that loud. He was singing to himself, probably a song from one of the obscure college bands he liked, and he paused at the bottom of the stairs for an air drums solo. I rolled my eyes at Ang. He looked like a complete idiot.
    “Aw, how nice of you to make something for me! What’s it going to be, a cake? Brownies?” he asked, surveying the ingredients spread out on the counter.
    “Yeah, right ,” I scoffed.
    “Hi, Bradley,” Ang said, and gave me a disapproving look. On an intellectual level, she knew full well why Brad irritated me so much, but being an only child, she didn’t completely understand.
    “Hey, what’s up?” he said to Ang, then disappeared into the storage room and started digging around. A few minutes later, he emerged with a golf bag slung over his shoulder.
    “Catch you chicks later.” He saluted and pounded up the stairs, the golf clubs clanking around in the bag.
    “Chicks? Oh my God, could he be a bigger dork?”
    “He’s not that bad,” Ang said. “He’s friendly. Sometimes he’s pretty funny, really.”
    “If you have a crush on my brother…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
    “No! No. You know I don’t. It’s just, sometimes you seem kind of hard on him.”
    “Yeah, well, try having your attention-whore brother in the same grade as you.”
    “I know, old news—it sucks.” She tilted her head in sympathy. “But it’s not his fault.”
    “Yeah, yeah…” I flapped my hand back and forth as if shooing away a fly, and stood up. We’d had this conversation about a hundred times before.
    I pressed my finger against the waxed paper that encased the butter, but it still wasn’t soft enough. Some people might stick it in the microwave for a few seconds to hurry the process, but not me. My grandmother taught me that microwaving caused the solids, oils, and water in the butter to separate. “Loses its integrity,” she used to say.
    I slouched back down on the sofa and examined the chipped, midnight-blue polish on my nails.
    “He just gets away with everything.” I looked at