Hidden Among Us Read Online Free Page A

of heavy woollen fabric, now glinting gold. Black eyebrows like flicks of ink, a ragged coil of red hair escaping from the hood: weird colouring. He was very tall, looking down at me. I hadn’t noticed that while he was sitting on the bench. It must have been his clothes that smelt, I thought. Woolly and ragged, kind of hippy-ish.
    I couldn’t stop staring. He looked so incredibly strange, yet there it was: a quick hot spark of recognition. I felt sure I’d seen him somewhere before. Known him.
    “Well?” said the boy. “Can I be of help?”
    Of course, my face immediately went idiot red, burning. That car was coming closer, closer. It shot past and then, a few yards further on, it stopped and the driver started to turn, inching slowly around in the narrow road.
    Now I was really scared.
    “I – I missed my stop,” I said, and regretted it instantly. What a stupid thing to do, telling this stranger that I was lost and alone in some one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. But somehow the words had just slipped out, as if he’d pulled them from between my lips like fish on a line.
    “Hopesay Edge?” he said, watching with polite disinterest as the car finished turning and inched back along the lane towards us. “A request stop only, I collect.” He smiled, so utterly gorgeous that I was shocked by it, almost insulted, like someone had just slapped me in the face. No one has the right to be that beautiful. It wasn’t fair. “You have to really
want
to go to Hopesay, Lissy,” he said, quietly, almost whispering. “Do you?”
    I just stood there, frozen. I looked up the lane after the car.
    And when I turned back, the stranger had gone.
    He knew my name
.

6
Joe
    Trees hung over the lane; it was like being in a tunnel, down some kind of pit. It started to rain and Dad flicked on the windscreen wipers. Connie had gone up to bed with a temperature in the end, and we’d been sent out to collect the AWOL elder daughter. The official reason was that Connie might wake up and want her mam. Unofficially, I could tell Dad thought Miriam was too wired to drive properly.
    It sounds stupid but I went cold thinking about that lass in the yard. Wondering if I should’ve told Dad or even Miriam about her, white hair against the black of her cloak. But what harm could she have done? It’s not like I’d seen some bloke hanging around with a wrecking bar and a ladder. She was just a girl. Miriam was on edge anyway. Her hand had been shaking when she’d poured the tea earlier. Dad had taken the pot from her, put an arm round her shoulder.
    “Don’t worry, love,” he’d said. “Lissy’s going to be here soon. She’s a clever girl – she can manage a train journey, and it’s not really that surprising she’s switched off her phone. You’ll sort it out between you.”
    Excuse me while I puke. And now we were lost – great.
    I peered at the unfamiliar name on the sign post ahead. “We must’ve missed the turn-off for the station.” I glanced at the map. “This isn’t Hopesay Edge – it’s the next village on.”
    “What was
that
?” Dad slowed the car right down.
    “Dad, why are you stopping?” I glanced down at the road atlas on my lap again: on the way out here, our SATNAV had given up on the tangle of tiny lanes not long after passing the last major town, sending us round in circles till Dad had chucked it in the boot. We were on our own. “We’re nowhere near.”
    “I know.” Dad eased the car into a crawl, reversing carefully round the corner, craning his neck to get a look out of the back window. “But I’m pretty sure that was Connie’s sister I saw by the road back there. She must’ve got off at the wrong stop—” He wound down his window, leaning out. “Lissy?” he said. “Are you all right?”
    And there was this incredibly tall girl at the side of the road, red hair lit up by our headlights like she was burning. She turned to look at Dad, mouthing his name.
    I saw it straight away. In