Skylar Wishes

By Tina L. Hook

Grace is the only one who remembers the truth—that comets are the source of extraordinary destinies. Since their last night together, all memory of their comets and their old powers has abandoned Skylar and Alina. All that is left is Alina’s enduring envy for everything Skylar touches, and Alina’s sudden ability to wake up inside of Skylar’s body, if only for a few minutes.

After Alina finally forces her will and switches bodies with Skylar, harsh realities surface. The holes in Skylar’s relationship with Darren are exposed, and Skylar herself becomes seduced by the idea of living two lives at once, and loving two men at once.

Grace might be able to save them, but everything Skylar and Alina know about love has to change. When their comets return, these three women must choose their fate once more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tina L. Hook
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301339006

Tina L. Hook

Tina L. Hook grew up in Orlando, Florida where she graduated from Rollins College. Her debut novel, Enchanted by Starlight, was honored as a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards for Science Fiction/Fantasy. She lives in a small town near Nashville with her husband. Visit Tina's author info. at www.TinaLHook.com.

Book preview

Part One

Skylar’s Body

Chapter 1

Alina

Her body felt different than I thought it would.

I had imagined what it would feel like sitting inside her skin, looking out from the dark frames of her eyes and vibrating that intoxicating perfume that always lingered over her. I thought the air might taste different from her lungs—richer somehow. And yet there I was, seeing the world from Skylar’s body, wrapped inside the feminine curves I had so long coveted, and nothing magical had happened. The air was as stale as I remembered from my former body, the one I was born with.

My life as Alina felt two sizes too large, too misshapen to ever define me. Invisible, that describes the life I lived in Skylar’s shadow since our high school days. I didn’t loathe her. That isn’t what led me here. I loathed myself.

Where am I? I tested the words for my own benefit. Though her undulating accent was gone, her smoky voice sent out its low syllables in place of my own. Hoarse sounding at first, there was something beguiling about her scratchy drawl, like something both pretty and hard at the same time.

Here I am. The reflection from a tall mirror framed with golden vines announced itself in my peripheral vision. The smoldering image of Skylar bounced back at me. Just beyond it loomed an extra soft bed covered in silver sheets so iridescent they looked like a puddle of warm water. Inviting, I thought.

Her bedroom ceiling vaulted high overhead, a feature further exaggerated by the tall floral panels covering the walls. A large white armoire stood to my left with frilly bits of jewel toned fabric poking out from its half opened crevices. Behind me, under the weight of my hands and pressing the back of my thighs, I could feel the dimensions of an oversized vanity. Better to look at myself with, I sang, turning to see my reflection again.

Just like Skylar, I thought, to traipse around half covered in a silk robe. Red, no less. I pulled the loose shoulders over myself hoping to cover up what I had grown so accustomed to disliking, until Skylar’s daring eyes gazed back at me again. This visage didn’t belong to her anymore. It was now mine. This was the new me—inside of my new body. I had taken it from her.

From Skylar’s bed, a framed photo of her and Darren kissing glinted back next to the machine. Darren. I had almost forgotten. My memory was betraying me more and more these days. There were whole segments of my past that had floated away.

I held the photo next to my reflection. He was kissing me now—the new me.

Chapter 2

Grace

There are things I remember that Skylar and Alina don’t.

On our last night together, each of us called out under the stars, all three of our comets revealed themselves. The sand was damp beneath my soles, giving less resistance to my steps and leaving a trail of sunken footprints behind me. That must be how Alina found me. Standing in the stark white of her nightgown, she revealed her power to me for the first time. The revenge business, is what she called it. Until then I didn’t know there were others like me, least of all my old friends Skylar and Alina. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the magic tying all of us together, but I didn’t know that then. Now I might be the only one that knows.

It was the night before my wedding day. Alina was only a placeholder, a friend I used to fill in Skylar’s absence. I was still mourning Skylar’s affair with my ex Liam, and a bride can only endure so much, especially when she is emptying out her heart for someone new. I had listened to each of Skylar’s recorded apologies and all of her scribbled notes, but I couldn’t bear the weight of them, or of her. Until she stumbled onto the beach that night, I wasn’t sure if I could manage the sight of her again.

You didn’t think you were the only one with a power did you? Alina’s red curls moved from her as if alive, coiling tighter and loosening around her head. She pulled at her gown, hungry to expose her skin to the starlight. I had been so naïve. Alina had come to steal my power. She demanded it from me.

As for Skylar’s power, the power to make anyone admire her, it was easy to feel betrayed. Among all of her social followers, the ones that packed her parties and drove her events promotion business forward, I was no different. I had trailed behind her at soirees and soaked in her every convincing word, just like the rest. The violet mist floating up from her voice was only visible to me that night, while she stood under the light of her own soaring comet.

I didn’t know about your power, honey, Skylar assured me, not until tonight. Alina’s the one that had us both figured out. I believed her then, but knowing her gift I might have believed anything she said.

The sand picked up around us in a frenzy. Pushed down by the pressure of our comets, Alina clawed her way toward me. If it were not for Skylar stopping her, she may have gotten what she came for.

The unnatural shifting of Alina’s red curls and the violet simmering of Skylar’s voice still visit me in my sleep two years later. Their powers were gone after that last night, Alina’s power of revenge taken away by her angry comet, and Skylar’s power of influence given back willingly to the cosmos. I was the only one to hold on, refusing to let go, the power to make men love me, even though my comet pressed itself over me and asked without asking.

My husband Bennett doesn’t understand why I spend so much time gazing into the darkness, or why the stars hold so much sway over me. As time goes on they call to me more and more, as if my debt only grows. It is as if this power is not rightfully mine, but I hold onto it.

The ancients believed that stars and comets were prophetic messengers. My comet had been trying to tell me this all along, though the signs were easy for me to miss early on. The truth first visited me through the words of William Shakespeare in a dusty old book with tissue-thin pages. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was hidden beneath a stack of books at a neighborhood garage sale. Despite its broken spine and three dollar price tag, I knew it was important. Mom usually frowned at my discoveries, cautioning me about money not growing on trees. Wasteful, would have been her normal observation. This time, however, she didn’t flinch. Buy it if you want it, she said instead, pressing three dollars into my palm. Effortless.

From my childhood bed I read aloud when Calpurnia foretold of blazing heavens and the death of princes within the lines of Julius Caesar. Comets don’t set sail for regular people, her words advised, only for the chosen ones. Would I ever be chosen?

The answer doing cartwheels in my head was too terrifying to accept. My eyelids never closed shut that night.

Later I found another comet burning its message in the pages of The Scarlet Letter. And again in the works of Nostradamus. Death was always close at hand when comets were mentioned, and the fear of my own mortality held my truth even farther away. That was before I understood that life was a cycle of mini births and deaths, beginning and endings—all of them strung together into a common fate. One death equals another birth. One life can contain many deaths.

This primitive knowledge grows inside of me now, a gift from my comet, the greatness of past nobles and saints recycled into a willing new soul. If Calpurnia was right, the same magic that once pulsed in the veins of men like Julius Caesar now pulses through me. The power to become more than ordinary. A cosmic equalizer of man’s destiny. It burns behind my eyes in a dancing blue flame, though only Skylar and Alina have ever recognized it for what it really is.

One day, when I offer my power back to the universe, the memory of it will dry up, just as it has for my two friends. Then we will have only our failure or our success, and only ourselves to blame.

Chapter 3

Alina

My aimless vacation in Fiji had been relaxing to begin with. The thought of Darren paying for every tropical drink and miniature umbrella was fun at first, but only at first. Unfortunately, the rum-induced blur between sunset and sunrise could not erase the truth. This trip had been a gift from Darren to Skylar. Skylar had only passed the travel package on to me out of pity. To wherever your heart desires, were the words Skylar had left behind with her secondhand gift, an inscription she fingered in the sand our last night on the beach—the last night I could have called her a friend. The fact that this was Skylar’s intended getaway and not mine, and that Darren was under the illusion that all of these drinks and hotel suites were happening for his beloved Skylar, began to burn a hole in the bottom of my stomach. She had wasted her gift on me.

***

When did it first happen? It’s hard to say for sure. At first I began seeing Skylar’s reflection in the mirror, not like she was standing on the other side of it, but as if she were standing in my place—as if I were looking out from her eyes. You would have thought the sight of her would have startled me, but it was if I were expecting it. As if I had willed it. Free will, were the words that always came back to me in those first encounters, as if something about them conjured her to me. As if some part of the old me, the part I couldn’t remember, was connected to them.

Originally, she only appeared for a second, brushing her hair as I pulled the brush through my own, or leaning forward into the mirror as I came in closer to inspect my skin. And there she would be, dark and smoldering and everything I wasn’t. It was a lovely fantasy, thinking of myself as her, looking like her even if for only a flash. Soon I began craving her, even spending whole hours searching in the mirror for her. Something inside of me gave me permission to believe that I could do it—that I could become her if I tried hard enough.

I was sleeping the night she first came to me. All I remember is turning over in my sleep, dreaming some dream of her, and suddenly feeling the shape of her body around me, and the perfumed smell of her pillow. I opened my eyes, and there I was, surrounded by a silky den of sheets and moonlight streaming in from a set of French doors. I clutched my hand to my throat, a throat that felt different from my own, and with a trembling hand, ran my fingers lightly down my chest. This was not my body. This was Skylar’s. The round curve of her breasts settled over me, and my long limbs had been replaced with something smaller. I curled my toes to be sure, and even that sensation was different in this body. I felt more feminine in this form, and softer.

Rising upward, I searched for a mirror. A reflection. Anything to confirm my transformation. Her muscles wrapped themselves around me as I moved, flexing and relaxing as I willed them to. It was her legs I admired the most, the way her calves and thighs creased with supple indentations. They were full and inviting. I touched my fingers to them, smoothing upward from the ankles to the soft underside of her knees, and up her thighs. And just as quickly as it had happened, it was over. I was back in my own bed, back in my own skin, covered in sweat and gulping for air, as if I had just breeched back to the surface.

That was the night I first took Skylar’s body.

For a long time then it only happened at night, while she was sleeping. Maybe in her unconscious state she was more vulnerable to me. Or maybe in my own unconscious state I was more vulnerable to myself. Whatever it was, in the beginning, our trysts happened only at night.

For all the times I awoke in her bed, I was disappointed there was no man lying beside me. No Darren. For all of Skylar’s charms I thought for sure her bed would be ripe with suitors for me to experiment with. It became a regular fantasy of mine, the idea of waking up next to Darren and taking him from inside of Skylar’s body. Even the thought of it turned me flush and sleepless, imagining all of the ways he might touch me if he thought I was her, if I were Skylar.

Finally, one night I searched for her cell phone on her nightstand and called him myself. These encounters inside of Skylar’s body were growing a little longer each time, though still not long enough for Darren to make the trip to her house. Still, I wanted my fantasy so desperately that I dialed him anyway.

Yes? Darren’s voice was groggy but not surprised, as if Skylar’s late night calls were routine.

Darren? I pulled the phone closer to my ear, half in disbelief that this was actually happening.

Yes, doll, he drew his words out, enunciating each sound with an enticing dip in his voice.

Can you come over? Skylar’s voice was raspy and low compared to my own. Somehow I sounded more convincing, even to myself. The effect so startled me I almost dropped the phone.

Anything for you, kid.

Anything. He would do anything. Wait. I jumped back in, sensing he was about to hang up.

Yes? He answered smoothly. Just as he had the first time.

I could feel my grip on Skylar’s body loosening. I was leaving again. Stay on the phone with me.

He laughed a cool almost inaudible laugh. Okay. I guess I can do that. What do you want to talk about?

Tell me you love me.

Defiantly, I pulled her red robe open, allowing the creamy folds to gather down the sides of my breasts. Her breasts. The weight of them round and full on my chest prickled my senses. This is what Skylar looked like beneath her clothes. A sharp throb constricted inside of me. It was sensation strangely pleasurable, being in this body that was somehow still hers and yet mine at the same time. My fingers slipped over me, over her, exposing my new body one revelation at a time. Arching hips. Slender arms. The long line trailing down my back.

You know I love you, he answered.

An achy tenderness shot down from my navel. Falling into the puddle of her bed, I felt changed. Finally—the epiphany I had been waiting for. I breathed it in deeply. The world was tasting different already.

Chapter 4

Skylar

I stood in the rain. The funeral home had erected a tent over Momma’s coffin but the ground was sloped and water was falling in sideways. The rug of astroturf was sinking into the mud beneath my heels.

I suppose you would make it rain today. The lid of Momma’s reddish brown coffin didn’t answer, as much as I could imagine her sitting up and eyeing me, reading every emotion on me at only a glance, like she had since