Read Tattoo #1: Tattoo for Free Online

front of me. I stared at her tattoo for a moment, the blue-green color jumping out at me as if it had been made of pure, bright light. Silver-blond hair. Blood. Dead, blue eyes. It has begun. "I don't know," I said, closing my eyes. My head pounded. Why was it that I was the only one who got dizzy just looking at the tattoos? "I don't know," Annabelle said, answering my silent question and consulting her notes. "It could have something to do with the fact that you're the one who actually bought the tattoos. They were yours, and you just shared them with us" "Like the tattoos know who owns them," Delia said skeptically. "This from the girl who insists that her shoes would hate being worn by anyone else," Zo said. I opened my eyes just in time to see Delia launch a pillow at Zo. "Hey, a girl's shoes are sacred"

The word echoed in my head for a moment. Sacred. "Maybe," Annabelle said, lifting the thought out of my head before I'd even put it into words. "Maybe there is something sacrosanct about the tattoos" I wasn't surprised that my thoughts sounded smarter when Annabelle said them. When she'd moved back to the U.S. in the seventh grade, she'd used such big words that the rest of us hadn't been able to understand her. We figured it out eventually. That was when Annabelle had stopped talking to anyone but us. Delia flipped her hair behind her shoulder. "As great as this superpower talk really is, I think we have some other issues to deal with, like the fact that this Mango Mermaid polish really needs three coats to achieve the tone I'm looking for" Some people panic in a crisis. Delia painted her nails. "Or maybe I could frost them," Delia said. "If I paint over them with a thin coat of Misty Madness." She brushed one hand over the fingertips on the other, lost in her musings on the perfect nail.
    No one but me saw the flash of blue-green light from... To fight, to live We two of three bestow this gift... I shook my head to clear it of the now-familiar words. Delia gawked at her hand. After a moment, she spoke. "Wow. Just wow" "What?" Zo, Annabelle, and I asked at once. Delia held up her right hand. "Notice anything different?" she asked. The hand looked normal to me. "Your `wow, just wow' has something to do with your nails?" Zo flopped back down on the bed. Delia held her other hand up next to it. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the nails on her right hand were a different color from the nails on her left. "Slightly frosted," Delia said in a shaky voice. "Like I just painted over them with Misty Madness" "Can you do it again?" Annabelle asked, her pen flying rapidly over the paper as she spoke. "Can you change the color of the other nails?" Delia ran her right hand over her left. "Misty Madness," she said out loud. Again, I saw the faintest hint of blue-green light roll in a wave off the tattoo on her stomach, and Delia beamed as she held up her newly frosted left hand. "This," she said, "is so cool" "So," I said slowly, "I have the power to start fires, Annabelle's psychic, and Delia can change her nail polish color just by running her hand over it?" Something about that last power didn't seem quite right. "Maybe it's not just the nail polish color," Delia said. "Maybe it's any color" With a grin, she held her hands up to her head and ran them both down her hair. "Blond," she said, and as her hands passed over her thick locks, the hair turned blond, from the roots down. Delia turned to look in the mirror. "This is so not me," she said, and the next instant, she was chang- ing herself back. Without a word, Annabelle walked over to my computer and turned it on. "What are you doing?" I asked her. "I'm going to try to find out what sort of telekinetic power would allow Delia to change something from one color to another," she said simply, as though this was the kind of thing she did every day. "Telekinetic?" I asked. Just because Annabelle could see into my head didn't mean I could see into hers, and I was