“Don’t say a single word,” Cole rasped. “Stay quiet until I can put you back together.”
I wanted to tell him to help me, to take me to a hospital, please, please, please, but no matter what I tried I could no longer force my voice to work.
Maimkilldestroy.
Yes, I thought next. Yes. I would. I must. That would make everything better.
Maim—
Something pricked at my neck, stinging. “This will help,” he said.
Kill—
Something heavy fell on top of me.
Des—
I inhaled sharply as my mind blanked and my eyelids popped open. Cole was still hovering above me, looking concerned and beautiful and so wonderfully alive. But the pain, even though it was fading, hadn’t gone away. I hurt.
“That’s the last of them, but more could be on their way.” He grabbed me by the upper arms and hauled me to my feet. My knees gave out, and he swept me up, carrying me to his Jeep.
“My body,” I managed to whisper. I looked toward the car, where I’d left it. And what a strange thought to entertain. Only, I wasn’t there any longer. How…when…
I glanced at my arms. My wrists were nicked and bruised, bleeding, as if they’d truly been bitten.
I glanced at Cole. He was just as nicked and bruised. “Are you…okay?”
“I’m fine.” He got me settled inside the car, claimed the driver’s seat and revved the engine. As he burned rubber onto the road, he made a call. “Parking lot,” he said. “Ten are down. I checked, but there aren’t any more nearby. Yet. I’ve got Ali, she was bitten, so you need to take care of this.”
That was it. The entire conversation.
“What about Kat and the others?” I asked, my voice stronger now, with far less grate. And besides a few minor aches, I was beginning to feel normal again.
“They’ll be rushed out of there and kept safe.”
As he maneuvered down the street, I twisted around to catalog the carnage we must have left in the lot. But…there were no bodies. No blood. There were people, though. Many living, breathing people.
A tremor moved down my spine as the thing that had bothered me while fighting at last crystallized. There were people walking around, talking and smiling, looking for their cars, but they were oblivious to what had happened.
“They didn’t see us,” I said. How could they not have seen us? We’d been right there, right in front of them, grunting, groaning—killing!
That last word echoed through my head. Killing. Killed. Kill. I’d helped him kill those monsters. And I was glad the monsters were dead, I was, but… “Will we go to jail for this?”
“People saw our bodies standing there, not the actual fighting. So no, you won’t go to jail or even to an insane asylum. Plus, no evidence will be left behind.”
I chose to believe him. I would have freaked out otherwise. Would have? I thought as a hysterical laugh built inside me. I’d hoped to talk to Cole about this, but not like this. “I don’t understand what just happened. We left our bodies.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
His gaze jerked toward me then back to the road. “Have you never done that before?”
“No!” I shouted. “Of course not.”
“Well, you’ve answered one question for me at least. You can see them. Therefore, I’ll answer this one for you.” How calm he sounded. “You can’t fight evil in your natural form. What’s in the spirit realm has to be fought in the spirit realm.”
Evil. Spirit realm. So…the monsters were spirits? That would explain how they’d disappeared inside my dad and mom. That would explain why they could move, even after receiving deathblows. That would explain why no one else had seen them. But that failed to explain how I had seen them.
“If they’re spirits, how’d they leave footprints in the forest?” I asked.
“I never said they left the prints.”
“But—”
“I wasn’t saying they didn’t, either. They can leave tracks. But you can’t always assume it’s them. There are always people chasing them.”
Wait. What? “You?”
“Plus a group of others, but that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
Frustrating! Could he not see how desperate I was for this information?
Still I said, “All right. I’ll drop the ‘group of others.’ But tell me this, at least. If I fought the monsters while I was in…spirit form, why am I bruised? And how did your crossbow hurt them?”
“Spirit and body are connected. What you experience outside always manifests inside. As for the crossbow, I brought it with me, like my clothing. Whatever I was wearing on my body was accessible to my spirit.”
I would never ever be without a weapon again. “So wh—what were those things?”
“You still don’t know?” he asked.
“No.” Well, I had already admitted my father had been right. Evil was out there. Evil was real. My silly belief that we were somehow separate from it had been shattered, yes, but now, I knew those pieces could never be glued back together.
“And yet you knew how to fight them.”
“Not well enough,” I snapped. What my dad had taught me about hand-to-hand had helped, yeah, but he’d had no idea what he was truly up against because he’d never truly fought. He’d always run.
“Tell me everything, Ali. It’s time.”
Yeah, it was. At long last, the things I’d hidden from others and even from myself came spilling out. Maybe because I’d never felt more vulnerable. Maybe because I knew Cole would believe me. Bottom line: I had to trust someone, and for better or worse, Cole was it.
“My dad saw them. He was so afraid of them, he tried to teach my sister and me how to fight them, just in case we were ever cornered. But we’d never seen them, and we thought he was crazy, so we paid very little attention to his instructions. Not that he knew what he was doing. He thought he could take them down with a gun. Then he died one night, all of my family died, and I saw the monsters for the first time. They…ate my parents.”
Cole listened, his knuckles bleaching of color on the steering wheel.
“Why did I start seeing them that night? How long have you seen them? Do the others know about them? If so, can they do what we did?”
“So many questions,” he said. “Give me a minute to decide how to break this to you.”
Tell me now, I wanted to scream. Instead, I remained quiet. I wanted the answers, but I also feared them. They would change my life.
Again.
Was I ready for another change?
What would my dad have said about this? His face twinkled through my mind, his blond hair disheveled, his blue eyes glassy. After all the horrible things I’d said about him over the years, all the times I’d shut him down, he and my mom had been the only ones on the right path.
Daddy, I projected toward the sky, hoping he could hear me. I’m so sorry for doubting you. I’m sorry for every awful thought I ever had about you, and for all the times I wanted Mom to leave you and marry someone else. If I could redo my life, I would take you seriously. I would love you and accept you and help you.
“First, let’s get something clear,” Cole said. “You can’t tell anyone what happened tonight.”
“I know.”
“Not even Kat.”
“I know!” If I had treated my own father like a candidate for a straitjacket, how would my new friends treat me? Yeah, that one didn’t take a lot of thought. I’d be shunned, laughed at and publically humiliated. No, thanks.
Cole cursed under his breath. “Grab the wheel and steer toward the suits. Now!”
“What—” I said, thinking he’d cursed at me. Wrong! Two monsters had ambled into the road, and they were headed straight for us. Right on their heels were five walking hazmat suits.
“Ali!”
As ordered, I grabbed the wheel. Cole palmed a blade, and with his free hand wrapped around a lever on the Jeep’s roof, he leaned out of the open doorway. His other hand, the one clutching the blade, stretched out…and kept on stretching, that part of his spirit rising out of his body.
His blade slashed across several of the suits, a hissing sound filling the air.
I think I screamed. My brain was too busy trying to figure out what had just happened to be sure. “Those are real live people, Cole!” At least, I thought they were.
A second later, he was back in his seat and driving, his blade put away, as if nothing had happened. “I didn’t hurt them, just opened their suits to send them home.”
Okay. I could deal with that. “Next time, do me a favor and go for the monsters.” Wait. Next time? Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t want to do this again. I’d learned my lesson.
“They weren’t the biggest threat.”
“But—”
“If Frosty and the others stumbled upon the hazmats, they’d be in trouble, their attention divided between the humans and the—what’d you call them? Monsters. So to answer one of your earlier questions, yes, my friends can see them.” He flicked me a quick glance. “And now you have another thousand questions, don’t you?”
“Of course not. But what do you call them, if not monsters? Why were those people wearing suits? I mean, if the suits help, why don’t you and your friends wear them? Or do you?” See, only four questions.
“We don’t. The suits protect us from being bitten, but they also prevent us from killing. As for that first thing you asked—”
He cranked up the music.
Message received. A short while later, he pulled the Jeep off the road and I thought he would stop. But, no. He veered into the forest, following no discernible path. My heart started thumping wildly, as if the stupid organ wanted to run away. Cole knew where he was going, though, and never hit anything he shouldn’t. Finally he parked in front of a secluded log cabin, the car lights chasing away the shadows.
