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.
There were two other cars parked there, both SUVs. The cabin had two windows covered by thick, dark curtains with cracks in the center of each. Peepholes, some part of me guessed.
He removed the key from the ignition, and the music stopped.
“What is this place, and why are we here?” If he claimed we were outside of town and he planned to murder me because I now knew too much, I think I’d be fine with that, as long as I never had to be in close contact with those monsters—or whatever they were—again.
“You’re here because you can’t go home like that,” Cole said, motioning to my clothing with a tilt of his chin. “You need to shower and change, and your injuries should be cleaned.”