“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!”