I crept inside and heard muffled voices coming from the living room off the kitchen. The pocket door was pulled almost completely shut, but I could just make out a heated exchange resonating from within.
“You can’t do this, Bill,” someone said, his voice angry, desperate. “Not after everything we’ve been through.”
“I can and I will,” my grandfather said. “I’ve already made the plans.”
Then a woman spoke, and I recognized the voice as Mrs. Strom, one of the members of the Order of
Sanctity. “After all you’ve taught us, after all you’ve preached, and now you’re going to pull the rug out from under us. You’re going to send our only hope away.”
“She’s my granddaughter, damn it,” Granddad said, and a jolt of electricity shot down my spine when I realized they were arguing about me.
“She’s also the prophet, Bill,” someone else said. Another woman. I didn’t know who. “She’s the only one who can stop what’s to come.”
“We’ll find another way,” my grandmother said, her voice fragile, unsure. It was very unlike her. “We can’t risk her. Not like this. Not anymore.”
I heard something fall, like a table toppling over, then a low voice so full of anger and resentment, it shocked me to the core. “You’re going to send her away when all the signs point to Armageddon? When she’s our only hope?”
Send me away? Did I hear that right?
“You need to calm down, Jeff,” another male voice said. It was Sheriff Villanueva, one of the many members of the Order. “This isn’t our decision. It’s Bill and Vera’s.”
Jeff’s voice broke through again. “I hope to God you rethink this, Bill, or we’ll all pay for your idiocy.
You’re gambling with our lives.”
The pocket door slid open with a loud crash and Jeff stomped out through the kitchen to the front of the store. The bell chimed when he left. Four others followed him, and I jumped back behind our refrigerator.
“Please rethink this, Vera,” Mrs. Strom said. “For all our sakes.”
She sniffled into a tissue as my grandmother showed them out. They were scared and angry. Energy sparked and pulsated around them like someone had put it in a blender and set it to puree.
Granddad was still in the living room. I didn’t know if he was alone or not. I should have checked. I should have tried to talk to him. Instead, I sneaked around to the stairs and hurried up to my room.
Stunned.
Speechless.
They were sending me away? To where? While I didn’t want the visions or the prophecy or, most definitely, the monster inside me, I also didn’t want to leave Riley’s Switch. And sending meant alone.
They would not be going with me. No one would be going with me. What would I do without Brooke and
Glitch? Without Cameron? Without Jared?
My heart contracted as though I were a cornered animal, wounded and scared.
I pulled out the pink slip of paper from my pocket and studied the map. The party was in the forest about two miles from the store. Maybe a party was just what I needed. I could walk the two miles. I could walk a lot farther if I had to. Running away would be better than being sent away like a criminal, but getting back at someone was not a good reason to run away.
A floorboard creaked on the landing by my door.
“I made dinner, pix,” Grandma said.
But she knew the drill. “I’m not hungry,” I said, hardening my voice and my heart.
They could have made me go downstairs and eat with them anytime they wanted, and at first I wondered why they didn’t. Then I figured it out: guilt. They felt guilty for keeping all that information from me growing up. For my near-death experience. For not telling me about the monster inside. So I was getting away with way more than I normally could have.
“I’ll keep a plate for you in the oven,” she said. My grandmother was the feistiest, cleverest, most direct person I’d ever known. She never let me get away with even the slightest white lie. The fact that I was getting away with treating them like lepers astonished me. And made me feel almost as guilty as they did. They had given up everything to raise me. When my parents had disappeared, they were nearing retirement. They had plans to travel the world, and then I was dropped into their laps like living anvil—a constant burden, a constant reminder of what they’d lost.
And there I sat, treating them like the enemy. But I was beginning to wonder if they weren’t.
THE CLEARING
I waited until after ten. My grandparents had gone to bed an hour earlier, but I had to make sure they were asleep before descending the stairs. I didn’t dare take the stairs outside my bedroom window. Since this whole building used to be a store and my grandparents transformed the back part into living quarters for us, there was a fire escape right outside my room. I took those stairs often, but the metal clanged with every step. No way would my grandparents not hear me.
Worse, I had two bodyguards by the names of Jared and Cameron just outside somewhere. Surely they didn’t actually stay up all night every night. They had to sleep sometime. But I couldn’t risk going out the back door. Jared’s house, a small apartment my grandparents had used as storage and remodeled for him to live in, sat right behind the store. If he didn’t see me, Cameron—who camped out behind the store in his truck while on sentry duty—surely would. So I decided to sneak out the front door.
I crept down the stairs, through the store, and out the front door. Thankfully, when the lights were turned off, so was the door chime, but I did have to turn off the alarm, which beeped every time I pushed a number. I cringed and waited to make sure no one heard, then headed out into the frigid night toward a waiting car.
“I’m glad you called,” Tabitha said when I shut the door to her Honda. Her car was warm and smelled like Tommy Girl.
“Thanks.” I strapped on my seat belt and settled in. I felt like I’d wandered into the cave of the enemy, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. Why would Tabitha Sind invite little ol’ me to a party? And where was her entourage? She never went anywhere without Amber, her second-in-command. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe Amber was waiting for us in some remote part of the forest and they were going to beat me to death with rocks and sticks. That would suck.
Tabitha drove down the winding canyon and took the cutoff to the Clearing, which was pretty much party central for high school kids. I’d been there once, but only during the day, never at an actual party. I waited for Tabitha to make a point in her ramblings, hoping she’d fill me in on why she’d invited me, but she went on and on about her hair and her chem test and about who all was going to be at the party.
Riley’s Switch had taken state this year and we were apparently still celebrating three weeks later, no matter how cold it was.
“Help me with the bags?” she asked.
We got out and she handed me a paper bag with glass bottles in it.
“My dad will kill me if he finds out I raided his liquor cabinet,” she said, offering me a conspiratorial wink. But all I could think about was how she was going to navigate the uneven ground in those heels.
The party was everything I’d expected it to be: Couples sitting around a campfire, others standing, chatting and drinking. A few yelling powerful fight metaphors into the night, after which everyone had to raise whatever he or she was drinking into the air. Someone had a car stereo on in the background, the music fairly low. Lots of jocks. Lots of hair-sprayed girls. Lots of popular kids who actually got invited to parties fairly often. I straddled a weird kind of fence at school. I wasn’t popular by any stretch of the imagination, but I was friends with most of the kids. And almost everyone I wasn’t friends with was at this party. This was going to be loads of fun.