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Michael glanced over at her. His window was down, his arm on the ledge. The wind pulled strands of hair from his ponytail, and he needed a shave.
“You made a path,” he said.
She rolled that around in her head for a second. “Are you deliberately being cryptic?”
“No.” He looked at her as if she was deliberately being stupid. “Chris told you what we are, right?”
“I think I got the CliffsNotes version.”
He turned back to the road. “You’ve been to the house several times. Once you lay a path, the ground starts to remember you. If you’d only been to the house once, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
“So I guess you can’t bitch about me showing up unannounced anymore.”
“I guess I can’t,” he conceded.
“You going to tell me what really happened to you?”
He was silent so long she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. But then he said, “I’m not sure. Someone came after us. I felt the power in the woods behind the house.”
“When?”
“Just before midnight maybe? I didn’t check my watch. I was able to run him off, so I thought it was Tyler or one of his buddies, and then the guys never came home... .” He shrugged and let his voice trail off, but she heard everything he wasn’t saying.
Before midnight. That was later than when the Guide had attacked them on the field.
But also after Hunter left the school for an “emergency.” Becca couldn’t get Chris’s question out of her head.
Just what do you know about him anyway?
The school was deserted, but some of the Homecoming decorations were still stuck to the glass doors of the gymnasium, red and blue decals that had started to peel after the storm last night. Cigarette butts littered the ground around the flagpole.
“Can you do that tracking thing to find them?” she asked.
Michael shook his head. “I already tried. There were too many people here.”
“Come on,” she said. “I last saw Chris on the soccer field.”
He followed her, striding silently by her side. True to form, he didn’t say a word. He just stopped about thirty feet from the bleachers, dropping to a knee to touch his hand to the ground. “This is where you last saw Chris?”
“Ah ... yeah.”
He glanced up. “What were you doing out here?”
“Nothing. Just talking.”
“I don’t buy that for a minute.”
She flushed and hugged her arms against her body. “We did. I don’t care if you believe me or—”
“Fine. Then it must have been one hell of a conversation.” Michael gestured. “Come here. Touch the ground.”
She squatted and pressed her fingertips through the grass and into the dirt. At first she felt nothing but mud, cold and gritty, sliding below her fingers.
Then awareness crawled up her arm.
Her brain couldn’t quite comprehend what she felt. Not words—more like things that wanted to be words. Like a foreign language she’d studied years ago and could barely remember. She could almost piece it together, but the concepts kept evading her, turning from wisps of thought into coils of something darker.
Whatever it was, the longer she kept her fingers planted in the earth, the less she liked it.
