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She glanced at the phone again, then back up at him. “Does my dad know about these text messages?”
“Yes.”
He put out a hand, but Hannah took a step back and held the phone out of reach, scrolling up, reading through a brief exchange. “Do you know this guy?”
“No.” He paused. “Sort of.”
“So someone has been threatening you? For how long?” Michael didn’t say anything. She glanced past him, to where Tyler and Hunter were sitting at the dining room table. “Do they know?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, so they get to be in on all the secrecy.”
“Hannah—”
She glanced at the text messages again. “Did this just start today?”
“No.” Michael took a long breath. “It’s complicated.”
“Is this related to the fires in your neighborhood?”
He hesitated. “Yes. And the restaurant bombing.”
He didn’t say anything else, but she kept looking at him expectantly. “There’s more,” she said. “I can feel it.”
leaned in against the table. “What did you do?”
“He was going to kill me. So I tried to kill him first.”
Hunter finally spoke up. “Hand to hand?”
“Yeah.” He paused. He almost didn’t want to say what had happened, as if admitting it would make it more real. It was plenty real. He’d scrubbed the blood off his hands forever. He still felt like he hadn’t gotten it all. “I stabbed him. A couple of times. Broke some ribs, too.”
“Holy crap,” said Tyler. “What did you stab him with?”
Michael met his eyes. “A rock.”
“And they think he was the same guy who bombed the restaurant?” said Hunter.
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think so.”
“Interesting.” He paused, and his expression said he was working through something in his head. “If he was the kind of guy to work from a distance with a bomb, I’m surprised he confronted you in the woods like that.”
“There was a lot of smoke and fire in the underbrush,” said Michael. “Poor visibility. He was shooting at us to begin with.”
“Huh.” Hunter picked at his food again.
“What?” said Tyler.
“I don’t know. I just think people tend to fall into two camps: those who prefer to be violent from a safe distance, and those who prefer to be an active participant. My dad and uncle were opposite sides of that coin. My dad had lots of experience in hand-to-hand combat. He wouldn’t work from a distance unless he had to. He thought violence should mean something. My uncle was a cop, and he’d been trained to take care of a situation from a distance, if he could. It was a safety thing: why engage with a bad guy if you don’t have to?”
“So what’s that all mean?” said Michael.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.” He paused. “But there wasn’t just one Guide last time, right?”
The question made Michael’s heart stop for a moment. “No. But why wouldn’t the other one step in to save the first?”
Hunter rolled that around for a long moment. “I don’t know. I can’t see any advantage to letting you leave if the first was going to kill you. Especially since the police have a body and a name and someone to investigate.”
