Return (Awakened Fate Book 3) (8 page)

Her dad blinked and his gaze ran over me afresh, with a heavy dose of protectiveness and threat in there this time.

Linda just twitched as though restraining herself from snagging Chloe’s arm and yanking her away from me. Breathing hard, she seemed to flounder for a moment, and then she made an aborted motion to the sedan.

Sticking to my side, Chloe headed for the car. At the rear passenger door, she climbed in and then scooted to the other seat, leaving me to follow.

I got in and shut the door, feeling her parents’ eyes on us the whole time.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She gave a tight nod, watching them walk toward the car.

They sank into their seats and didn’t say a word while they closed the doors and then put on their seat belts. Her dad turned on the engine and gave the road a brief glance before pulling back onto the empty highway. In short order, he’d spun the car around, sending us eastward once more.

And no one spoke. The tension in the air was so thick, even breathing felt like it would trigger some kind of explosion. On the edge of the passenger seat, Chloe’s mom perched and cast strange, truncated looks back to me for no reason I could determine. Behind the wheel, her dad seemed focused on the road, though I occasionally caught him glancing to his daughter in the rearview mirror.

And Chloe never quite looked at them. She never quite looked at anything. Her gaze darted across the middle distance like a fighter expecting an attack and trying to watch every direction at once.

Corwin fell behind us. Fields swept by and so did time. A sign flashed past, notifying us we were entering Kansas, though otherwise, nothing in the landscape changed.

I wondered if anyone planned on making a sound for the entire trip back to their home.

The sun crept toward the horizon and gradually painted the sky with brilliant colors of pink, purple and gold. Shadows stretched from the tall crops lining the highway, growing darker while the twilight deepened.

In the distance, a town came into view, like another island of trees in the midst of a flatland sea. Bigger than Corwin, but still small by far compared to Santa Lucina, it seemed mostly made up of houses, with scarcely a building taller than two stories to be seen.

I glanced to Chloe, curious if we were finally there.

Her expression answered me. It was definitely Reidsburg. She was watching the town roll toward us with a look somewhere between desperation and that of a convict staring at their prison cell.

Minutes crawled by. As the sun sank over the horizon completely, drowning us in shadows, the sedan passed the first buildings at the edge of the town. More roads followed, each of them seeming identical to me. Houses upon houses, with the odd smattering of businesses and bars, restaurants and rundown motels between them. A monolithic high school interrupted the endless neighborhoods at one point, its old brick construction towering over the homes facing it from the other side of the street, and every few blocks seemed to reveal another church.

At a road like any other, Chloe’s dad turned the sedan. He continued on for a few moments, and then he thumbed a button on a small box clipped to a visor above his head.

On a two-story, pale brown house with white shutters and a covered porch, the garage door began to roll upward. A yellowed light bulb came on when the door finished opening, illuminating the random assortment of tools, cleaning supplies and metal shelves inside. Flicking the turn signal briefly, he guided the sedan from the road into the driveway and then pulled into the garage. He tapped the tiny box again, leaving the door to roll down behind us, and then turned off the engine. Wordlessly, Linda pushed open her door and left the car.

I looked to Chloe while her father got out as well.

She didn’t move.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

She swallowed hard and gave a quick nod. Not looking at me, she shoved open the door and then climbed from the car.

I eyed her curiously, uncertain what that had been about.

Still waiting for the tension to break and something to finally explode, I trailed Chloe and her family into their house.

Chapter Six

Chloe

The steps from the garage clunked under my feet. I followed Dad through the door and past the laundry room into the kitchen.

And I wondered if I had made a mistake.

They weren’t speaking to me, but I knew that would change. The moment we were alone, everything would pick up where it left off – though, really, silence was almost as bad as yelling in its own special, drawn-out-torment sort of way.

I should have kept running with Zeke. Maybe gone to Canada or something. Surely it was nice this time of year.

The smell of the house surrounded me, all cinnamon and clove and alien after my weeks away. With his good arm – the one that wasn’t in that horrible white sling – Dad reached over to flip on the light switch. As the fixture overhead flickered to life, he continued through the kitchen toward the living room.

I paused. On the breakfast table below the back window, I could see abandoned dishes. Beside the refrigerator, a gallon of milk still sat on the green laminate counter. A striped dish towel lay in a rumpled heap on the tile floor as well, the whole mess so unlike my parents that it was startling.

They’d left in a rush. They’d been worried.

My throat tightened. I hurried through the room, leaving Zeke to follow me.

By the fireplace, Mom was murmuring something heated to Dad.

She cut off the moment I appeared at the doorway.

Dad put a hand to hers as though trying to calm her. “Would you ask your friend to wait in the kitchen, Chloe?”

I could hear the careful choice of words. Cautiously, I glanced to Zeke.

He nodded. Taking my hand and giving it a brief squeeze, he eyed my parents for a heartbeat and then headed for the breakfast table.

My feet sank into the brown shag carpet as I walked into the living room. Mom and Dad took a seat on the overstuffed couch beneath their pictures of the Gobi Desert and Death Valley, leaving the armchair across from them to me.

It felt familiar. So many of our arguments had started this way.

Though they usually ended with slammed doors and more silence.

I glanced over, grateful that I could see Zeke through the archway connecting us to the kitchen.

“What happened, Chloe?” Dad asked.

Blinking, I looked back at him.

His gaze twitched to my neck.

I shook my head. “Nothing. A guy… we handled it. It’s fine.”

They stared at me.

“Someone tried to
kill
you,” Mom demanded. “And you ‘
handled
it’
?”

I paused. I did not want to get into this. Desperately.

“Yeah.”

She exhaled, looking away as though she couldn’t believe anything about me or what I’d just said.

“And will this guy be looking for you?” Dad asked.

I swallowed. “I don’t think so. Not… not here.”

He paused. “By the ocean then.”

I gave a tiny shrug.

“How did you make it to Nebraska?”

I tried not to fidget on the chair, feeling like I was in an interrogation. My gaze flicked to Zeke. “We stole the guy’s truck.”

Mom made an incredulous noise, the sound so familiar I could feel my blood start boiling. My nails dug into my palms with the effort of not letting anger get the better of me.

“It ran out of gas, so we called you,” I finished.

Dad’s mouth thinned. “So this wasn’t a dehaian?”

“No.”

He glanced to Mom, who was staring at the brown chenille of the couch and shaking her head.

I looked between them. “What?”

“Are you in pain? From the… the ocean?” Dad asked.

“No.”

Mom turned back sharply. “Then you’ll stay,” she said, a weird mix of insistence and hope in her tone.

I hesitated. “For now.”

She exhaled again. It almost seemed like she was fighting back tears. My brow flickered down.

“We would like it very much if you would,” Dad said to me carefully.

I didn’t know how to respond. But for a few moments here and there, they weren’t acting
remotely
like themselves. Like the erratic, no-explanation, dictatorial crazies I’d grown up with. It was like they were scared of something. A real something, not just the made-up stuff they’d always pretended to fear.

And as impossible as it seemed, it kind of felt like it was me.

“O-okay,” I managed.

“Thank you,” he said.

My brow furrowed incredulously.

“But,” he continued, “while you
are
here… we’d like to ask you not to discuss your trip with anyone. Just to be on the safe side.”

My confusion deepened. “What? Why?”

“There are a couple other landwalkers in town. We’d prefer if you avoided speaking with them about your trip.”

I stared at him. “A couple other… who?”

He looked to Mom again. “Chief Reynolds and his nephew, Aaron Erlich.”

I blinked at the names of two of the local police officers.

“Everyone is already aware you ran away to California. There’s no fixing that. After the events in that ambulance, the Delaneys told the police you had been kidnapped before we could ask them to create another story.”

I blinked again. Peter and Diane had reported me
kidnapped
?

“But we’d appreciate it if you didn’t volunteer any information about that. We’ll need to come up with an explanation for your return, and your bruises as well, but barring that story to the police, please remain silent on the entire subject.”

I heard the words, filing them away somewhere in my head while I tried to sort out the rest. Police. We were going to have to talk to the police. Because they thought I’d been kidnapped.

My stomach rolled.

I guess I couldn’t blame the Delaneys for their story. Marty and Colin had stolen me and Baylie away from the cabin, something that had been witnessed by the other EMTs at the scene, and then I’d vanished into the ocean. There probably hadn’t been much the Delaneys
could
say.

But still…
kidnapped
. And from an ambulance where two men died.

Where I’d killed one of them.

The nausea grew worse. True, that’d been self-defense and halfway an accident as well, but I couldn’t explain that to anyone. Colin had been trying to inject me with a drug that could have killed me if Noah hadn’t gotten me to the ocean in time. I’d just been trying to stop him. But the spikes from my arms had left a straight, savagely deep row of stab wounds in Colin’s chest.

I doubted anyone had come up with an explanation for those.

And now I’d have to create one for the police.

The
landwalker
police…

I let out a breath. It was hard to know what to think. Chief Reynolds was like a cartoon, all gregarious and rotund and white-haired like Santa Claus in a brown police uniform. I was fairly certain he knew each person in Reidsburg by name, and could probably quote their life history as well. His nephew was his scrawny opposite, though: a shy guy with big glasses who looked like he belonged buried in a chemistry lab someplace. Only two years ahead of me in school, Aaron had been raised by his uncle and he’d taken up with the police force at his first opportunity, something that I supposed should have garnered respect. But with a build like a scarecrow and an awkwardness that meant he could barely answer a direct question, no one in Reidsburg had ever seen him as anything but a product of nepotism or a joke.

Except my parents, anyway. They’d just gone out of their way to avoid him and his uncle alike.

And suddenly, that didn’t seem like simply another symptom of their insanity. Not entirely.

“Are they dangerous?” I asked.

Dad glanced to Mom. “They think you’re our daughter,” he allowed awkwardly. “Biological daughter, I mean.”

I swallowed. There was that. And I didn’t want to get into that.

“How do you know they’re… like you?” I asked instead.

“We checked with the elders.”

My brow knitted again. “The who?”

Dad paused. “The elders. They’re… well, they’re rather like leaders among the landwalkers. We don’t have any way of just
knowing
who is one of us and who’s simply human. The line is blurry anyway. There aren’t many of what you’d call ‘purebloods’ left. None, actually. We’ve been among humans for so long, we’ve all got them in our ancestry. In fact, there comes a point where some folks… well, they’re so much more human than landwalker, there’s nothing really
landwalker
in them. Just odd traits like a tendency toward bad seasickness, or a fear of the ocean and the creatures in it. And otherwise, they’re human.

“But if we
do
want to know about others like us, there are the elders. They’re not old, necessarily; some are younger than your mother and me. But they’re men and women who,” he glanced to Mom, “perhaps are more in touch with what we used to be, I guess you could say. And a long time back, maybe a few centuries or more, they started keeping track of our people. Making genealogies, as well as maintaining stories from our history so that as a culture, we wouldn’t just be completely absorbed into the humans. They’re the ones who let us know about other landwalkers in our area.”

Warily, I watched them. “And it’d be dangerous if they knew about me? About…”

I trailed off, not sure if I should bring up the fact I was adopted. My mom – my biological mom, or real mom, or something – was Dad’s sister, Susan. My actual, real, or whatever dad was a dehaian named Kreyus, whom no one had ever heard from again. And until a Sylphaen had nearly killed me in Santa Lucina a few weeks before, Bill and Linda Kowalski had never told me about either of them.

Instead, they’d lied to me. They’d let me believe I was their daughter by birth. They’d never mentioned a word about the dehaians, the landwalkers, or how turning into the former could kill me because I was half of the latter.

And short of screaming at them –
again
– I still wasn’t sure how to talk about that.

Dad hesitated. “Half-dehaian, half-landwalker kids… like we told you. They don’t usually survive. The ones who do grow up a bit…” He glanced to Mom again. “We’ve heard stories. Some landwalker folks who are enamored of the idea that they could change our situation. Become dehaian again and all that. So they take these kids who manage to survive infancy, and they push them. See if they can learn anything about integrating dehaian traits back into us. But that just speeds up the destabilizing of the two sides of those kids’ heritage. The dehaian side is stronger. It overwhelms them, and then they die.”