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"Tell me what's going on, Zara," he said. "The police, the FBI and the news people, they're all outside, waiting for you to wake up to answer questions. They've been asking me and asking me because they think I was part of this somehow, but I don't even know what happened."
I looked up at him, startled. "How long have I been here?" He ignored my question. "I was at the house, taking the garbage outside, and then this guy, this...alien appears right in front of me. He took my phone from me and then hit me, and when I woke up again, he handed the phone to me, but before I could figure out what was going on, he took it away. Then he kept hitting me, and I tried to fight back but..."
"Scott, I'm sorry." Tears stung my eyes, and I reached out a hand for him, but he didn't turn away from the window.
"And then the next thing I know, I'm falling on the floor, covered in blue stuff and these Observers, these aliens are everywhere, fighting each other. And you..." He turned to stare at me with that same look of horror that I'd seen in the Awakening Chamber. "You were pinned to the wall with that alien choking you and blood pouring out of your nose and mouth." Tears spilled down his cheeks and he jerked his fist across his face, drying them without looking at me.
"Scott, it's going to be okay," I said.
"The hell it is." His face crumpled as he turned away. "I watched you burn someone alive. And you were glad about it. I saw it in your face, just now. You were glad you'd killed him."
"Scott." I tried hard to stay calm, to keep from grabbing at him and shaking him. "You don't understand. If that hadn't 234
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happened, we all would have been dead."
"We all who?" he shouted. "It was just you and me in that room. Everybody else was one of them."
My stomach twisted hearing his words. He didn't know the truth about me. If he did...I couldn't think about that now. "There is an explanation, Scott, a good one."
"There better be. There's about a hundred cops and secret agent guys out there waiting to hear it." He took off his glasses and dried his eyes on his sleeve.
I hadn't even thought about that. What was I going to say to them?
"So let's hear it." Scott sat back down his chair. "Let's hear the explanation that makes sense of all this."
"All right." My mind chugged along, trying to decide which pieces of the story to censor, which ones would only make him worry more or embarrass him. "But there are some things you just can't repeat, Scott, not to anyone."
"I won't." He set his glasses on the table next to my bed and rubbed his eyes. "Who'd believe me anyway?" He looked up at me then with a grim smile.
I froze, struck by the memory of his face pale and without glasses, an island in a sea of blue fluid. He had been vulnerable and alone then, and I couldn't help him. Could that happen again?
I had information now that some, particularly Nevan's fellow Council members, might be nervous about. If I told Scott, would that put him back in danger again?
"Don't keep it from me, Zara." Scott's voice was tight. "If you're worried about someone coming after me because I know, you can stop. They'll assume I know even if I don't and kill me anyway, right alongside you."
I stared at him. The hardened edge in his voice when he talked about death, that was new. Courtesy of me and this little adventure, I was sure. No eighteen-year-old guy, a freshman in 235
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college and rushing three fraternities, spoke about death that way.
"They'll know, Scott, if I've told or if I haven't." I sagged back on my bed, cradling my left arm, which was beginning to throb beneath the heavy bandages. "I don't know if it'll make it any safer for you to keep you in the dark, but I can't risk it. If they find out you know what happened, they might kill you for it. But they might spare you, if I keep my mouth shut." Scott shoved away from my bed, sending the chair crashing to the floor. "I won't tell them anything. I won't tell them I know." He loomed above me, his face growing red, his hands on his hips. He looked just like Dad when he was angry. Dad...his dad, not mine. Not anymore.
Blinking back tears, I shook my head. "I can't, Scott. I'm sorry."
He nodded his head in a jerking motion. "Fine, fine. You go ahead and keep your secrets, Zara. They'll find out anyway." He gestured toward the window where I presumed the aforementioned police and media were gathered. "Then you'll be screwed. And I won't be able to help you."
"It's better this way." I gritted my teeth, knowing how I would take those words.
"Fuck you, Zara." He snatched up his glasses and stormed out.
Yeah, pretty much like that.
The sounds of his shoes slapping against the hard floor in angry retreat had barely faded before a knock sounded at my door. I looked up to find a stranger, a dark-haired man in a suit, standing in the open doorway. My breath caught in my chest until he stepped into the room a little further, giving me a clear view of his non-silver eyes. I relaxed a tiny bit.
"Ms. Mitchell?"
I nodded.
He reached inside his suit coat and produced a wallet which 236
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he flipped open. FBI stood out on his id card in bright blue letters. Shit. I'd only been awake for fifteen minutes. I'd thought I would have a little longer to prepare.
"I'm Agent Matt Brickman with the FBI. I'd like to ask you a few questions."
Okay, keep calm. He can't read minds so this can't be anywhere near as tough as dealing with the Observers, I counseled myself. I shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant, without seeming like I was trying too hard. "Have a seat."
"I understand you just woke up from a rather extensive nap." He picked up the chair that Scott had knocked over and sat in it.
"I'm sorry?" I frowned. My confusion, for now, was genuine.
"Ms. Mitchell–"
"Call me Zara."
He shifted a little in his seat. "All right. Zara. You've been here for almost three days."
His words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, my mind refusing to make sense of them. "Three days." I repeated. I'd thought maybe a few hours, most of the night perhaps, but never this long. I shoved back the covers, making the IV pole wobble precariously. "I have to go. I have to find...they could be anywhere by now." My heart ached at the idea that they'd taken Caelan somewhere. Taken him and buried him, without me.
"Who? Ms. Mitch...I mean, Zara." Brickman's words broke into my panicked haze.
I stopped, my feet dangling over the bed.
"Your captors? I understand from your brother's statement that the ringleader," he paused, consulting a small pad of paper he'd pulled from his suit coat, "a silver-haired, older looking man, is dead. But under some very strange circumstances." He closed the notebook. "Would you care to share your version of events with me? Starting from when you left Texas, of course." I swallowed hard, my throat drying out and the burn on my 237
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arm beginning to throb beneath the bandages. "What did Scott say?" I asked.
Brickman smiled at me, transforming him from average to good-looking, even though the smile didn't quite reach his normal brown eyes. "Now, Zara, how are we supposed to get an untainted version of the truth if I tell you what all the other witnesses said?
Your statement would be compromised."
All the better, I thought. I gestured at the water pitcher sitting on the bedside table. "Could you?"
He nodded and poured me a glass. "Slowly," he said, handing it to me. "You've been sleeping for awhile, no solid food or water. Your stomach might overreact."
I frowned. "Thank you, Doctor Brickman." If I'd been asleep for that long, how come nobody had come to check on me before they let him in here? I took a long swallow of cold water, feeling its sharp wonderfulness cut the stickiness in my mouth. Brickman shot a casual, but still uneasy look over his shoulder at the door. Answer: they didn't know I was awake and that he was in here. The nurse's call button lay almost under my thigh. I could have pressed it with no problem
right then. But that wouldn't have fixed the problem. Brickman, I could tell, wouldn't leave me alone until he got his answers. He'd sneaked into my hospital room for God's sake. So, I had to tell him something. But what? If I told him the truth, they'd probably have me locked up somewhere–take the nice pills, Zara, they'll make you feel all better. But if I lied about the whole thing, then they'd have no idea what the Observers were really up to. Then when the fake attack Nevan had talked about commenced, they'd believe it, no hesitation. I drained the last of the water and handed the cup back to Brickman.
"Another?" He reached for the pitcher. I shook my head. "Not just yet."
"You ready to tell me now?
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I nodded. "Though, you're not going to believe me," I said with a half-laugh. "I'm not sure I can believe it all happened myself."
So, I told him the truth. Well, not quite. I told him that a group of Observers had saved me from a Council member, the aforementioned silver-haired male, who thought I was some threat to him and should be killed. I didn't mention the fact that, oops, Nevan had actually turned out to be right. I also left out the bit about me being a little more closely related to the Observers than I would have liked. Which meant I had to tweak the ending, too.
"So, he took Scott to get to me. The other Observers tried to help me rescue him, but it turned out to be an ambush. As you can see, I barely survived." I looked at Brickman steadily, waiting to see what part he would challenge.
"And the other Observers, the ones that helped you. What happened to them?"
I bit my lip, picturing Caelan lying on the floor. "I don't know." I looked down at my hands in my lap. "Some...some died saving me, I know."
"Is that who you were talking about earlier, the ones you had to find?" He leaned in closely.
I jerked my head up and glared at him. "I owe them my life and Scott's life too. I'd like to know that they're okay and to thank them."
He nodded. "And you have no idea who they are, which team they're from?"
I shook my head. "No."
He tapped his pencil on his notepad for a long second, until I had to resist the urge to tear both from his hands. Then he said,
"We found the place where you were attacked. Scott described it to us and we managed to locate it in the woods, about 35 miles north of here."
I nodded, heart thudding in my chest. Had they gotten to 239
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Asha, Thane, and Namere? Were they being held in a cell somewhere?
"There's nothing left but a big charred hole in the ground. No remains, human or otherwise, at least not yet." Thank you, Asha, I thought. If they'd found dead Observers, especially Nevan, I had the feeling we would have been having this conversation in military hospital. Our government didn't mess around any more with those committing violence against Observers. Though, maybe they'd have to rethink that.
"Anything else you'd like to add?" he asked. I shook my head.
"Any idea why this Nevan fellow would think you're a danger to him?"
I shrugged. Keeping my mouth shut as often as possible seemed like a very good idea right now.
Brickman took a deep breath, then said, "Okay then. We'll be in touch." He started to walk out. But my conscience balked, and I couldn't let it end there.
"Count them," I said.
He paused in the doorway and turned back around to face me.
"What?"
"Count the Observers here in this country. In all the countries."
"The Observers landed here with approximately two hundred researchers." He frowned. "Why?" I shook my head impatiently. "Listen to me. Just send out a bunch of your guys, or girls, or satellites or whatever you've got and try to count them."
"And again, I ask, why?" He stepped closer.
"You won't get an accurate count, but it won't matter. You'll see then."
"See what?"
I just looked up at him silently.
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"You know, I could make life very difficult for you. Keep you in questioning for who knows how long. Why don't you just tell me what you know?"
I rolled my eyes with a weary smile. "I don't know anything, Brickman. I just have a few ideas. I'm not even sure if they're right."
"Tell me," he demanded.
"Doesn't the 'I' stand for investigation, Agent Brickman?" I leaned back on the bed and pulled the covers around me again.
"You'll figure it out. And your conclusion will have far more weight than theories coming from a mentally-ill waitress from Texas."
He grimaced. I waited for him to leave.
He started to, then stopped, turning back to face me. "You are one interesting woman, Zara Mitchell."
"Thanks."
"No, I mean it." He consulted his notebook. "Doctors here say that your recovery is nothing short of miraculous. They've never seen anyone make such strides in this amount of time. In fact," he looked up at me, "they weren't predicting you being conscious and alert until later this week, if ever."
I swallowed hard. The power from Caelan must still have been circulating within me. "Lucky thing, I guess." I cleared my throat and pressed the call button next to my leg, out of sight from Agent Brickman.
"I guess." He shrugged, an action of forced carelessness.
"Course, we won't really know anything until the tests are back, will we?"
"Tests?" I pressed the call button again. Where were all the nurses in this hospital?
"Well, sure. We can't have you suffering any long-term effects from this. Besides, haven't you ever wanted to see your own DNA strands?"
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I froze.
He smiled. "We'll be seeing you then." He turned and headed out the door, nearly bumping into the nurse coming into my room. I fell back against the pillows, listening to her lecture him in the doorway for disturbing me. DNA. A little bit of curiosity tickled at me, but along with it, an almost overwhelming sense of doom. They wouldn't miss it. They couldn't. They would see that I wasn't quite who and what I was supposed to be and then the jig, as they say, would be up.
The nurse came in and fussed over me. I asked for a glass of water to explain my call to her. She gave it to me and then left me alone again.
Tears suddenly prickled my eyes. I didn't know what to do. I needed help. I needed Caelan.
The tears spilled over as I pictured his calm planning that got us out of trouble time and again, his unshaken demeanor even when his back had been full of shattered glass.
"This isn't fair," I whispered to God. "I never asked for any of this. Now you've taken it away again and I don't know what to do."
I wiped my eyes on the edge of my bed sheet, hoping for some kind of sign. But as usual, God or fate or destiny was silent just when you needed help the most. But maybe that was a sign in and of itself. For now, that was what I had to believe. 242
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Chapter 22
I went home after that. I didn't belong there anymore, but I didn't belong anywhere else either. Scott picked me up at the airport and drove me home, without a word the entire way. But that was okay. The crowd of reporters and rubberneckers that greeted us from our front lawn made up for the noise quotient. Eventually, some other story took my place on the front page above the fold, so the media left town like lions abandoning a three-day-old zebra carcass. Scott transferred to Richards Community College, where I had planned to enroll, despite my protests that he should finish in California. He still refused to talk to me, other than the once-a-day call between classes that he insisted on to make sure I was still there.
Nights were especially bad; I jumped at every sound in the house, seeing Nevan in every unexplained shadow. The dreams that I'd had before meeting Caelan hadn't returned, but the ones I had now were far worse, filled with screaming and the smell of cooking meat.
But the visions, for lack of a better word, were the worst. T
hey didn't happen when I was sleeping, only when I was awake and concentrating on something else, like driving or cleaning. One minute, I was staring down at the bottom of my tub and the next, I was looking at Asha, Thane, or Namere. Sometimes I felt pain, not of the physical variety, but the kind that surrounded and squeezed your heart, like whenever I thought of Caelan, of his smile, of not being able to tell him goodbye.
The visions only lasted a few seconds at a time, and I didn't tell anyone about them, hoping they would go away and at the same time, clinging to every one of them because they somehow made me feel closer to Caelan, like he wasn't really gone and we 243
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were still somehow connected. I did my best to squash that fantasy every time it came up, if only to try to spare myself pain, but nothing I did could make it go away for long. Two months to the day that Caelan knocked me flat on the floor of the diner, I was standing at the job site where the new Silver Spoon was being built, better and probably greasier than ever. The insurance company had come through with a check–though there was still an open investigation into the explosion–and I'd hired Jorge Martinez, a former schoolmate from grade school on, as my contractor.
"Walls will be up next week, Zara." He pointed out where the lumber was already piled.
"Thanks, Jorge, I appreciate it." I smiled at him. He was one of the few in town who made an effort to treat me just as he had before. Some other people refused to look at me, or hurried their children past. Still others stared at the hand-shaped burn around my wrist and whispered. A few, including Sheriff Brigham, glared and spoke loudly about the evils of aliens whenever I walked by. It was all right, I could deal, as long as a few people, like Jorge, still tried. "Now, you're not screwing me on lumber, right? Charging me more than the cost?" It was, by now, an old joke between us. He laughed. " Querida, if I were screwing you, it wouldn't be on a stack of lumber." He winked at me, then walked back to his crew as the cell phone in my jeans pocket rang. I never went anywhere without that phone now, Scott insisted on it and even if he hadn't, I still would have done it.
