“You don’t know that.”
“It will.” He gives a little squeeze.
I expect him to let go. He doesn’t. So I hold on, too.
“Seppie would give us hell if she knew we were holding hands,” I say, trying to pretend like everything is all light and normal. “Also, you kissed my thumbs before.”
“I don’t care what Seppie thinks. Do you?”
“Nah,” I say, even though I’m not sure if that’s the real answer. “We’ll tell her it’s a side effect of my concussion.”
“Obviously, because you’d only hold my hand if you’re brain damaged.”
“Nice.”
We don’t let go.
He shifts a little closer to me. “I can’t believe I let you go back in the house alone.”
“I told you to.”
“It was an idiot move. I’d have to kill myself if anything happened to you while I was just sitting in the freaking car like a wimp.”
Watching all the emotions crossing Lyle’s super-expressive face is too much for me to handle right now, so I turn and stare down the road. There are headlights coming our way.
Lyle asks, “The cops?”
“I hope so,” I say, letting go of his hand so I can jump out of the car. I run/limp down the road toward the headlights. I want to make sure they know where to go. The street numbers might not be easy for them to read, and Lyle might not have even given them an actual street number, and—
“Mana!” Lyle yells, running after me and catching me ridiculously quickly. “Don’t!”
He tackles me into the ditch on the side of the road. We roll and tumble. Our bodies bash together. I try to smash him away. His face is just inches from mine.
“What are you doing?” I grunt.
“What if it isn’t?” He whispers the words, but even in the whisper there is the really obvious sound of Worried Lyle.
I am totally confused. “Isn’t what?”
“The cops. I’ve watched enough stuff to know that it’s not always the cops that show up. Listen, there are no sirens. Cops would have sirens or at least blue lights.”
As I pause to listen, the car flashes by and stops at the end of a driveway—my driveway. We both stay down, but angle ourselves so that we can see everything. Two men in black suits get out of the car, which is black, too, and has no flashing blue cop-car lights anywhere.
Lyle makes big eyes at me. The whites of them flash in the moonlight. The wind blows some dead leaves against his face. He sputters and swats them away with his free hand. His other hand is currently pretty close to my bum, which I will not think about.
“See?” he whispers.
I hedge. “Maybe they’re undercover.”
“Okay, right,” Lyle scoffs. “Undercover in suits. Only bankers in Manchester wear suits.”
“They aren’t bankers,” says a voice above us, “and they aren’t undercover.”
We both jump upright. I clutch the edge of Lyle’s jacket. His hands are fists, ready to strike. A man steps out from behind the Johnsons’ oak tree.
“You two getting a little romantic in the gutter? That’s sad,” he says. “When I was in high school, we at least did it in a car.”
I point my finger at him as I stand up fully. “You…”
Lyle steps in front of me like he’s a superhero instead of a cross-country-running cheerleader and gets all cop-show voice. “Don’t even think about it, buddy.”
China, aka Sunglasses Guy, snorts. “Buddy?”
I push my way in front of Lyle and angry-whisper at China, “Knock it off. I am so not in the mood. My mom is missing. Dakota was here—”
“Well, if you’d just let me kill him when I wanted to,” he says.
“I thought you were kidnapping him,” I say, crossing my arms in front of my chest. It is freezing out here.
“I was.” China steps forward. The night sky leans in on us, deepening things, including my rage.
“You obviously failed,” Lyle says.
“He speaks!” China snarks at him. “The boy toy speaks. I thought they only did that when you push a button on their stomach, or pull a string.”
“Shut up. You make no sense. He talked like two seconds ago.” I step forward one more time and smash my hands into China’s big chest, trying to push him backwards. Nobody treats Lyle that way. My hands push against the leather jacket, but he doesn’t move. The man is a tree. A slightly sexy and very sarcastic tree. It’s so aggravating, but I sputter, “There was this monster thing…”
“That’s why I’m here,” he says, nodding.
“To exterminate us?” Lyle interrupts. He has straightened up, trying to appear bigger than he is.
“No.” China shakes his head, obviously disgusted by our stupidity. “To get you out of here.”
As appealing as getting away from freaking monsters and creepy men in suits sounds, I am not cool with that idea. “I’m not going anywhere without my mom.”
There is a siren in the distance. I wonder if the police are actually going to show up or if they are responding to something else—another drunk driver or some family fight. The night is dark and full of menace and danger. I never realized before just how terrifyingly bizarre the world really is. I never realized that my mom, my sweet, dependable, pretzel-dipping mom, could just disappear. The horror of it makes my throat close. Lyle comes up and touches my hand, steady and calm. His touch slows my heart rate into a beat that is more normal. I don’t know how he knows I need him. He just does.
I address China, though, because unlike Lyle and me, he seems to have a vague idea of what is going on—at least he did with Dakota. “Do you know what happened to my mom?”
Before he can answer, another set of headlights comes down the road. China motions for us to get behind a tree with him. We do. Another dark car pulls up outside my house. More men in suits hustle toward my porch door. One stands by the front tire of Mom’s car, obviously checking out the squashed Windigo.
“You two need to leave the scene, and you need to leave it now,” China says, all business. He captures both of our arms in his hands. Lyle yanks his arm free.
I stare at the guy, amazed that he thinks it’s okay to be rough handling us. His jaw is set, the lines straight and strong. It’s the kind of jaw you want to trust, but how can I? I steel myself. “Why?”
“Because they’re coming.”
“Who are coming?” I ask.
“More Windigos.”
Lyle claps his hands together. The sound echoes. “I knew they were Windigos.”
“Lyle, this is so not the time.” I feel a little guilty for saying this, because he is so psyched about being right.
“You’ve got it,” China says. “We do not have the time. You have to leave now.”
“Why?”
His face shifts. “I just told you. The Windigos are coming.”
“No. Why? Why are they coming?” It takes a lot of nerve to get the words out. The wind picks up again, and cold slashes into my teeth, but I keep going on, keep asking questions, because it’s not like I’m just going to trust him because he says so. “And who are those men in the suits? And where the hell is my mother? Did you hurt my mother?”
I am right up next to him, and yes, he towers over me, but I don’t care. Not at all. He grasps my shoulders in his hands, not too roughly but not gently, either, and he says, “Mana…”
“How do you know her name?” Lyle pushes his way in between us, jostling to protect me and distance me from Mr. No Answer Man.
China ignores him. “Mana, I would never hurt your mother. I am extremely worried about her, but right now my priority is you. You have got to get out of here now.”
“And go where?” I ask.
He is about to answer when his attention shifts away from us. Wincing at whatever he sees, he pushes at me, shoving me toward the woods. He shoves Lyle as well. His voice is an order and a whisper and it is full of fear. “You two go in the woods. Find somewhere safe. Hide
.”
“Why?” Lyle asks, clasping my hands.
“They’re leaving the house, coming to search for you. I’ll hold them off, but you need to hide. You need to hide now.”
I’m not sure what to think, but there is a quality to his voice that makes us believe.
We run.
CHAPTER 6
My mom and I first moved here when I was little—six or so. I was terrified, because the neighborhood was pretty white (and by “white” I mean descended-from-Puritans, we-came over-on-the-Mayflower white). My mom is white, too, but my dad is obviously not. His people are from Hawaii. Everyone calls me Asian, or sometimes Latina. Once someone called me a derogatory term for a Native American. I don’t know. Mom said I’m beautiful and an individual and all those perfect mom things that are in the mom handbook for situations like that.
Anyway, Lyle was the first kid I met in the neighborhood. I remember him standing at the end of my driveway wearing this filthy Thor T-shirt that he hadn’t taken off for two weeks. He was holding two sonic screwdrivers with sword attachments. Mom pushed me out the door to say hi. After he told me I would be much cooler if I was a boy, and I punched him, he took me to these same woods behind the houses and we found some dead tree branches, bundled them up like people, and played war. Then he accidentally slashed a tree branch with the screwdriver. The branch fell off and cut my arm. I bled all over the place. (I’m a big bleeder. There aren’t enough clotting agents in my blood or some such weirdness. It’s not life threatening; it just means that when other people would bleed for one minute, I bleed for ten.) Anyway, he fixed me up with five hundred million Angry Bird Band-Aids. The next time we played, we were on the same side, fighting this huge, imaginary time-traveling dragon who breathed fire. But even though the dragon was imaginary, Lyle always had to be three feet in front of me, facing it first, making sure I didn’t get hurt again, even if there was nothing that could actually hurt me, even if no threats were remotely real.
That’s how it is now. He’s one step ahead of me, obviously keeping his pace just slow enough for me to stay close. Tree branches stab at our bodies as we run through the little wood that hides behind the houses on our street. We stumble on the uneven ground, holding hands. Our feet don’t know where to step. The cold air slashes at our lungs. We’re running blind, and running without a purpose other than to get away.
“This is ridiculous.” I stop.
Lyle tugs on my hand. He could run forever. Not me. I do not like running. “C’mon.”
I don’t move. A bright flash lights the air behind us. It looks like it comes from where we were standing before, by the road. There’s no exploding sound, just a light.
My fingers dig into Lyle’s. I can’t see his face because it’s so dark beneath the trees, but I can imagine it: strong, scared.
“What the hell is going on?” he whispers.
I don’t answer. I wait for a clue, a sign, some sort of signal that will tell me what to do next.
“Mana?”
“I don’t know, Lyle. How would I know?”
One of our hands is sweaty, even though it’s cold. I can’t tell whose hand it is. I don’t care. This is so unimportant compared to everything else, but here I am thinking, One of our hands is sweaty.
I repeat myself. “How should I know what’s going on?”
“It’s … Well, it’s happening at your house. You saw that guy, and … he knew your name.” Lyle’s voice meets the air, quiet and hurried. It’s his exasperated voice, the one he uses when our English teacher fails to know the proper use of a semicolon. Lyle has a big love for semicolons.
I try to focus for both of us. “What’s important right now is finding my mom, getting safe.”
“I’ll get you safe.” Lyle squeezes my hand. “But I think we have a better chance of finding your mom if we know what’s going on.”
Another light flashes, huge and bright. It should make me feel okay. Isn’t that what light is supposed to do? Make us feel safe in the darkness? It has the opposite effect. The air vibrates with danger. An owl hoots warnings. My breath comes rapid quick, and I’m not sure why but there’s this scared shaking inside of me that is threatening to burst out, take control of me. Fear. It’s pure fear, and I cannot give in to it because if I do I don’t think I’ll ever stop screaming and shaking until another one of those Windigo monster things finds me.
You would think I would feel protected, hiding in the trees, in the dark, but I don’t. Not even close. I tug on Lyle’s hand again. The tree branches hide the sky. The sky hides the world. And in the world there are things I never imagined were possible … things with sharp teeth, things that appeared to be normal high school drummer boys but weren’t.
“We should go somewhere,” I say.
Lyle inhales. “My house.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll sneak you in.”
A twig snaps in the distance. Bile moves up my esophagus. “Okay. Fine. We should hurry.”
* * *
Lyle’s parents have strict no-girls-in-the-house rules, which are antiquated and old and beyond stupid. They say it’s not that they don’t trust me and Seppie; they just don’t trust hormones. Whatever. It’s not like people only fornicate in houses. Not that Lyle roasts the broomstick with anyone, but … Still, if he actually had a current girlfriend, I’m sure they would find places to thump thighs. Or he would just sneak them in the house the way he always sneaks me in.
The Stephensons live in a big rectangular house that is supposed to look like an old-time New England colonial, but it’s new. A mudroom with a low roof attaches the house to the garage. Lyle’s room is right above the mudroom roof. So all you do is go to the back, step up onto the edges of the monstrous ceramic planter, grab onto the roof edge or Lyle’s hands, and he hauls you up onto the roof. Then you both go back into his room via the window. As neighbors, we have done this about ten million times, and this is what we do tonight, but tonight it feels dangerous. Tonight it feels life-or-death.
Just as we both get onto the roof, and I look back toward my house, the men in suits get into one of the black cars. It drives by the two houses between mine and Lyle’s. Headlights flash into Lyle’s yard just as we flatten ourselves onto the roof shingles.
“Should we be hiding from them?” I ask.
“Maybe.”
“In all those shows you watched, were the Men in Black good or bad?”
“Both. In those old movies with Will Smith, they were good. Most conspiracy theorists think they’re bad.”
“Conspiracy theorists?”
“The people who think the government is covering up the whole UFO thing. I talk about it all the time. Don’t you listen?”
“Not really,” I admit.
He lets out a big breath. I’ve disappointed him, which makes my stomach back twist again.
“I’ll listen better next time,” I whisper-promise.
He studies me for a second too long. “I can’t believe you sometimes.”
“It’s not like you listen to me when I talk about lip plumpers, and I don’t get all pissy about it.”
After contemplating this for a second (I am assuming here), he says, “Point taken.”
He hustles in the window and gives me a hand into his room. I stand there and stare at all his Doctor Who posters as he plops the window screen back on and shuts it. No real lights illuminate the area, just a night-light, which is kind of cute, if you think about it. It would be cuter, however, if it wasn’t a White Walker from Game of Thrones. After the Windigo, all pseudo humanoids creep me out.
“The other black car is leaving,” he whispers, all urgently.
I go to stare out the window with him. “Weird.”
“Ultraweird.”
“Super ultraweird.”
He crunches up his face at me. For a second everything seems normal. But it fades, because normal is not true. Normal is never true; I know that now.
I walk around the game con
trollers and running crap scattered all over the floor. I grab the sword he made back in seventh grade, when he was into those fantasy reenactment games. Then I hop over his trail runners. Lyle is one of the best cross-country runners in the county, which is why he’s heading to Dartmouth on a scholarship. That’s not until next September, though. And I have another whole year before I get to go, leave this place. That is, if we don’t get eaten by monsters first.
“I wish we could run away from this,” I say.
“We don’t even know what we’d be running from.” Lyle yanks his hand through his hair. “You’re bleeding again.”
I peel away the scarf. My ankle has gashes along it that are still bleeding. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s awful.” He takes a new sock out of his drawer and wraps it around my ankle. He tosses the bloodstained scarf into his little metal trash can. I wonder if his mom will notice it. She’s the type of mom who would go through her son’s trash. He comes back and squats in front of me. The top of his head is full of ruffled, light-brown hair, thick and soft-looking. “It’s really awful, Mana.”
“Fine. I’m a total mess like normal; a stupid, horrible mess.”
“What are you talking about?”
I want to shout about how I’m not as smart as him or Seppie, not as good a runner, about my D, how I will never get into Dartmouth … but he meets my eyes and all my words get stuck somewhere behind my heart. He asks, “Did the Windigo thing do this?”
I shudder but don’t answer.
He grits his teeth. “That’s so wrong. I should’ve killed it.”
“I think you did.”
“I should have killed it before it hurt you.” He lifts my foot up gently and peeks beneath the sock again. “We should probably clean it out. I don’t want it to get infected.”
I suck in a breath. “Does it feel weird?”
“Your foot?”
“No…” I don’t want to actually say what I want to ask.
He guesses anyway. “Killing an unspecified life form?”
“Exactly.”
Shadows make homes beneath his eyes. “Kind of. I mean, it was going to kill you.”