“I want to go home.”
Daisy had barely whispered the words, but her voice carried far in the dead Knight’s lonely backyard. Shannon sat next to her on a small patch of dry grass while Merek paced a few feet away. The yard itself was depressing, littered with fast food wrappers and lined with a plastic construction fence that sagged in several places. It looked even worse under the dim orange sky and its thick, brown clouds that seemed to be pushing themselves toward the ground as night grew closer. Then again, the yard was a virtual oasis compared to what was going on inside the house.
“I know,” Shannon managed, her throat tight. She put one hand on Daisy’s shoulder, but she knew the gesture wasn’t enough, could never be enough. She wanted to say something more comforting to Daisy, but at the moment she couldn’t even figure out how to comfort herself.
She could still smell him, the dead man. As though the air in that closed-off living room had followed them outside.
“We’re gonna get out of here soon,” Shannon said, this time more to herself than to Daisy. After she’d barged into the house, Joe had immediately directed her to wait outside so he could call the police. She hadn’t needed to be told twice. “We’ll leave soon, and you’ll go back with Joe.”
Daisy shook her head. “No. I want to go home.”
Of course you do, Shannon thought. But she could only nod and pat Daisy’s shoulder again.
“Who would have done this?” Merek asked. He continued to pace, his brow furrowed. “If that man was truly a Knight, why kill him and just . . . leave him there? For what purpose?”
“I don’t know,” Shannon replied, helplessly.
Joe made his way into the backyard then, stepping around the busted-up remains of an old lawn chair. A bit more color had returned to his face, but his phone hung limply from his hand.
“The police are on their way . . . sometime. I suppose they have more urgent things to take care of,” Joe said, gesturing vaguely at the streets, the city, the sky beyond them.
“Do you know what happened in there? Did you find anything?” Shannon asked. Her legs felt shaky, but she stood anyway, just to prove she could.
Joe paused, as if weighing his words, but ultimately just shook his head. Shannon didn’t quite believe him, but she wasn’t up to pressing him on it. Not right now.
Daisy stood up and crossed her arms. “I can’t go back there,” she said. Her voice was no longer a whisper, but came out sounding forceful.
Joe looked taken aback. “You don’t have to, Daisy. None of us need to go back inside that house.”
“No, I mean to Los Angeles. I can’t.” Daisy’s voice broke as she spoke, and Shannon could see tears at the corners of her eyes. She was looking everywhere but at the three of them. “I wanted to help, I wanted to get Liv and Peter back, too, but I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”
Daisy’s head finally fell down, and tears streamed past her nose and cheeks onto the parched ground. Shannon moved forward, at a loss for how to help but knowing she needed to . . . but Joe beat her to the punch, taking two steps toward Daisy and pulling her into a hug.
“Oh, Daisy, you don’t have to do anything,” he said, his voice both gentle and sure. “I know your brother and sister would want you safe. I want you safe.”
“It’s just too . . . much . . . ,” Daisy said through hiccups, her eyes on the back windows of the house. Shannon thought of everything Daisy had been through recently—discovering her biological brother and sister, getting kidnapped, living through a near-apocalypse. Nearly stumbling into a dead body wasn’t the worst thing to happen to her by far, but she was right—it was too much.
“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, still not making eye contact with any of them.
“There’s absolutely no need to be sorry,” Joe said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a travel-size packet of Kleenex. He handed them to Daisy. “We’ll get you back to your parents as soon as we can.”
Daisy sniffed. “My old nanny lives in Santa Barbara. I know she’d take me in if I asked, and the news says the sky is still normal there. Do you think . . . I could stay with her? Until my parents come?”
“Of course. We’ll find her,” Joe said.
Daisy nodded as she wiped her nose with the Kleenex. She already looked a little better than she had moments before.
“What next? For the rest of us?” Merek asked.
Joe sighed. “I think we all need a moment to regroup. It’ll take a while for me to get Daisy to Santa Barbara, and in the meantime you need a place to stay.” Joe looked off into the distance, thinking.
“He can stay with me,” Shannon said. She’d barely formed the thought before the words came out of her mouth. And she had no idea how she’d get this past her parents. But it felt good to be able to do something, to help somehow.
Joe nodded, and Merek just lifted an eyebrow, which Shannon took for agreement.
“And after that?” Merek asked.
“Like I said, I think we all need to take a breath,” Joe said. “And what I said to Daisy applies to all of you—you’re under no obligation to put yourselves in any danger, do you understand? Your only job is to stay safe.”
Shannon thought about contradicting him, but she didn’t have the energy. Part of her wished she could be like Daisy right now, asking for a tissue and a one-way ticket out of this place. She knew that leaving wouldn’t solve anything, but she couldn’t think past the sight of the dead man, killed in the worst way and left to rot in his own living room. It was the best she could do just to nod in Joe’s direction and follow him silently away from this place.
“Can you . . . hurry . . . up?”
Shannon gritted her teeth and turned away from Merek’s backside, which was currently located just two inches from her face. Merek shifted awkwardly in place, his feet pressing down on her right thigh.
“I am trying,” he said, his voice coming out muffled from the other side of the window they were trying to sneak him into. Shannon suspected he wasn’t trying all that hard.
If it had been just another regular day, there would be no need to sneak Merek into her garage. Shannon’s parents would be safely at work instead of watching for their daughter through the house windows like hawks. But obviously, it wasn’t just a regular day. There might not be any more regular days for some time.
So the only way to get Merek into Shannon’s garage unnoticed was through the tiny back window, which he could only reach by using her like a ladder. He lifted one of his feet and planted it on her shoulder, using his elbows to scoot farther into the window hole. Finally, his weight was lifted off her body and he pulled himself through, tumbling down to the other side.
“Oof!”
“Are you okay?” Shannon hissed toward the open window. There was no response. “Merek? Did you pull your stitches?”
Silence.
“Merek?”
“Why in all that is holy is this entire room pink?”
Shannon leaned against the side of the garage in relief. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be inside in a sec.”
She raced back around the side of the garage and slipped past the hedges lining the driveway. When she hit the sidewalk, she doubled back, making her way up the front walk as if she’d just arrived. Even though she knew it was almost nine p.m., the sky above her wasn’t going dark. If anything, the orange was just turning a slightly darker, slightly sicklier shade. Shannon wondered if she could blame her lateness on that, but very much doubted it.
After going inside and talking her parents down—which took much longer than usual—Shannon slipped back out into the garage. She’d fixed up and decorated the space herself when she was twelve, transforming the whole garage into something her parents referred to as the “Glitter Den.” It was where she did her homework, watched movies on her iPad, and at times had even tried to stash Liv when a foster home wasn’t working out. And yes, it was mostly pink.
Shannon opened the door to find Merek had made himself at home on a neon beanbag chair.
“Sorry, I couldn’t sneak out any food or pillows yet without making my parents suspicious. But there’s some chairs and a little air conditioner. As long as you’re quiet, you’ll be good here for now.”
Shannon reached for a small purple blanket on the ground and tossed it in Merek’s direction, remembering too late that the blanket was also covered in kisses and rainbow-colored unicorns. Merek caught the blanket in one hand and looked down at it for a second. He glanced back at Shannon, and she waited for the sure-to-come sarcastic commentary. But instead, Merek just sank back in the beanbag chair, blanket over his knees.
“Thank you.”
“It’s just a blanket,” Shannon said, with a half shrug. “From when I was a kid,” she hastily added.
“I don’t mean just for the blanket,” Merek continued, averting his eyes. “I know you are putting yourself at risk by allowing me to stay here, but I have . . . nowhere else go. I appreciate your generosity, and I want you to know it.”
Shannon stood stock-still, at a loss for words. The last thing she’d expected was sincerity.
“Even if your generosity includes chairs that somehow stick to one’s skin.” Merek’s expression slid back to its usual one of mild disdain as he tried to separate his arm from the beanbag chair beneath him.
“Ah, there’s the guy I know and . . . well, tolerate,” Shannon said, moving forward and plopping down in the neon-green beanbag chair next to Merek’s. “And you’re welcome.”
“So what shall we do?”
There were a lot of possible answers to that question. They could decide to take Joe’s offer that they back out of this whole crazy mission, lying low until their friends returned from another world. Or they could keep helping, keep putting themselves in danger.
But Shannon didn’t want to think about that right now. She didn’t want to think about dead bodies or crumbling cities. She didn’t want to think at all.
“Wanna watch a movie?”
“A movie?” Merek’s eyebrows raised. “Liv talked about those. A lot.”
“I’m sure she did. And if it were up to her, the first movie you ever watched would be an old black-and-white one or, like, a movie that won a bunch of Oscars for something boring like sound editing. But I’m going to show you something good. Something with zero dead people in it.”
Shannon got her tablet from the far side of the room and sat back down, moving her beanbag chair closer to Merek’s.
“Are you ready?”
“I suppose?”
“Good. I think you’re gonna like this. A modern classic of our time,” Shannon said, queueing the movie up and pushing play. “It’s called Mean Girls.”