Spirit

“Mommy is working.” His voice dropped to a hushed whisper. “I’m supposed to be sleeping, but I wasn’t tired anymore.”

The house was a well of quiet, insulated by the rain smacking the glass outside. At least that meant it was probably morning.

The boy stretched for a remote control on the coffee table, ignoring Hunter’s hold on his wrist. “Can I turn on cartoons?”

This was . . . surreal. Hunter let him go again. “Sure.” He paused. “Do you know where everyone else is?”

“They’re sleeping.” The boy climbed up on the couch next to him as if he’d known Hunter all his life. Then he clicked on the television.

Hunter sat there for a full minute and wondered what to do.

Unfortunately his brain kept replaying the previous night.

Fire.

Gunshot.

Calla.

The music from the cartoons was like water torture. Hunter rubbed at his eyes again, suddenly worried he was going to be sick.

He needed to find out what had happened, whether they were still in danger.

He stumbled off the couch, leaving the boy there. The front door was locked, but he threw the bolt and stepped onto the porch.

Rain coursed down from the dark gray sky, slapping against the siding and running in rivers down the driveway. It had to be very early, because he didn’t sense motion from any of the houses on the street.

Wait—maybe he still had his phone.

No, his pockets were empty. But blood stained the waistband of his jeans and streaked down one leg.

Hunter stepped onto the front walk, letting the rain hit him. He put a hand out. No power in the drops; just a normal storm.

“I thought the only person crazy enough to stand out in the rain was Chris.”

Hunter turned. Gabriel stood in the doorway, wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. His hair was rumpled from sleep. He didn’t look panicked, but he looked tired.

About thirty questions came to mind, but Hunter said, “Who’s the little kid?”

“James. Hannah’s son.”

That meant nothing to Hunter. “Who’s Hannah?”

“Mike’s girlfriend. You’ve seen her; she was one of the firefighters at the police station last week. She stayed at the carnival to help, so Mike brought him here.” Gabriel paused. “You want to come in out of the rain or what?”

Hunter realized he’d just been standing there, feeling rain trail through his hair and run in rivulets down his chest.

But the rain felt good on his shoulder, so he didn’t move. “What happened? How did I get here?”

“Do you remember the carnival?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember the fires?”

Was Gabriel kidding? They were permanently etched on the insides of Hunter’s eyelids. “I remember the generators. I had to climb down from the Ferris wheel.”

Gabriel glanced back in the house, then pulled the door shut. “That kid hears everything.” He leaned back against the doorjamb. “Do you remember getting shot?”

Hunter froze. “I got shot?”

“Yeah. In the shoulder.” Gabriel looked out at the gray sky. “And no offense, dude, but you weigh a f**king ton.”

That left Hunter with more questions than answers. His shoulder hurt, but he sure hadn’t missed a bullet hole.

That meant one of them had used power to heal him.

“Go clean up,” said Gabriel. “I’ll make coffee. School’s closed for the day, so . . .”

“Are we in danger?”

Gabriel snorted. “When are we not in danger?” He paused. “I have no idea. Nothing has happened since the fires.”

Hunter snuck into Nick’s room to find clean jeans from his bag, trying to be as silent as possible. He probably didn’t need to bother. Nick was practically unconscious, an arm hanging down over the side of the bed. The entire second floor felt thick with sleep. A quick glance at the clock revealed it wasn’t even six in the morning.

The shower felt even better than the rain had, but questions were burning the inside of his brain, so he rushed.

James was eating Cookie Crisp straight from the box when Hunter walked past the family room. He’d wrapped himself in the comforter.

Hunter wondered what it would be like to feel so comfortable in his surroundings. He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way, even around his own family.

He heard hushed voices from the kitchen, and that didn’t mean anything until Michael’s words registered.

“This is the first time I’ve considered leaving town.”

Leaving town. Hunter hesitated in the hallway.

Gabriel said something in response, but Hunter couldn’t catch the words.

Then Michael said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Hunter could feel Gabriel’s surprise from here. Hunter strained to hear him. “I think this is the first time we all have a reason to stay.” He paused. “You’re dating a girl who left her kid with you, Michael.”

“Exactly. I’m putting them at risk.”

“There’s no pentagram on the door.”

“Yet.”

Gabriel paused. “You sound like you’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

“Only all night.” A tapping sound that Hunter couldn’t make sense of. Then a heavy sigh. “Money would be tight for a while, but we could make it work.”

“When?”

“A week if we had to.”

A week! Hunter held his breath.

“Do you know where we’d go?”

Michael’s voice was muffled, as if he was moving away. Hunter only picked out random phrases. “. . . go to the bank. We need . . . quiet so he doesn’t hear us.”

So he doesn’t hear us.

Exclamation points flared in Hunter’s head. He eased forward to hear the rest.

The floor creaked.

The conversation in the kitchen came to an abrupt stop.

But he wasn’t stupid. That vise grip had closed on his chest again. He’d never been welcome here, not really. Expecting anything else was downright lunacy.

Hunter walked into the kitchen easily, as if that creak in the floor was completely innocuous and he hadn’t heard a word. Gabriel and Michael were at the table, and he expected them to look guilty, but they just looked tired. Three mugs of coffee sat on the table. One was untouched, but a carton of half-and-half sat there, along with a bowl of sugar. And Hunter’s cell phone. The light was flashing.

At least it gave him an excuse not to look at them. He wasn’t sure he could keep the feeling of betrayal off his face. Hunter dropped into a chair and glanced at the screen.

Kate.

We need to talk about last night.

That kicked his heart into action. He hit the button to clear the screen and set the phone down in favor of the coffee.

Gabriel’s words on the porch were duking it out with the conversation he’d just overheard.

No offense dude, but you weigh a f**king ton.

“Hey.” He looked across the table at Gabriel. “Thanks.”

Gabriel half shrugged and spun his mug between his hands. “I didn’t know what you wanted in it.”

“No—I mean—”

Gabriel met his eyes. “I know what you meant.”

“Did you fix my shoulder, too?”

Another half shrug, like it was nothing. “There was a lot of power in the fire. You were bleeding. It was easy.” But then he looked away. “We had to run. I couldn’t do it all the way. Hannah saw all the blood and was ready to put you on a helicopter.”

Gabriel’s voice was casual, but Hunter could hear the undercurrent of tension. Shadows underscored his eyes, punctuating his worry.

“What happened to the Guide?”

“Don’t know. Chris and Nicky pulled the rain to stop the fires, and we thought for sure he’d find us, but . . . he didn’t.”

“Yet,” Michael said. “He didn’t find us yet.”

Gabriel took a sip of coffee but didn’t say anything.

Michael glanced over at Hunter. “You look a lot better than you did last night. You all right?”

No. He felt like his world was collapsing around him. His brain was having trouble reconciling the fact that they’d saved his life with their talk about secretly leaving town, abandoning him to this mess that they were a part of.

He looked into his coffee and nodded.

“I thought about calling your mom,” Michael said. “But I was worried she’d want to come over here, and I didn’t want to put her in the line of fire.”

“It’s fine,” he said. He didn’t want to see her—if she even cared to see him. His grandfather would probably call him names and demand that he pay for the damages to the carnival equipment.

But for a fraction of a second, he wished Gabriel hadn’t used power to heal him, that this Hannah woman had put him on a medevac helicopter to shock trauma or wherever. Just so his mom would have to look at him for an instant, instead of wallowing in her own mess.

Then again, she’d probably ignore even that. She hadn’t moved a muscle while her father was laying into him.

Michael pushed loose strands of hair back from his face. “I checked the news last night. Seven people are missing. Three are confirmed dead, but the bodies were too badly burned to identify which of the missing people are definitely dead. Seven. Most of those were kids. And that doesn’t even count the number of people in the hospital.”

The sudden guilt clogged Hunter’s throat. He remembered the feeling of panic and despair on those carnival grounds. He hadn’t been able to help any of them. He rubbed at his eyes.

Michael was still looking at him. “Calla is on the list of the missing.”

Hunter thought of the way her body had jerked, the way she’d dropped in the middle of the flames.

She’d fallen in the middle of an inferno. She had to be one of the dead.

“At least she can’t hurt anyone else,” said Hunter.

“Jesus,” said Gabriel. “Why do you sound upset about that?”

“I’m not upset.”

But he was. Because he’d wanted her to stop, but he hadn’t wanted her dead. Because he hadn’t been able to stop her himself, and now more people had lost their lives. Because once again, he wasn’t exactly sure where he fell on this continuum of good and evil, or even which end was which.

He wasn’t like Calla. He knew that much.

But if he wasn’t like the Guides, where did that leave his father? Where did it leave the man who’d shot Calla? The same man who’d pointed a gun at Hunter?

Hunter’s first instinct had been to run.

Not to put his hands up and say, “Don’t shoot. I’m one of you.”

And where did it leave Kate, a girl who seemed to have as many secrets as he did himself? She’d climbed down the Ferris wheel more efficiently than he had. She’d called his name when he’d been running from the Guide—causing a hesitation that had probably saved his life. His shoulder wasn’t any great distance from his heart.

She hadn’t been the one with a gun. But what would happen if he told the Merricks that he suspected . . . something about her? About this friend she was texting all the time? He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t even pin it down himself, so how was he going to explain it to them? He had no proof of anything, really. And they already didn’t trust him.

He wasn’t sure he trusted them, either, if they were going to leave him here.

His head hurt.

Seven people missing.

Seven people. All because he couldn’t make himself pull a stupid trigger in the library.

All because he’d made his dad come back for him.

This line of thinking wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

Hunter kept thinking of the kid who’d shown up in his kitchen that night, when Calla had come after him in his bedroom. Where had that guy gone? Why hadn’t Hunter seen him around school?