HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
THAT NIGHT I PROJECTED OUT. I ENDED UP IN MISSISSIPPI GOING after a predator not unlike the dude I killed the night I met Sadie. I knew they were everywhere, but the sheer volume of drunk aging bastards who would go after young girls in that part of the country was mind-blowing.
I made it back in around dawn, to find Sadie already up, dressed, and pacing in the living room, a gray Monterey Bay fog covering the house. "What's wrong?" I asked, wondering where everyone else was.
"Pretty-shield called," she said. "She wants to meet up in Gilroy this morning."
"Garlic Gilroy? Forty-five minutes from here?" I asked. "Didn't you last see her in Canada?"
"Yes," she said. "You think that's weird."
"I think it's more than weird. She must be mobile like us, but how many people are?"
"That's what I was thinking," she said. "I know I need to see her, but I've got a bad feeling about this. The first time I met with her was weird enough. Like she knew too much or something. I think you guys should come with me."
"We're there, no problem," I said. "Just give me time to clean up. Where are my fearless siblings?"
"I don't know," she said. "They went down to the beach hours ago."
That was . . . more than atypical. Not that I wanted Sadie to know. "Yeah, that's their thing. They do that all the time here. I'll go get them." A lie.
Sadie went into the kitchen, and I ducked out the front door.
I found them walking the shoreline in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a few miles south. They got quiet as soon as I came up on them. "What brings you this way?" I asked.
"Nothing," they said in unison. Ginny's hair was blowing in the wind and her makeup was undone. Everett was barefoot and in a T-shirt. Something was off.
But now I had my secrets too. So I guess they got to keep theirs.
"Okay then," I said. "Sadie got a call from Pretty-shield, and she's supposed to meet her in Gilroy in an hour. Sadie wants us all to come. Think you could be finished with "nothing' soon enough to make that happen?"
"Yeah, sure," they mumbled.
I went back to the house alone.
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THEY CAME BACK A FEW MINUTES LATER, AND WE GOT IN THE SUV. AS WE drove, I wondered about Pretty-shield. Who did Anthony know who was a reader? If he had been around someone with that power, wouldn't he have acquired it by now? Whom would he trust enough to ask for help? What kind of creature would this person be? And why was Sadie worried about meeting her?
As we wound up the 101, I knew it was too late to ask questions.
Sadie pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald's, and it was safe to say it was a move I wasn't expecting.
