Chapter Six

 

Chloe

 

The steps from the garage clunked under my feet. I followed Dad through the door and past the laundry room into the kitchen.

And I wondered if I had made a mistake.

They weren’t speaking to me, but I knew that would change. The moment we were alone, everything would pick up where it left off – though, really, silence was almost as bad as yelling in its own special, drawn-out-torment sort of way.

I should have kept running with Zeke. Maybe gone to Canada or something. Surely it was nice this time of year.

The smell of the house surrounded me, all cinnamon and clove and alien after my weeks away. With his good arm – the one that wasn’t in that horrible white sling – Dad reached over to flip on the light switch. As the fixture overhead flickered to life, he continued through the kitchen toward the living room.

I paused. On the breakfast table below the back window, I could see abandoned dishes. Beside the refrigerator, a gallon of milk still sat on the green laminate counter. A striped dish towel lay in a rumpled heap on the tile floor as well, the whole mess so unlike my parents that it was startling.

They’d left in a rush. They’d been worried.

My throat tightened. I hurried through the room, leaving Zeke to follow me.

By the fireplace, Mom was murmuring something heated to Dad.

She cut off the moment I appeared at the doorway.

Dad put a hand to hers as though trying to calm her. “Would you ask your friend to wait in the kitchen, Chloe?”

I could hear the careful choice of words. Cautiously, I glanced to Zeke.

He nodded. Taking my hand and giving it a brief squeeze, he eyed my parents for a heartbeat and then headed for the breakfast table.

My feet sank into the brown shag carpet as I walked into the living room. Mom and Dad took a seat on the overstuffed couch beneath their pictures of the Gobi Desert and Death Valley, leaving the armchair across from them to me.

It felt familiar. So many of our arguments had started this way.

Though they usually ended with slammed doors and more silence.

I glanced over, grateful that I could see Zeke through the archway connecting us to the kitchen.

“What happened, Chloe?” Dad asked.

Blinking, I looked back at him.

His gaze twitched to my neck.

I shook my head. “Nothing. A guy… we handled it. It’s fine.”

They stared at me.

“Someone tried to kill you,” Mom demanded. “And you ‘handled it’?”

I paused. I did not want to get into this. Desperately.

“Yeah.”

She exhaled, looking away as though she couldn’t believe anything about me or what I’d just said.

“And will this guy be looking for you?” Dad asked.

I swallowed. “I don’t think so. Not… not here.”

He paused. “By the ocean then.”

I gave a tiny shrug.

“How did you make it to Nebraska?”

I tried not to fidget on the chair, feeling like I was in an interrogation. My gaze flicked to Zeke. “We stole the guy’s truck.”

Mom made an incredulous noise, the sound so familiar I could feel my blood start boiling. My nails dug into my palms with the effort of not letting anger get the better of me.

“It ran out of gas, so we called you,” I finished.

Dad’s mouth thinned. “So this wasn’t a dehaian?”

“No.”

He glanced to Mom, who was staring at the brown chenille of the couch and shaking her head.

I looked between them. “What?”

“Are you in pain? From the… the ocean?” Dad asked.

“No.”

Mom turned back sharply. “Then you’ll stay,” she said, a weird mix of insistence and hope in her tone.

I hesitated. “For now.”

She exhaled again. It almost seemed like she was fighting back tears. My brow flickered down.

“We would like it very much if you would,” Dad said to me carefully.

I didn’t know how to respond. But for a few moments here and there, they weren’t acting remotely like themselves. Like the erratic, no-explanation, dictatorial crazies I’d grown up with. It was like they were scared of something. A real something, not just the made-up stuff they’d always pretended to fear.

And as impossible as it seemed, it kind of felt like it was me.

“O-okay,” I managed.

“Thank you,” he said.

My brow furrowed incredulously.

“But,” he continued, “while you are here… we’d like to ask you not to discuss your trip with anyone. Just to be on the safe side.”

My confusion deepened. “What? Why?”

“There are a couple other landwalkers in town. We’d prefer if you avoided speaking with them about your trip.”

I stared at him. “A couple other… who?”

He looked to Mom again. “Chief Reynolds and his nephew, Aaron Erlich.”

I blinked at the names of two of the local police officers.

“Everyone is already aware you ran away to California. There’s no fixing that. After the events in that ambulance, the Delaneys told the police you had been kidnapped before we could ask them to create another story.”

I blinked again. Peter and Diane had reported me kidnapped?

“But we’d appreciate it if you didn’t volunteer any information about that. We’ll need to come up with an explanation for your return, and your bruises as well, but barring that story to the police, please remain silent on the entire subject.”

I heard the words, filing them away somewhere in my head while I tried to sort out the rest. Police. We were going to have to talk to the police. Because they thought I’d been kidnapped.

My stomach rolled.

I guess I couldn’t blame the Delaneys for their story. Marty and Colin had stolen me and Baylie away from the cabin, something that had been witnessed by the other EMTs at the scene, and then I’d vanished into the ocean. There probably hadn’t been much the Delaneys could say.

But still… kidnapped. And from an ambulance where two men died.

Where I’d killed one of them.

The nausea grew worse. True, that’d been self-defense and halfway an accident as well, but I couldn’t explain that to anyone. Colin had been trying to inject me with a drug that could have killed me if Noah hadn’t gotten me to the ocean in time. I’d just been trying to stop him. But the spikes from my arms had left a straight, savagely deep row of stab wounds in Colin’s chest.

I doubted anyone had come up with an explanation for those.

And now I’d have to create one for the police.

The landwalker police…

I let out a breath. It was hard to know what to think. Chief Reynolds was like a cartoon, all gregarious and rotund and white-haired like Santa Claus in a brown police uniform. I was fairly certain he knew each person in Reidsburg by name, and could probably quote their life history as well. His nephew was his scrawny opposite, though: a shy guy with big glasses who looked like he belonged buried in a chemistry lab someplace. Only two years ahead of me in school, Aaron had been raised by his uncle and he’d taken up with the police force at his first opportunity, something that I supposed should have garnered respect. But with a build like a scarecrow and an awkwardness that meant he could barely answer a direct question, no one in Reidsburg had ever seen him as anything but a product of nepotism or a joke.

Except my parents, anyway. They’d just gone out of their way to avoid him and his uncle alike.

And suddenly, that didn’t seem like simply another symptom of their insanity. Not entirely.

“Are they dangerous?” I asked.

Dad glanced to Mom. “They think you’re our daughter,” he allowed awkwardly. “Biological daughter, I mean.”

I swallowed. There was that. And I didn’t want to get into that.

“How do you know they’re… like you?” I asked instead.

“We checked with the elders.”

My brow knitted again. “The who?”

Dad paused. “The elders. They’re… well, they’re rather like leaders among the landwalkers. We don’t have any way of just knowing who is one of us and who’s simply human. The line is blurry anyway. There aren’t many of what you’d call ‘purebloods’ left. None, actually. We’ve been among humans for so long, we’ve all got them in our ancestry. In fact, there comes a point where some folks… well, they’re so much more human than landwalker, there’s nothing really landwalker in them. Just odd traits like a tendency toward bad seasickness, or a fear of the ocean and the creatures in it. And otherwise, they’re human.

“But if we do want to know about others like us, there are the elders. They’re not old, necessarily; some are younger than your mother and me. But they’re men and women who,” he glanced to Mom, “perhaps are more in touch with what we used to be, I guess you could say. And a long time back, maybe a few centuries or more, they started keeping track of our people. Making genealogies, as well as maintaining stories from our history so that as a culture, we wouldn’t just be completely absorbed into the humans. They’re the ones who let us know about other landwalkers in our area.”

Warily, I watched them. “And it’d be dangerous if they knew about me? About…”

I trailed off, not sure if I should bring up the fact I was adopted. My mom – my biological mom, or real mom, or something – was Dad’s sister, Susan. My actual, real, or whatever dad was a dehaian named Kreyus, whom no one had ever heard from again. And until a Sylphaen had nearly killed me in Santa Lucina a few weeks before, Bill and Linda Kowalski had never told me about either of them.

Instead, they’d lied to me. They’d let me believe I was their daughter by birth. They’d never mentioned a word about the dehaians, the landwalkers, or how turning into the former could kill me because I was half of the latter.

And short of screaming at them – again – I still wasn’t sure how to talk about that.

Dad hesitated. “Half-dehaian, half-landwalker kids… like we told you. They don’t usually survive. The ones who do grow up a bit…” He glanced to Mom again. “We’ve heard stories. Some landwalker folks who are enamored of the idea that they could change our situation. Become dehaian again and all that. So they take these kids who manage to survive infancy, and they push them. See if they can learn anything about integrating dehaian traits back into us. But that just speeds up the destabilizing of the two sides of those kids’ heritage. The dehaian side is stronger. It overwhelms them, and then they die.”

I shivered.

“We don’t know for certain if it’s true,” Dad continued carefully, “but honey, that’s part of why we kept everything a secret. Let Chief Reynolds and his nephew just think you were our…” A pained expression flickered across his face. “Our girl.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“We didn’t want to risk that someone might hear about you, and might try to steal you away from us to do that to you. And now that you’re… well…”

“Alive?” I offered, my voice choked.

“Please just don’t tell anyone about this,” he finished.

I looked over to find Zeke watching me. His brow twitched up, every line of his face and body making clear how he’d come into the living room in a heartbeat if I just gave him a sign.

My gaze dropped to the carpet.

“It would also be better,” Mom added, her voice cautious like she was afraid something might break. “If your friend went back to his home.”

“What? No.”

The response came out fast, and harsh too, and my gaze snapped up from the ground to glare at her.

Her face tightened, as though arguing with me and trying to tell me what to do had suddenly become difficult for her. “Chloe, I… Whatever you think you’re feeling toward him, you can’t… it’s not…”

I stared at her in confusion as she struggled for words.

“He’s dangerous,” she concluded. “He’s dehaian, and if anyone finds out he’s–”

“I’m dehaian.”

“No, you’re our Chloe,” she countered fervently. “You are not–”

She cut off and turned away as Dad put a hand to her knee.

“Not what?” I demanded. “A fish? Scale-skin? Scum-sucker? What were you going to call us?”

Breathing hard, I stared at them.

“Like them,” Mom whispered.

Still shaking with fury, I took a moment to respond. “And what does that mean?”

Dad gave a small glance to the kitchen. “I’d rather we not discuss this with–”

“Say it.”

He paused, watching me. “Soulless.”

My brow flickered down incredulously.

“The dehaians,” he said, “when our people split from theirs, we each got a bit of what made us who we used to be. For them, it was the ability to live underwater. To change like they do. For us, we have the ability to live on land without pain, and apparently, well…”

He sighed. “I guess you’d call it humanity. The capacity to care about others. Dehaians… they’re not like people, Chloe. Every story we’ve heard of them makes it clear they don’t have feelings like us, and that they use the feelings of others for their entertainment. They enjoy manipulating people and their emotions, and they don’t care about the consequences or the suffering. They even use magic to force people to become obsessed with them, just so they can watch–”

“Wait, that?”

“They kill people with ‘that’, honey. For fun.”

I stared at him. “No, they–”

“That’s not true.”

Zeke’s voice made me stop, and I looked over to see him standing by the archway, his gaze on my parents.

“Only sick freaks do that. And it’s illegal. Using it at all on non-dehaians is illegal, and what you’re describing, we view as murder.”

I turned back to Mom and Dad.

Dad’s mouth compressed briefly. “Chloe, of course he’d say that. They’re manipulators, only interested in getting what they want. But if you understood what they are truly capable–”

“I do understand,” I interrupted.

“Then you’d understand that this boy has probably used it on you!” Mom cried. “Everything you’re arguing for him could just be a result of what he’s done!”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Chloe, they–”

“It doesn’t! Not between dehaians. For us, it–” I cut off, discomfort catching up with me, and I fought to keep myself from blushing. “It’s not like that.”

She shook her head. “You can’t be sure, Chloe. Please. You’re not one of them; you’re like us. You wouldn’t know what it is or if he–”

“I’ve used it,” I said.

She froze, her face a picture of shock and horror.

“We both have,” I continued. “The man who attacked us, when he was strangling me, I used it to stop him. And Zeke helped a friend–”

“Your daughter,” he interrupted.

I turned to him in confused surprise. In the cave, he’d told me he’d been trying to keep someone from dying.

He hadn’t mentioned anything about it being me.

Zeke didn’t take his eyes from my parents. “When she was in the hospital and the damage that Sylphaen bastard had done was killing her, I had medicine from back home that could help. But I needed to get past emergency room security, so I used that ability you’re describing. Aveluria. Just a bit, so the woman recovered. And your daughter did too.”

He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice shook with quiet intensity. “We care.”

They stared at him.

“Zeke’s saved my life over the past few weeks, Mom. He’s done it more times than I can count, even when it meant he might die.” I trembled. “Dehaians aren’t monsters, no matter what those stories say.”

She blinked as she dropped her gaze from his. “It’s still not safe,” she persisted. “He shouldn’t even be able to be here–”

“Everything we know says your kind can’t go much more than a hundred miles from a coast,” Dad said to Zeke, a note of challenge in his voice. “And yet here you are.”

Zeke glanced to me, not answering.

“I did that,” I supplied quietly.

Mom’s brow furrowed.

“I don’t know how,” I continued before they could ask. “I just know that it’s working.”

She glanced to Dad, obviously seeking help. “T-that may be, but he still needs to leave. If he becomes sick at the wrong moment…”

“If he goes, I go.”

She looked back at me in alarm. “Chloe, you–”

“I mean it.”

My heart raced as Mom stared at me, her brow twitching down. I’d never gotten away with demands like this. Ever. But they weren’t acting like themselves, and this was important. I didn’t know, if he left, how far Zeke could travel before the pull of the ocean came back.

And killed him.

With effort, Mom tugged her gaze to Dad. “Bill?” she tried.

Dad drew a slow breath. “Alright. Fine. The boy will stay… for now.”

Without another word, he pushed to his feet and headed for the hall. Mom rose from the couch as well, hesitancy written all over her.

“Well, um… in that case… are you hungry?” she asked. “I could cook something?”

I stared at her, so taken back by her uncharacteristic behavior, I didn’t quite know what to do.

“Uh, sure,” I answered, knowing we’d both eaten only a few hours before and could probably keep going for a day or two if necessary. But I couldn’t tell her that. She almost seemed desperate. “Food would be nice.”

She nodded. Clutching her hands together, she started for the kitchen, only to balk at Zeke still standing in the archway.

He stepped aside. She skirted past him.

His brow rose as he glanced back at me.

I shook my head in bafflement. Getting up from the chair, I walked over to him. He took my hand and I drew a breath, feeling a bit of my tension leak out just at having him there.

“Chloe,” Dad called.

I tensed all over again. I looked down the hall to find him at the base of the stairs.

“You should probably get cleaned up before dinner.”

I hesitated, reading the stern way he was watching us.

Zeke squeezed my hand. I glanced back.

“Be right here,” he whispered.

My lip twitched up in a grateful smile.

“Chloe,” Dad said again, his voice even harder.

“Coming,” I replied.

Squeezing Zeke’s hand as well, I nodded and then headed for the stairs.

The steps creaked under me and when I reached the second floor, everything was still. Not bothering to look back to where I knew Dad watched me at the base of the stairs, I continued down the brown-carpeted hallway, only to pause when I came to the white wood of my bedroom door.

My hand rose and the door swung aside at my touch. Reaching past the doorframe, I flipped on the light.

Sterile white walls with pictures of the Sahara met my gaze. The brown quilt with its crosshatched patterns of wheat covered my twin bed against the far wall. A few snapshots of me and Baylie stood on the oak dresser, trapped in bronze frames. On the window, the heavy, tan curtains were closed, sealing out the darkness.

I barely felt like I recognized it all. Only a few weeks had passed, but in that time I’d lived under the ocean. I’d swum with royalty through a palace the size of a mountain and fled from mercenaries God-knew-how-far beneath the sea.

And now…

A shaky breath left me. I stepped into the room, feeling like I was walking into another reality. The backpack I’d taken to California was tucked against the side of my bed, and my cell phone and wallet were on the nightstand nearby.

I glanced to the window and the closed curtains. Baylie could be home. The lights at her house had been off when we drove up, and most of the curtains had been closed, but she still could be. After all, our stay at the Delaneys was supposed to have ended over a week ago.

But then, she’d still been in Santa Lucina when I called the day before Zeke and I left.

I swallowed. Maybe she was here. Or maybe Peter and Diane had shipped it or something.

Mom cleared her throat behind me and I jumped.

“Would you like help?” she asked.

I stared, confused. That weird, worried look was on her face again. “Help?”

“Putting your stuff away,” she elaborated.

My expression didn’t change. “That’s alright.”

She hesitated, seeming as though she still wanted to try. She gave me a jerky nod and didn’t leave.

The silence stretched.

“So I wondered what you might like for dinner?” Mom asked. “I thought maybe we could see if anywhere in town carries sushi.”

I made myself blink. Sushi? She–

“If you’d like,” Mom pressed on hastily. “I just… I want you to feel… what I mean is, I heard that’s similar to what they eat, and if you need to have food like they do, then we can find it.”

I shook my head. “Whatever you make is fine for both of us,” I managed. I paused. “Mom, what is this?”

“Nothing,” she replied, a touch of familiar defensiveness coming into her voice. “You’re my daughter. I’m not going to starve you.”

I looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

My eyebrows rose as I turned back in surprise at the words.

“I’ll make barbecue chicken,” she continued. “Your favorite. Is that good?”

“Y-yeah. Thanks.”

Giving me a tense smile, she moved to leave and then hesitated, looking back. “I want you to know,” she said tightly, “we’re happy you came home. I know things are… are tense sometimes. But we’re really just…”

Mom’s brow furrowed and, as impossible as it seemed, she actually looked like she was trying not to cry.

Swallowing hard, she forced her expression to clear. “We always want what’s best for you, Chloe. That’s all. And so if there’s anything you need in order for you to be okay here, you just let me know. Anything in the world, understand?”

I stared and succeeded in moving my head in something like a nod.

Mom echoed the motion. Without another word, she left the room.

It took me a moment to drag my gaze from the doorway, and a moment more before my thoughts ordered themselves enough to process what had just happened.

My mother… wanted to make things okay for me.

Okay for me.

A breath escaped me, the sound loud in the quiet.

My mother wanted to make things okay for me here.

I didn’t know what to do. I’d thought coming home would be normal. I’d known what ‘normal’ meant – fights, months of being grounded, and my parents possibly even trying to move us out of town simply because I’d run off to California with Baylie – but after the past few weeks, I’d been willing to risk it.

But this…

This was a parallel dimension.

This was crazier than what I’d left. This was Mom and Dad acting in a way I’d never seen in my life.

Acting like they’d been scared I wouldn’t come back.

I trembled at the memory of Zeke’s words. I didn’t know what I’d planned. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’d just been trying to survive.

And now I’d returned to something as strange as anything I’d seen in the past few weeks.

Turning away from the door, I hurried toward my closet to get changed out of the clothes I’d worn for the past few days. I didn’t want to be in here, in this familiar-alien room with the desert décor my parents had mandated all these years. I didn’t know how to be here.

And Zeke was downstairs.

He was the only part of this new life of mine that still felt sane.