head.
"You needed proof, so I provided proof," he whispered, his 42
Stacey Klemstein
words slurred. I looked over to see his eyes half-open and glazed.
"Yeah, some great proof. You think nearly killing me is evidence somebody else wants me dead. I've already seen that show, no thanks." Did he have a concussion? He wasn't making any sense.
"No, proof of why. Why Nevan wants you dead." He reached up and traced the lines of my face a fraction of an inch above my skin. "Why we need you alive. Why you are the one we've been waiting for."
"Okay, that's enough." I released my hold on him and scooted away. His words and the intense emotion I sensed behind them sent a chill through me. "Look," I held up my hands in protest, "I don't know what..."
I stopped, staring down at my hands, palms out toward him. My entire right hand was dark with something. I closed my fingers, feeling the damp stickiness between them. My stomach roiled with the memory of the agony I'd felt radiating from my back moments ago. Only it wasn't my memory, and it wasn't my back.
I stared at my hand and then at him. The blood looked black in the faint light, though I knew it wasn't. "You're injured. Why didn't you say something?"
"We have to keep going." He lifted a trembling hand toward the steering wheel.
"You need a hospital."
"No hospitals, no doctors."
"You're going to bleed to death, and I don't want any part of that."
"If that is true, then the farther north we are when that happens, the safer you will be," he said. I stared at him for a second, then shook my head and moved back into the driver's seat to put the car in gear. "No way. You're going to get some help. I'm sure there's someone in Findlay who–" 43
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"It is unlikely that I will die in this manner. My body is right now attempting to recover."
"Uh-huh. Sure doesn't look like it to me." I steered the car back toward the road. Thank God we hadn't been near a bridge when he'd done whatever that was.
"No hospitals, no doctors," he repeated. I looked over at him half-lying across the seat. "What, are you going to stop me?"
"It would not take long for Nevan to find us in a hospital. Our presence, particularly mine, would not go unnoticed. He would make another attempt on your life, and he might succeed this time, taking an unknown number of innocent lives with yours." I gritted my teeth, thinking of Dewey and Earl Johnson. If there was even the smallest possibility that Caelan was right, I couldn't take the chance. "All right," I said, almost shouting in frustration. This was not going at all the way I'd thought. "What am I supposed to do?"
The tension seemed to run out from his body. "If you insist on stopping, all I need is a place to rest so my body can heal. Some place where we will not garner much attention."
"Unless we bump into Barnum and Bailey, I think you're out of luck on that last part," I muttered. Then I said, "I'll help you find a place to rest, all right? But then I want to hear everything." I shuddered, remembering the strange feel of his thoughts inside my head and the sight of me through his eyes, shorter, paler, and thinner than I'd ever seen myself. I knew he recognized me, or he thought he did, but how I knew that was an entirely different matter, one that scared me.
"I will tell you everything," he said. "But–"
"I won't believe you," I finished his sentence. "So you've said." The troubling thing about that statement was that twentyfour hours ago I would never have believed the diner would be gone, an alien would be trying to kill me, and I'd be fleeing town behind the wheel of a 1982 powder blue Impala with another alien riding shotgun. And two and a half years ago, I never would have believed aliens would live on Earth, let alone that my dreams would be filled with them. So, it seemed reality had little or nothing to do with what I believed, and that was more than a little terrifying.
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Chapter 5
Two miles outside of