Josie was a few feet in front of me, standing near a pile of driftwood, staring across the still waters of a huge-ass lake. I brushed a strand of hair that had come loose behind my ear as I stared at her stiff back.
Gods, the last thing I needed was for her to run off like this, but dammit, her emotions were heavy, tangible in the cooled breeze, practically a third entity between us.
“She’s gone,” she said, turning around. Her blue eyes shone as she stared at me, her expression pleading, and there was a tug in my chest, an unsettled feeling, because I couldn’t answer that unspoken plea. Squeezing her eyes shut, she reopened them and walked past me, back toward the stand of trees. I turned, relieved when she stopped, her back to the trees. “Something’s wrong with my grandparents. They would never be okay with her leaving…or with someone taking her.”
Stepping forward, I stopped when a look that said she was ready to bolt again flickered across her face. “I think your grandparents are under a compulsion.”
“A compulsion?” she whispered, and a sudden gust of wind picked up her words, tossing them around. “Someone like you has been here? Took my mom and messed with my grandparents’ heads?”
I could already tell this wasn’t going to go over smoothly, but there was no point in lying. “It could be a pure, or a god or…”
“Or what?” She took a step back, her hands balling into fists. “Or what?” she shouted.
It could’ve been a Titan. But taking her mom and placing her grandparents under a compulsion didn’t make sense. If they knew where Josie lived, knew about her mom, I doubted anyone would’ve been alive in that house. But then again, the only Titan I’d ever met was Perses, and he was whacked enough to show me that Titans were capable of anything.
“God. This isn’t right. My mom hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“I know,” I said as carefully as possible. “I understand.”
“You understand?” She laughed as she raised her hands, pulling her hair back. “How in the hell do you understand, Seth? Have you ever had your entire world turned upside down? Told things you never thought possible were true? Had your mother possibly kidnapped by a mythical creature?”
“No.” And then I surprised the hell out of myself. “But I know someone who has. I knew someone who had their entire world turned upside down, who lost their mother and a lot of other people.” I couldn’t believe I was actually talking about her—about Alex—but I forged on. “So I’ve seen this before. I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to keep it together. Your grandparents are okay, so that leads me to believe that whoever took your mom didn’t want to upset or harm them. That’s a good sign.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. Some of the panic receded from her expression, but her muscles tensed, and I knew she was going to run again. I really couldn’t blame her. The girl had been through a lot and she probably needed space and time, probably someone who could comfort her, but I couldn’t chase her around Bumfuck, Egypt, and I sucked at the whole comfort thing.
And we were running out of time.
Josie let out a sound that tore into me just as intensely as claws from a furie would, and she twisted at the waist, about to take flight. I took a step forward, ready to tackle her ass if need be, but before she could run, the ground under my feet began to tremble. Before I could take my next breath, a great and terrible sound— like a thousand shouts booming along a mountain—erupted.
Awareness curled its way down my spine as the glyphs bled onto my skin, swirling in warning, and gods, that was a really, really bad sign.
Chapter 15
ALL AROUND us, the trees rattled and shook as a wave of birds suddenly took flight, streaming into the air in a flurry of snapping wings and frantic shrieks, blocking out the sun as they blanketed the sky.
Seth shot to my side. “Damn, this…yeah, this is not good.”
The ground quaked as the sound of hoofs pounded from the direction of the shaking trees. I stumbled, plastering myself against the tree as deer broke out from the trees. Not one. Not a few. Hundreds of them. They ran, hopping over the slight dip where the grass turned to pebbles, their white tails twitching.
But among the deer were smaller critters—rabbits, squirrels, skunks. Stunned, I watched as an entire cast of cute Disney-type creatures veered sharply at the water’s edge, following the lake until they disappeared out of sight.
Seth twisted toward me, brows raised, and I swallowed hard around the knot of fear in the base of my throat. “That’s not normal,” I said. “At all.”
“What? You don’t have a mass exodus of animals every weekend?”
Before I could respond to his smartass comment, a loud sound clapped again, causing me to jump. Louder than thunder, it rolled through the blue, cloudless skies, an endless roar that raised the tiny hairs all over my body. It sounded like trumpets, like the apocalypse kind of trumpets.
Or Godzilla.
And the sound was coming from where all the animals had run from, the direction of my grandparents’ home. My stomach dropped to my toes. “My grandparents…”
I pushed away from the tree at the same moment Seth grabbed my hand. He didn’t try to stop me. We ran together toward the noise. From above, branches broke away from the trees, streaking down and snagging my clothes and hair. Seth was sure-footed, avoiding every exposed root and boulder. We burst out from the trees, and there was my grandparents’ home, the Porsche next to the Ford, and everything looked normal except for the trampled bushes my grandfather had planted around the driveway a few years ago. I rounded the side of the house and the porch came into view. The front door gaped open, the screen door hanging off its hinges.