Page 15 of The Shadowed Oracle (The Bonded Worlds #1)

Chapter Ten

Dean’s car became a slow amusement park ride in the darkness.

Ingrid had her eyes and her gun fixed on him as he drove, making it nearly impossible to see her surroundings as they navigated the winding roads to his mother’s old home.

She only stole occasional, lightning-quick glances out the passenger window, making sure she knew which general direction she would need to start in to escape.

The last thing she wanted to do was get careless.

At every curving turn she anticipated twisted metal, screeching tires, a gang of masked men, or a sea of cop cars—anything to make sure the gun in her hand didn’t give her an illusion of control.

For all she knew, this man had planned for this all along.

Which seemed more and more likely.

To his credit, Dean had been blunt with her since she’d agreed to get in his car with him.

He told her that those nights he’d come in to The Boneyard afterward were all by design, an excuse to be close to her, to protect her.

Since the very first moment he’d met her, he was planning on a way to tell her what he knew. He just didn’t know how.

So instead, he watched her.

“All that time?” she snapped, gripping the cold steel of her gun a little tighter. “You were following me even before Kyle Twyker was killed?”

Dean seemed unaffected by her threatening tone. “Yes,” he said. “But not just me. I have friends who helped me keep an eye on you. The same ones that were watching today in the park.”

Her mind rifled through the new faces she’d seen in the last month at her bar.

A few stuck out, and she shivered at the thought that one of them, or maybe even Dean himself, might’ve been the one sending her those messages.

It was the first and most logical conclusion.

She was being followed by a mysterious person, twisting their torment to try and appear as if he—or she, Ingrid realized, was helping.

And here was Dean, claiming to be helping, and openly admitting he’d been following her.

“How well do you know these friends?” Ingrid asked. “Did you ever think it could be one of them that was stalking me?”

“No,” Dean said incredulously. “We have every reason to help you and none to hurt you. Just, please, let me get there. Let me start from the beginning.” He yanked the collar of his shirt down, cracking the window and letting the breeze hit him.

“Think about it. Think about the first night I came in. Do you remember?—”

“I remember,” Ingrid cut in. She’d never forget how he looked at her. How he stared, stuttering over his words. “And I remember that it was right around the same time I got the first message,” she added accusingly.

“That’s only because they came here around the same time. That thing that attacked you. And the others. It’s all happening now for a reason.”

“What reason? What others?” Ingrid said impatiently. “You said you’d start from the beginning. So start.”

“I’m trying.” He glanced at her, unblinking, before focusing back on the road.

“At the beginning it was all a coincidence.

Finding you there, right under our noses.

It was a miracle we got to you before they did.

Truly, a fucking miracle. And so I knew, right then, my only mission was to protect you. To?—"

A scoff cut him short. “And your advances?” Ingrid made sure to emphasize the word sharply. “Was that for my safety, too?”

“In a way,” he replied coolly. “But I know that was a mistake now. You just have that effect on me, and I’m sorry. All I wanted was for you to get to know me first. I wanted you to trust me enough so that when I told you what you are, you would think twice before writing me off as nuts.”

“A lot of good that did,” Ingrid shot back. “I still think you’re nuts. You’re not making any sense. Listen to yourself. What you are . Tell me what that means. Tell me why you thought those things would be after me.”

“The eyes,” Dean said bluntly, and smiled at her like he was seeing them for the first time again. “That’s how I knew you were different. Because of your eyes.”

The eyes she’d always hated, the anomaly that set her so far apart from the other kids at school. It was like some cruel joke. “What about them?” she asked.

“I’ve only met one other person with those eyes. His name was Karis, and he was unlike anyone I’d ever met. I mean that literally. He wasn’t from here.”

“What does that?—”

“I’m telling you,” Dean interjected. “Karis was from that place I’ve been trying to tell you about. The same place that Thing came from. The same place you came from. It’s another world, but, in so many ways, it is connected to Earth.”

“Is that where we’re going?” Ingrid asked in a quivering whisper, suddenly aware that the streetlights were becoming sparse, the forest thicker. “To this other place?”

Slumping a little in his seat, Dean said, “Please don’t be afraid, Ingrid.

Please. I won’t lie to you anymore, I promise.

I told you where we were going. My mom’s old safe house.

Karis helped her build it and fortify it with things that can keep the real bad guys away. It’s the safest place for you now.”

He sighed, cautious with his next words, as if he’d been walking a conversational tight-rope, feeding her in small doses so as not to lose the balance completely.

“Karis came here to Earth because he foresaw something. Something horrible. Something like what is happening right now. To you. To us. To all humanity. And because of that, because he spent so much time with humans, he became a target of some very powerful people in this other world. He lived on the run for a long time, and he left behind tools for us to do the same. To help us hide. To help us fight off what attacked you tonight, and worse.”

She didn’t fully believe him, didn’t think it was wise to change her approach now even if she did.

But at his insistence, air stretched Ingrid’s lungs in a comforting swell.

The answers, as thin as they were, settled her a bit.

That stain of unformed fear that the creature in the elevator had created inside her now seemed a little more palpable.

Calmly, she dug in her pocket and pulled the fiery red-gold talisman Dean had shown her back at her apartment building.

Her father’s stone was still around her neck, though she hesitated to think about it just yet.

“So this is one of the tools he gave you?” she asked, removing the cutting anger from her voice.

“Yes. But we can’t use that one just now. Not after all it expended. Think of it like a phone. The battery needs to charge.” He glanced at her with friendly reverence, adding, “But don’t worry. We have more.”

She wanted to ask what kind of batteries a stone would take, and where you’d find such a thing, but instead decided on, “So you’ve used these before tonight?”

“Part of my upbringing. My mother had me studying this shit instead of doing my math homework, so...” He shook his head as if an unpleasant memory had latched on to him. “My childhood, if you can call it that, was more like a training course in speculative warfare. By the time I was?—”

“Wait! Stop. Do we have to go back that far?”

Dean couldn’t contain a smile. “I mean, what better way to prove I’m not crazy than to tell you about the first time I heard what you’re about to hear?”

He gave Ingrid time to object, but she didn’t.

“On my sixth birthday,” Dean said. “My mom sat me down and told me there was a war brewing. A war that was in another world, but that would eventually come here to Earth. A war, she said, that she was going to train me to fight in. As you can probably imagine, I thought she was crazy. Not to mention a lecture wasn’t at all the present I’d asked for.

” He paused, almost laughing again. “Now that I think about it, I asked for a bike. This really cool red and gold one I saw at—well, never mind, the point is that I didn’t get it.

Instead, I got the first of many lessons in my decade-long training. ”

“Poor baby,” Ingrid joked. “What did you ask for your birthday the next year?”

“I stopped asking,” Dean said, tone going flat.

“I bought into the fear my mom was selling and, by nine years old, I could barely sleep because of the nightmares I had of this inevitable war. By eighteen, I realized the only way out of that mindset was to pretend none of it existed. Cut all ties, go off to college, and avoid anything even remotely outside of the norm.”

Dean tilted his head out the window again to catch the breeze. “I went the next five years or so in denial,” he said. “Wasn’t until Karis tracked me down that I started to see the truth of it.”

Ingrid waited impatiently for more, but got none. “What truth?” she barked. “It’s like pulling teeth with you, man. What is happening?”

“I told you already—a war. It wasn’t just my mom being crazy. It wasn’t just a childhood fever dream. It was real. And Karis recruited me into it.”

“Recruitment? As in, for an army?”

Dean cleared his throat. “Well, Karis never called it that, but essentially, yes. He’d been here on Earth a long time. He’d been around for a long time. And in that time, he assembled a very large group of people with similar goals from all over the world. This world, that is.”

Ingrid would’ve rolled her eyes if she weren’t so locked onto every movement Dean was making. With every bit of information he offered, two more questions came with it.

“So this Karis, is he gone? You keep using the past tense.”

“He’s gone now, yes,” Dean rasped, then quickly changed the subject. “He’d wanted me to join his cause since I was old enough to make my own decisions. Especially when I got my job. He thought it would be useful to have someone in law enforcement.”

Ingrid couldn’t help but laugh. “The otherworldly supergroup army wanted a crime scene photographer in San Bruno on their team?”