Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Ben was handing Sidney her second cup of coffee when movement outside the window caught his attention.
The tremor had stopped a few minutes earlier, leaving behind a crack in the hallway plaster and a sense of wrongness that made the dimensional scars prickle beneath his flannel shirt.
Sidney stood in front of her grandmother’s portrait, her face pale and her nose still faintly pink from the nosebleed, and he’d been about to suggest that she sit down when he saw the SUV.
The street in front of their house was usually quiet at this hour.
A few dog walkers, maybe, or someone heading over to Eliza’s café on Main Street for an early breakfast. But the vehicle parked three houses down wasn’t the kind of thing you saw in Silver Hollow.
It was a black SUV with tinted windows, the sort of aggressively anonymous car that screamed “government” even without the telltale plates.
Ben had noticed it yesterday, too…and the day before that.
The agreement they’d made with the government had made it sound as if he and Sidney wouldn’t be subject to any further surveillance. So what the hell was going on?
“I need to check something,” he said, doing his best to keep his tone casual. “Stay here.”
Sidney turned away from her grandmother’s portrait, her brow immediately furrowing. “Ben — ”
“It’s probably nothing.” He was already moving toward the front door as he spoke, pausing only to snag his jacket from the coat rack as he passed. His hand brushed against Josie’s scarf, the purple and turquoise silk cool beneath his fingers. “I’ll be right back.”
Before Sidney could say anything else, he stepped outside.
The morning air was cold and damp, filled with the mineral smell of rain that hadn’t quite arrived yet, underlaid by something else, a faint burnt-ozone sharpness that he’d learned to associate with magical disturbance.
The green lightning still flickered overhead, and Ben felt the hairs on his arms rise beneath his jacket sleeves.
The dimensional burns prickled in response to the charged atmosphere, a sensation he’d grown reluctantly accustomed to over the past two months.
He made his way down the porch steps and along the gravel path to the street, the crunch of his sneakers unnaturally loud in the early morning quiet.
The black SUV sat where it had been parked since Tuesday, tucked between a pickup truck he recognized as belonging to Jimmy Hansen and an older Toyota that he thought belonged to the people who were renting the Alvarez’s house across the street.
From this angle, he couldn’t see through the SUV’s tinted windows, couldn’t tell if anyone was sitting inside.
But someone was watching. He could feel it, a sort of prickling awareness at the back of his neck that had nothing to do with his enhanced electromagnetic sensitivity and everything to do with the instincts he’d honed over years of being out in desolate desert canyons where being watched could mean being hunted.
Trying to look casual, he crossed the street, angling toward the SUV.
His heart rate stayed steady — another thing the phoenix fire had changed, burning away the anxiety responses that had plagued him since childhood and leaving something calmer in their place.
He still wasn’t sure if that was a gift or just another form of damage.
He was about ten feet from the driver’s side door when a figure stepped out from behind the Alvarezes’ overgrown laurel hedge.
The man was tall and lean, maybe in his late fifties, with dark hair gone gray at the temples and a face that looked like it had been lived in hard.
He wore an expensive jacket that didn’t suit the cold, damp weather and held himself with a kind of careful stillness, as if he’d spent years learning how not to be noticed.
His eyes, when they met Ben’s, were so dark that they looked almost black in the dim morning light.
Something about the man seemed almost familiar, but he couldn’t place that familiarity, couldn’t recall where he’d ever seen the guy before.
Ben made himself stop. His hands stayed loose at his sides, but he was acutely aware of the charge building beneath his skin, the dimensional energy that lived in his scars now and could be released if he needed it.
He’d only done that once, by accident a few weeks after the encounter with the phoenix, and it had shorted out every electronic device within a fifteen-foot radius.
He wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
“You’ve been watching the house,” he said.
The man inclined his head slightly. “I have.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.” The man’s voice was quiet and measured, with a sort of roughness to it that suggested he didn’t use it very often. “You’re Ben Sanders, the cryptozoologist.”
“And you’re the guy in the creepy surveillance vehicle who’s about to explain what the hell he’s doing on this street before I call the sheriff.
” Ben paused there so he could study the man’s face.
The familiarity nagged at him again, but he’d met a lot of people over the years, thanks to giving lectures on cryptozoology in cities all across the U.S.
“Or maybe you’d prefer to explain yourself to Sidney.
She’s right inside, and I should warn you, she’s not having a great morning. ”
As soon as Ben said Sidney’s name, a flicker of emotion passed over the stranger’s face. It was suppressed quickly enough, but it was still something he thought he recognized.
Pain.
“I know,” the man said. “I felt the tremor.”
“Felt it how?” Ben demanded. “That wasn’t exactly your garden-variety earthquake.”
The man didn’t answer right away. Instead, he glanced past Ben toward the house, toward the window where Sidney was probably still standing in the hallway, and then back at Ben’s face. Whatever he saw there seemed to decide something for him.
“My name is Finn Lowell,” the stranger said. “I’m Sidney’s father.”
All Ben could do was stare at him.
He’d known, of course, that Sidney had a father somewhere out there.
She’d mentioned him a handful of times over the past six months, always briefly and always with the kind of careful neutrality that suggested deep and complicated feelings underneath.
All Ben really knew was that Finn Lowell had walked out when she was ten years old and never returned.
The silence that followed his leaving had stretched for seventeen years, broken only here and there by a birthday card before those, too, disappeared.
Ben had assumed, when he’d thought about it at all, that Finn Lowell was exactly what he appeared to be, an absent father who’d walked out on his family and hadn’t worried too much about the pain he left behind.
But the man standing in front of him didn’t look like someone who’d stopped looking back. He looked like someone who’d never stopped watching.
“You’ve been surveilling your own daughter,” Ben said flatly.
A shake of the head. “No,” Finn Lowell replied at once, “protecting her. There’s a difference.”
Ben crossed his arms. “Is there? Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like stalking.”
“From where you’re standing, you don’t have the full picture.” Finn glanced at the sky, at the green lightning that crawled through the clouds, and then back to Ben. “We should talk. Not here.”
Did this guy really think he was that stupid? “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said shortly.
“Then we’ll talk here.” Finn took a step closer, and Ben held his ground, even as the charge beneath his skin began to intensify.
“You felt the tremor. You know what’s waking up under this town.
What you don’t know is that I’ve spent the last seventeen years trying to make sure my daughter would survive long enough to face it. ”
Ben gave a harsh laugh. “You left when she was ten years old. You missed her entire adolescence, her college graduation, the disappearance of her mother and grandmother. You missed all of it. And now you show up three weeks into apocalypse weather, and expect us to believe you’ve been protecting her this whole time? ”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything.” Finn’s dark eyes were steady on Ben’s face. “But I do expect you to listen, because you’re not as uninvolved in this as you think you are.”
A finger of cold trailed its way down his spine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
The older man was silent for a long moment.
Behind them, a car drove slowly past on its way toward the center of town, and Ben caught a glimpse of the driver — Linda Fields, the realtor, her Mercedes SUV looking almost as out of place in Silver Hollow as Finn’s surveillance vehicle.
Luckily, she didn’t seem to notice the two men standing on the sidewalk, since her attention seemed to be focused on the phone mounted to the dashboard.
Once the sound of her engine had faded, Finn spoke again.
“Six months ago,” he said, “you were in San Francisco for a cryptozoology conference. You went to the hotel bar afterward, and a stranger sat down next to you. He made a comment about how all you people were looking in the wrong place, how ‘the real thing’ wasn’t too far away.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. He remembered that night with perfect clarity now — the mediocre turnout for his chupacabra presentation, the Scotch and soda he’d been nursing, Prentiss MacAfee holding court in the corner booth with his Bigfoot devotees.
And the older man who’d taken the barstool next to him, dark-eyed and slightly disheveled, who’d seemed three sheets to the wind.
“That was you,” Ben said. Now he understood why Finn Lowell had seemed so familiar…
but also why he hadn’t recognized the stranger right away.
This man, with his neatly combed dark hair and no-nonsense demeanor, seemed a world apart from the person he’d met, someone who’d looked like your regular barfly.
Finn nodded. “That was me.”
“You weren’t drunk at all, were you?”