Chapter 3
“What are you going to do?” Tara asks when we get outside.
“What I said I was,” Mom says. “Get some answers. But what you’re going to do, both of you, is run. Also, I’m sorry I punched your mother.”
“She deserved it,” Tara says. “Run where?”
“Away from the gods would be a good first step.”
Tara’s face hardens. “If you’re going to be sarcastic with me, my mom won’t be the only person getting punched.”
My mother grins, actually grins. She looks at me. “I like her.” Then back to both of us. “The gods are huge, so even though they’re fast, I’ll bet you can guess where they’re going.”
They’re not going anywhere so far, I start to sign.
“They’re not doing anything,” Tara says before I can finish. “They’re just standing there.”
“I know,” Mom says. “Somehow that feels worse, doesn’t it?”
She’s right. To have eight of them–
Nine, now.
Nine of them, standing in a circle around the town feels almost worse than one rampaging through the woods. You can almost believe the one rampaging isn’t after you personally, that it’s just driven by some instinct, doing whatever it needs to survive.
But a circle is part of a plan.
“There’s more,” Tara says, counting them, too. And yep, there’s ten, and now eleven.
“Get to the edge of town,” Mom says, “find the biggest gap possible, and run as far and as fast as you can.”
I sign, What about you?
“Someone has to stop these things,” Mom says, “and it’s not going to be Burly or Margery Wingard. No offense,” she says to Tara.
“None taken,” Tara says, but she’s looking into our unit, where Margery is at our sink, washing the blood from her face and looking like murder.
“I haven’t been able to get hold of your father since this morning,” Mom says to me. “So if someone’s going to stop it, it probably has to be me.”
Why you? I sign.
“Why you?” Tara says at exactly the same time.
My mom just looks at us and says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world, “Why not me?”
Why not us? I sign.
And that’s when the gods attack.