“I mean if I’d been a few minutes late, both of us would be dead now,” he replied. “You think that monk was keeping you in that room waiting for your mother to arrive?”
I twisted my lips up wryly. I could recall most of it clearly and Thad was right. Why wasn’t I with the Guardians, locked up wherever they would have taken me after Brother James had handed me over? The sounds flooded back too: the loud scuffle and the gunshots. I began to realize that all that fighting hadn’t been between Brother James and a Guardian after all. Thad had appeared instead.
“I must’ve given that monk quite a fright, tearing down the door with these,” he said, flexing his claws. “He shot himself in the head when he saw me.”
Obviously, Brother James had thought Thad was a Guardian come to kill him and collect me. I didn’t know whether to feel sympathy for him or to think that it’d served him right. It was too late now, though. Whoever was returning to the church to pick me up would be greeted by yet another corpse—the latest in a long line.
“I—I don’t even know where to start,” I stammered. “How do you even know who I am? And how’d you know I was in there?”
“Psh,” Thad said with disgust. “Those are all the same questions I have and I was hoping you could answer.”
I didn’t have any.
“Look,” he said. “Give up now on getting the answers you want. They’re not going to appear. I’ve already tried.”
He scratched the knees of his jeans, looking blankly toward the cliff edge. “That was the first thing I learned, when the dreams started…”
So, he’d had them as well. I shifted a bit.
“You sure act like you know me, though,” I noted.
“Yeah?” he said. “I guess you’re right. I kinda feel like I do. Enough to risk my life to save yours, at least.”
He checked his watch again. As he did, I couldn’t help but notice that even the skin around his ring was still bearing the light red inflammation, like he’d gone through the same transformation as I.
“Did it all happen the same for you?” I asked, now letting my curiously take over. I looked down to where my scales had been but now the skin was smooth and unbroken, as if it had simply healed itself back into a human disguise.
“I’d think so,” he said. “If you mean the dreams and the ring that just came out of nowhere. The claws happened a day before my seventeenth birthday.”
“My birthday is tomorrow,” I said.
“Of course it is,” he replied matter-of-factly. “That’s why they’re so desperate to make you a dead Michael.”
Did growing claws make a person impervious to empathy? I’d known this Thad person for ten whole minutes and I already wanted to shake his hand in thanks and punch him at the same time.
“Just think like one of them,” he said. “You know what Guardians are. Do you think they’d let anyone who can fight them stay around?”
“It’d help if I knew what any of that meant,” I said.
“It’s because you’re a threat,” he said insistently, as if I was missing some obvious point. “You haven’t realized it yet? You’re one of them. You are a Guardian.”
He looked at me like I should have expected his answer, as if somehow I should have known that this was coming. But nothing so far had prepared me for it, and suddenly I was unsure if anything surrounding me was real or if Brother James’ chemicals were still at work.
“Me?” I said, the fright causing my voice to rise in pitch. An unwanted feeling began to creep its fingers up the back of my neck. I wanted to say he was lying but I couldn’t form the words.
“You have claws and scales,” he said, gesturing in my direction. The proof was attached to me, after all. My insides didn’t feel any different. I still felt like a human, and my mind still functioned in the same way it always had. In fact, the very mind that should have been helping me understand what he was saying was busy fighting against what appeared to be the inevitable truth.
“What do you think Guardians are?” Thad asked. “You’re not human, that’s for sure. At least not entirely.”
I wanted to curl up into a ball and block out his words, that flippant, uncaring tone like this was all so natural when absolutely nothing about it was. I realized why he bothered me so much. I’d just lost control over everything. Or rather, I’d found out that I’d never had any control to begin with, but had been a pawn in some greater game. And Thad, irritatingly calm, appeared to have already come to terms with all this.
“How did you find me?” I asked. The more answers I could get, the more I’d feel like I was actually sitting on solid ground.
Thad gave an unexpected grin.
“Ah,” he stated. “The start of all of this mess for me. If only I didn’t know.”
Again, his fingers twisted at the ring, almost like he wished he could remove it but it simply wouldn’t budge. “Don’t even ask me how. It started right after the dreams and I still didn’t know who you were. Then all of a sudden, I woke up—on my seventeenth birthday—and I had this bizarre feeling. Like I had to find you.”
It felt like he was leading up to some big joke, but he never reached the punch line.
He shrugged. “It was weird. I just knew where you were. I mean, I’m looking at you now so I know you’re right there. But at the same time I know you’re there.”
He gestured at me. “I could go a mile the other way and still now you’re right there. I could stand and point to you from where I was back in that white room they had me in. That’s why the Guardians took us.”
He looked up, gaze stronger now. “They wanted us to take them to you. Luckily, that gave them a reason to keep us alive.”
I blinked. His positivity had only suffered a tiny crack as he spoke of his own possible demise. But I’d caught something unexpected in his words.
“Us?” I echoed. “There are others?”
He nodded. “Yes. Don’t you remember? Wasn’t Callista in your dreams too?”
“She’s alive?” I burst with dismay. Keeping my outbursts in check had become an impossible task.
“I read in the newspaper that she’d died in a fire,” I blurted. Thad gave me a quizzical look.
“Obviously you’ve been doing some research,” he said, a little impressed. “But no. That was a cover-up. Guardians have had her for weeks, I think.”
“So she’s alive?” I said again, unwilling to believe until I was certain.
“I hope so.” His face fell slightly. “Last time I saw her she was…”
His voice trailed off, and I couldn’t help but notice that his shoulders sagged lower, and the nonchalant gaze changed to something more of concern. That wasn’t exactly the answer that I’d wanted, but for some reason I felt my insides soar because it was far more than I’d had earlier. She was actually alive somewhere? All this time? Of everyone I’d tracked down so far, this girl had always seemed the most important. Finding out that she hadn’t died was like erasing a history book chapter and starting over—a mental rewriting of what I’d thought was concrete truth.
Nervously, Thad glanced at his wristwatch again. Then he stood abruptly, the rain already having slowed from before, and started toward the cliff edge so that he could see over. He studied the horizon, checking his watch yet another time.
“You know the Guardians will go back to the church and find I’m not there,” I said. “That’s if they haven’t already.”
I didn’t know what to do next. I’d reached the end of my plans long ago when I’d found the priest, and everything after had only been venturing further into the dark. Intuition told me I could trust Thad, as strange as that seemed. He looked up from his watch.