Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,41

dad’s feet, but he woke up at the sound of his name, raising his head to look at Dad and wag his tail. He probably wouldn’t have been so cheerful if he understood English.

“Isn’t that going a little overboard?” I asked. “I feel pretty safe with Bob, and if he ever starts acting like he did in that alley, I know better than to ignore it now.”

“I know. But I’d feel a whole lot safer if I knew you were indoors.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It’s killing me that you’re home alone so much. If something happened to you…” His voice choked off, but I got the message.

I wanted to argue, because what Dad was describing sounded almost like being grounded again. Under house arrest. But it wasn’t as if I went out a whole lot at night, at least not during the school year. And it was obvious the stress was already getting to my dad. The last thing he needed was to have me adding to it by tempting fate just to prove something. Staying inside once the sun went down seemed like a damn good idea, at least until things got back to normal—assuming they ever did.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The news broke the very next day. It started slow, just one local news station having the guts to mention that something genuinely bizarre might be happening. The talking heads worded everything very carefully—lots of “claims” and “alleges” and other words to help cast doubt on the story—but predictably, that first news story brought all the wackos out of the woodwork. The trouble was, it was hard to tell the difference between the wackos and the people who had legitimately seen bizarre changes.

My dad, of course, was called into work first thing in the morning, even though it was a Saturday, and once the news started getting out, I knew it was going to be another marathon day for him. I made sure our pantry was well stocked so I wouldn’t have to go out after dark, then tried once again to work on my term paper.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the willpower to disable my Internet connection while I worked, and I kept getting sidetracked by “breaking news” as more and more legitimate news outlets picked up the story. Most people were calling it all a case of mass hysteria, and the groundless, often ridiculous speculations would have been laughable if I weren’t dealing with my own case of “hysteria.” The reporters seemed to think that starting every theory with “We don’t want to speculate, but…” meant they could say whatever they liked, without a shred of evidence. Some evil mastermind had put hallucinogens in the Philadelphia water supply. Some new virus had sprung up out of nowhere and was spreading. Philadelphia was experiencing the first effects of a terrorist attack using previously undocumented biological or chemical weapons. And those were just the ideas the legitimate news sources were throwing out there. Never mind the tabloids, with their aliens and government conspiracies.

I wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on the stories as the news went national. My sister called to see if I was okay. I lied and told her everything was fine, because that was the path of least resistance. I love Beth, but she’s five years older and we’ve never been super close. She was the poster child for everything my parents valued—drive, determination, decisiveness—so of course we had almost nothing in common.

My mom’s phone call came about thirty seconds after I hung up with Beth. We were barely past hello before she was telling me to pack a bag and catch a train to Boston until whatever was going on in Philly was smoothed over.

“I have school,” I reminded her. “I can’t just abandon ship.”

“Of course you can,” she said. “You can keep up with your classwork from home, and you’ll be off on Thanksgiving break in a couple of weeks anyway. I’m sure your father is camped out at his office, and I don’t like the idea of you being home alone all the time.”

Her voice fairly oozed with righteous indignation. Just because she and my dad were now divorced, it didn’t mean they’d stopped fighting, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see my mom was spoiling for one of those fights. I’d tried playing peacemaker when my folks were still married, and it hadn’t gone well. But when I thought about how hard my dad had been working lately,