“I brought you so much good news, I thought you’d reciprocate.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true. I have to go back. I have to put on my big-girl panties and face this.”

His gaze slid past me and he sat slightly devastated for several minutes.

Kenya stood and started punching buttons on her phone. “I’m calling my parents again. I’m coming with you.”

I jumped up. “No, Kenya, stay here with them. With your family. Your aunt and uncle.”

She glared at me. “Why? So I can die with them? So I can spend my last moments on earth huddling in fear and crying with them?”

I pressed my mouth together in sadness. That was exactly how she was going to die. She saw it on my face and lowered her phone. Her eyes watered. After a moment, she lifted her phone to her ear. “Mom, I need three tickets to New Mexico. We need to leave tonight.”

“Kenya,” I said, my voice breaking, “no. You should be with them.”

“Why? In case you fail?”

I nodded.

“Hold on, Mom.” She took a menacing step toward me. “In case you don’t know the prophecy forward and backwards like I do, you don’t.” She poked my chest. Kind of hard. “You don’t fail, McAlister. You save us. You save us all, and I want to be there when you do it. I want to see it for myself.”

Her faith crushed me. She had no idea just how much I was not capable of.

“Okay, Mom, yes, three plane tickets to Albuquerque.” She leveled a decided expression on me. “I’m going with her. I’m fighting with her.” She gave her mother our information so she could purchase the tickets, then hung up the phone. “My parents will pick us up and drive us to the airport in two hours. They want to meet you.” She knelt beside me. “You know, a lot of people think we belong to a cult, like we’re a bunch of crazy end-timers, but we don’t. We’re not. We just believe in the power of good over evil.”

“You should be with them, Kenya.”

“McAlister, if I’m going to die anyway, if we’re all going to die, I’ll be with them soon enough. But that’s just not going to happen. Sorry, Charlie.” She winked at me, the gesture causing a fat tear to push past her lashes. She wiped at it, took a deep breath, and said, “Now, let’s go pack.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already done so.

EXCESS BAGGAGE

We stood in the student parking lot waiting for Kenya’s parents. The low moon had a delicious fog curling around it and I suddenly realized I was going to miss Maine. But even more, I was going to miss Crystal. She stood beside me, wrenching her hands, wondering exactly what was going on. I was fairly certain she figured out the undercover story was a lie. When Glitch started talking about the reporters that had descended upon Riley’s Switch like a pack of vultures again and how this one woman got arrested for going undercover in the high school, pretending to be a student just to get the scoop, I decided to tune him out.

Crystal and I hugged good-bye, her round face and freckled nose buried in my jacket, and she said something about tickets and pliers. I had no idea what she said, but I nodded in agreement anyway.

All together, the flights home took over twelve hours including the layovers in New York and Dallas, but that was a lot better than the three days it took me to get to Maine. My grandparents were waiting for us when we landed at nine o’clock in the morning, unkempt and sodden.

We’d taken the escalators down to baggage claim and waited for the conveyor belt to start its rounds when I heard a feminine voice call out to me.

“Lorelei?”

I turned and saw my grandmother running toward me.

“Grandma!” I cried, and took off at a dead run into her arms. She wrapped me tight in her embrace, but I soon felt another crush as Granddad joined us.

My grandparents took over when my parents disappeared. They took on the burden that was me, changed their lives to accommodate raising another child, one they hadn’t expected to have to raise. My grandfather, who was my mother’s father, even took over for my father in the Order. He became the pastor of the church and taught the members what he knew, even though it wasn’t nearly as much as my father. It was his line through which Arabeth’s DNA weaved. All male descendants, for over five hundred years, until me. But when he disappeared, my grandparents took up the cause and kept me safe. They studied the prophecies and taught as best they could. I didn’t know where I’d be without them.

We hugged a long time. I didn’t know how long, but I was home. Their arms were home. I never thought I could miss anyone so much in my life.

When they finally eased their hold, Granddad framed my face with his weathered hands. He looked exhausted. Disheveled. And I quickly realized Grandma looked much the same.

“We sure missed you, Pix,” he said, his gray eyes bright above the shadows under them and wet with emotion.

“I missed you, too.”

I looked past Granddad to Brooklyn and got excited all over again. Her thick black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, and her dark irises sparkled with joy. “Brooke!”

She ran forward. “I missed you, too!”

We hugged a solid minute before breaking the hold. Despite her ecstatic exterior, there was a sadness in the depths of her deep brown eyes. A weariness that hadn’t been there before. But I knew Brooke. She wouldn’t let me talk about it here in front of the others.