The Countdown (The Taking #3)(8)

And it was, but it wasn’t the most far-fetched thing I’d heard, not by a long shot. Especially considering that Tyler and I were no longer human and had just held our breath for who knew how long.

“Do you know what they said?”

He shook his head. “Something about the Returned maybe? But that was when I pulled you under the water.”

My stomach plunged, even as I found my voice. “What about the Returned?”

“Kyra, we don’t have time—”

I caught hold of his arm. “Just guess.”

He looked at me, his eyes drilling into me when he said the words that turned my skin to ice and made my heart stop: “I know how it sounds, but I might’ve heard: ‘The Returned must die.’”

A sour taste filled the back of my throat and the ground tilted beneath me. I shook my head.

The Returned must die.

No way was that a coincidence.

Tyler froze beneath my fingertips. “What is it?” I started to ask, but he was already dragging me backward. My chest tingled in anticipation. “Are they back? Do you hear them again?”

“No,” he answered distractedly. Then vaguely added, “I don’t know.”

When I finally heard something, it was faint—the snapping of a branch maybe. It was far away.

I might have see-in-the-dark super-vision, but we’d just learned that Tyler’s hearing was vastly superior to mine.

The underbrush shuddered then, the bushes shaking more violently. Someone was in there. Chills raced along my spine. I wanted to run but my feet were rooted in place.

Nancy exploded out at us, bursting from the foliage with leaves and twigs all matted in her fur. I nearly had a heart attack. Branches snagged and pulled at her, but didn’t slow her at all as she barreled forward, looking every bit an animal on the run.

Every nerve fiber in my body was on high alert. She shouldn’t be here. She should be back at camp . . . with my dad.

She came skittering to a stop at the edge of the warm spring, her nails clattering against the rocky embankment. Then she turned toward us, and her body went utterly and totally still.

It was me, I realized. Me, she’d fixated on as she lowered her front haunches, her teeth bared.

I felt it in my gut, the wrongness of the situation. The not-Nancyness of her behavior.

She was confused, I tried to reason, she had to be. This was Nancy and I was me.

But seeing her hackles rise, and hearing her breath as it shifted from a heavy pant to a deep and guttural growl, caused the skin at the back of my neck to prickle.

What if I was wrong?

“It’s okay, girl,” I whispered, but my voice wavered. Nancy just showed even more of her teeth and her growl deepened.

“What’s wrong with her?” I wanted to know.

Tyler’s voice was unshakable. “Get dressed. We need to go.” His hand on my shoulder steered me back a step and then another. “Easy now,” he guided. “Slow.” After I’d shimmied into my jeans, he pressed my shoes into my hands and without missing a beat, I slipped them on, not bothering to tie them.

We’d barely managed to get three steps from Nancy before a beam of light flickered out from the trees at our backs. It was bobbing crazily and my first thought was: they’d come back. Nancy had led them right to us, and we had nowhere to run.

But it was my dad’s voice I heard. He was breathless and yelling for us from between the brush.

“Go,” Tyler mumbled absently. And then, with more conviction, “Go.”

Then I could make out my dad shouting the same thing Tyler had just said, “Go!”

“Go? Dad, what—?” I shoved away from Tyler to reach my dad now. To get a glimpse of him.

And when I did, when I finally spotted him, he was running, or rather staggering. Moving as hard and fast as he could manage.

His shaggy hair was damp, and his plain white undershirt clung to his belly.

“Get to the truck, Kyra! Run.” His last word came out on a wheeze, but his panic-stricken expression melted into relief once he spotted me and my glow-in-the-dark eyes. He paused only for a second as he clutched his chest, his fist curled around his trademark flannel. He gasped for air like an asthmatic, but then forced himself to keep going, his long strides tearing at the brush.

Tyler sprang into action. “Let’s go.” His voice rumbled against my ear as he tugged me toward our camp.

Panic gripped my throat, Darth Vader–style.

We should’ve been unfindable. My dad had taken extreme measures to ensure no one, not even Simon and the others, would know where we were.

But what if it was them? What if they’d somehow tracked us down and were here . . . now, Agent Truman and the rest of his creepy Daylight Division? They’d like nothing more than to pin Tyler and me down, like dried-out butterflies in their collection.

Oddities to be marveled at.

Without thinking, I started to reach for Nancy’s collar as I passed her, but she snarled at me and I recoiled, torn somewhere between fear and rejection.

So we left her. My dad would have to deal with her.

When we reached camp, my dad wasn’t far behind. To say I was impressed by his stamina would have been an understatement. Still, he was more than a little winded when he appeared in the small clearing, his breath coming in hard, heaving gasps. He waved the flashlight around at our tent and all our stuff, which was scattered around the dead remains of what had once been a campfire. “Leave . . . it. All . . . of it,” he wheezed. He fumbled in the pocket of his jeans and, probably because I’d never passed my driver’s test, he tossed the keys to Tyler. “You . . . drive.”