Alex hunched in on himself, ducking his head. “I know it sounds insane, but Ori kept insisting that nothing like it should exist and no one they talked to knew anything about it. If all these people that know about the paranormal keep swearing that it can’t exist naturally, then that means it came about unnaturally, right?”
“You’re not insane, Alex. It does sound strange, but you’re right. Unless it’s managed to stay hidden from everyone and everything it’s entire life, then it must be something new. Considering how aggressively it came after Landon and us, I’d say hiding isn’t a big priority for it.”
“How is this our lives?” he sighed. “I thought I was going crazy when I first started seeing ghosts. For awhile, I thought my mom did the right thing by locking me up. Now we’re sitting here talking about living, breathing chimeras.”
My heart ached for him. The three days he’d spent held in that hospital clung to him even now. He always played it off as a joke or a throwaway comment, like it didn’t bother him anymore, but I knew him better than that. Reassurances didn’t help, so I fell back on distracting him.
“Honestly, I’m trying not to think too hard about it. Once things calm down,thenwe can have an existential crisis.”
It worked, earning a quiet chuckle from Alex.
“Only you could make me laugh while we’re talking about killer monsters.”
“It’s my specialty,” I teased. “Tell me more about it, though. Did you find anything else?”
“Nothing super useful. ‘Chimera’ is kind of the catch-all for any creature made up of parts of other creatures. In the original myths, it could breathe fire, so I guess it’s a good thing there aren’t any real creatures that can do that, otherwise that fight would have gone alotdifferent.”
The wings and tail were bad enough, not even taking into account the massive fangs and talons. I didn’t want to imagine what could have happened if it could breathe fire on top of all that.
“I don’t suppose there was a handy guide on how to kill it? We shot it three times and that barely even slowed it down.”
“In the myths, it was killed by Bellerophon. He rode Pegasus up into the sky and shot it from above, which apparently was enough to kill it.”
“I guess we’ll have to figure something else out, then, unless flying horses are real, too?”
Thinking about the flying horse, something suddenly clicked in the back of my mind. The day Landon went missing, something had spooked his sister’s horse and it’d thrown her, hurting her bad enough that she didn’t go with him. Could the chimera have been that close to their house and no one saw it? It made sense, though. Any sane creature would freak out if they encountered that thing.
“Honestly, at this point, I don’t think I’d be surprised if they were,” Alex laughed, shaking his head. “But until someone shows me one, I think we’re out of luck. Besides, it’s not our problem anymore.”
That gave me pause, and I frowned in confusion. “Come again?”
“Right, I forgot to tell you that part,” he said, wincing. “Ori made me promise we wouldn’t go looking for it. They said they’d deal with it and we were to back off unless it was an absolute last resort and they needed help to find it.”
“And you agreed to that?”
“That thing scratched you once and you almost died, Donovan. Like you said, guns aren’t enough to stop it and we’re just regular people. Yes, I agreed. Let the folks who can shapeshift and do magic or whatever else is out there deal with it. We’ll do what we can to protect the people in town, but we don’t need to go chasing after this thing. It absolutely, one hundred percent will kill us.”
As much as it pained me to admit it, he had a good point. It went against my instinctive drive to protect others and get rid of any threats, but in reality… what could I really do against a monster like that?
“I don’t like it,” I grumbled. “But I get it.”
“Ori said they’d keep me up to date on whatever happened with it, and if they can’t find it, they’ll come to me, if that helps?”
“It kind of does, I guess.” It would have to do. “Anything else I need to know about?”
Alex leaned back in his chair, running through a mental tally before finally shaking his head. “I think that’s everything major.”
“Thank God. I honestly wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, but I had to ask.”
“There’s nothing going on right now that we can deal with, so just focus on recovering. We’ll be out of here and back home soon. Everything else can wait.”
A comfortable silence settled over us while we waited for the poultice to do its work. Alex settled back down on the pillow and after a few minutes, the events of the day caught up to him and he settled into an exhausted sleep. Much as I wanted to join him, though, I couldn’t quiet the thoughts racing through my mind. So much had happened in such a short time and it was going to take a while to really process it all, but in the end, it all came down to one solid fact: today, for better or for worse, our entire lives had changed.
Chapter 21
Alex
Ineverthoughtthedaywould come when I’d approach the Lowery’s Crossing police department building and walk through the doors voluntarily and yet… here we were.
