Chapter 22

Pine’s battle scars closed up after his first triple cheeseburger, which he ate lying down in the back of Dr. Jacobs’ Dodge. The second burger, and the cheese curds on the side, were just for fun. We drove back to Dr. Jacobs’ ranch, and once he got a chance to change into a ProRodeo T-shirt that hadn’t been shredded by raptor claws, he ate his combo with the rest of us around the kitchen table.

Just as Dad was introducing him to ketchup, the front door opened.

“Hey everybody,” Martina called.

“You still got a job?” Dr. Jacobs yelled across the house.

“As far as I know.” Martina came into the kitchen with a backpack slung over her shoulder. She tossed her keys on the counter with a shrug. “Mrs. Hemming wasn’t at the museum today.”

Mom and Dr. Jacobs exchanged a look. Noted.

Wherever Dixon’s nightmare mom was, she was probably up to no good. Looking for Crow, I bet.

Martina extended her hand in the wrist cast to me for a gentle fist bump. “Welcome back.” Her good hand snuck one of my french fries.

“I saw that.” Lucky for her I didn’t want the crunchy ones, or she’d have a second broken arm.

“You went to Dairy Queen and didn’t get me anything?” she said.

I picked out an extra-fat fry to dip in my Choco Brownie Extreme Blizzard. “Ice cream is for raptor hunters.”

She gasped and dropped her backpack on the tile floor. “You didn’t. You caught him?”

“One of two,” Mom said, picking at her salad. She couldn’t seem to let go of the one that outran her sniping skills.

Martina braced herself against the back of my chair and held up her hand like she needed to pause the conversation. “There are two?”

Dr. Jacobs nodded with glittering eyes and whispered, “And they’re dimorphic.”

“What?” Martina’s voice hit the roof like she’d just won a new car. “Have you summoned it? Summon it.”

Pine gave a low groan and put his hand over the place where the raptor hen just about slashed out his kidney.

“Maybe we should test the new dinosaur tomorrow.” Dad cleared his throat and nodded not-so-subtly toward Pine. “I think we could all use a break.”

“Right. Yes.” Martina plunked down at the table and buried her fingers in her hair. “Two raptors. Wow.”

Something had been bothering me since we got ambushed by Deinonychus: The Sequel—and that’s when I realized what the problem was. All these raptors weren’t adding up.

“Hold on. We just saw two of the same dinosaur.” I thought hard about the day Dixon showed me around the museum. “But there’s only one Deinonychus in Trinity Hall.”

Mom paused with a tomato on her plastic fork. She slowly looked up from her take-out salad, frowning like she was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube colorblind.

“If there are other Deinonychus fossils, they’d be in storage, locked in the lab.” Martina looked at Dr. Jacobs. “We’d know if Crow summoned anything in there. Right?”

“Well . . .” Dr. Jacobs chewed on her red plastic straw, letting the question sit for a minute. “Sometimes, especially on older mounts, the fossils you see on display are sorta Frankensteined together from multiple specimens. It’s possible that the skeleton in Trinity Hall was built from two different raptors, a male and a female.”

“But we were expecting to find a second dinosaur. Remember”—Dad pointed a chicken strip at me—“you had two episodes where you lost your magic.”

“Yeah.” It was hard not to roll my eyes and add I was there. The racking burn of Crow wrenching away my power stuck with me very clearly—once Thursday night on the floor of our kitchen, and the other Friday afternoon at the hotel. “But those happened a whole night apart. Don’t you think it’d be weird for Crow to summon one, wait overnight, then come back to summon the same dinosaur again?”

Mom set her fork down like she’d suddenly lost her appetite. “Are you trying to say he summoned those raptors both at the same time?”

“Maybe. If they were close together and in the same display.” I put my head in my hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” So many crazy things had gone down in the past week that time was passing like it would at summer camp. The last seven days felt like a month.

Dad combed his fingers through his beard. “So, our mystery dinosaur might still be out there?”

“Lord have mercy.” Mom slumped over the table and rubbed her eyes. “It never stops.”

As the ever-flowing fountain of all our magic drama, it was hard not to shrink in my seat. “I might be wrong.” I hoped I was.

“No.” Mom shoved her chair back and stood. “It’s the only way two raptors make sense. We should’ve noticed sooner.” She dropped her half-eaten dinner in the trash and went straight for her car keys. “I’m heading out. Someone needs to watch the museum to make sure Crow doesn’t come back.” She slipped her purse over her shoulder, barely pausing to glance back at Dad. “I’ll call if I see anything. Turn your ringer on.”

When she shut the front door, it didn’t slam—but still, I flinched.

She was gone before I could even say goodbye.

*

That night, Dr. Jacobs put me up in her son’s old room. The walls were covered in 4H awards, and a display case full of junior rodeo buckles sat on the dresser.

I crawled into a bed that wasn’t mine and plugged my phone in to charge.

You’d think I’d be relieved to have my cell back. But every time I opened it, I got slapped with a stack of texts piling up from Dixon. So far, I’d just put it back in my pocket. That was a problem for later.

But tonight was the first quiet moment I’d had all weekend. So, here I was. Later.

I gritted my teeth, opened my texts, and tapped his unsaved number.

Without so much as skimming his messages, my finger hovered over the block button.

Tempting.

But I couldn’t bring myself to axe him. Dixon was about as much fun as a haunted doll, but he hadn’t told his Mom about me yet. To save his own skin, for sure—he’d made that clear at the party. But maybe a standoff was almost as good as a truce. And what if he could tell me something about his family? About Crow?

I caved and put his number in my contacts. When I had to enter his name, my finger hovered over the barf emoji, then scrolled to the devil. But after some thinking, I flipped to a whole new category and picked the magic eight ball.

He’d be neutral. For now.

I took a breath to brace myself and opened his texts to my last Worm Fact, the night of the party.

Did you run out of worm facts?

???

Another message came in the next morning—the morning I got my phone taken.

Are you going to leave town?

A chill prickled between my shoulder blades. That was fast. By the timestamp, it looked like he predicted Mom would pull me out of Glen Rose before I even knew it was happening.

I scrolled through a stack of six or seven hey texts from Friday. Then—

I need to talk to you

Let’s meet up

I bounced off the bottom of the thread and heaved a sigh. At least he hadn’t dropped any blackmail over the weekend. If blowing my cover meant tattling on himself to his unhinged mom, he apparently didn’t have the guts.

A new text dinged. From Dixon.

You got your phone back

I threw my cell down on the bed and scooted all the way up against the headboard, glancing out the dark window to make sure that creep didn’t have his nose pushed up against the glass.

Nothing.

I hugged my arms and pulled my knees up close, staring at my phone like it was a scorpion. Little fortune-telling weasel. Scrying into other people’s bedrooms.

The screen lit up again.

I need to talk to you

Or what? He was terrified of his mom. He wasn’t going to tell her about me.

But I could definitely tell my mom about him.

I took a screenshot of his texts and sent them to my group chat with Mom and Dad with a quick explanation. Probably should’ve brought this up days ago.

Mom immediately came back with one word—OK.

Less than thirty seconds later there was a knock on the bedroom door, and Dad barged in. “How many boys are you talking to?”

I put my hands up in defense. “Do you see me texting him back?”

“Should I be worried?”

“No. He’s just a jerk.” I hugged my knees. “I mean, he is kind of a loose thread, which bugs me. But I don’t think he’s all that dangerous.”

“Hm.” Dad didn’t seem so sure. He shifted like he might close the door, but at the last second, he stopped himself. “Are you too old for me to tuck you in?”

I drummed my fingers on the covers like I had to think about it. “I guess I’ll let this one slide.”

He came over to sit on the edge of the bed and waited for me to get situated. “Your mom told me things were getting chaotic, but I don’t think I really understood what you were dealing with until today.” He pulled the covers up around me. “What a mess.”

An apology caught in my throat. “Sorry,” I whispered.

“I’m not mad.” He rested his hand on my forehead, and the pressure was weirdly comforting. “You’re a teenager, and teenagers get into trouble. It’s what they do. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“It doesn’t seem okay.” I stared up at the ceiling, hoping the wobbly, watery feeling welling up in my chest wouldn’t turn into tears. “It actually seems like it’s getting worse. Dr. Jacobs lost her job. Every minute Pine is stuck here is torture for him. And Mom.” I shut my eyes. “I feel like I broke something with Mom.”

“What do you mean?”

Where to start? I couldn’t unhear what she said to him on the phone, wishing the biggest problems I brought her were boys and report cards. I couldn’t unsee how happy she seemed onstage at the party, performing her one-hit-wonder, reliving the life she had before me. And I still couldn’t shake this horrible idea that when she looked at me, she saw a big red button to get her dead dad back that she could never, ever push.

“I feel like”—I almost couldn’t bring myself to say it—“I’m ruining her life.”

“Oh, Cee.”

“And I know what you’re gonna say.” I backpedaled before he could even get started. “I know it’s not true. I just . . .” I pressed my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I stress her out more than anything. And some of that is because I screwed up and covered up, again and again. I’m trying to fix that.” I took a shaky breath. “But some of it—this crazy power, the nutjobs who want it—I didn’t choose that. It’s just what I am. Her life is worse just because I exist.”

Slowly, gently, Dad worked my fingers away from my face until he was holding both of my hands. He bent close to my face and squeezed my hands tight to press his point. “She loves you.”

I squeezed his hands back. I wanted to believe it. I tried to. But I couldn’t get the words to stick.

“You need to tell her how you feel,” he said.

I turned my head away from him to face the wall. “She’s gonna say the same thing you’re saying.”

“Maybe you need to hear it from her.”

Even if that was true—“I can’t dump this on her,” I said. “Not right now. All I’m gonna do is freak her out more.”

“She would want to know.” He set my hands free. “I’m trading off with her tomorrow to stake out the museum. She’ll come home in the morning.” He cupped my face and tipped it toward him, forcing me to meet his eyes. “You can tell her, or I can tell her. But you can’t hold something like that in.”

“Ugh.” I smooshed my cheek into his palm. I knew he was right. But the idea of actually saying those words to her face made me sick.

Weird. Today, I came inches away from death by slice and dice, but this was what kept me up at night. Not a raptor bent on slashing me and my loved ones into cold cuts. My mom.

Dad wrapped me up in a hug and held me tight until I made the first move to let go. “We’ll get through this together.” He switched out the lamp by my bed. And just before he left the room, he added, “All three of us.”