Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments Read Online Free Page B

explanation for why this shouldn’t be allowed. Verbs tell time. End of story. Time can’t just ignore grammar. I smile thinking this because I can hear my mother’s voice.
    Whatever that Big Book of Running Bird’s says, I feel one thing. I’m tired of running. I want to fight. No matter what, I want to fight.

When I get to the campsite, Lauren, Catlin, Zack, and Zelda are sitting around where our fire would be if we could have a fire. Which we can’t.
    The cold seeps through my thin jacket. A fire would make the whole night better. A flickering orange in the dark to light up our faces, a source of heat to warm our hands. Is it too much to ask?
    I’m pretty sure heroes don’t whine. They quietly endure cold, fireless nights. Further proof I’m no hero.
    Someone coughs from one of the tents, and from not far off in the woods, something scurries over leaves. A small animal? I trip over a root as I try to sit next to Lauren. I land harder than planned next to her. She puts her arm around me, which lightens my darkening mood. Lauren doesn’t expect me to be a hero. She knows that if we have any chance of defeating the aliens, we’ll do it by working together, not because of the mysterious powers of some prophesized Chosen One.
    Lauren asks me what I needed to talk to Doc about, and, because of the presence of Zack and Zelda, I say that I just wanted to learn a little more about the camp. Lame, I know.
    “So what did you find out?” Lauren says.
    “That that Running Bird/Sam White guy is one weird dude.”
    “He was a priest of the House of Jupiter,” Catlin says. “My mother met him once. I remember her talking about him, how powerful he was. But he broke his vows after his wife died — killed by a drunk driver or something. He was pretty young, I think.”
    “He’s a priest of Weirdness now,” I say.
    Then, before someone asks me to explain, I ask Zelda and Zack about how they got here. They say they walked all the way from Denver.
    “We were lucky to get away,” Zelda says. “A lot of people didn’t. Our parents and our aunt and uncle and cousins didn’t. We had some close calls getting here. Then I heard the whisper of minds in these mountains. We found the camp.”
    “You have that talent?” Catlin says.
    “What talent?” Lauren asks.
    “Some people can hear farther than most,” Catlin says. “Not many. It’s a very powerful talent.”
    “I’m lucky,” Zelda says, her face flushing a little. I can feel it flush, feel the heat in her body rise, even though I can’t see her clearly.
    “Did everyone in your clan have this talent?” Lauren asks. I can hear her wanting to catalog and organize information. I can hear her curiosity and the reach of her mind. She always impresses me.
    Zelda says her clan members could predict the weather, tell if someone was lying, sometimes make people see things that weren’t there for a second or two, and sometimes see what someone might do or had done. Also, many were good fighters. A lot of them worked in law enforcement or in the military.
    “So houses tend to have certain talents?” I say.
    Catlin answers that they do. Her house, the House of Venus, is known to be good at affecting people’s emotions. They can calm people or anger them. Many of them were good healers — nurses and doctors and psychiatrists.
    I turn to the shadowy figure of Zack, thinking maybe I’ll ask him what his abilities are since he seems too shy to join the conversation on his own. But even in the dark, I can tell that Zack is looking right at me — and that he probably has been for quite some time.
    “Is something wrong?” I ask him.
    “It’s just . . . you don’t sound like I thought he’d sound. The Chosen One, I mean.”
    His voice breaks in that unlucky way a voice does sometimes when a totally normal boy is asking something important. The whole miserable “suddenly a girl has inhabited your vocal cords” experience. Luckily, I’m past that phase. Well, like,