“Where are your keys?” Gemma asked, realizing the house was far too small for her to stay away from him. Sawyer stared blankly at her, not understanding. “I need to get out of here! Where are your car keys?”

“They’re on a hook by the garage.”

She turned and ran toward the garage, but Sawyer followed, asking her where she was going and apologizing for upsetting her. She never answered him, though. She just grabbed the keys off the rack and dove into his convertible.

Gemma sped off without knowing where she was going or how to get there, but the wind was in her hair, helping clear her head of the bizarre lust that had consumed her inside the house. She wasn’t sure if she was ever going back to the house, or if she could ever handle herself around Sawyer again. All she knew was that she had to get the hell away from that house as fast as she could.

15. Superstitious

FIFTEEN

Superstitious

The idea had been Marcy’s, and Harper thought it was idiotic. Harper had woken up Monday morning with renewed vigor and determination to find Gemma. She’d been gone for a week already, and Harper had yet to hear anything from her.

Before going to work this morning, she did her morning routine of making phone calls to everyone she could think of. Alex continued to scour the Internet, not just with his FindGemmaFisher pages, but searching for any news stories that might relate to the sirens at all.

The problem was that Gemma could literally be anywhere. She could’ve swum across the Atlantic, for all Harper knew, which made it impossible to pin down any type of location. So until Harper got some kind of clue or lead, she was stuck making phone calls, searching the Web, and going about her daily life and hoping that Gemma was taking care of herself.

It was while Harper was at work that Alex stopped by the library, and the two of them began lamenting the lack of search options for Gemma. Then Marcy came up with her brilliant idea.

“Why don’t you ask Gemma where she’s at?” Marcy asked.

Harper was standing at the copy machine, making flyers for the new July summer reading program. Alex was sitting in Harper’s chair at the desk, and both of them were completely caught off guard by Marcy’s question.

“What?” Harper asked, and turned around to look at her.

Marcy was sitting on top of the desk, even though there was a perfectly good chair next to it, and was focused on making herself a necklace out of paper clips.

“You keep saying that Gemma could be anywhere, like Spain or Japan or Kentucky.”

“I never said Kentucky,” Harper corrected her. “The sirens wouldn’t go to the middle of the country. They’d want to be by the ocean.”