“Okay, so what do we do now? Run away and try to find John and the others? I’ll go with you if you do. Hell, I’ll drive.”

I have no desire to go on a blind search for the Loric, but if Sarah wants to go, I’m not letting her go alone. And I have to admit, the idea of a road trip with Sarah is appealing—even if it is to track down her alien boyfriend.

“How would we even find them?” she asks.

“Actually,” I say, lowering my voice, “I’ve kind of been doing some research on the whole . . . Well, you know. Everything. There are other people out there who know about this stuff. People like Sam, who the rest of us thought were just kind of crazy. I’ve been talking to some of them, and we think we might have figured out a little more about what’s going on.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah says, perking up. “What kind of stuff?”

“Well, now that I’ve seen John and Six in action, I kind of get what you’d need to look for. There was a girl in Miami who saw her boyfriend get picked up using telekinesis. It wasn’t John, but it might have been one of the others like him. Maybe someone who’s in contact with John. And one of the other bloggers has been keeping track of this guy in India who some of the locals have been worshipping as a god.”

“Yeah, but how do you know these bloggers or the people they’re writing about aren’t just a bunch of crazy people?”

“Well, a day or two after John and the others left Paradise, a police officer in Tennessee had pulled over some teenagers driving a suspicious car, but before he could arrest them, some kind of supernatural winds basically blew him out of the way.” Sarah raises her eyebrows, a glint of hope in her eyes. “Sound familiar?”

“Six.”

“That’s what I think.”

She grins, but it only lasts for a few seconds before the reality of the situation sets in.

“They could be anywhere by now,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“So there’s nowhere for us to even start our search.”

We pause as the waitress comes back and sets down my drink in front of me, then half slams Sarah’s onto the table, sending little drops of diet soda lapping over the rim of the glass. She leaves without saying a word.

“We could go anyway,” I suggest, trying not to sound enraptured by the idea of all that alone time with Sarah. “Skip this small town and let everything blow over.”

She gives me a little smile and shakes her head.