“If you hear or see her, she can affect you,” I said.

“Great,” Gilpatrick said. “Master–stranger! Noise protection, eyes down! Yellow for open fire, you better remember the rest!”

People scrambled to listen.

“Hey!” came a male voice from the woods.

“How fast does it take effect?” Gilpatrick asked.

“Fast, but limited exposure isn’t too bad. Hallucinations, auditory and visual.”

“I risk exposure, to know what’s going on?”

I nodded once. “I don’t see a better way. Unless you want me to deal with it alone.”

“No.”

Gilpatrick looked like an entirely different man, with the tension in his face and neck. He’d ceased being the tough-but-fair teacher and had become the soldier who had fought real-as-shit monsters.

He held his gun in one hand and a small remote in the other. The active squad members who weren’t managing the Fallen that had already evacuated were standing with ear protection on, caps pulled down with brim blocking some of their fields of view, their heads bent so they stared at the ground a few feet in front of them, instead of looking forward.

Some of them looked pretty fucking scared.

In the background, I saw Ashley emerge from the back of one of the trucks parked on the road. Not repainted schoolbuses, but a heavy metal van that might have transported money once. She walked around to the side and leaned against it, one hand over the wound on her arm.

I nodded once. She nodded back.

Well, some sort of backup, in the event of a dire situation.

And the guy in the woods was still making noise. “Hey!”

“What!?” Gilpatrick called out.

“Don’t shoot!” the guy said. “I’m unarmed, she wants to talk. I’m talking for her.”

Gilpatrick looked at me. I wasn’t sure what response to give. I knew this might be safe in the technical sense, with emphasis on might. This guy could have powers and he could have powers from the same branch of the family, but odds were that he was unpowered and unarmed as he said.

“She might want to talk, but she’s going to use the chance to threaten to do something horrible to hostages,” I said. “And she’ll do those horrible things.”

“Better to open dialogue,” Gilpatrick said.

I nodded.

“You and you alone, come out!” Gilpatrick called out.

The Fallen was a skinny shirtless guy with a beard, tattoos up his neck and tattoos on the whites of his eyeballs. He stood at the edge of the woods. We stood on the road, a ditch with tall grass just in front of us, a hundred feet of uneven ground with rocks and weeds spanning the space between the ditch and the guy. Gilpatrick’s group had made a makeshift bridge with two stretchers side by side, for the evacuees to cross the ditch.

The bearded man paused. “She says her son needs medical attention.”