You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

swear words she’d just been allowed to hear. If her mom was here, she’d go bonkers. At home, if Karin used a single curse word she had to apologize and replace “shit” with “shoot.” She just gaped.

“She can build a fire without matches,” the guy at her right said, totally randomly. “I’d like to see that.”

“Duh, that is so seriously stupid,” said the hag. “You want to blow up the entire forest?”

The guy looked hangdog. “I don’t mean right here. Over there, on the other side of the stream, maybe? I mean, if we’re going to be out here in the woods, it would be kind of cool to have a campfire.”

Then all of them were talking at the same time again, arguing about whether or not they could build a fire. Karin was totally amazed. These ghouls were so creepy, but then the one on the right was like a little kid who had never had a campfire before.

“It’s not so hard,” Karin offered. “I can show you all how to do it. It’s pretty easy. I have a tinder kit in my backpack, if you’d let me…” She was starting to be hopeful that she might be able to get her stuff back.

One of them, who looked a little bit older, pushed her way to the front of the group. “Jesus, you’re all wet. You got drenched in the rain.” She turned back to the others. “She must be cold. We could go across the stream,” she said, turning back to Karin, “and you can make your fire there. Anyway, you better stay here with us until the morning. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”

Some of the other ghouls suddenly seemed all happy. “Yeah, you better stay with us,” said another one, and then they were all nodding, except the hag.

The thought of staying with these ghouls, these zombies, these vampires, was crazy, but her dad had said that staying wet when the temperature drops is one way to get sick. “It’s really pretty easy to make a fire if you have enough kindling,” she said.

And that was how Karin got the ghouls to go out in their garbage-bag raincoats to look for twigs in the forest across the stream from their compound. Since there was a lot of damp wood and brush, she had to show them how to pick kindling from underneath a top layer of logs and leaves. They only let her get her tinder kit after they’d dumped her backpack out onto the dirt, and the tinder was totally soaked. She couldn’t use it. But she managed to find a dead birch tree that was still partly standing, and she peeled away the outer bark to find some dry bits inside that were perfect for tinder. Then she used the magnesium rod from her kit. It wasn’t like doing it from flint and stone, but still, they were impressed.

Once she’d got it going, she added the sort of damp twigs, which caught pretty well too. Then they all gathered around it. It was almost like a dropping, but with everyone wearing weird, ugly masks. She wasn’t totally sure they wouldn’t push her into the fire and burn her alive—but she did manage to relax just a little. Sparks flew into the night sky. The smell was comforting, and the crackling sound it made reminded her of all the campfires she’d ever made with the Scouts and with her dad. Her clothes even started to dry. Could she really stay and spend a night here? It was pretty clear they weren’t going to return her stuff. What if she wanted to leave? Would they let her?

Chapter 14Spooked

Okay, there had to be a hundred good reasons why Martijn would have all this material on Pieter, right? Well, at least one workable reason. That was all there needed to be: one reasonable explanation.

Maybe it was connected to this so-called friendship they’d had that she was never privy to, Martijn as an invisible man in her life all along. Could it be that his interest in her went far beyond her and to Pieter—or rather, somehow through Pieter? Or was she going a little bit mad now, trying to get this all figured out in her head? There had to be a simpler explanation.

She should just ask Martijn what it was all about, shouldn’t she? After all, they were married, husband and wife. They were supposed to trust each other and talk things out. She should ask him about things before she jumped to conclusions. She owed him the respect of asking, right?

Grace paced. First she paced in Martijn’s attic office. Then she climbed down the ladder, with the intention of going to her room. Next she paced up and down the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom. She pulled at strands of her hair; she stared at herself in the mirror, as if that would provide answers. She became so tangled up in her head that she screamed into the toilet.

Okay, she would do two things. First, she would pack. Because she had to get out of here. No matter what was going on with this, she was truly frightened of Martijn. Who was he? And had he ever loved her?

She would pick up Karin from the dropping and then she’d take her to a hotel for a few days and they would figure out whatever the hell was going on from there. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they would have a brief vacation, enjoy a few museums, and come home and everything would be all right, normal.

The other thing she would do was call Martijn, because that was what a non-hysterical, non-bewildered person would do when they came across confusing information. They would ask in a calm, reasonable way: “Hey, what’s all this about?” Yes, that was what she would do too, because she was calm and reasonable. And she would make that call just as soon as she found herself