You'll Thank Me for This Nina Siegal (red white and royal blue hardcover .txt) 📖

it was just the darkness. Or maybe I just was really scared. They grabbed me and brought me back to their camp and told me that I needed to stay with them until morning. I thought they were going to do terrible things to me, but they didn’t, they…they stole my backpack and they gave me a place to sleep. They were frightening, but I couldn’t stay there…”

“Are you hurt?” Martijn put a hand on her other shoulder and looked her over, like, inspecting her, trying to see what had happened. “Did they hurt you? Are you okay?”

Karin pulled back, feeling uncomfortable. She wasn’t that close with Martijn. He wasn’t her mother.

“No, no, they didn’t do anything, except steal my stuff. I think they were hungry. They were eating some food, some canned food, like maybe dog food or something like that. They didn’t offer me anything and I didn’t ask to eat it.”

“That was smart of you.”

“And then they told me that I should stay with them, sleep with them there in their camp, until morning. I didn’t want to say no; I didn’t think I could say no. But I was really scared being there with them. They…they didn’t look okay. I don’t know how to say it, but their faces were all stretched out and I kept thinking they were maybe like zombies or vampires or…I know it sounds weird.”

Martijn seemed to be thinking this over, like he could figure out who they were. Like he would know.

“But anyway, I got up and got away,” said Karin. “I ran away just when they were woken up. Something else came into the camp, and then I ran…”

“Wait, what…?”

Karin didn’t let him ask questions; she just wanted to get her story out. “And then I got out of the forest and I got here, and then there were wolves, and I had to scare them off. I got as big as I could get and I shouted, and they ran off. Just like my mom told me to do, and it worked! And then I was alone here, and I thought finally I knew how to get to the camp, and then you came, and then you’re here…”

Karin suddenly felt herself to be dead tired, and without doing it on purpose she crumpled into Martijn’s chest, her legs kind of buckling under her. All the energy that she had managed to muster to get this far seemed to seep out of her at once. She was exhausted.

Martijn grabbed her, trying to catch her before she fell. She slipped lower, but he pulled her back up and held her to his chest.

“There, there,” he said, patting her head. “Mijn Kleine Roodekapje,” he added—my Little Red Riding Hood. “You got away from the Big Bad Wolf! That’s impressive.”

She felt the warmth of his body and realized how cold she had been. His strong arms around her back felt comforting. But that smell. Something really rank. It wasn’t just sweat; it was like…like it had a copper kind of edge to it. Kind of like a dead animal. But then also something else. What was it? Something weird and something else.

“I thought I was so strong, but really I’m weak,” she said. “I’m tired and I’m scared and I just want to go home. I want to be home. I wish I could see Mom right now. I don’t want to be here, doing this, anymore. I hate this dropping. I hate this whole trip.”

“Don’t worry,” said Martijn. “Really, don’t worry. We’ll get you home. I’ll get you home. We’re not actually very far from the campsite, where Rutger and Riekje are waiting for us.” He looked up, as if assessing the distance from where they were to where they needed to be, and then back down at her. “You rest for a moment,” he said, gently lowering her to sit on a large rock, “and then we’ll go there together.”

That smell…Karin got another whiff of it as he leaned over to help her sit. There was something sickly sweet about it too. Like rose water. No, like rose water and cotton candy, a scent that came in a bottle in the shape of a swan. Was Martijn wearing Margot’s perfume?

Karin nodded, looking up at him. His face looked really pale in the moonlight, and somehow different—somehow stranger than before. Like all the blood had been drained out of it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “Okay,” she said. “Give me just a minute until I catch my breath.”

A weird thought came into her head. What if Martijn had been captured by the ghouls too? What if they had bitten him and right now, before her eyes, he was turning into one of them? Like in those horror movies where outsiders come and take over the whole town by invading people’s bodies one by one? What if they’d done that to Martijn? What if he was already one of the outsiders and he was just pretending to be her stepdad?

The thought of that gave her the serious creeps, and she actually shuddered. Martijn saw it. Even in the dark, she could see the strange expression on his face, as if he was wondering what she was thinking. He crouched down and tried to give her a warm smile, but it had the opposite effect: She suddenly felt like she had to bolt. Martijn wasn’t going to save her. She needed to get herself back to her mom. Her mom was the only one she could really trust. But what if the ghouls had gotten to her mom too?

Chapter 22Culture Clash

“I’m sorry I didn’t stop. I know I should have, but I’m dealing with an…an…It might be an emergency.”

“You were speeding,” the policeman nearly yelled at her, his right hand on his belt. Did he used to have a gun there? Grace had read that the Dutch traffic police had been disarmed a few years ago. Had he even heard