Kaitlyn was still terrified the police car would turn around, or follow them when they left. But it didn't. It seemed to have stopped at the other end of the rest stop.
Where the white Cadillac was, Kait's mind supplied, and she tried to squash the thought and the memories it evoked instantly. She didn't dare look at Gabriel or let herself wonder if the curly haired girl had remembered something after all.
"Don't be scared," Lewis said when they were once again on Highway 5. He'd felt her turmoil even if he didn't know the reason. "We're okay now."
Kaitlyn gave him a watery smile.
They found a do-it-yourself car wash in a town called Grants Pass, and Kaitlyn disbursed ninety-nine cents from their funds to buy paper towels. She also paid for breakfast burritos and coffee at a McDonald's, since none of them could face peanut butter this early in the morning.
"And now we should cut over to the coast," Rob said when they were done eating. They'd washed themselves as well as the car at the car wash, a novel experience that Kait wasn't sure she wanted to repeat.
"Well, you have two choices," said Lewis, who had by default become the Keeper of the Map. "There's a road that goes through the Siskiyou National Forest, and then a little north of that there's a regular highway."
After a short discussion they decided on the highway. As Anna said, the white house might be surrounded by trees, but it wasn't in a landlocked forest. It was someplace where the ocean came between two wooded arms of land.
"Some place called Griffin's Pit," Lewis said, his eyes crinkling as he looked at Kait.
"We might try looking that up in a library somewhere," Rob said, steering the van back to the freeway. "That and all the other variations we can think of."
"Maybe we'll just find the place first," Kaitlyn said wistfully.
But at Coos Bay, where the highway finally reached the coast, she slumped and shook her head.
"Not north enough," she said and glanced at Anna for confirmation.
Anna was nodding resignedly. They all stood around the van, staring down at the ocean. It was vast and blue and sparkling—and wrong. Not at all like the water they'd seen in the dream.
"It's way too civilized," Anna said. She pointed to a large freighter loaded with logs that was passing through the bay entrance. "See that? It's putting junk in the water—oil or gasoline or something—and the water we saw wasn't like that. It wasn't traveled like this. It felt clean."
"Felt clean," Gabriel repeated, almost sneering.
"Yes," Kaitlyn said. "It did. And look at those sand dunes. Did anybody see sand in the dream?"
"No." Rob sighed. "Okay, back in the van. Yukon ho."
"Can't we eat first?" Lewis pleaded. It had taken them until noon to get to the bay.
"Eat while we drive," Rob said. In the van Kaitlyn made and passed out peanut butter sandwiches.
They chewed on them apathetically, looking out the windows. The view as they drove north up the Oregon coast was not inspiring.
"Sand," Lewis said after half an hour. "I never knew there was so much sand in the world."
The dunes seemed endless. They were huge and rolling, sometimes blocking off the view of the ocean. In places they were hundreds of feet high.
"How horrible," Kaitlyn said suddenly. In the sand she could see distant trees—buried trees. Only the top third of their trunks emerged from the dune, standing but quite dead. It was as if the dunes had swallowed a forest… and digested it.
"Jeez, there's even vultures circling," Lewis said, eyeing a large bird.
"That's an osprey," Anna said almost unkindly.
Kait glanced at her, then sat back, relapsing into silence. She felt depressed, and she didn't know if it was the dunes, the prospect of endless traveling to an unknown destination, or the peanut butter sandwiches.
Everyone else was silent, too. There was a heavy feeling to the air. Oppressive. Laced with something Kaitlyn couldn't quite put her finger on…
"Oh, come on," she said, half aloud. "Cheer up, everybody. This is only our second day." She groped in her mind for an interesting topic to distract them. After a moment she found one, not only interesting but slightly dangerous. Oh, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
"So, Lewis, about this chi stuff," she said. He glanced at her lethargically. "So, I was wondering, how much can somebody afford to lose before they get sick?"
She could see Gabriel stiffen in the front passenger seat.
"Um," Lewis said. "It depends. Some people have a lot—they generate it all the time. If you're healthy you do that, and it just kind of flows freely inside you, without any blocks. Through strange channels."
Kaitlyn laughed. "Through what?"
"Strange channels. Really. That's what my grandfather called some of the arteries the chi runs through. He was a master of chi gong—that's the art of manipulating chi, kind of like what Rob does when he heals."
Gabriel by now was deliberately not looking at Kait, all the while willing her fiercely to shut up. Unable to send a reassuring message, Kaitlyn ignored him.
"So it's sort of like blood," she said to Lewis. "And if you lose it, you manufacture more."
"In the Middle Ages people thought blood was the life energy," Rob said from the driver's seat. "They thought some people had too much—that's what they had in mind when they bled you with leeches. They thought if they could drain some of the extra blood off, it would relieve the pressure; help you produce better, clearer blood afterward. But of course they were wrong—about blood."
He looked over his shoulder as he said it, and Kait thought his glance encompassed Gabriel as well as her. Alarm shot through her. Rob wasn't stupid. What if he'd guessed… ?
Gabriel was radiating cold fury.
"Well, that's interesting," Kait gabbled. She now wanted to find a boring topic to make them all forget this. Even silence would be fine—but Rob was speaking again.
"Some people think that's how the legends of vampires started," he said. "With psychics that drained their victims of life energy, sekhem, chi, whatever you want to call it. Later the stories got twisted and people called it blood."
Kaitlyn sat frozen. It wasn't just what Rob was saying, it was the way he was saying it. His disgust and loathing filled the web.