Read Online The Stranger by Caroline B. Cooney - Free Book Online Page A

it said to her.
    She knew who he was now, but not why or how. She wanted to talk to him. Not just this night, but every night and forever. She wanted him to be the only person she ever talked to.
    But he was not a person. He was a thing.
    “When do you change?” she said to him. “When are you one of us?”
    “I am always one of you,” he said desperately. “How could you have brought Christo? How could you betray me?”
    “I would never betray you. I love you.”
    He released her, and the rough granite of him scraped her painfully. There was more red now under the moon: her rubies, her cheeks, and her one drop of blood.
    “Go!” he breathed. “Go. Convince him I am not.”
    Convince him I am not.
    Not what? Not who?
    She was alone now between the lakes and Christo was trying to join her, his large feet clumsy on the tilting ice and snow. “I’m coming, Christo!” she said, and ran toward him, but she was clumsy now, too. Her partner of the silence and snow was gone; her choreography failed her.
    She slipped first, and Christo slipped second.
    They were a yard apart, too far to touch, too far to catch.
    At first she was not afraid, because she knew that even falling through the ice, the creature would save her, lift her, carry her out.
    But the sharp tiny heel of her silver shoe punctured the ice at the same moment that Christo’s big black shoe cracked it, and as the frigid water crept up her stockings, she realized that the creature would not save her, any more than it had saved the hunters. What mattered most to it was being unknown, and being untouched, and being safe itself.
    Christo and I will drown, she thought. We will fall as far beneath the black water as the hunters fell in the black shaft. We will die in ice and evil cold.
    She thrashed desperately, but that only made the hole in the ice larger.
    Christo said, in a normal high school boy’s voice, “I can’t believe I have done anything as stupid as this. Don’t tell anybody, that’s all I ask.” He was crouching at the water’s edge, having pulled himself back. He grabbed her hand and waist and yanked her unceremoniously to dry land. “Let’s get out of here before we get frostbite.” He hustled her along the straight path and back into the woods and back around the boulder.
    Nicoletta was afraid the boulder would roll upon them, would crush their wet feet beneath its glacial tons, but it ignored them. Back in the van, Christo turned on the motor and then immediately the heat, with the blower on high.
    After a moment he looked at her, reassessing what had happened and who she was.
    He knows now, thought Nicoletta. He knows who I love and where I go and what matters most.
    But he did not know. People in love seldom do.
    “You,” said Christo finally, “are not what I expected.” He was laughing. He was thrilled. Nicoletta had proved to be full of well-kept secrets, a girl whose hobbies were not the usual, and he was even more proud of being with her than he had been at the dance.
    Christo started to list the things they would do together—things he probably thought were unusual and exciting. To Nicoletta they sounded impossibly dull. They were of this world. They were commonplace.
    Nicoletta had a true love now, from another world, a world without explanation or meaning, and she did not care about Christo’s calendar.
    The light was on in the bedroom Nicoletta shared with Jamie when Christo pulled into the Storms’s driveway. Jamie had definitely not gone to bed. Her little face instantly appeared, and she shaded the glass with her two hands so that she could see into the dark.
    Christo grinned. “We have to give your little sister a show for her money,” he said.
    No! thought Nicoletta, shrinking. I can’t kiss you now. I’m in love with another—another what?
    Man? Boy? Rock? Thing? Beast?
    Or was she in love with a murderer?
    She thought of the two men falling to the depths of the cave.
    Where are we going? they would have