If there was something beyond madness and insanity, Anora would have said she had stepped straight into that.
	Though he couldn’t see her, she shook her head at Dan’s first comment, with an exasperated, interrupting, “Wasn’t important.”
	Anora shouted and jumped in her seat when the end ofthe man’s sentence sounded both through the phone and from behind her. A couple purple sparks flickered to life with her surprise, but quickly died away. She pulled forward, turning to get a better look at the seat behind her. The seat belt pulled against her, and her backpack shifted at her feet.
	“Of course you do,” she breathed, bracing herself with a hand against the back of her seat, the seatbelt pressing firmly into her back. She contemplated just unbuckling it, but decided against it. Last thing she needed was to go flying through the windshield if Ahllasta decided to slam on the breaks.
	Sparing Ahllasta and Darsby scarcely a glance to see how they took to Dan’s sudden appearance, she focused on the newcomer. Heart pounding in her throat, she took in his shockingly normal, unthreatening appearance.
	She blinked slowly at him, her brows rising. She had had no idea what she had expected from Dan, but something even remotely resembling ordinary was far from it. Someone with a few extra appendages or an aura that would put Ahllasta’s to shame, perhaps. But not someone who looked like they had just stepped out of an office on a Casual Friday.
	The mixed reactions she noticed from both Darsby and Ahllasta made Anora shift uncomfortably in her seat.
	[i]Who [u]is[/u] this guy?[/i] she wondered in the short seconds of quiet that followed, her eyes narrowing. Her gaze met his as he leaned over in the blood-stained seat so she could see him better.
	Even his tone differed from what she had grown accustomed to hearing from her supernatural encounters; he spoke as casually as his appearance.
	Anora gave a snorting laugh. “‘Really weird’ doesn’t even [i]begin[/i] to cover it!” She flipped the phone closed, then opened her mouth again, a ranting recap of the day itching to bubble from her tongue.
	But she hesitated. She eyed Dan again. As affable as this man seemed, there was no telling what kind of secrets he held. After all, he had found them, made a phone appear in her pocket, and transported himself into a moving car. A car which he knew the exact number of occupants in.
	Darsby didn’t seem to mind him, and the affect he had on Ahllasta was somewhere between reassuring and unnerving. On one hand, she clearly didn’t like him. But on the other, whoever this was, he made someone as powerful as Ahllasta act like a child waiting for a beating for writing on the wall with permanent marker. A small voice of caution poked at the back of her mind, the dusty instinct determined to be heard.
	“What’s it matter to you who ‘pulled’ me into all this?” she said instead, a slight overwhelmed tremor in her voice. “Who [i]are[/i] you?” She tilted her head down, one corner of her lips pursing upward as she pointed at him with the hand holding the phone. “And don’t you [i]dare[/i] say ‘Dan.’ That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” she added, just in case. She glanced again to Darsby, the silent question of, [i]Should I trust this guy?[/i] written on her face.