Author: Christopher Farnsworth
Date: 2022-06-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Horror
Description: A girl detective. A boy genius. A warrior princess. A young magician. Four young people with extraordinary gifts. For years, they solved mysteries, caught crooks, and slayed monsters. They were secret heroes, keeping an idyllic small town in the middle of America safe from the things that lurked in the dark. Then, the year of their high school graduation, the darkness came for them. During what the media called “New Year’s Evil,” a demonic force rose to turn their hometown into a literal Hell on Earth. They gathered to stop it. They fought. And they won. The rest of the world never discovered

REUNION

Copyright © 2022 by Christopher Farnsworth

All rights reserved.

979-8-9862375-0-3

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

REUNION is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Contents

Introduction

Advance Praise for Reunion

Quote

Prologue

All About Eric Weiss

1. The Young Magician

From the Wikipedia entry for Middleton:

2. Where They Used to Live

All About Carrie Keene

3. The Girl Detective

All About Alana Bright

4. The Warrior Princess

All About Daniel Sharp IV

5. The Boy Genius

6. I’ve Done My Part

7. The Only Warrior Left

8. The World Beneath the World

9. Even Less Fun Now

10. The Flawless Performance of Innumerable Lines of Code

11. Like Time-Lapse Photography

12. You Don’t Have to Go Home but You Can’t Stay Here

13. This is Where She Gets It

14. I Never Believed in Prophecies

15. Normal People Stumble Along

INTERLUDE: The Case of the Candy Cult

16. That’s How Her Story Ought to Go

17. Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With

18. Even Good Kids Have Their Limits

INTERLUDE: The Menace of the Middleton Monster

19. Alanis Morissette Irony or the Other Kind

20. What You Want Is Not the Most Important Thing

INTERLUDE: Trapped in the Goblin’s Lair

21. The Slowest Person in the Room

INTERLUDE: The Final Secret of Dr. Sax

22. All Part of King Jeremy’s Land

INTERLUDE: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

23. You Breathed It In, All the Time

INTERLUDE: What Happened

24. Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts

25. Ice and Bottles of Zima

26. You Were Right All Along

27. A Lot of Sacrificing to Do Tonight

28. You Walked Right into It

29. How Magic Works

30. Was This Your Master Plan

31. This Time, I Swear, We Can Do It Right

32. You’d Think He Would Know Better

33. Fresh Blood on Its Hands

34. Any One of a Thousand Different Men

35. The End of the World over There

36. These Are Not Ideal Conditions

37. Lightning and Thunder, Demons and Angels

38. Into the Jaws of the Dragon

39. Unafraid at Sunset

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Works by Christopher Farnsworth

REUNION

By Christopher Farnsworth

Bestselling Author of BLOOD OATH and THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE

A girl detective. A boy genius. A warrior princess. A young magician. Four young people with extraordinary gifts.

For years, they solved mysteries, caught crooks, and slayed monsters. They were secret heroes, keeping an idyllic small town in the middle of America safe from the things that lurked in the dark.

Then, the year of their high school graduation, the darkness came for them.

During what the media called “New Year’s Evil,” a demonic force rose to turn their hometown into a literal Hell on Earth.

They gathered to stop it. They fought. And they won.

The rest of the world never discovered the truth behind the disaster. For 20 years, the four tried living like normal people.

Now their past is coming back to haunt them.

The darkness is gathering once more. They’re summoned back to their hometown to face it, along with everything else they left behind. Whether they want to or not, they’ll have to be heroes again.

THE GIRL DETECTIVE

Carrie Keene — born with an eidetic memory, Carrie has been fighting crime since grade school, graduating from stolen bikes to federal felonies. But when she finds the sign of a murderous cult at a crime scene, she knows that she has to return home and re-open the case that everyone else would just as soon forget.

THE BOY GENIUS

Danny Sharp — the insanely smart heir to a high-tech fortune, Danny spent his childhood building jetpacks and robots, catching mad scientists and industrial spies. After losing his start-up in a corporate takeover, Danny returns to face the same evil that killed his father, and now waits for him.

THE WARRIOR PRINCESS

Alana Bright — born to a refugee from a mystical world, Alana always knew she was different. She carried a magic sword and killed the monsters that came out at night, keeping the daylight world safe. Once the final battle was over, she was ready to be normal. Her days are spent with her daughter, and she’s happy. But an old evil won’t let her walk away — and she will have to pick up her sword again to protect the people she loves most.

THE YOUNG MAGICIAN

Eric Weiss — a misfit plagued by disturbing visions, Eric learned early that all the demons and horrors he saw were real. This generation’s Merlin, Eric lost his powers two decades ago and has been doing card tricks in Vegas ever since. When his abilities return, he knows that his nemesis is alive again, too. Only this time, he’s not sure he wants to sacrifice himself for the greater good.

Together, they will have to finish what they started. Last time, they saved the world. This time, they’ll have to do something much harder.

They’ll have to save each other.

In a story that’s like Stephen King rewriting Nancy Drew, REUNION is about what happens when the good guys grow up.

Advance Praise for Reunion

“I’m a longtime fan of Christopher Farnsworth’s brilliant thrillers. Now I’m equally enthralled by REUNION, an incandescent horror novel where ancient legend meets the American heartland, with characters so real and engaging, I felt like I’ve known them since childhood. Farnsworth’s new novel is dark fantasy at its finest.”

— Elizabeth Hand, author of Hokuloa Road and Generation Loss

“Christopher Farnsworth combines myths old and new into a harrowing, gripping novel where the past and present of a small town's unlikely band of heroes collide, with the fate of the world — and their friendships — in the balance. Fans of Stranger Things, Yellowjackets, and well-told fantasy will love it.”

— Gwenda Bond, New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds and Mr. And Mrs. Witch

“REUNION is a gleeful horror/thriller mashup, about a group of former child heroes vanquishing the foes they thought they'd conquered back in high school. If you're thinking REUNION sounds like a poignant parable for the travails of adulthood, you're not wrong — but it's also hilarious, shocking, and genuinely suspenseful. There is no limit to Christopher Farnsworth's imagination.”

— Ben H. Winters, New York Times bestselling author of Underground Airlines and The Quiet Boy

“Like the Nicolas Cage of high-octane fiction, Christopher Farnsworth is a National Treasure — and REUNION is a classic slice of weird Americana, served like the best apple pie you ever tasted if it was laced with cyanide. You’ll scream, you’ll cry, and then you’ll go back to the home you left behind to face the darkness with your friends beside you. I wish I was reading it for the first time again myself.”

— Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Violent Century and By Force Alone

“With heart-pounding action and sly dialogue, REUNION is a book you’ll be thinking about long after putting it down. I loved it!”

— Brendan Reichs, New York Times bestselling author of Nemesis

“REUNION is the book I've waited for my whole life. When I was a kid, I inhaled all the adventures about young heroes — the Tom Swifts, the Nancy Drews, the kids who discover magic — and desperately wanted to know what happened to them when they grew up. Christopher Farnsworth gives us the answers in this banger of a book about four chosen ones who have to return home to take care of unfinished business. If it was just a witty, thrilling genre mashup, that would have been enough for me, but REUNION is more than that — it's also an affecting story about the pressures of being a child prodigy, the debts owed to family and friends, and the hard work of living the rest of your life. It's frickin’ brilliant.”

— Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Spoonbenders and Revelator

To Randy,

My companion on a thousand idiot adventures,
old bean to my old man,
my best friend.

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Prologue

That Was Then

MIDDLETON. THEN.

Danny was the last to arrive, as usual. He pulled up to Eric’s house in the new Beemer he bought to replace the ElectriCar.

Eric went out to greet him in the driveway. He hadn’t been sure Danny would make it. Not because he thought Danny was scared — Danny didn’t get scared, not that Eric had ever seen. But he was the one still insisting there must be some kind of rational explanation, hanging onto his skepticism like it was a cross that might keep a vampire at bay.

(That didn’t always work, though. Eric knew from experience.)

So maybe Danny did get scared, after all.

Now he was here, unloading stuff from the Beemer’s trunk as if there’d never been any doubt he’d show. Eric helped him carry the duffel bag inside. Eric’s mom was spending the holidays with her new boyfriend at a crystal healing retreat in Sedona (she’d told Eric it was her Christmas gift to herself).

The girls were in the living room. Alana was wrapping her fists in long, leather cords, carefully fitting the iron spikes of her cestus over her knuckles. Carrie was strapping herself into a bulletproof vest, stolen from a locker at the station. They didn’t have any women’s sizes, so she looked like Eddie Murphy wearing his fat suit in The Nutty Professor.

Eric dropped Danny’s bag on the floor.

“Careful with that,” he snapped.

“Sorry. What is it?” Eric said.

Danny unzipped it and began assembling something out of the components inside, his movements quick and sure. “Dangerous,” he said. “I’d like to avoid anything exploding before we actually want it to explode.”

Carrie stepped over to take a closer look. “Seriously, what is it?”

Danny attached a pistol grip to a long barrel, then slapped in a battery pack.

“We know light hurts them, right? I figured a burst of coherent light should be enough to scatter them completely, just like a real shadow. So I pulled apart one of the industrial lasers in the lab and mounted it to a — ”

“Jesus Christ, Danny, are you saying you built a ray gun?” Carrie asked.

He gave them his usual look, as if he was gazing down from the great height of his mountainous IQ. “No,” he said, insulted. “It’s a PEW. A Plasma Emitter Weapon. It pushes light through a series of ruby crystal diodes to exponentially increase the output of — ”

He stopped when he saw the looks on their faces.

“Fine. It’s a ray gun.”

Eric looked at it, frowning. “What does it… do?”

Danny hefted the device and pointed it at the ceiling. “Hopefully, burn those things into oblivion.”

“No, I got that,” Eric said. “What does it do if it hits any people?”

Danny shrugged. “Should carbonize skin and bone at about ninety feet.”

“Jesus Christ, Danny,” Carrie said.

Danny scowled at her. “Does that thing shoot Nerf darts?” he asked, pointing to the holster on her waist.

Carrie put her hand on the butt of the gun. She had her father’s back-up weapon, a .44 Ruger Police Special. As far as he knew, it was locked away in his gun safe. But she saw him enter the combination when she was six years old. She remembered. Carrie didn’t forget anything. Ever.

Now Carrie felt the gun, heavy and solid, weighing her down like an anchor. Even with everything that had happened so far, the gun was what made it all real. They were going to go out there tonight. They were going to fight. And they were probably going to die.

But first, they were going to kill some things, and some of those things would be wearing the faces of people they knew. There would be blood, and pain, and no matter what else happened, they would be responsible for it. All of them.

So instead of answering him, she asked, “Are we ready to go?”

“Ready,” Alana said, her hand lightly on the hilt of her sword, which was strapped to her side. They’d never seen her in full battle gear before. For a moment, they were all struck dumb. In her armor, with her weapons, she looked magnificent. She practically shone with her own light.

She put a heavy coat over it all, and they managed to stop staring.

“Here,” Danny said. He took out little devices about the size of a deck of cards. Each one had a glass screen on the front. He showed them how to turn it on, and each screen lit up with rows of symbols.

“Personal communicators,” he said. “They use cell-phone signals, but they have cameras and computers inside as well. We can send pictures or video or text to one another if we have to. We can use these to keep in touch.”

Danny showed them how to tap each little symbol — the communicators had a touch-screen instead of a keypad — to make everything work.

“Cool,” Eric said. “When does Sharp Industries release these to the public?”

Danny made a face. “Never. My dad said nobody’s going to pay a thousand dollars for a cell phone. He hated the idea.”

All of them caught the past tense. None of them knew what to say.

Carrie broke the silence. “Well then,” she said. “I guess it’s time.”

Eric snapped his fingers, and a brilliant ball of light exploded in the air. This was the big show now. He had to be perfect. There were no second chances. Not tonight.

Danny hefted his not-a-ray-gun. Alana had her sword. Carrie put her coat on over her holster and the vest.

They were as ready as they would ever be. There was no sense putting it off any longer. They opened the front door. For a moment, they paused and stood on the threshold.

The boy genius, the girl detective, the young magician, and the warrior princess.

The street was empty. The streetlights seemed to be clouded, muddled by some extra layer of darkness. The few remaining drifts of snow were dirty, almost black. A bitterly cold wind picked up, and they all shivered.

The End waited out there for them. They could feel it.

Despite everything they had been through, everything they’d already done in their lives, they were scared. None of them had to say it.

Carrie took Danny’s hand, and he let her. Eric and Alana tried not to look, but for them, this was shockingly public behavior, as if they’d started kissing and tearing each other’s clothes off right there.

For one wild moment, they all had the same idea. What if they went back inside? What if they pretended none of it was real? What would happen if they just stayed home?

Then a car went past, filled with some of their classmates, all dressed for the Party Like It’s 1999 Dance. They had the stereo up and the windows down. They didn’t notice the murk filling the air. One of them threw a bottle out the window and it smashed against the curb, which everyone inside the car seemed to find hilarious. The driver stomped on the gas, and they barely missed a mailbox as they roared out of the neighborhood.

It seemed even quieter once the car was gone.

Eric couldn’t take the silence anymore. “Alana, I hear Mike Fuller is still looking for a date. You could be underneath him in a couple of hours if you want.”

“At least I can get a date,” Alana said. “Your big Saturday night is a box of tissues and a bottle of lotion.”

Carrie rolled her eyes, dropped Danny’s hand. “Hey. Will and Grace. Are we doing this or what?”

They looked at one another, then sort of shrugged and shuffled their feet. Even Danny smiled. Because he knew, like they all did, that they didn’t really have a choice.

Eric closed the door behind them, and they walked out into the night.

Some kids got to go to dances and go to parties and make out and sneak their parents’ booze. Some kids got to stay home, where it was warm and safe. Some kids got to grow up.

While other kids went out to face the things that waited in the dark.

NAME: Eric Weiss

ALL ABOUT ME!

Answer the questions and tell us about yourself. Please write clearly.

1. Who is in your family?

Me, my mom, and my dad.

2. Do you have any pets? What are their names?

I used to have a goldfish, but it died.

3. What does your father do?

He’s a lawyer.

4. What does your mother do?

She is a housewife runs a charity, paints, and learns yoga and Japanese.

5. Who is your hero?

Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tony Hawk

6. What do you want to do when you grow up?

I want to test video games for Nintendo.

1

The Young Magician

Eric Weiss realizes he is drowning. Actually drowning, not fake-drowning for the tourists from Boise and Beijing and Dusseldorf and Lexington. The quick-release bar on the water tank is stuck, so he can’t get out.

And all he can think is: God, he hates the matinees.

First of all, people bring their kids. As if he’s a clown giving away free balloons. Magic is not for kids, Eric thinks. He knows that better than anyone. The sign out front says, very clearly, Magic For Adults. Which means that there are showgirls. And what they show are their tits. Magic — stage magic, anyway — depends on distraction. That’s their job. They remove more and more of their glittery outfits as the show goes on.

As usual, they were down to their G-strings by the time Eric was wrapped in a straitjacket, chained up, then attached to a winch and dangled over the reinforced dunk tank.

Just like always, he’d given his lecture to the audience, hanging upside down over the tank. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to remember. This is real,” Eric told them. “If I am not out of these chains in three minutes, I will drown. So please, keep your eyes on the timer. Maybe dial 9 and then 1 on your cell phones. My life literally depends on it.”

That kept everyone’s eyes on the big clock on the wall instead of on him. Misdirection again.

Then, splash, he was in the water, and one of the girls drew the curtains around the tank.

Before tonight, Eric had this routine down so he could get out in two minutes. This is how it usually works: he pops his shoulder out of its socket and shucks off the straitjacket. (This is why he takes a Vicodin every night before bed and why he can’t shoot a basketball anymore, but hey, nobody said show biz was easy.) Then he takes the key to the padlocks out of his hidden pocket, and presses the button on the trick manacles on his feet.

This all went fine. He can hold his breath underwater for at least four minutes. He’s been doing this twice a day, five times a week, for four years now. And he’s done similar acts all over Vegas for almost fifteen.

Usually all he has to do next is flip the hidden latch on the tank, and get out. He’s supposed to climb the hidden catwalk, go around to the back of the theater and zipline to the stage, flying right over the heads of the audience, thus bringing a small moment of wonder into their jaded, dreary lives before they return to the buffet and the slots. Easy-peasy.

But the goddamn latch won’t open.

Which means Eric is actually drowning.

He’d noticed the latch was sticking yesterday, and he asked Gordon, the ancient stage manager, to check it.

Right before the show, he’d asked again. “Did you have a chance to look at it?”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

That didn’t exactly fill Eric with confidence. “And?”

Gordon, veteran of maybe a hundred thousand Vegas shows, had stared at Eric for a moment in silent contempt. “It’s fine,” he said.

Now he pounds his fist against the latch, the water slowing his movements.

Fucking Gordon.

Eric thinks about what’s going on outside the tank. In his head, he’s been counting. Two minutes, forty-two seconds. He knows that despite themselves, they’re starting to wonder. Some of them will be holding their own breath, trying to see if they can last as long as Eric. They can’t. That’s how they know it’s all fake.

But what if it’s not?

Well. This will be a hell of a story for the audience to tell when they get back home.

Don’t panic, he tells himself. Don’t raise your heart rate, don’t increase the body’s need for oxygen.

His lungs are burning. Eric expels a stream of bubbles through his nose. It’s the CO2 build-up that gets you, makes you want to breathe. He can buy himself a little more time. He flips around, kicks against the latch and the glass as hard as he can. Still nothing.

He wonders if Kendall, the showgirl he’s been seeing, is worried about him. She’s very young. Really too young for him. She hasn’t figured out she can do much better than dating the magician.

And honestly, he should be past hitting on showgirls. He’s going to be forty in a couple of years. It never ends well. They’re either at the start of a bigger career or the end of a small one, either on their way up or on their way out.

While Eric stays in Vegas. Doing the same tricks, over and over again.

No. She’s not worried. Nobody will come to rescue him. They will think he’s running long. Possibly hungover. In fairness, it’s happened before.

Three minutes, thirty-four seconds.

Eric’s vision is going dim at the edges. He’s got nothing left in his lungs to exhale. His hands are cut and bleeding as he tugs and pulls at the latch. He might be panicking a bit now.

Once upon a time, he could walk through walls. He could burn through metal and call down lightning and even fly. He could shuffle through realities like a deck of cards and select the one he needed.

Once upon a time, he did real magic, just by snapping his fingers.

He lost that a long time ago.

Four minutes, five seconds. Six. Seven.

Everything narrows down to a small tunnel, and Eric sees something rushing toward him.

Colchester: a face like a skull, burned down to the bone on one side, the smile pulled into a leer by the melted flesh of its cheek.

Colchester opens his mouth and laughs at Eric. His breath smells like an open grave. “You thought you won.”

“You’re dead,” Eric says, and a part of his mind registers the water flowing into his mouth as he speaks.

“So are you,” Colchester says.

Eric feels heavy. Sleepy. Something important occurs to him. If Colchester is back — if he’s really back — that means something for him, too. If Colchester is back, then the magic might be back, too.

Eric snaps his fingers.

Something bright explodes in his vision. The glass wall of the tank shatters.

He flops out onto the stage like a dying fish, soaking wet, as the screams reach his ears. The showgirls cluster around him quickly. It’s Kendall who gets to him first. He remembers she worked as a lifeguard every summer in college. She helps him to his hands and knees and pounds his back.

Eric pukes out tank water amid the shards of broken glass on the floor.

He can see the audience beyond the stage lights. They are almost all on their feet, mouths open in genuine wonder and terror.

At least they got their money’s worth.

Eric looks offstage and spots Gordon, slowly backing away. They lock eyes for a moment.

Then Eric leaps to his feet and launches himself at the old man.

Two hours later, Eric limps up the stairs to his apartment. All things considered, it could have been worse.

He dragged Gordon out from backstage — he had already been running for the door, the coward — and pinned him in front of the knife-throwing target. By the time security arrived, four hundred tourists had watched him assault the stage manager.

He didn’t really blame the casino for firing him. Eric felt he was justifiably angry, but he couldn’t explain that when he looked at Gordon, for a moment he still saw Colchester’s face. He could barely explain that to himself. He is pretty sure that he must have been hallucinating. Lack of oxygen firing random neurons in his brain. There’s no way he saw Colchester, no way he broke open the tank with a magic ball of lightning. Those days are long gone.

So he went along quietly. The management agreed not to press charges if he agreed not to sue. Papers were signed. The guards who escorted him out of the building were entirely professional.

Eric opens the door and throws his mail down on the kitchen table. He gets a beer from the fridge and finds his bottle of painkillers on the counter. He swallows two Vicodin with a chaser of Heineken, then sits down and does a quick inventory.

He’s unemployed. Again. He probably won’t get his last paycheck. He’s got no job and not much of a life. Kendall texted him to see if he was okay. He’d ignored it. She’s better off without him.

He could call his father. His dad would send a check without complaining too much. He’s still feeling guilty about skipping out on most of Eric’s childhood. But Eric never liked asking for his allowance.

He could hit up Danny for money, too. Danny has never once asked him to repay any of the loans over the years, because they both know they are not loans. Still, guilt and humiliation are their own kind of interest payments, and he doesn’t want to rack up any more.

He might not have a choice, though. The mail in front of him is nothing but bills.

Well, almost nothing.

He finds one envelope with a familiar return address and a cartoon Viking printed on it. He opens it and a thick, cream-colored card falls out.

OH MY GOD WE’RE BACK AGAIN…

ARE YOU READY TO PARTY WITH

THE MIDDLETON HIGH SCHOOL VIKINGS

20 YEAR REUNION!

GO VIKINGS!

For a second, he can’t believe it. It’s been twenty years. It feels like both an eternity and less than a week at the same time.

Then he sees the message on the other side.

IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN

Yeah, he figured that, thanks very much. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him what a sign means. He’s had plenty of experience with them. He’s being summoned.

Which means he wasn’t hallucinating.

Eric puts the card down. He takes a deep breath. And snaps his fingers.

A brilliant ball of lightning blooms into existence and floats above his hand, illuminating his whole apartment with a gentle blue glow.

His mouth drops open and he watches the ball shimmer before him for a full five seconds as it rotates slowly in the air.

That old familiar feeling, the power of the world locking into place, floods back into him, like it was never gone. He spent years chasing it, trying booze, pills, even heroin, until that stint in rehab. In the end, it hadn’t been that hard to kick all the normal, human addictions, because he’d already lost the greatest high anyone could ever know.

You can’t blame him for being skeptical before. He thought it was gone forever.

And now it’s back. The magic is back.

Eric realizes he can’t see because his eyes are blurry with tears. He’s weeping in his ugly little kitchen as the ball of light winks out of existence.

But the magic is still there. He can feel it, coiled under his skin, running down to the ends of his nerves.

Like it was never gone in the first place. He’s a magician again.

He wipes his eyes to clear them, then looks at the invitation to the reunion.

And if he refuses, there’s a chance the magic will go away again. Which is not a chance Eric is willing to take.

He picks up the card and puts it back in the envelope.

He has to contact the others. He has to let them know. They have to go back. It’s starting again, Eric thinks.

But he’s wrong.

It never really stopped.

The End is near. And people will die tonight, because they all left. None of them are where they are supposed to be.

They are already too late.

From the Wikipedia entry for Middleton:

Middleton is a city located near the Sweetwater River, and is the county seat of Middleton County. Its estimated population as of 2016 was 56,702.1

History

Middleton was founded in 1826 by the pioneer Charles Colchester, who stopped in the valley while traveling west.2 Colchester could not understand why the nearby Native American tribes shunned the area, and established a trading post and supply depot for other settlers. The spot was initially called “Bugtown,”3 “Snakeville,”4 and “Manitowa,” the latter a mistranslation of a native word that was used to refer to the valley, which meant “place where the spirits dwell.” [citation needed]

As the town prospered and grew with the increasing number of travelers passing through on their way west, it was officially renamed “Middleton” in 1830 as part of its claim to be the closest settlement to what was then the geographical center of the United States.5 (This was often disputed by Centerville, Middleton’s nearest neighbor.)

The town is also located near Snake Hill, a Native American earthwork constructed around 300 BCE, at the time of a prehistoric indigenous culture that flourished in North America for centuries before European settlers arrived. Although the tribes that lived near the area were not related to the mound-builders, the mound and its surrounding forest were considered sacred by them. The early settlers of Middleton agreed, by an informal treaty later signed into state law, to leave the hill untouched.6 It was designated a National Historic Landmark and protected by federal law in 1901.7 Archaeologists and historians are in dispute about the actual uses and significance of the mound, with some calling it a site for religious ceremonies (possibly including human sacrifices, as in the Aztec culture), while others maintain it is an early observatory.8,9 Snake Hill is the largest serpent effigy in the world.

Economy

Middleton’s economy was largely based on agriculture and shipping due to its central location in the Midwest, but grew to include manufacturing. At one point, it was headquarters to three Fortune 500 companies, but lost those employers in the late 90s and early 2000s.10

Charles Colchester founded the town’s first major industrial employer, the Colchester Arms Works, which manufactured rifles and handguns for both Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War. The company operated until 1899, when the factory exploded, killing nearly 100 employees and town residents.11

In 1910, Middleton became home to the Sharp Industrial Manufacturing Company, later known as the technology company Sharp Industries.12

Middleton was also the headquarters of technology company Sax Enterprises from 1974 until its bankruptcy and dissolution following the death of its founder, Edgar Sax.13

At its peak in the 1990s, Sharp Industries employed more than 5,000 people, or almost a third of the town’s eligible workforce. At the same time, Sax employed approximately 2,500 workers.14

After Sharp offshored most of its consumer electronics division and Sax collapsed, Middleton entered a recession from which it has only recently emerged. The town is now a popular location for telemarketing call centers, due to the residents’ lack of a distinct regional accent. After the call centers, the region’s top employers include Interstate Freight and Warehouse, Middleton Hospital & Health System, Middleton State College, and Statewide Financial Services. Approximately thirty percent of the workforce is employed in the retail or service industries.15

Demographics

As of the 2010 census, the racial makeup of Middleton was 95.3% White, 3.2% African American, 0.2% Native American, 0.5% Asian, 1% from other races, and 1.7% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 5.8% of the population. The gender makeup of the population was 50.8 percent female and 49.1 percent male.16

Crime

For several years, Middleton was known as “America’s Safest City,” due to the city’s low incidence of homicide and its police department’s exceptional clearance rate for all crimes.17 From 1992 to 1997, every major crime in Middleton was cleared by arrest, a record for which Middleton Chief of Police Michael Keene received the U.S. Department of Justice’s Innovative Policing Award.18

“New Year’s Evil”

Main article: New Year’s Evil

Middleton was the site of a mass shooting/bombing during a New Year’s Eve dance held at Middleton High School, later dubbed “New Year’s Evil” by the media, which ended with 46 people dead and more than twice as many injured.19

Notable people

Charles Colchester, pioneer, arms manufacturer

Tobias Fox, American politician

Charlotte “Charlie” Hand, alleged mob boss

Jacqueline King, comedian and actress

Robert Neal, nationally syndicated cartoonist

Frank Phillips, inventor of the Acapillow singing novelty pillow

Henry Pryor, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of War, 1939-1945

Edgar Sax, CEO of Sax Enterprises

Daniel Sharp I, founder of Sharp Industries

Daniel Sharp II, inventor, CEO of Sharp Industries

Daniel Sharp III, technologist, CEO of Sharp Industries

Daniel “Danny” Sharp IV, Sharp Industries’ mascot, founder of SharpTech

Laurel Star, Grammy-winning singer/songwriter

Earl Taylor, former NBA player

2

Where They Used to Live

This is where they grew up. Middleton. Everyone still says it is such a nice place to raise a kid.

People come here from Chicago, California, New York, flush with cash from selling their overpriced houses. They look at the classic two- and three-bedroom homes with the mature trees out front, and they can picture a rope swing in the branches. They paint the upstairs bedrooms, and fill the houses with new carpeting and furniture and wide-screen TVs, and eventually, babies.

There is something idyllic about the town, something you can almost touch as you glide past a Little League baseball game in the park. It is a place where all those clichés seem to be true: nobody has to lock their doors at night, you can leave your keys in the car while you run into the store, you don’t worry about your kids walking alone to school.

Of course, people lock their doors at night. Nobody who lives here is stupid. But they feel like they could. They feel safe, which counts for a lot.

Even the place on Oak Street, the house everyone thought was haunted, has been renovated and flipped. (Although there is a good chance an elderly gangster will come looking for the strongbox hidden in the walls if he makes it to the end of his sentence in 2039.)

The longtime residents say, You should have seen it before, back in the old days. Old people say this in a lot of places. But in this case, they’re right. As nice as Middleton is now, it used to be better. Crime was almost nonexistent. It was like the town had its own guardian angels. Middleton was home to three corporate headquarters, and everyone had a job with decent health insurance. The football team was undefeated, people smiled more, and ice cream probably tasted better, too. You really should have seen it before.

Before.

Nobody has to say before what. Everyone knows. They don’t like to talk about it. In Middleton there is a deep, jagged scar marking the place where the past and the present were sliced apart. There’s where it all went wrong, and there is no going back.

That’s when Carrie, Danny, Alana, and Eric went out into the real world, and left Middleton to fend for itself.

But it’s still such a nice place to raise a kid.

Somehow the new couple on Saxon Drive, with their adorable child, managed to get the four-bedroom before anyone knew it was on the market. One week, the old guy who’d lived there was dead, and the next, the new family moved in.

Marianne knocks, and the husband answers the door, a look of relief on his face.

“Hi,” he says. “Marianne? I’m Kirk. Thank you so much for coming on such short notice.”

“It’s no problem at all,” she says. She doesn’t really need the money she gets from babysitting, but she gets lonely. Her husband George is gone (a stroke turned him off like a light four years ago) and her own kids never visit.

She enters the house. It’s nicer than hers, at least on the inside. Fresh paint and new hardwood floors, and furniture that looks like it’s right out of the shrink-wrap.

Over in the corner, there is a small child playing with blocks, the kind that she bought for one of her grandsons last Christmas. He’s a little boy. Practically a baby. He reminds her of her own son, who was also so pretty. You’re not supposed to use that word for boys, but it certainly fits. He snaps and clicks the blocks together with a quiet intensity, not looking up as Kirk closes the door behind Marianne.

“That’s Jeremy,” Kirk says, very quietly, as if he doesn’t want to disturb the child. “Susan,” he calls up the stairs. “Are you ready?”

The wife comes down, pulling at her hair, fussing with her dress. She is pretty (although Marianne would probably not have chosen a dress that tight), but she looks rushed and worried. She glares at her husband. “I’m not sure about this,” she says, and there’s a tone in her voice.

Marianne smiles. “Oh, I know how it is. You don’t want to leave your little one. But I promise, everything is going to be fine. You go out and have a nice time. Parents deserve a little space.”

The woman looks at her blankly, then at her husband, who takes her by the arm and pulls her toward the door. She yanks her arm away, not gently, and turns toward the boy.

“Jeremy,” she says. The husband winces. Maybe he’s trying to avoid a scene. But he doesn’t stop her. “We’ll be back soon. Marianne is going to look after you. Please be good.”

She sounds like she’s begging. The little boy looks up at her. It almost seems like he’s going to laugh at her.

But then he goes back to his blocks.

“Come on,” Kirk says to her, and this time, she lets him guide her to the door.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” he says to Marianne. “We just have to sign the mortgage papers, and you know — kids, in a bank. We won’t be long at all. Let him play by himself. He’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure we’re going to have lots of fun,” Marianne says, but Kirk has already closed the door on her.

Well. Perhaps they are not the happiest couple. The wife definitely seemed to be angry at the husband over something, and neither of them bothered to hug or kiss their child. They practically ran out the door.

She reminds herself not to judge. It’s not easy, especially when you have a young child. She crosses the room to the couch, and sits down. She sets her bag next to her and looks at Jeremy. She takes out her knitting, and a few old storybooks that she dug out of the attic when she started babysitting. The boy is still fixated on his blocks, building some complex structure.

“Jeremy? Would you like me to read you a story?”

He looks directly at her for the first time. For a moment, Marianne would swear there is something insolent, something that borders on contempt, in those wide and innocent blue eyes.

Then he looks back down at his toys, and Marianne dismisses the notion with a shake of her head. He’s just a little shy, she decides.

She tries again. “Or would you like to play a game? I’m pretty good at Candy Land.”

This time there is no mistaking it. He’s definitely scowling at her. “Leave me alone.”

Well. That’s not how she raised her kids. Marianne believes in discipline. In her opinion, that’s what so many families today lack.

“Jeremy, that’s not a very polite thing to say.”

He ignores her.

“Jeremy,” she says. “Do I have to take away your toys?”

Jeremy doesn’t answer, but he stops playing. He sighs heavily, as if he cannot believe he has to tolerate her. It’s such a grown-up sound. He looks up with a sly smile.

For a split-second, Marianne believes she’s making progress.

“That’s better. Now. Do you want to tell me what you’re building? Is it a house? Or a car?”

“No. It’s you,” he says, and his face splits into a wide grin. For some reason, Marianne feels a chill run down her back.

She tries to smile, though. “It’s me? Well, it doesn’t look much like me.”

“It’s not you on the outside,” Jeremy says, and she notices, for the first time, how unusually clear his high little voice sounds. He has no speech impediments, no childlike inflection to his voice. He sounds like someone much older speaking through someone much younger. “It’s everything that makes you. Everything you are inside.”

“Oh,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say to that.

He holds up the structure of blocks, all held together by magnetic force and precise angles. It’s really very accomplished, whatever it is, some kind of a geometrical shape she could never name.

Savagely, Jeremy snaps off one corner. “See? Those were your memories of your daughter.”

He holds the little block, green and translucent, in one hand, and for a moment, Marianne feels terribly dizzy. A swarm of moments from the past flies through her head. She sees her first child born, her daughter Lydia, feels the pain of the twenty hours of labor again, feels the tears of joy on her cheeks as she holds the tiny little body in her hands, and sees her leaving for college, not looking back, not ever coming back to Middleton. It all dangles in front of her, jewel-like and perfect and as fresh as if it were happening again.

The little boy tosses the block to the carpet and the joy and the pain of Lydia, all of her science fairs and softball games and first dates and prom nights and the heartbreak — it all vanishes. Lydia is gone from Marianne’s mind. She couldn’t tell anyone her daughter’s name if they asked.

All she feels is a sudden gaping hole inside. And fear, like cold water seeping all the way through her skin and into her bones.

She sinks back into the couch cushions, fighting the urge to run. She doesn’t know what she’s lost, and anyway, he’s just a little boy.

“Stop that,” she says, her voice shaking.

Jeremy grabs another block, as if he hasn’t heard her. “And this? This was your son.”

He tosses the small blue plastic block aside, and it bounces on the carpet next to the green one, and Marianne’s middle child is gone forever from her. A small piece of her heart goes with it, and she feels like crying, and she doesn’t know why.

“Stop it,” she says. “Stop it right now.”

“And this was your love for your husband,” he says, and takes a big chunk of blocks and pulls them apart, and the structure collapses a little more. Marianne tries to stand up now, and realizes she can’t. Something vital has been cut, like a string holding her up.

“This was everything your parents gave you. And this was that day you spent with your grandfather on the lake, where you looked up at the sky and wished every summer could be like that one.”

“Stop it,” Marianne says, weeping openly now, her voice high and childlike. “I don’t like this, I don’t like it.”

But he doesn’t stop. He takes the whole structure apart, bit by bit. Her hopes, her dreams, her memories, her fears. George’s funeral. Their wedding night. Her first kiss. Her fifth birthday. Everything.

Marianne stops crying after a while. Then she goes completely silent.

And then she’s not there at all anymore.

Jeremy looks at the fragments of his little sculpture, scattered all over the carpet. He looks around for the remote, and turns on the TV. Now he can watch cartoons.

An hour later, the man and the woman return. They find the boy there, watching a show about a deranged goldfish and a cat. The blocks are still all over the rug.

There is no sign of Marianne. They see her bag and her knitting, abandoned on the couch where she left them.

The man steps forward cautiously, as if there’s a land mine waiting under the living room carpet.

“What happened?” he asks, his tone hesitant and careful.

The thing that only looks like a child looks up at him with eyes as placid as a cow’s, and doesn’t answer.

“Where is she?” he asks, a little more forcefully.

“Gone,” Jeremy says, and goes back to watching TV.

“Ah, fuck,” the man says.

“What did you do?” the woman asks.

Jeremy doesn’t look at her.

The woman, who is definitely not his mother, turns and glares at the man, who is also not her husband. “I told you we couldn’t leave him with her.”

“What was I supposed to do? You think it would have been better if this happened in the bank? In front of a bunch of witnesses? And we can’t ever leave him alone. That’s what the Good Son said. Not until the ritual is done. I told you: you should have stayed here.”

“And I told you, not a chance in hell. Now you know why.”

“Look, we both decided on this,” he snaps. “Now what do you want to do about — ”

“No one will miss her,” Jeremy says, quietly.

They both look at him. “She had no family here. Nobody will care. No one will notice she’s gone. Not until we’ve finished.”

The man nods, trying to sound cheerful. “Well, that’s good. That’s great.”

“Great,” the woman repeats.

Jeremy stands and goes into the kitchen. “I’m hungry,” he says, and the woman steps quickly to make something. Jeremy especially likes chicken nuggets.

The man grabs Marianne’s bag and her knitting. He rifles through the bag and finds her keys and her ID. He drives carefully to her address and parks her car in her garage.

He leaves her things on the kitchen table, locking the door on his way out, and walks quickly back to the house.

A week later, Marianne’s son will call and leave her a message. He won’t call back.

NAME: Carrie Keene

ALL ABOUT ME!

Answer the questions and tell us about yourself. Please write clearly.

1. Who is in your family?

My family is me, my father and my mother.

2. Do you have any pets? What are their names?

I have a dog named Bailey. He is a bloodhound mix.

3. What does your father do?

He is the chief of police of Middleton. He keeps people safe.

4. What does your mother do?

My mother is a doctor. She saves people’s lives when they are very sick.

5. Who is your hero?

Clarice Starling.

6. What do you want to do when you grow up?

I am going to be a policeman woman officer like my dad.

3

The Girl Detective

Carrie Keene looks at the corpse in the closet. She’s seen worse, even before she was an FBI agent. She worked VICAP when she started, which meant digging through the autopsy reports and crime-scene photos of hundreds of victims.

But this is still pretty bad.

Lori Blanchard is on her knees. She didn’t have any rope, so she used the cord from her vacuum cleaner. One end is wrapped around a broken hanger bar and the other end is embedded deep in her neck. The rubber coating on the cord must have been frayed, because when Lori dropped off the stool and her weight hit, the wires cut into her throat instead of strangling her.

Like a blade, the cord sliced through her windpipe, her carotid arteries, and her jugular veins, practically halfway through her neck. Then the closet hanger bar broke too, and she went down.

Lori’s eyes are open. She looks surprised. She must have been shocked when she hit the floor and realized she was bleeding to death. There is blood all over: the doorframe, the walls, the carpet. There are handprints where it looks like Lori tried to crawl, as if she was having second thoughts.

A lot of suicides do. Usually when it’s too late.

Keith Kohler, another agent on the team, stands behind her in the condo’s bedroom. The apartment is sweltering. The door is open as cops move in and out, the A/C losing the battle against the sticky August heat.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

“Yeah.” She waits. “Did you want something?”

He stops looking at the body. “Right. We found a note on the desk. She says it was all her fault. Takes the blame for everything. Said she hopes that Gannon can forgive her.”

Carrie closes her eyes, suddenly very tired. “Of course she did.”

Keith looks around the room. “You think she was forced?”

Carrie shrugs. “No idea.”

Keith walks away as the crime-scene techs move behind them.

Carrie is about to do the same, but something catches her eye. She takes another close look at the carpet.

There, in the blood, near Lori’s hand, is a symbol. To someone else, it might look like a random mark that Lori Blanchard made as she scrabbled in the carpet, writhing in pain.

But Carrie knows better.

Viewed one way, it is a circle with a slash through it. But viewed from Carrie’s perspective, it’s a warning. She has not seen this symbol for twenty years.

Not that she will ever forget it. She would remember it clearly even if she were normal, but she’s not. Carrie never forgets anything. It’s her gift. She hasn’t forgotten anything since her first memory. (She was on the kitchen floor in the house where they lived before her father became chief of police, watching her mother, still a resident in surgical scrubs, putting groceries into the ugly avocado refrigerator. She said, “Mama,” and her mother picked her up and whirled her around, a huge smile on her face, and said, “Carrie! You said your first word!”) Everything she’s ever experienced, everything she’s ever learned, everything she’s ever seen, it’s all trapped in her head in a tangled pile, accessible with a little effort and concentration.

The symbol is a variant on an old hobo sign that means “Good Road to Follow.” It took her weeks of research to find it when she was a kid, using old books and the reference section in the back stacks of the Middleton Public Library. Now, of course, she could look it up in an instant on Google.

It’s the sign of the Followers.

It’s not possible, she thinks. We stopped them. We won.

But the symbol is there, drawn in blood.

Carrie takes out her phone and quickly snaps a picture. At the moment, she has no time to figure out what it means.

Carrie has to get back to the courthouse and tell everyone their case is dead in a closet.

It took months of patient work to get Lori Blanchard to testify against her boss, Governor Jeff Gannon.

Carrie and a half-dozen other FBI agents were brought in to investigate Gannon because local law enforcement is hopelessly compromised. Everyone from the county sheriff to the state attorney general owes the governor. He funnels cash to their campaigns, does favors for them, goes hunting and fishing with them, attends their kids’ birthday parties, provides drugs and hookers when they go to Vegas together.

It was that last one, along with seventeen other counts of bribery, perjury, witness intimidation, money laundering, conspiracy, and racketeering that finally brought the governor to court.

There were some politicians who, looking at mandatory minimums of 70 years in prison, might step down from office. Or cut a deal. Or at least make a public show of contrition.

Not Gannon. The whole thing was a witch hunt, he said. The feds were out to get him because he was fighting so hard for the good people of Arkansas. It was all a frame-up.

Carrie was the one who uncovered the key to the entire case: an LLC that served as the original shell company for every one of Gannon’s illegal transactions. The governor was smart enough to have someone else sign all the paperwork. That someone turned out to be Lori, his loyal administrative assistant and, unsurprisingly, part-time girlfriend.

You’d never have taken Lori for a politician’s side piece, Carrie thought when she first saw her. She was a slim woman who looked like the owner of an independent bookstore and too many cats. Carrie still has no idea what she saw in Gannon, who is so obnoxious that Carrie assumes he yells his own name during sex.

Carrie didn’t think Lori believed any of Gannon’s promises to leave his wife and kids. She had her own condo, regular vacations to Cancun, and a slush fund that paid her AmEx every month. She got to see her boyfriend when she wanted, and time away from him when he was busy championing family values elsewhere.

It was a great deal until Carrie came knocking on her door with a warrant. Not that Carrie was entirely unsympathetic. She’d dated her share of assholes, too.

In the end, Lori signed the plea deal, gave her depositions and grand jury testimony, and wore a wire. Carrie and the other agents collected hours of video and audio in Lori’s condo, where Gannon snorted cocaine, counted his bribes, and generally acted like a dipshit version of Scarface.

Lori was their star witness. They needed her to introduce the videos and financial documents into evidence. She was supposed to begin testifying this morning. Without her, Gannon will walk.

He seems to know this, even as Carrie walks into the courtroom to deliver the bad news. The governor — a handsome guy who looks like a dad who does CrossFit — catches Carrie’s eye and winks as she enters the courtroom. She gives him her mad-dog stare, the one she uses when she visits prisons. He looks away.

Carrie explains everything to Lawrence Stearns, the U.S. Attorney (never, ever, call him Larry). Stearns, a political appointee who looks like a dollar-store version of Don Draper, manages to keep a straight face as Carrie tells him about the apparent suicide and the note. He never wanted this case. Unlike Carrie and the other agents, he has to live here. His future career depends on Gannon and his allies. He doesn’t appear to be too broken up over the death of Lori Blanchard.

Carrie doesn’t tell him about the symbol, because the world doesn’t know about the Followers. They wanted to keep it that way.

Stearns stands and informs the judge of everything that’s happened this morning.

And from there, it is all so predictable. Gannon’s lawyers move to toss the charges. Stearns pleads with the judge. “Your Honor, we are literally still clearing the scene. You have to give us more time.”

“No,” the judge says. “I don’t believe I do.” She bangs the gavel and that’s it. Case dismissed.

Stearns stomps out of the courtroom, shoving his way past the media. Carrie and the rest of the agents and lawyers follow, all of them ignoring the shouted questions and the cameras in their faces.

Gannon and his lawyers hold a triumphant press conference outside in the corridor. This is what they’ve been saying all along: faked evidence by a woman scorned, an honest public servant slandered. The guilt must have been too much, so she took her own life. A tragedy. There are no winners here. And so on.

Carrie watches from a dozen yards away.

When Gannon breaks from the scrum for the restroom, she follows.

She waits a moment to be sure no one else is nearby and goes in after him.

Gannon is at the urinal. He glances over his shoulder and smirks when he sees her.

“Wrong room, Agent Keene.”

Carrie isn’t in the mood to banter. “What did you do?” she asks.

He shakes and zips up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Carrie bites off each word. “I am not screwing around here, Governor. What did you do?”

Gannon begins to wash his hands. He gives her his most sincere, solemn, politician’s face. “I know what you must think. But believe me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I swear. I would never hurt Lori. Never. I loved her.”

Carrie squeezes her eyes shut tight, takes a deep breath, then opens them again. The rage boils up and over anyway.

In one smooth motion, she draws her Glock and uses it to club the governor in the head.

Blood from the gash on his forehead hits the floor. Then he does too, as Carrie sweeps his legs out from under him.

She aims the gun at his face. “How did they reach you?” she demands. “What did you offer them?”

He looks dazed, hurt, and baffled, all at once. “What?” is all that comes out of his mouth.

He tries to push himself up. Carrie kicks his arm and he hits the tile floor again.

“Where are the Followers?” she says. Or maybe shouts.

His eyes appear to be having trouble focusing when he looks up at her.

“I loved her,” he says.

Carrie kicks him one more time for that. That’s when his attorneys come into the men’s room and the screaming starts.

Nine hours and two airports later, Carrie is walking through the door of her apartment in Georgetown for the first time in six months. She’s been living in an extended-stay hotel in Little Rock since the case began. Now she’s back to her normal life, or what’s left of it.

As of today, she is on administrative leave with pay, pending a formal investigation into her conduct. She will likely be suspended and demoted, if not terminated. (Her supervisor screamed at her, “You pistol-whipped the sitting governor of the state?” She replied, “Only once.” He’d made a noise, then got control of himself before he said, “This is why you were never promoted, Carrie. You’ve always got a smartass answer for everything.”)

She’s not thrilled about that, but she’s mostly angry about the case falling apart, and the fact that Gannon really didn’t seem to have a clue about the Followers. She can’t stand loose ends and unsolved mysteries. She’s been like that since she was a little girl.

Her fridge is empty. Not even ketchup. She slams the door shut. She thinks about going out, then decides against it. She doesn’t feel like seeing people right now.

Carrie checks her email, which is mostly messages of support from the other agents. A couple admit they wish they’d hit Gannon themselves. (They use their private email accounts for this, of course. Nothing ever vanishes from the government servers.)

She calls for Chinese delivery while she sorts the mail from her mailbox down in the lobby. Most of it is junk. But then she looks at an envelope with a cartoon Viking printed on it.

She breathes deeply, and opens the envelope.

She looks at the invitation for her twenty-year reunion, then flips it over. On the back, written in block letters, she sees:

YOU HAVE TO STOP IT

She doesn’t waste any more time in disbelief. Carrie has always been a detective. She follows the clues, wherever they lead.

Her phone rings at that same moment, because this is where she lives again. Back in the world of coincidences and synchronicity and omens. She sees the name on the display.

ERIC.

“Hey,” she says. “Funny. I was just about to call you.”

NAME: Alana Bright

ALL ABOUT ME!

Answer the questions and tell us about yourself. Please write clearly.

1. Who is in your family?

Me and my mom and dad.

2. Do you have any pets? What are their names?

We don’t have any pets. But I know a lot about animals. Once I helped cut up a cow so I could see what its insides were like.

3. What does your father do?

He is a nurse. Men can be nurses.

4. What does your mother do?

She does a lot of things.

5. Who is your hero?

I am learning to be my own hero.

6. What do you want to do when you grow up?

Happy.

4

The Warrior Princess

Alana Bright watches her daughter Grace in the rearview mirror while they sit at the red light. Grace is totally absorbed in her book. (Latest in a series about children who discover they’re actually the last in a line of demigods. Alana can’t stand them, but whatever gets Grace reading.) Grace feels her mother’s attention on her, and looks up, scowling. “What?” she says.

Alana beams at her. “Nothing. I just love you so much.”

Grace rolls her eyes. “Thanks for the update, Mom. Light’s green, by the way.”

Alana tries not to laugh at her. Eleven is a tough age. She remembers. Although she had it considerably tougher than her daughter, so it’s hard not to be amused by the constant drama.

They pull away slowly from the light (“Ugh, you drive like such an old lady, Mom.”) and after a couple of turns, pull into the driveway of the house where Grace’s dad, Peter, lives. It’s 4,000 square feet stuffed between the property lines in a new development in San Diego. Her ex-husband stands in the driveway, next to his BMW. (At least it’s not a Tesla.)

He looks at his watch. Alana checks the clock. She’s five minutes early. This is just his usual performance.

She gets out of the car. Grace slides out of the back seat, then gives her a surprisingly fierce hug before running over to her father. Peter looks perfect as usual, crisp chinos and polo shirt, the All-American Dad. He bends over and wraps Grace in a bear hug and kisses her repeatedly on the head, which causes her to gag and struggle. At least Alana isn’t the only one who gets that response.

Peter loves Grace with all his heart. Alana would never dispute that. Unfortunately, that’s about the only pure compliment that Alana can pay him these days. He doesn’t resemble the man she married in any other way. He was a floppy-haired English major when they met in college. He wrote her poems. He listened, and more importantly, he believed her when she told him some of the things she’d survived as a kid. (Not all. Some. That was enough.)

But they were both too young. In their twenties, Peter changed. He got sick of living on noodles and rice while doing research for his PhD and switched to law school. Now he works for a big firm, defending even bigger corporations.

Alana judged him for it. She was raised to slay dragons, not defend them.

But they might have worked it out, if not for Grace. If Alana is being completely honest — which she always is — it was Grace that ended their marriage, not that she’d ever say it out loud, not even under torture.

They waited a long time to have a child. He wanted kids from the start. She was the one who wasn’t sure. When she finally gave in, she discovered she loved her daughter more than anyone in the world, and that included her husband. Peter became sadly, but inevitably, irrelevant. She paid less and less attention to him, until one day he wasn’t there at all anymore. That was why their marriage ended.

Well. That, and he was fucking his assistant.

Grace was five when they finally split. Alana has primary custody, but in the summer, Peter regularly takes Grace during the week, like today, in addition to his regular weekends, so he can spend more time with her. He and Alana are polite to each other. Sometimes they even open presents together at Christmas, as if they were still a family.

He gives Alana a hug. She opens the trunk so he can fetch Grace’s stuff. He takes it to his front door and throws it inside. “Grace, honey, get into my car. We’re meeting people for an early dinner and we’re running late,” he says. He checks his Omega again.

Then Candace emerges from the house wearing only a bra and her jeans, carrying two different blouses. She holds them up, making sure that Alana sees the implants and the abs that look like they’ve been outlined with a Sharpie.

“Peter, I can’t decide,” she says. “Which do you like best?”

Candace isn’t a bad person, Alana reminds herself. She’s insecure, and not above reminding Alana that Peter basically goes to bed with a clip from Pornhub every night. Candace isn’t Peter’s first actress/model/whatever. She probably won’t be the last.

And Alana could kick her bony little ass without breathing hard.

So she tries to find some sympathy. “They’ll both look beautiful on you, Candace.”

Candace smiles. “Ohmigod, Alana, thank you. That is so nice.” She holds both tops up to the light, flashing the goods one more time, twirls, and goes back inside.

There’s a moment of silence.

“Candace is taking a new spin class,” Peter says.

“It shows,” Alana says. She reminds him that Grace has fencing practice in the morning, followed by afternoon day camp, and then Summer Mathletes at the Tutoring Center on Monday morning.

“I thought she had karate on Monday.”

“That’s next Monday. It alternates every other week in the summer.”

He makes a face. “Remember when we were her age, and we’d ride our bikes all summer and hang out at the pool?”

“No,” Alana says. That’s not how she spent her childhood.

She goes to the BMW’s open window and pecks Grace on the cheek.

“See you Monday,” she says. “Love you.”

Grace is already wrapped up in her book again. “Uh-huh,” she says, eyes not leaving the page.

She tries not to be hurt by that and mostly succeeds. Kids grow up. If they feel safe, they don’t need to cling to you. She read it in a parenting book. She believes it. At least, she believes she’s done everything she can to keep her daughter safe.

Waving goodbye even though Grace isn’t watching, she gets back in her car and drives away.

Alana makes a frankly uninspired stir-fry out of the leftovers in the fridge, eats it in front of the TV — something she never allows when Grace is home — and knocks back a glass of wine. The wild life of a single mom.

She’d prefer to go to bed when she finishes watching Netflix, but Rocky is losing his mind. Grace wanted a puppy for Christmas when she was five, and Peter got her the tiny, growly, hideously ugly Chihuahua, knowing full well that Alana would have to take care of the little beast. Grace loves him beyond all reason sometimes and cannot stand him at other times. Alana figures this is good training for every other relationship she’ll have in her life.

She puts the dog into his tiny harness and attaches his leash, and they head out into the night. There are coyotes that come down from the hills, and they snack on cats and small dogs. And occasionally there are men who wait for women and children to walk alone on the paths.

Alana never worries for herself. She might not be what she once was, but she’s still more than a match for any predator, animal or human.

Which is why she takes the footpath leading into the hills behind their cul-de-sac. The path turns into a hiking trail. Maybe it was that look at Candace’s stomach, but she feels like she needs a little exercise. Rocky whines. Alana drags him along.

They’ve taken the first turn around the hill when Rocky stops and will not move any further. She pulls him easily, because he’s, like, five pounds, but he puts his paws down and tries to lock himself in place.

“What is it? Why are you being such a spaz?”

Then she hears the growls.

She spins on the balls of her feet, instantly at full attention, old reflexes coming online as if no time has passed at all. She expects to see coyotes.

They’re not coyotes. Not anymore.

They still have the basic shape, but there is something else in them now. There are three of them, blocking the hiking trail, their fur up in ridges along their backs. The biggest one stands a few feet in front of the other two, his eyes gleaming in the dim light of the moon.

It opens its mouth and snarls, and she knows something is deeply wrong. There are too many teeth. They don’t resemble anything canine. They look like needles, long and sharp, crammed into its gums, crowded and packed in at all angles. It seems like the mouth of a different kind of creature, something from a prehistoric sea, horribly out of place and time.

Alana can smell them. They smell like burned meat and dog-stink and hunger and dried blood.

She thinks she hears the sound of a claw on a rock, back and to the left of her. She can’t be sure because Rocky is yapping his little head off now. She could dive forward and attack the lead animal. That would disrupt the ambush and bring the rest of the pack out of hiding.

Of course, Rocky would surely get shredded and end up in the stomach of one of those things. And Grace really loves the mutt.

So she runs.

She scoops Rocky up and stuffs him inside her hoodie with one smooth move and begins sprinting down the path the way she came.

A step behind her, she hears jaws click shut on empty air. She hears a howl, and the chase is on.

She puts all her strength into her legs, pumping her arms. She remembers the long runs with her mother before school, when she was still too young to understand that nobody should have been able to cover as much ground as they did, at that speed.

Rocky has shut up. She feels him curled into a ball, snug against her stomach.

She knows they’re right on her heels. They’re made to run over this kind of uneven ground. She can hear them breathing. She doesn’t need to look.

Her feet hit asphalt and she’s in the neighborhood again. She sprints into the warm pool of illumination under one of the streetlights. She expects them to stop as if it will burn them. Things like these always hated the light before.

Then the streetlight blinks out. It might be a timer, or coincidence. But she watches as the rest of the neighborhood’s lights go out in a line, all the way down to the end of the road.

She hears the click of claws on the pavement.

Alana doesn’t panic. She pours on the speed, and opens a dozen yards of distance between the creatures and herself.

Through the picture windows of the houses, she can see people zoned out in front of their plasma screens or bathing in the blue light of their tablets and phones. She knows that she could shout for help, and people would come running. It’s a good neighborhood. People help each other, look out for the kids when they drive, and give away full-size candy bars at Halloween. These people are nice.

She would hate to get any of them killed. That’s why she stays quiet.

She runs down the sidewalk to the Park house. Lee Park keeps his boat in the front driveway, where it’s been sitting, immobile and unused, for the decade that Alana and Grace have lived here. Its trailer juts out into the sidewalk about a foot with a piece of rebar chained to the end, a short flagpole for a red ribbon now faded to pink. It’s supposed to make the street safer — so people will see it and avoid running into the trailer hitch — but it’s a sharp, rusting piece of steel sticking out on the sidewalk. For years, Alana has lived in fear of the day when Grace comes home from roller-skating or riding her scooter with a deep puncture wound, or missing an eye. Alana has never mentioned it to Lee, because these are things you’re supposed to put up with from your neighbors.

Now she’s glad it’s there. Cold iron. She pulls it free of the chain, snapping the links like they’re made of paper. She holds it in one hand like a spear, spins, and stops in the middle of the street.

Rocky can feel the sudden lack of movement. He starts scratching madly at her stomach. He knows they’re not out of danger yet. He whines as if to tell her, Move move move, predators right behind us, are you crazy?

Alana ignores him.

The pack comes for her. Their eyes glow.

The creature in the lead leaps for her throat, while the second is a half-pace behind, ready to take out her legs.

The pole spins in her hand, the ribbon fluttering in the air, and Alana stabs the creature in mid-leap. A fountain of hot blood pours from its chest and it dies without so much as a whimper. Almost simultaneously, she brings her heel down on the one charging at her legs, crushing its skull.

Just like riding a bike, she thinks.

Then she’s a little bit slow, and one of the creatures clamps its jaws on her arm and she’s reminded, as the pain lances through her and her vision goes white at the edges, that no, it’s not very much like anything else at all.

She stops thinking, and becomes nothing but speed and motion and intent, taking each of her enemies as they come.

She kills like she was born to it.

A moment later, she is panting and sweating, the large bite on her forearm oozing blood with every beat of her heart. But she is still standing, and the street in front of her is littered with four-legged corpses. Rocky quivers inside her sweatshirt.

The last of the creatures, the pack leader, stands alone now, looking at her with those weirdly glowing yellow eyes. It bares its needle teeth once more, but stays well out of range of her weapon.

“Come on,” she says, like she’s coaxing a reluctant pet through the doggie door.

It takes a step forward. Then a step back. It turns to run.

Alana is not in the mood to let it retreat.

She covers the distance between them in one impossible leap, as if drawn through the air on invisible wires. She comes down with the rod, impaling the creature between its shoulder blades, driving the tip through its body and an inch into the asphalt.

It cries out with a moan like something much older and more human than anything with four legs should.

Then Alana is the only thing left alive in the street.

Except for Rocky, who chooses that moment to piss all over her, inside her sweatshirt.

The streetlights click back on, and the darkness lifts as if it was never there. Alana looks at the coyotes and knows that her neighbors will wonder what killed them. They are smaller. They look harmless. Whatever was inside them is gone.

She yanks the rebar out of the ground and tosses it down a storm drain. Her arm begins to throb as she walks home.

Inside the house, warm and familiar, Alana takes Rocky out of her soggy sweatshirt, peels it off, and dumps it in the laundry. She tells him he’s a good boy, washes him in the sink and gives him a special treat. She finds a bottle of vodka one of her firm’s clients gave her for Christmas and pours some over the bite. She doesn’t have anything but Hello Kitty Band-Aids, but they’ll have to do. It looks like an industrial accident but it’s already scabbing over.

No one ever notices, because she’s a mom, but Alana doesn’t really ever get hurt or sick. She hasn’t had so much as a sniffle in twenty years.

She takes the vodka, fills a large plastic cup, and sits down at her kitchen table to drink it.

This should not have happened. She did her job. That part of her life is supposed to be over.

Rocky is snoring in his little doggie bed and her cup is empty before she notices the envelope in the stack of mail. It might have been there for a while. Grace brings in the mail, and it tends to pile up before Alana gets around to it.

There’s an invitation to her high school reunion. On the thick envelope is the cartoon mascot of the Middleton High Vikings. And inside, on a card, inked in heavy black marker:

YOU HAVE TO SAVE US

Oh God, she thinks. She closes her eyes, and allows herself to consider throwing the invite in the recycling bin and going to sleep.

She finishes the vodka and goes upstairs.

A light glows inside her closet. She opens the door. It’s coming from a box on top of the shelf, as she knew it would be.

She reaches up and takes down the box and opens it. She withdraws a short sword from its scabbard. A historian might say it’s similar to the xiphos carried by the hoplites, or the medieval seax of Northern Europe, but it’s far older than either of those weapons.

Once free, the sword burns with a brilliant white light, a glare like the sun on a cloudless day.

Alana closes her eyes briefly. Terrific.

She sheathes the sword and places it back in the box. The glow dies down.

Her phone rings. She checks the number. Eric. As if she didn’t already know.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she answers, before he can say anything. “I got the message.”

She listens.

“What do you think?” she says. “We have to go back.”

She listens again. She rolls her eyes — her daughter gets it from her. “I don’t know, Eric,” she says. “Maybe it’s harder to kill an immortal necromancer than we thought.”

All About Daniel Sharp IV

NAME: Daniel Sharp IV

ALL ABOUT ME!

Answer the questions and tell us about yourself. Please write clearly.

1. Who is in your family?

My family consists of me, Daniel Sharp IV, and my father, Daniel Sharp III.

2. Do you have any pets? What are their names?

I do not have any pets. I am building a robot instead. Its name is RANN-D.

3. What does your father do?

He is chairman and CEO of Sharp Industries.

4. What does your mother do?

My mother is dead.

5. Who is your hero?

My hero is my father, Daniel Sharp III.

6. What do you want to do when you grow up?

A billionaire.

5

The Boy Genius

Danny Sharp — who really prefers to be called Dan these days — looks at the papers one last time, then signs his name everywhere there’s a Post-it tab. The lawyers from Facebook, a man and a woman, sit on the other side of the conference table. They smile at him in a way that reminds him of the robots he used to build in his workshop. He’s already forgotten their names.

Danny speed-reads the agreement, making sure they haven’t changed anything. He also answers the man’s questions about one of his bots’ base algorithm and its related patent, describes his last snowboarding trip to Whistler (cold, uneventful, injury-free), compares the user-retention numbers on Instagram and TikTok among key demographics, makes one joke about Bay Area real-estate prices (polite laughter) and another about their boss’ blink rate during his latest Congressional appearance (stony silence), confirms his bank account numbers from memory, and comments on the weather.

He’s been doing this — as well as using everyday phrases and pretending to pause as if he has to organize his thoughts like a normal person — for so long now that it is pure reflex, his Human Emulation Program running on autopilot.

He catches seven typos in the 453-page document, but none that will affect his payout. It’s an acceptable error rate.

When Danny puts the pen down, it’s done. His company no longer belongs to him.

“Congratulations,” the male lawyer says. He grabs the papers and stuffs them in his bag quickly, as if Danny might try to take them back.

“We’ll authorize the release of the signature payment by the end of business,” the female lawyer says, gathering her things, putting her phone away. “It will take another week or so for the rest of your compensation to clear, but you’re going to be a very wealthy man.”

Which is true, Danny thinks, if you’re measuring by mere mortal standards. But he was supposed to be much more than that. He was supposed to be a billionaire: big B, nine zeroes, three commas. Jeff Bezos hit the magic number at thirty-five. Bill Gates became a billionaire at thirty-one. Larry Page was thirty when Google went public. Evan Spiegel, twenty-five. And Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the company that has gobbled his own like an appetizer, made billionaire at twenty-three.

Danny is about to turn thirty-eight. He lost this race years ago. Now he’s sold his life’s work for the equivalent of Facebook’s pocket change.

The lawyers stand, signaling that it’s time for him to leave. He doesn’t work here, after all. That’s the point of the whole deal. They wanted one of his patents, based on work he did on artificial intelligence when he was still a kid. But not him. Definitely not him.

“It’s been great working with you, Danny,” she says.

Dan, he almost corrects her. He decides not to bother. He’ll never see either of these people again.

He drops off his VISITOR badge with the security guard in the lobby. The guard tells him, helpfully, that he has fifteen minutes to leave before the automated security system will flag him as a trespasser.

On his way across the quad to the parking lot, he passes a couple of coders headed in the opposite direction. One of them stops and stares at Danny. He wears a hoodie (of course, like everyone else here) over a T-shirt with the logo of a video game that Danny played when he was in junior high.

The guy calls after him. “Hey. Hey.”

Danny turns back, not really in the mood for a chat. “Yeah?”

The guy is smiling like he’s just won a prize. “This is going to sound weird but…when you were a kid, did you build a jetpack?”

“Yeah,” Danny says. “I did.”

The coder, still grinning, says, “I knew it was you!” He turns to his buddy. “I knew it! That’s Danny Sharp, man.”

The other guy stares blankly. “Who?”

“Dude. You know. He used to be really smart. ‘The Boy With The Computer Brain,’ right? Robots and rockets and shit!”

For the record, Danny never wanted to be called “The Boy With The Computer Brain,” or any of the other names he got tagged with. That was his father’s idea, to use him as a “spokeskid” for Sharp Industries’ products when he was ten. To this day, if you enter “that annoying kid from the 90s computer ads,” an old picture of him will pop up on Google.

The coder turns back to Danny. “When I heard we were buying you out, I went down a serious Wikihole looking at all the old stories about you! You went for the altitude record in a homemade jetpack! You actually did that!”

Danny remembers spending most of the summer when he was eleven in traction, his leg and collarbone broken in multiple places. “Yeah. I did that.”

The other guy nods slowly and squints, as if trying to see something at a great distance. “Oh, riiiiight.” He smiles at Danny too, working up some interest. “My first computer in grade school was a Sharp-C80. Man, what a piece of crap that was.”

It’s like he farted in an elevator. The first coder looks embarrassed. “Dude,” he says.

The other kid tries to soften the blow, which only makes it worse. “I mean, no offense. You were really something back in the days of dial-up.”

There’s a pause and the conversation dies while all three of them stare at each other. But what’s Danny going to say? The kid is right. It was a long time ago.

When it can’t get any more awkward, the coder says, “Well. I guess we’ll see you around.”

“No,” Danny says. “You won’t.”

They stare at him for another moment, then turn and walk away. Danny can hear the first guy mutter to his friend, “Dude. Not cool. Not cool at all.”

Danny watches them head across the Facebook campus. The sun sparkles off the water in the bay. A flock of birds takes off from the roof garden. Other smart people pass him on the footpaths, staring at their devices, drinking coffee or smoothies, on their way to work on the Next Big Thing.

He’s glad he’s not going to work here, he decides. His future could never have looked like this. This looks like an expensive community college.

He would have had jetpacks.

Back at his office, Danny has to pack up his things. He’s been procrastinating. The staff of SharpTech is long gone, and the landlord has already leased the space to a different start-up. He walks past the abandoned standing desks, the dismantled espresso machine, the rows of unplugged computers waiting for the liquidator to come pick them up. There’s a construction crew scheduled to put in a new climbing wall on Monday.

Danny’s assistant, Alexa — don’t laugh, the joke was old the first time, and anyway, her parents had no idea Amazon was going to turn her name into a household word — has tossed the mail she couldn’t sort into a pile on his desk. She’s gone now too, on her way to Machu Picchu before taking a new job at Google.

There’s a Post-it note on top of the pile. DANNY YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR STUFF! SRSLY! XO A.

He sighs. There’s no sense putting it off any longer.

On his way down to the garage, he peels away the Post-it and looks at the first envelope. Ordinarily that would go right into the shredder, because who uses paper these days? But he sees the familiar return address.

It’s the invitation to his twentieth high school reunion. He laughs out loud.

That would be disturbing enough for normal people — twenty years? No way! I’m not that old! and so forth — but for Danny, it’s like a wormhole has opened under his feet. His stomach feels light, and he drops back in time. He feels the weight of his homebrew plasma emitter in his hand, hears a screaming come across the sky, sees something emerge from the shadows and reach for him again.

Absolutely not. He barely escaped before. Why would he ever go back?

He wonders, for a brief moment, if Carrie will be there. He shoves the thought away. She’s no more eager than he is to revisit the past. None of them are.

His phone bloops at him, dragging him away from his memories. He stuffs the invite into the pocket of his hoodie (he’s adopted the native garb of Silicon Valley in his time here) and sees the alert from his bank. The money is already on its way to his account. Facebook doesn’t waste any time.

He could buy a Gulfstream and fill it with scotch and strippers. He never has to work again. He has no idea what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.

Half of the ground level of the parking garage is taken up by his workshop. It has a big, roll-up bay door at one end, and a smaller, human-sized door at the other. His employees moaned about this frequently, because this meant fewer parking spaces for them, but it was always nonnegotiable. Danny had it written into his contract with the board of SharpTech. He’s always needed a place to think.

Everyone in Silicon Valley likes to talk about starting their company in their garage. Well, this is Danny’s garage.

There’s a numerical keypad by the human-sized door, and he enters the code. Inside, motion sensors blink at his presence. His biometric profile is scanned by the mounted cameras, and the computer database decides he belongs in here. Lights switch on.

A robotic voice crackles from a speaker in the ceiling.

“Good afternoon, Danny. It’s good to see you again.”

ISAAC. Intelligent Semi-Autonomous Automated Computer. He created his own digital assistant when he was in junior high. He loved acronyms then.

One of the little cleaning robots trundles past, whirring as it sweeps the floor. Another one of his kid inventions. “Good afternoon, ISAAC,” he says clearly and distinctly. “Please set the thermostat at 70 degrees.”

“Of course, Danny,” the voice replies. He hears the A/C start up through the open vents. The air smells like an empty refrigerator.

Most of the space inside the workshop is taken up by his ElectriCar. He built that in high school too, long before anything rolled off the line at Tesla. Magnetic suspension, independent steering, carbon-fiber chassis over a titanium frame, zero to sixty in 4.3 seconds. It could outrace every gas-powered muscle car in town. He thought it would revolutionize the auto industry, but his father said there was no infrastructure to support it, and nobody would ever pay what it cost to make one. Now it just sits by the roll-up door. He never takes it anywhere; in his real life, he drives an Audi.

Attached to an overhead track is a giant robotic claw that he uses for assembling larger inventions. There’s his worktable, with another robotic arm bolted to the bench. Big Waldo and Little Waldo. His apprentices and his helpers. His extra set of hands. Big Waldo can bend steel and lift an engine block. Little Waldo can weld and solder and place a circuit board.

The PR people adored this place. They saw it as a way to leverage Danny’s minor celebrity. It featured prominently in several puff pieces when SharpTech was first raising money.

But he rarely comes down here at all anymore. He’s not sure why he keeps it, to be honest.

Carrie had a theory, of course. She stopped by about seven years ago, on the trail of a multistate serial embezzler. She had a long layover at SFO, so they worked in a quick visit.

“I never thought you would be so nostalgic, Danny,” she said when he brought her down here. She laughed at the blank expression on his face. “Don’t you see? You built a toybox for all your favorite things.”

They didn’t talk much after that. He had to get back to work, and she had to catch her flight.

Maybe if Danny had thought more about home appliances and less about jetpacks, he might have patented the Roomba or Alexa twenty years before they hit the market. But like most of the things he built back then, these were only gadgets, something to do in his spare time. Other people got rich from the inventions he dismissed as kid stuff. He always thought the real work would be something bigger.

Whatever. Now it’s time to get them out. The ElectriCar will be picked up by a tow truck later today. He doesn’t have to be here for that. The rest of the tools and chemicals and spare parts will be collected, or more likely, thrown in the trash. He just has to gather the toys from his childhood.

He goes over to the clunky old desktop where ISAAC lives and drops his packet of mail on the workbench. He spent a ridiculous amount of time programming in all the interface’s responses on 3.5-inch floppy disks. Now he begins to shut it down, wondering if he should get a box from upstairs or if he should just throw the whole thing in a dumpster.

Then the lights begin to flicker and the door slams shut behind him, the bolt sliding into place automatically with an ominous click.

Anybody else might wonder what was happening. Mouth open, a stupid look on their face, standing there like an idiot.

But Danny’s not that guy. He grew up with this. He hears a mechanical whirring behind him and dives toward a patch of open floor.

Little Waldo, the arm bolted to the workbench on his left, just misses with a claw that punches a deep hole into the concrete wall.

It’s been twenty years since someone tried to murder him, but he’s still got the reflexes.

He stands up and Little Waldo extends itself to its limits, whirring in what almost seems like frustration as its pincers snap inches from his nose.

At the other end of the workbench, the old desktop computer monitor flares to life, text scrolling on its amber monochrome screen so fast he cannot read any of it. The speakers in the workshop pop and hiss, and a staticky voice spits at him.

“Good afternoon, Danny. It’s so nice to see you again.”

It’s not ISAAC. It’s the voice of a ghost. A dead man speaking.

Dr. Edgar Sax.

Which should be impossible, but Danny doesn’t waste much time thinking about it, because he’s got to deal with Big Waldo as it unslings itself from the ceiling. He ducks just in time again, and it only glances against his shoulder. It’s still powerful enough to knock him to the floor, sending waves of pain through his body.

Every electrical device in the place is now fired up and angry at him. The welding torch shoots a white-hot jet across the room. The angle grinders and table saws spin and growl. Sparks fly from a dozen pieces of electrical equipment. Circuits overload and glass cracks and plastic melts.

Big Waldo rotates and stabs out, trying to grab him. He ducks and the claw misses clamping shut on his skull, but just barely.

Danny backs away, to the door. He tries to open it with one hand. Locked.

There’s an image on the computer monitor now. The 640 x 200 display was not meant for high-resolution pictures. It looks like something built of blocks, constructed bit by bit.

It’s a dot-matrix rendering of Dr. Sax’s smiling face.

“Oh, Danny,” the computer says. “Don’t tell me you’re trapped. You’ve gotten out of much worse than this before.”

Little Waldo gives up trying to reach him and settles for tossing whatever it can find on the shelves in his direction. A jar of screws flies past his head, fastball-quick, then shatters against the wall.

Danny dives to one side to avoid it and there is a buzz saw waiting for him, screaming as it spins in place, dangling from a cord on the wall. He cannot move any farther, not if he doesn’t want to be chewed up by the whirling blade.

Big Waldo races toward him on the ceiling track. It will be right on top of him in a moment.

He’s just where they want him. It was a feint, a trick, a trap. (The term anthropomorphic fallacy flits through his head: to attribute human form or personality to things not human.)

It will be game over in less than a second if he doesn’t think faster.

“Then again,” Sax’s voice says, “you’re not as young as you used to be, are you?”

It’s only a recording, Danny tells himself. A distraction. Don’t lose focus.

Danny thinks. He splits his mind into different processes, running simultaneous calculations and models. He measures the angles. Figures out the timing.

And dives, just as Big Waldo reaches for him.

The robot arm crashes into the metal roll-up door, and breaks loose from the ceiling track. It clatters heavily to the floor, still grasping for him, making a horrible metallic screeching. Like something dying. (Anthropomorphic fallacy.)

Little Waldo reaches for the next container on the nearby shelf. Danny speed-reads the label. His eyes go wide and he’s up and running for the safety cabinet as Little Waldo pitches it like a fastball through the air.

Hydrofluoric acid. Used to etch metals, clean auto parts, and make computer chips.

Danny knows what is going to happen next. He yanks open the cabinet door.

The container hits the garage door behind him, and cracks open. The acid splashes far enough to reach him, burning holes instantly through his shirt, and then his skin. But the real danger is the hydrogen fluorine gas that fills the air as the acid combines with oxygen.

The ventilator mask inside the cabinet is old. Danny puts it on anyway.

“Nasty stuff, Danny,” Sax’s voice says. “You know the CDC guidelines say that hydrofluoric acid can cause severe burns, pulmonary edema, skin ulcers, and, of course, death.”

Yeah, no shit, Danny thinks. The mask will keep his lungs from burning out, but if enough of the gas touches his skin, he’s dead anyway.

Little Waldo tags him with a metal can of something to the head. His vision goes blurry and his head spins.

He stumbles forward to the side of the ElectriCar. He pulls open the driver’s side door and hops into the seat. Danny taps the brake (regenerative braking — he thought of it years before anybody else), and presses his thumb to the fingerprint-recognition starter button.

The ElectriCar — one of the only things in the entire damn workshop that is not connected to a computer, because he never thought wi-fi would be something you’d use while driving — starts up and purrs.

Damn right. He built things to last.

He stomps on the accelerator, aiming the car straight at the sealed garage door, barely able to see now.

It occurs to him that this would be an especially stupid way to die.

The car leaps forward and punches through the steel door, already weakened by the acid. A great cloud of green-yellow fumes rolls out behind Danny as he roars through the garage at 75 mph. He makes it ninety feet before he slams through the parking gate, and flattens all four tires going the wrong way over the wrong-way spikes.

Danny skids to a halt in the driveway outside the building as the airbag punches him in the face.

For a moment he hears nothing. He yanks the respirator off, kicks the door open, and gets out of the car. He breathes deeply, and feels a stab of pain in his chest. He’s pretty sure he’s broken at least one of his ribs. He might be concussed. He drops to his knees, suddenly and completely exhausted.

But he’s alive. He won.

Despite everything, his face splits into a grin and he thinks, Let’s see Elon Musk do that.

Then, from inside the workshop, he hears the voice again, very faintly.

“Well done, Danny. Well done. See you again soon.”

Something drops from his pocket as Danny struggles to get back to his feet.

The invitation. Only this time, it’s landed face down.

On the other side, he sees, written in thick, careful block letters:

YOU HAVE TO COME BACK

Again, he thinks, Yeah. No shit.

He picks up the card and begins limping back to the building, already planning, making a list. The fire department will need to get a hazmat team out here. He will need to pack a bag, and arrange a flight.

His phone buzzes and he sees it’s Eric.

The others are already on their way back, Eric tells him. Then he tells Danny the rest.

Formerly the smartest guy in any room, and Danny learns he is the last one to know what’s going on.

Again.

6

I’ve Done My Part

It’s all Hailey Thomas can do to drag herself from her Range Rover after parking in the garage. She had back-to-back showings all day, and two of the clients sent offers for the same property. God, she never used to get this tired. Right now, all she wants is to go inside and have a glass of wine and sit down.

Her daughter, Regan, oblivious, runs inside, still full of energy and noise. Hailey did not know what it was going to be like, being a mom, but she’s pretty sure that she never expected to be completely ignored so often by the person who came out of her body.

She gathers all the stuff up from the seats, including Regan’s backpack and lunchbox and snacks and toys. It will all have to be repacked for tomorrow, but that’s Future Hailey’s problem.

The situation in the fridge is dire, so she calls for a pizza — “Yay, pizza night!” Regan shouts — and they sit down together to watch Frozen for the millionth time.

Regan chews her pizza and watches Anna and Elsa with wide eyes. Her daughter is nine going on five, Hailey thinks. She absolutely refuses to grow up. Hailey asked Regan if she was crushing on any of the boys in her class and Regan looked at her like she was some kind of alien creature.

It’s not Regan’s fault. Hailey spoils her. So does her father. They give her everything. It was bad before the divorce. Now it’s worse.

And Hailey refuses to feel guilty about that. She’s done everything she can to ensure a good life for Regan.

Maybe even some things she shouldn’t have done.

She pushes the thought away. It will all work out in the end. It always did before, right?

She sees a reflection of herself in the darkened window while she’s clearing the plates. She’s lucky, really. She’s still thin and pretty, still able to fit into her old cheerleader outfit if she wants to. (And she did, that one time when she and her ex had waaaaaay too much to drink.) Her skin isn’t as butter-soft as Regan’s anymore, but she doesn’t need Botox. Men still stare at her when they tour the open houses.

So cheer up, she tells herself. Your life isn’t over yet.

Then the phone rings. She sees the name and number, and her heart spasms a little.

Get a grip. It could be anything, she tells herself as she answers. It could be a butt-dial, for God’s sake.

“How are you?” he asks. He sounds chipper. Upbeat. Same tone of voice she uses when selling. She starts to relax. This is a normal call.

“Great,” she says. “Regan and I are having a girl’s night. What’s up?”

“Nothing important,” he says, in the same relentlessly cheerful tone. “I just wanted to ask you something: Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”

She hesitates, too long. “I don’t know what — ”

He shushes her. “It’s all right, Hailey, it’s all right. It’s going to be fine. But I admit, I am a little surprised. I didn’t think you’d go crying to them now.”

She takes a breath. Tries to laugh. “Them? Who? I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. Like I said. Don’t worry. It’s all going to work out. Everything is going according to plan.”

“Look, I have kept my mouth shut. I’ve done my part — ”

“You’re right. You did. And now it’s over.”

Hailey’s mouth goes very dry. She knows she’s caught. She thought she was clever and careful, and had worked around the restrictions so they wouldn’t know. But clearly she was wrong. So very, very wrong.

There’s only one thing she can do. She knows she is finished. She begs for the life of her daughter.

“Please,” she says. “Please, leave Regan alone. She has nothing to do with this — ”

“Well, I wish we could. But you brought her into it. I’m sorry.”

He really does sound like he’s sorry. It doesn’t matter. Hailey has already thrown down the phone and is running to get her daughter.

There is no one she can call for help. She already knows this.

She couldn’t reveal anything about the Followers’ plan because the mark would not let her. She didn’t realize it at the time. She only thought it was a formality, the little tattoo they put on her shoulder. Like the Greek letters she got on her ankle back in college, along with her sorority sisters.

She didn’t realize that the little circle and slash would give them a window into her. The rules said she could not tell anyone about the group. She was not allowed. She thought it was a little stupid. Who was going to know?

So it almost slipped out, after a couple of glasses of wine, when she was talking to her girlfriend Ashley. She almost told her about the Followers.

And found she couldn’t.

It was as if her tongue was seized by some force outside herself. She choked. She tried to say the word again and her throat seized up. Ashley pounded her on the back and asked people in the bar if they knew the Heimlich. But as soon as Hailey stopped trying to say the name, the spasm passed.

She learned she couldn’t use their name. She couldn’t write about the group in her own journal. Her hand went limp. Dead.

That was when she realized the whole thing was very wrong. There was something sick, something evil, about it all. She wanted to skip the gatherings, but she was too frightened by then. She learned they were completely serious about everything. The more she learned, the more horrified she became. But she was trapped.

She smiled and nodded and went along when she was with them, but the whole time, she was desperately plotting. She was not stupid. She couldn’t trust anyone in Middleton, obviously. She had to get word to someone outside the town. It was obvious: she had to tell Danny and Carrie and the others.

Eventually, she had an idea. She thought of a loophole. He’s right, she did think she was clever. Hailey was prevented from telling anyone about the plan, but Regan wasn’t. So she told Regan to do it.

She had her daughter write, in her clearest block printing, the words on the invitations, and sent them off to Danny, Carrie, Eric, and Alana.

She should have left town the second after she put the envelopes in the mail.

But some small part of her believed they would show up just in time, like they did before. Some small part of her believed that it could be made right, like it used to be. Because, deep down, that’s all she really wanted. She wanted it all to go back like it was.

And she never thought her ex would let them hurt Regan.

She’s an idiot. She knows that now.

“Regan,” she shouts. “Get your shoes on. We have to go. Now.”

Hailey runs through the house, grabbing what she can. There is an envelope full of cash, barely three hundred dollars, that she keeps in the junk drawer.

She calls for Regan. Nothing. She checks the front door. Still locked. But Regan isn’t here. She calls for her again, almost shrieking.

She hears the sound of her daughter’s feet in her room, above. She runs to get her, taking the stairs two at a time.

Regan stands by her bed, trying to grab as many stuffed animals as she can, her arms already overloaded. Hailey yanks her clean off her feet, causing them all to spill.

Regan begins to scream and kick. “Mommy, no! Those are my friends! They need to come too!”

Her shoe catches Hailey right in the gut, but Hailey barely feels it as she rushes out the door. “It’s all right,” she says. “Mommy will buy you new presents. Mommy will buy you all new presents.”

She looks outside. The sun is gone. There’s no light. Damn it. Of course he called after dark. When it would be too late.

She carries Regan to the garage, goes to the car and throws her inside.

She gets behind the wheel. “Regan, strap and snap,” she says. Regan always dawdles with her seat belt.

“Mommy, what’s going on?”

“Damn it, strap and snap! Now!”

Regan whimpers and tries to click the buckle shut. Hailey presses the START button on the dash.

Nothing happens.

No, no, no, she thinks. She knows she has the key fob in her purse. She takes it out anyway. She presses the button again.

Still nothing.

She grips the wheel. They will have to run for it. To the neighbors. Maybe they won’t come if someone else will see them.

She presses the button for the garage door. It doesn’t work either.

Hailey looks in her rear-view mirror, at the windows along the top of the garage door. There are shadows, twisting in the light from the street.

They’re already here. She makes a little noise without meaning to.

“Mommy? Mommy, what is it?”

Hailey doesn’t answer. She leaps out of the car, runs around the side, and hauls Regan back out.

“Mommy, you’re scaring me!”

“It’s going to be all right,” she says. “It’s going to be all right.”

She runs to the front door, dragging Regan along, but of course they are already there. She can see them through the decorative, faux-stained-glass window that she thought was so classy when they first moved in.

They are shadows without anyone or anything to cast them, somehow darker than the night surrounding them. They look like giant, distorted images of men. Twelve feet tall, all arms and legs, stretching across the yard, away from the porch light. They reach for the door. She turns and retreats into the house. She hears the wood of the door splintering behind her.

She goes through the kitchen to the rear sliding doors, the ones that lead to the backyard. But the Shadowmen are there, too, looming across the perfectly cut grass. One extends a long arm, ending in a hand that is like a claw. It runs its fingers down the glass, leaving long furrows with a high-pitched shriek.

It leans in close, and a mouth opens in the darkness, revealing sharp teeth that do not quite blend in with the inky-black shape of its head. It is smiling at her.

Regan clutches her hand. Hailey drops her phone and takes her in her arms. Regan wraps herself around her like a koala, burying her face in her neck.

Hailey goes up the stairs and hides in her big, walk-in closet. The overhead lights switch on automatically, blazing white LEDs. It’s all she can think of. She sits on the ground, still holding Regan.

Regan is crying. Quietly. Hailey might not have noticed if she couldn’t feel the tears on her neck. Such a good girl. Trying to be the best girl, even now.

“It’s all right,” Hailey says. “We have to wait until they’re gone. Then we’re going to a new house. I promise. And I will get you all new presents.”

Downstairs, something breaks. The lights in the house flicker, as if a storm is raging.

Regan is shaking.

“It’s all right,” Hailey says again, her arms wrapped tightly around her daughter. “Mommy will buy you presents. Mommy will buy you so many presents.”

The door bangs against the wall as something enters the bedroom.

She hears them coming now. Shadows make noise. If you listen closely enough. They sound like insects crawling across the carpet, thousands of tiny legs and jaws clicking as they move.

When she was little, Hailey used to hide under her covers after a nightmare. She thought that the monsters would not be able to see her that way. She thought she could hide in the dark.

Now she knows better. Now she knows you have to hide from the dark.

Regan tries to turn to look. Hailey holds her head so she can’t see.

“So many presents,” she says. “I promise.”

The first shadow enters the closet with them. Hailey holds her daughter as tight as she can. More join the first, blotting out the overhead light, and they rise above her.

Hailey closes her eyes, and everything goes dark.

7

The Only Warrior Left

Bobby Hogan pulls his Mercedes into the garage of his house, a five-bedroom on two acres near the river. He’s looking forward to the reunion this weekend. He’s come a long way since high school and he’s proud of himself. People can change. He’s the proof.

Twenty years ago, when he graduated high school, Bobby was pushing 300 on the scale on a good day. They called him Blobby in grade school, which became the Blob, which became Hog Hogan, which became Hog.

Bobby couldn’t really blame the other kids. He wasn’t a very nice guy. He shoved and he punched and he insulted, and he lied about it when he was called on it. He was a bully and a coward and a thief, and basically, kind of a dick.

Then it all went to hell, and Bobby barely avoided prison. It was enough to scare him. He got a job as a line cook. Pretty soon, he was jogging every morning and drinking strong coffee instead of cheap beer. Bobby now weighs 168 pounds and wears size 32 jeans. He owns his own restaurant and catering business.

In short, he got his shit together.

He goes to the fridge for a quick protein shake. He still has to watch his weight, and the closer he gets to forty, the harder he has to work at it.

That’s when he notices someone sitting in the dark, watching him.

The protein shake hits the floor and Bobby nearly jumps out of his skin

He reaches for the butcher block, and comes out with his prized Suisin Gyuto chef’s knife, which is 10.6 inches of inox steel.

Then Bobby recognizes the intruder sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a beer stolen from the fridge.

“Wade?” Bobby says.

Wade Wellman. He’s changed, too.

Once he was a skinny, good-looking kid. He always wore the best clothes he could afford or shoplift. His hair was gelled and slicked to perfection. He was baby-faced and wide-eyed, and nobody ever suspected him of anything until they got to know him.

Now he’s thick with muscle, and the formerly perfect face has a long scar running through a scraggly beard. He wears cheap denim and his hair looks like it was cut with a hedge trimmer. His eyes are dark and shadowed.

But Bobby remembers the smile. It’s the same smirk he always wore whenever he got away with something: the kid with a pocketful of stolen candy, all the test answers from the teacher’s desk, and someone else’s lunch money.

“Hey, Hog,” he says. “Good to see you.”

Bobby lowers the knife, but he doesn’t put it down. It’s not possible. It’s simply not possible. Wade — Wade cannot be here. Bobby heard from the prosecutor’s office. The prison. This isn’t like a bureaucracy getting your address wrong, this is life and death here, they said —

And yet here he is.

Wade Wellman was the leader of the West Side Warriors. A born con artist. Lying was like breathing to him. He didn’t know what happened to your bike. Sure, you asked him to watch it, and yes, it was right there — but how could you insinuate that Wade had something to do with its sudden disappearance?

People threatened to kick the crap out of Wade Wellman maybe twice a day, but nobody ever laid a hand on him. He would start talking, and before too long, anger would turn to confusion, and while his enemies were trying to puzzle out what he’d said, Wade would smile and walk away.

Or Wade would call on his gang. Troy liked to wear X-Ray Specs he ordered out of a comic book. Whenever he saw a girl, he’d reach down his pants, pretended he could see her naked. If anyone pointed out that the things didn’t really work, he’d laugh and say, “So what? My dick still works.” Mike stole Ritalin out of the other kids’ lockers and sold it to the bikers at the Crow Inn. Derek broke into cars at night and stole whatever was in the glove box or on the seats.

And there was Bobby. Hog. He was big and intimidating, even if it was fat, not muscle.

Wade watched Boyz n the Hood about a thousand times, so he suggested they call themselves the West Side Warriors. He treated them like people. Like friends. Then he used them like tools.

They stole. They had fake IDs. They sold cheap weed. They only qualified as a gang by Middleton standards. It wasn’t like they were doing drive-by shootings.

It’s not like anyone died.

Well, not until the end, anyway.

Years ago, Wade would have been talking rapidly, trying to bury Bobby under his bullshit. Now he sits calmly and silently. Prison seems to have dried up his constant stream of words just like it transformed his body. Bobby can’t say that he likes the change much.

“What are you doing here?” Bobby asks. He hears the pleading tone in his voice and hates himself for it. It’s like he’s standing at the back of the group in junior high again, desperately trying to think of something funny or smart to say.

“I think you know,” Wade says, standing up. “You’re the only Warrior left, Hog.”

That’s true. Bobby kept track of the rest of the gang, if only to stay away from them. Troy took a corner too fast and too drunk on the county road. Mike died of an overdose in his girlfriend’s trailer. Derek moved to Arizona years ago and hasn’t been heard from since, and it’s easy to assume he died out there.

Bobby’s the only one left. He did everything right. He testified against Wade all those years ago. He got his life in order. And somehow, Wade is back.

Which shouldn’t be possible.

Wade takes a step toward him.

Bobby points with the knife, even though his hand is shaking badly. “Don’t,” he says. “You came to the wrong house, Wade. We’re not friends.”

“No,” Wade says agreeably. “We’re not.”

He keeps coming. Slowly. Like he’s got all the time in the world.

Bobby scrambles to get his phone out of his jeans. He fumbles and steps back, unable to get his keypad on the screen. He can’t remember the last time he actually had to dial a number.

Wade stands right in front of Bobby, and he reaches for the phone.

Bobby panics, and shoves the knife in Wade’s chest. The steel slides into him like he’s authentic Kobe beef.

Wade doesn’t scream. He doesn’t react that much at all. He looks down at his chest, sees the handle sticking out, and frowns.

“Really wish you hadn’t done that,” he says.

He pulls the knife out of his body. There’s surprisingly little blood. Just some kind of black, tarry ooze.

Bobby is frozen, watching the knife reemerge an inch at a time. Wade doesn’t even wince.

Instead, he turns the blade around, and stabs Bobby in the gut.

The pain is unreal. Bobby’s arms go numb, his fingers go loose, and he drops the phone even as Wade stabs him again. And again.

Bobby realizes his legs have gone out from under him. He’s looking up at Wade from the clean Saltillo tile floor of his kitchen. Unlike Wade, there’s a lot of blood coming out of Bobby. Way too much, really.

Wade still doesn’t seem hurried. Or even bothered. He’s got the same expression on his face as someone doing the laundry or mowing a lawn; finishing a necessary and mindless chore.

This isn’t fair, Bobby thinks. He did the right thing. He worked hard to become a grown-up. He changed his life. And Wade came back anyway.

“It’s just not fair,” he mumbles, the words slipping out of him.

That strikes Wade as funny for some reason. He laughs, and he leans in close. Bobby can smell the beer on his breath, and a deeper stink of rot and corruption, like there’s raw meat stuck in his teeth.

“You’re right. It’s not fair. None of it is,” he says. “But don’t worry. I’m going to get even.”

He twists the knife again, and really starts to work.

A little less than an hour later, Wade is using the last of Hog’s paper towels to wipe up the mess on the kitchen floor. He pauses at one puddle of blood. He’s tired. He’s been on the road for two days. He drove straight through after doing the woman in Arkansas.

He thinks about skipping this next part entirely, but the pain shoots through his skull and reminds him of the deal he made.

Hog wasn’t on the list he’d been given. This was personal. Payback for his betrayal. Wade would have done the same to all the other Warriors, if only they’d lived long enough. Hog was the only one left. He had to foot the bill for all of them.

But Wade still owes the Followers. They got him here, after all.

Which means he has to do the ritual.

Wade dips his finger in the rapidly drying blood and draws a circle with a slash through the top on the floor, near the place where Hog’s body fell.

The sign of the Followers. So the pain of this death will go to the Good Man.

“Stretch out thine hand toward Heaven,” he says, loudly. “That there may be Darkness over the land.”

As soon as he makes the sign, Wade feels all the weariness leave his body. He checks under his shirt where Hog stabbed him. The wound has closed completely, leaving only a black crust. By tomorrow morning, even that will be gone.

Wade hates this shit, but he can’t argue with the results.

He gets up to grab another beer. He’s starving, but Hog barely has any food in the house. No wonder he got so damn skinny.

On his way to the fridge, Wade is very careful to step over the symbol in blood.

He can keep his end of the deal. They better keep theirs.

8

The World Beneath the World

Eric is the first to make it back.

Once he could have opened a door all the way back to Middleton. He could have folded space and stepped through, as if he were walking across the street.

But it’s been years since he pulled that trick. He doesn’t know where he’d arrive if he tried it; he might appear halfway into a wall if someone has built a house where there used to be empty space.

Instead, he takes two connections from Vegas on a discount airline, and each plane seems a little older and crappier than the one before. On the last leg of the trip, his armrest is broken and he’s pretty sure he can hear the wings creaking.

It gets him home. Or the place he used to think of as home, anyway.

He has a few hours before he meets the others. Eric rents a car — his already overstressed Visa card practically groaning under the weight of the charge — and drives around, getting the feel of the town again, looking at the old, familiar sights. It doesn’t take long. He makes a quick pass by his old house. It has a fresh coat of paint, kids’ bikes discarded on the lawn, and a new basketball hoop in the driveway.

He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Eric’s father left them when Eric was twelve. His mother sold the house not long after Eric took off for college. She and her current husband are living in Santa Fe now. (They showed up at one of his performances last year; she told him, “My therapist says I’m ready to forgive you,” so that’s how that went.)

He looks at the bikes and the hoop. He wonders what it would be like, to be raised by people who actually liked you.

He sits there long enough to worry that someone will call the cops on him. Eric knows he can’t put it off any longer. He drives out of town, toward the woods.

Middleton has expanded in this direction, construction encroaching on what used to be nothing but forest. There is a small billboard, an advertisement for a planned community, ready by next fall. NEW HOMES COMING SOON FROM BIXBY DEVELOPMENTS, it reads.

Eric wonders what kind of nightmares the kids in those houses will have, if they will feel the things that once walked on the ground under their beds. He hopes not.

It takes him a little while to find the glade. He pulls off the road and parks, then walks to the center of the clearing, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs.

It has been desecrated. That’s the only word that comes to mind.

There was a small meadow here, surrounded by trees, with clover and soft grasses and wildflowers. It’s long gone. The workers have already marked out the lots for the new homes, and the ground is all mud and weeds. The pines and birch have been clear-cut, their bulldozed stumps with roots like skeletal fingers emerging from the dirt. The spring that once bubbled up in the heart of the glade has been capped.

The workers must take their breaks here; there’s a pile of trash, old cigarette butts, water bottles, and a Porta-John.

This was his place of power. His connection to the world beneath the world, the intersection of ley lines and an older, purer time. After the wind began talking to him at ten years old, after the therapists, after he was the first kid in his class to be put on Prozac, after the divorce his mother said came because he was crazy, he made his way here, desperate. He still heard a call that was not drowned out by the pills, or the doctor visits, or the razor he put to his wrists that one time. He came here, and stood in the silence, and understood for the first time.

This was where he found his way, where he learned how to move the scenery of reality, where he learned he was this generation’s Merlin.

And they’re literally shitting on it.

He still finds the center of the glade by feel, as if it fits around him. He listens to the silence, and finds the still place within him. He imagines the door, and makes the sign of the glyph in the air to unlock it, the old, familiar gesture coming back like muscle memory.

The world spins beneath him. The door opens. He doesn’t step through. Instead, he opens his eyes.

Darkness. A cave, the walls thick with roots and rot. The bones of some small animal by his feet. The smell is worse than he remembers.

Just ahead of him, something at the back of the cavern moves. He finally sees the eyes, blood-red and burning in the dark, glaring at him.

A shape lurches forward, and a voice roars out.

“And where the fuck have you been?”

Merlin — also known as Ambrosius Merlinus, Mryddin Wilit, and Emrys; prophet, seer, royal adviser; the wizard of Camelot; (alleged) son of a demon; and the greatest (mostly) human magician in history — does not look good.

He is trapped in the cavern, as he has been for centuries, by the complicated root network of an ancient tree. It weaves around and through his body, knitting him to the dirt and stone of the cave’s far wall. His beard is wiry and long, his skin like wax, and his eyes are bloodshot and wild. Eric wonders, not for the first time, how anyone could ever have described him as a kindly old man with a Papa Smurf beard.

The cavern is not actually under Middleton. It’s not really under an English forest, either. As far as he’s been able to tell, it exists between the everyday world and the Other Side, outside of time.

This is where Eric learned to use his powers, where he learned the craft of magic, from Merlin himself. He knows he wasn’t the first. There were others before him, from his world, and from others, too. Merlin trained them all.

Eric is not sure why Merlin was imprisoned here, in this weird space in-between reality and legend. There are many places where the history relayed by Merlin, the entity who lives here, matches up with Merlin, the character known in a hundred different books and movies. And many other places where it doesn’t.

There were always more pressing matters, anyway: demons and lost talismans and undying ones trying to breach Eric’s world. They never had much time for small talk.

All Eric really knows is that Merlin can’t leave the cavern. There is a small scrying pool by Merlin’s feet. It’s like a magical window to the outside world. Merlin can watch what’s going on, but he can’t interfere directly. All he can do is observe.

Now he scowls at Eric, just the way he used to.

“Took your time getting back here,” Merlin says, disappointed in his student, as always.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to use my powers in twenty years.”

“Oh, well,” Merlin says. “Twenty years. How terribly difficult for you.”

He’s still an asshole, Eric thinks. Some things never change.

Merlin shifts and glares at him again, as if he can hear Eric’s thoughts. (Which, you know, he could sometimes. Wizard.) He’d always complained that Eric was barely qualified to be a magician, despite his abilities. Eric wasn’t English, which was almost unforgivable, at least as far as Merlin was concerned.

But he taught and advised Eric anyway, because there weren’t any other candidates. And because the servant of The End was in Middleton, too. Eric was the only one who could fight him.

At least, that’s what Eric thought, until he found out about Alana, and Carrie, and Danny.

Merlin coughs and spits something black into a corner of the cave.

“You don’t look good,” Eric says.

“Quiet,” Merlin says. “They’ve almost broken my tethers to your world. Fouled the glade. You’ve been away too long, and you haven’t much time to set it right.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Eric says. “I thought it was over. We beat him. We won.”

Merlin gives him a bleak look. “Don’t lie to me, boy.”

“Colchester is dead. We killed him.”

Merlin sits up, moving as far from the wall as he’s able, and for a moment, it’s like seeing him for the first time again, like when Eric first stumbled into this cave, and he blazed with wisdom and power.

“I said, don’t lie,” he shouts, and his voice echoes off the stone like a roll of thunder. “You know what you were supposed to do, and you failed. You turned away from your duty, and you disrupted the cycle of death and rebirth. You ignored your destiny, and your cowardice has given The End a chance to destroy everything once more.”

He sags and coughs up more of what ought to be blood, but it’s black and thick as pine resin. The moment is over. He looks old and broken again. And Eric feels nothing but rage.

He thinks about the first time he was told all of this. The war between good and evil, dark and light, with Middleton as the battlefield. How this place, this town, was special, how it was poised at the center of a universal balance, in this world and so many other hidden dimensions.

The End wished to claim it, and bring about eternal death and destruction. Eric had to save this town to save the world, to keep it in the light.

He sacrificed his childhood, risked his life, battled demons and monsters and things he barely understood before he was old enough to drive. He saw innocent people killed. And then it was all taken from him in a moment, leaving him broken and alone.

And now he learns, apparently, it wasn’t enough.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he says. “Again? You want me to do it all again?”

“No. I want you to finish what you started.”

“I did,” Eric insists. “I did my job.”

“You let your friends take your burden.”

“I found allies. I found another way.”

“I told you what was required,” Merlin says, wearily. “The only way to stop the dark sorcerer, the only way to prevent The End from winning — ”

“You told me I had to die.”

Merlin looks at him with something almost like sympathy. “Yes. Magic always demands a sacrifice. Colchester upset the balance. You had to die to restore it. To stop him. It was necessary. Instead, you let your allies fight for you, and they paid part of your price. But it wasn’t enough. And you knew it.”

“I was seventeen!” Eric shouts. “I had my whole life ahead of me! And you wanted me to die!”

Eric is prepared for Merlin’s anger. He’s not prepared for Merlin to laugh in his face.

“What else were you going to do?” Merlin asks. “The pool is cloudy, but I’ve seen you, you know.” He gestures at the scrying pool, which is dirty and nearly dry, barely a mud puddle now. “What have you done with your life? You missed magic so much you drowned yourself in its pale imitation. You’ve spent your years doing parlor tricks for mouth-breathing, gluttonous morons.”

Eric is stung. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Anything,” Merlin hisses. “You could have used that brain of yours. Do you know what kind of man can manipulate magic? Even without the raw power, you could have become rich beyond measure. You could have scraped the edges of the universe in math or science. Or you could have loved. Raised children. All you had to do was choose. But you knew, deep down. This is all you were ever meant to do. It’s all you wanted. It’s all you want now.”

Eric doesn’t care to admit that might be true.

“Now you’re back, because the fight is not over,” Merlin says. “There’s a new servant. A new vessel. And its Followers are working to bring about The End. Again. This is why your powers have returned. This is why you are here.”

“So let this generation’s Merlin handle it.”

“I can’t,” Merlin says. “The End already has the next one. There was a child meant to fill that role, but while you were off sulking, it claimed him. He’s lost to us now, because of you.”

Eric doesn’t feel like being blamed for this. “Then find another magician to stop him. That’s your job. I’m going to finally enjoy my life. Find another kid to fight your battles.”

Merlin laughs, coughs again, and black spittle stains his chin. “Boy, can’t you see what is in front of you? This is the last time you and I will speak. I cannot reach your world any longer. You are the only magician left, aside from the child. It is all up to you.”

It finally hits Eric. The desecration of the glade. The foul murk in the cave, the dried-up scrying pool, the coughing.

Merlin is dying. He looks weak. Eric can’t ever remember the old magician looking weak, despite being trapped here.

In this instant, Eric can see the small spark of what was once human in the magician beneath all those centuries. It’s nearly palpable now, the sheer accumulation of time, the number of lives that have passed, the dozens — hundreds — of children he’s met and trained and watched while stuck in this little cave.

Eric almost feels sorry for him, despite all the times he was sent out to do or die in his name.

Merlin waves his hand dismissively. “There’s nothing else I can tell you. You can leave now. Good luck. Try not to fail this time.”

Eric turns to go, preparing himself for the shift that will take him out of the cave, knowing that this time will be the last time.

He stops. He has one last question.

“Hey,” he says. “You remember when you taught me the rules of magic?”

Merlin looks at him wearily. “Of course.”

“First, magic always costs, and the price is always more than you are willing to pay,” Eric says, reciting from memory. This is why Merlin is wrapped in tree roots. The bill he’s been paying has lasted centuries. “Second, never use magic for evil, for selfish gain, or to harm an innocent. Third, never make a deal with a demon. And finally, remain chaste, or risk losing your power forever. Chaste. Which I took to mean, never have sex.”

“That is the generally accepted definition of chaste,” Merlin says.

“So was that true? Did I really have to stay a virgin all through high school?”

There might be a hint of a smile on Merlin’s lined old face. “Was that a problem for you?”

He only manages to hold a straight face for a second, then bursts into laughter.

“You unbelievable bastard.” But Eric smiles, despite himself.

Merlin breathes, exhales, and the sound of his lungs is like old paper being touched by a match.

“I didn’t want you to be too attached to this world. If you’d had something to live for, I thought it would make it harder for you to make the sacrifice,” he says.

“Yeah, well, that clearly worked out.”

“And I wanted you to be better than me, boy. I still do.”

Eric does not know what to say to that.

Merlin closes his eyes. Goes still. Eric does the same.

When he opens them, he is alone in the ruined glade again.

The sun is going down, the woods are full of shadows, and the mud around him smells of diesel and fumes from the Porta-John.

Eric is the last living practitioner of white magic in this world, and somewhere out there is a boy like him, only a servant of The End now; a boy he will have to kill.

He decides he could really use a drink.

9

Even Less Fun Now

Carrie cannot believe she has to drive her Geo Metro again. It’s been sitting in her parents’ garage for years, mostly idle. The front fender is still dented from where she hit that guy holding the shotgun on her friends that one time, and the stereo still has a cassette slot, but the goddamn car will not do the honorable thing and die.

It wasn’t exactly a happy homecoming when she arrived from the airport. She showed up as her parents were leaving the house for her mom’s Music and Memory class, like they do every Thursday.

Her mom scolded her for being out all night. “Honestly, Carrie,” she said, “I would expect you to be a little more responsible.”

Carrie didn’t try to remind her that she hadn’t lived at home for twenty years now. Carrie’s mom suffers from dementia, which is progressing rapidly. Mary Keene, who was a respected surgeon at Middleton Hospital, who saved literally thousands of lives in her career, who once knew the entire anatomy of the human body and the name of every structure and organ, now gets lost on her way to the bathroom. She noticed her deterioration in time to surrender her license — she was mostly retired anyway — but only just barely.

The doctors say it could be Alzheimer’s, or it could be vascular dementia, or a series of small strokes, or possibly a large one, or some other progressive deterioration of the frontal lobe. But they also say the specific diagnosis doesn’t matter because it will not change anything. None of it is treatable. Carrie’s mom is drifting away, a little further every day. In a few more months, or a year at the most, she will be gone.

The irony is not lost on Carrie. The girl who can’t forget has a mother who cannot remember.

Her father said they’d talk later. He was upset with her, because it would take that much longer to get her mom to the car.

Or he was upset with her because she was back home. They get along at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she and Mike Keene haven’t really been close since Carrie cost him his job as chief of police.

So, left to her own devices, Carrie found the keys to the Metro and went to work on another mystery, like when she was a kid.

She started with the only clue she had, aside from the symbol drawn in blood: the invitation.

Carrie didn’t recognize the writing on the back. And despite what the CSI shows tell people, handwriting analysis is only slightly more accurate than phrenology. Block printing is still pretty much untraceable, even to someone with FBI resources.

But Carrie recognized the handwriting on the envelope, which was different. She remembered the time in high school when Hailey Thomas asked Carrie to recover her diary, stolen from her locker. Hailey was the head cheerleader, on the student council, and queen of the mean girls.

They weren’t friends; Carrie wasn’t in school to make friends. She’d been busting her classmates for every minor infraction since kindergarten.

Still, Hailey begged and pleaded for Carrie’s help, and it only took a few minutes of searching. (It was stashed in Wade Wellman’s second-best hiding place, a hollow under a bottom shelf in the school library, along with a baggie of weed and some porn.) And Carrie got to read it. There was stuff in there that Hailey would never want made public, like a detailed account of the first time someone went down on her (it wasn’t her boyfriend; it wasn’t even a boy).

Hailey immediately returned to ignoring Carrie when she got the book back, of course, but Carrie never forgot the contents. Or the handwriting. Twenty years later, Hailey still dots her i’s with tiny circles.

It only took a glance at the Middleton High Reunion website to confirm her hypothesis. Hailey Thomas is on the reunion committee, in charge of the guest list.

Not exactly the perfect crime.

Carrie’s phone nags at her and she sees that she’s taken another wrong turn. Google Maps doesn’t know this neighborhood. It was only built a year ago. It’s still too new.

She decides to navigate the old-fashioned way, by looking at the numbers on the houses, and after another couple of blind turns, she finds her way to a cul-de-sac where a massive house sits away from its neighbors.

Now Google tells her she’s arrived at her destination, as if it wants credit. This is the address she pulled from the credit report she got online: Hailey’s new home.

Aside from the address and her credit score, all Carrie knows about Hailey’s life now is what she can see on Instagram. She’s a realtor, and she has an adorable little girl named Regan. The father seems to be out of the picture, since every other aspect of Hailey’s life is recorded for her followers, and there’s no sign of him.

Carrie walks up to the house and rings the bell. It echoes on the other side of the door in a way that she recognizes from a hundred other attempts to interview a suspect; empty homes have a sound all their own. Nobody there.

There are two reliable, Supreme Court-approved methods for a law-enforcement officer to enter a place without a warrant or invitation. The first is to have a reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed, and requires immediate intervention. The second is to have a belief that someone is in danger and needs help.

Carrie doesn’t glance around or check the street for witnesses; that sort of thing only makes you look suspicious. She brings her leg up, pivots, and kicks the door as hard as she can.

The frame splits at the lock, and the door swings open.

This is a trick her first training agent taught her. Now she has evidence of a crime being committed and a reason to believe that someone might be in danger inside the house: someone has clearly tried to break in.

Her dad would be appalled.

The house is dark and cold and quiet. She takes a deep breath. Carrie mostly works with numbers and screens these days. But when she was a trainee, she did a lot of field interviews, and sometimes she would find bodies. There were people who knew the law was closing in on them and did not want to learn what prison was like. There were people who were simply forgotten and abandoned, and who were left alone until Carrie pulled up to the house.

So she knows the rotting-pumpkin smell of a corpse. Of all the things Carrie wishes her perfect memory would let her forget, that odor is somewhere in the top ten. Maybe the top five.

She takes another deep whiff as she takes another step inside the house.

Inside Hailey’s home, it smells like pizza. That’s all.

There’s a new iPhone in a flowered case on the entryway floor. She picks it up. The screen shows a dead battery. She pockets it.

Carrie walks through the living room. The TV is on, flashing through the Blu-Ray screensaver of Frozen. There are plates with crusts on a Pottery Barn coffee table. Otherwise, everything is in perfect order. Carrie expected more glitzy crap, to be honest. She’s surprised to learn that Hailey had taste.

She goes into the kitchen. An empty pizza box. A can of soda. An open bottle of white wine.

She looks out through the dining area, which has a sliding glass door that opens onto a deck and a huge backyard.

There are deep scratches in the glass, extending down in five parallel lines.

Shit.

Carrie takes her gun out of her holster and heads upstairs.

Her foot is on the first step when someone kicks open the front door again and rushes through, shouting, “FREEZE!”

Carrie quickly holsters her gun and puts her hands up, even though he’s looking in the wrong direction. The last thing she needs is for Carl Stuckey to shoot her by accident.

“Carl,” she says.

He turns to her, then stops cold and points his gun in the air. “Carrie?”

He wears a chief’s stripes now, and has gained a few more pounds, but otherwise he’s got the same blank look on his face as always.

Carl was a rookie when she was in high school, a speed-trap cop with delusions of competence who lifted weights and wore tailored uniforms. He seemed to think police work was primarily about finding the right moment to leap across the hood of a squad car. Her father didn’t want to take him, but Carl was the mayor’s nephew, and little compromises were what paid for the new fleet of police cruisers at budget time.

He would get in her way when she was working her cases. Carl followed her around, dismissing the clues she found and the conclusions she drew. Then, after it had all hit the fan and she’d caught the bad guys, he’d stand by her in the pictures for the paper and take the credit.

When Carrie’s dad was fired, after the events on New Year’s Eve — what the national media called “A Horror in the Heartland,” or in the New York Post, “New Year’s Evil” — Carl got the chief’s job. It was the mayor’s way of telling the community that there would be change, but not too much change. And somehow he’s managed to avoid stepping on his dick in the twenty years since.

He goes to hug her, and realizes he’s still holding his gun. He holsters it, and she shakes his hand to avoid the embrace.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“The house had been broken into,” Carrie says. “I thought maybe Hailey was in danger.”

“Oh. So. Are you in town for the reunion?”

“Carl, maybe we should clear the house first, before we catch up.”

“Oh. Right.” He pulls his gun again. Carrie does the same, and they work their way up the stairs and into the bedrooms.

They check the little girl’s bedroom first. It’s painted with rainbows and there are stuffed animals all over the place, including the floor. They clear the hallway bathroom before heading into the master suite.

There’s a California king bed, and a massive framed portrait of Hailey and Regan that takes up most of one wall. An open door leads to a walk-in closet. Carl checks the bathroom. Carrie takes the closet.

The overhead light clicks on automatically when Carrie enters. It’s very bright.

Nothing. Just rows and rows of outfits.

Carl appears behind her. “Nothing in the bathroom,” he says. “Place is clean. We should probably go. She’s probably at work.”

“She’s not,” Carrie says. “I called.”

“Oh. Well. Either way. I’m going to have to get a locksmith over here to fix that door.”

Carrie isn’t paying attention. She looks down.

She kneels. She examines the thick pile of the carpet very closely, running her fingers over it and rubbing them together.

Carl sounds annoyed. “Hey. What are you doing there? You know, I’m not sure you should be here. This isn’t exactly your jurisdiction…”

Carrie pops up again. “You’re right,” she says.

“I am?”

“We shouldn’t be here.” She leaves the closet, walking right past him. “You coming?” she asks at the doorway.

He looks confused again. Then he follows her.

On the front step, he stares at her openly. “You look great,” he says. “Just like a real FBI agent.”

Carrie lets that pass. She has to admit, Carl looks the part of a police chief. From across a room or on a TV screen, he would appear to be solid and reassuring, a blue wall standing against chaos and crime.

Up close, however, you can see that time at a desk has caught up with him. His gut bulges over his belt, and a there’s a quiver in his jowls when he speaks, as if he’s carved out of pudding.

But he’s all she’s got. So she figures she had better try to get him on her side.

“Carl,” she says, “have you noticed anything unusual around town lately?”

He looks like he’s doing math. Then he shakes his head. “Nah. DUIs, a couple burglaries, stolen bikes.” He smiles. “Hey, remember when you found that old guy’s counterfeiting operation in the print shop?”

She wants to smack him with a rolled-up newspaper, like a puppy. Instead, she takes out her phone. “Have you seen anything like this?”

She shows him the photo of the Followers’ sigil drawn in blood on the carpet. The circle with the slash through it.

“Huh,” he says. “Now that looks familiar…”

She does not roll her eyes or make a rude noise, as much as she wants to. “You’re right,” she says. “Good memory. That’s the symbol of the Followers.”

Blank look, but only for a split-second. Then realization. “Oh. Them.”

“Yeah. Them.”

“But they’re gone. All of them. They’re dead.”

“That’s why this is so disturbing. I came across it in a completely unrelated case. Which leads me to believe that they might be active again. That could be incredibly dangerous.”

Carl shrugs. “Hey. You know. Kids. I see graffiti all the time with stuff like anarchy symbols, or the homicide code, or Helter Skelter, or 666. They’re all just little punks trying to be badasses.”

Carrie sighs, and gives up on the gentle approach. She’s always been more about brute force, overwhelming other people’s ignorance with a barrage of facts. It doesn’t win friends, but it’s always worked for her. More or less.

She flicks a finger across the screen, shows Carl the next photo in the series. The one of Lori Blanchard, nearly decapitated.

“That look like punk kids to you? They killed a woman, Carl. They strung a wire around her neck and cut her throat and let her bleed out all over the carpet.”

Carl goes very pale. He’s supposed to be a tough cop, but she doubts he’s set foot in an actual crime scene since he got this job.

“In twenty years, no one has used that symbol for any other criminal activity,” she says. “You should know this. The case records were sealed by the county court, remember? Everybody thought it was for the best. Do you remember what the DA said when he made the motion, Carl? To avoid inspiring copycats. Nobody would use that as graffiti. Nobody knows it outside of this town.” You moron, she doesn’t add.

“So what are you trying to say, Carrie?” he says, crossing his arms. He doesn’t appreciate the lecture.

She has to spell it out for him. She didn’t enjoy this when she was a teenager, and it’s even less fun now.

“The only people who would be involved in this would have a connection to the Followers. Maybe through someone in prison. Or maybe some members were never caught last time.”

Carl smirks at her. Carrie knows she’s made a mistake. She’s angry, and he knows how to deal with that. Just like old times, he dismisses her completely.

“Carrie. I’d like to help you. I would,” he lies. “But nothing is happening in Middleton. Honest. We’re a dull little town these days.”

“Where’s Hailey? Where’s her daughter?”

He shrugs. “Maybe she took a couple days off. Went to Disneyland. Who knows?”

“Right before the reunion she helped organize?”

Carl shows one of those uncharacteristic moments of sharpness she used to notice, like a glimmer of another version of himself. “Maybe she didn’t want to see some of the people coming back. Bad memories. I’m sure you can relate.”

Cute. “Thanks, Carl. I never thought of that.”

He smiles again. “Always happy to help. Now, I better call that locksmith. I’m sure that Hailey will want all of her stuff to be here when she gets home.”

Carrie goes to the Geo and gets in. Carl waves as she drives away.

She rummages in her bag, finds a wet wipe, and cleans her hand.

Carl is wrong, of course.

She didn’t see anything in the closet. But she smelled it. Someone was very, very scared. Someone pissed themselves on that rug.

That’s the only trace that’s left of them.

She didn’t bother to tell Carl. She also didn’t tell him about the scratches on the window, which looked like claw marks.

He wasn’t there on New Year’s Eve. He would never believe her. Even if he did, it wouldn’t change anything.

Carrie knows what left those marks. And she knows no one will ever see Hailey or her daughter again.

10

The Flawless Performance of Innumerable Lines of Code

Danny is the last to make it to Middleton.

It’s not because of his injuries. Yesterday, he summoned a doctor with an app. (The Next Big Thing, “like Uber for health care,” for those who can afford it. Danny is an early-round investor.) He had his cuts glued and his ribs taped up. The doctor offered him OxyContin. Instead, Danny put the pain in a small blue box in his mind, which triggered a biofeedback subroutine that enabled him to ignore it. This was one of the only useful tricks he learned from a New Age therapist his father insisted he see when he was a kid. It probably didn’t work for anyone with a normal brain.

That accomplished, he tossed his phone and all his tech and got brand-new devices, still in their shrink-wrap, from a closet in his home. He scrubbed them all and ran heavy-duty encryption and antivirus protocols when downloading his data from the cloud. He’d already taken his old computer and disks and smashed them to bits with a hammer.

Danny still has a hard time believing in magic. But he believes in viruses and malware, and he knows how to kill those.

Then he used one of his NetJets credits and booked a private plane to Middleton.

Despite his precautions, there have been little glitches all day, knocking him off schedule, the minutes snowballing until he’s hours behind. The power went out in his house this morning, taking all his systems offline. His Uber driver’s phone froze up, so he couldn’t find Danny’s address. The bank put a hold on Danny’s account, which required an actual phone call with a live person to untangle, like he was some kind of caveman.

When he finally got to the San Jose airport to meet the private jet, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was following him. Every CCTV camera seemed to be an eye turned in his direction. He had the irrational conviction that there was something measuring his steps, comparing his gait to a database, keeping track of him as he made his way to the plane. He knows the technology exists. He’s met the CEOs who are selling it, in fact. But he never felt like it would be aimed at him. He would have considered it paranoid.

He thought about how much of an airplane’s flight depended on the flawless performance of innumerable lines of code in hundreds of different devices, and wondered if it was that smart to board.

He shook it off and got on the jet. He put in his brand-new earbuds. Danny doesn’t actually like music that much. It’s distracting. But the earbuds keep him from having to speak with people, which is even more distracting.

So he plays Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (the 1955 and 1981 versions) on repeat; it always sounds, to him, like a perfectly built machine. (He first found the album in a collection of his mother’s things left in a closet, but he would consider that irrelevant if anyone asked.) It helped a little.

He made it. The plane didn’t crash.

But the feeling didn’t go away when he landed. Danny notices all the electronics all around him. People looking at their phones, rather than each other. Flatscreens on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, running through loops of advertisements and bland greetings from the mayor. The noise of announcements over the sound system. Ordinarily, this is comforting. He has always loved the idea of all these things performing within appropriate tolerances.

But for the first time he can remember, it doesn’t feel like they’re on his side. It’s irrational. He knows that. It doesn’t help.

The sun is going down as he makes his way to his rental car — it took an annoyingly long time to find his reservation, which had been lost in the system.

In the parking lot, he’s still wearing his earbuds, listening to the sounds of Gould mumbling along to his playing (he’s up to the 1981 performances), so he doesn’t hear the footsteps until the men are right behind him.

He turns around.

“I said, the fuck you think you’re doing back here, Sharp?” the first guy says.

Of course, Danny thinks. The henchmen. The thugs. The muscle.

It’s so insanely predictable he feels physically tired by it. It takes him a moment to place both guys. They graduated with him, but they’ve put on some mileage since those days. Mike Fuller and Lonnie Decker. He’s disappointed.

Not in them. They were not good people even in high school. Linemen on the football team, which was a get-out-of-jail card for all their little cruelties. They were never as bad as the West Side Warriors — Wade Wellman and his usual gang of idiots — but they got to let their worst impulses run free.

To Danny, the sad arc of their lives since graduation is obvious in a glance: their clothes and beer guts and mean little smiles. He can guess the contents of their browser histories, the porn sites they visit when their wives and kids are asleep, the “hot stepdaughter action” clips they have bookmarked.

“Look at the balls on you,” Lonnie says, “showing your face after what you did.”

Right. That.

Even without the threat of an occult conspiracy, Danny knows there are people who hate him and want him dead for what probably seem like pretty good reasons.

Danny shut down Sharp Industries and offshored its operations shortly after he graduated and took full control of the company. Along with the collapse of Sax Enterprises, the decision put half of Middleton out of work.

It nearly killed the town. The population dropped by 20 percent, and that was before the recession triggered by 9/11. Danny didn’t pay too much attention to the details. He was at Stanford, doing accelerated coursework and planning the pitch for his first round of venture capital.

It was the smart move. Electronics manufacturing was over in the U.S., and keeping Sharp Industries alive would have been a waste of money. He sold the brand name, inventory, and product lines to a Korean company while they were still worth something.

Danny does not feel guilty about this. Even though he still has to pay a guy to clean up the bags of dog shit and other garbage that are flung at his father’s empty house on a regular basis.

So he can see how Lonnie and Mike might still harbor a grudge.

He takes a stab at defusing the situation, even though he suspects it’s pointless.

“Look,” he says, trying a conflict-resolution routine he was forced to learn at a human-resources seminar. “I can tell you’re upset. We can talk about this.”

“Fuck you, Danny,” Lonnie says, shoving him so that he bounces off the rental car, setting Danny’s ribs on fire again. “My dad worked at Sharp for twenty years. Until you decided you needed another million dollars, asshole.”

The actual sale price of Sharp Industries was $135 million. Which is a point Danny is smart enough to keep to himself.

One more try. “And I know that must have been hard for you.”

Fuller slaps him. Dots and circles dance in Danny’s vision, another remnant from yesterday’s car crash. “You never should have come back, Sharp.”

All right, Danny thinks. I tried.

He taps an icon on his smartphone and a specialized tone plays. Infrasound. Well below the human range of hearing, but a deep, vibratory pulse that passes through them all.

It sloshes through the fluid of Fuller and Lonnie’s inner ears like they are standing on the deck of a ship in the middle of a hurricane. Instant nausea.

Lonnie goes green immediately and doubles over. Fuller, eyes wide, holds out for an admirably long moment. Then they’re both emptying the contents of their stomachs onto the asphalt with a heavy splash.

Danny, of course, still has his earbuds in; his ears are occupied by the gentle sounds of Gould’s take on the Aria da Capo, along with a counter-tone that neutralizes any ill effects.

His grandfather tried to sell a version of this to the army, back when Sharp still made weapons. It was too indiscriminate, the Pentagon decided. Couldn’t have the troops and the enemy both puking their guts out on the battlefield. Also, it didn’t kill anyone. Danny tinkered with the wavelength and turned it into an app recently, when he had a little spare time.

He goes to the trunk and puts his bag inside. He realizes he’s overestimated the efficacy of the app, however, when he turns and Fuller is on his feet again, blocking his path.

“You mother — ” he begins, murder in his expression, cocking his arm back for a punch that will probably break Danny’s jaw.

He stops. His arm isn’t moving. Fuller’s look of pure rage dissolves into confusion as he realizes someone is holding his wrist, keeping him locked in place.

“Danny,” Alana says. “Still winning friends and influencing people.”

“Alana. I thought you got in at four.”

“My flight was delayed,” she says.

Fuller gets over the shock of Alana’s ridiculous strength. He pivots and tries a swing at her with his left hand.

Alana moves her head an inch and lets it whiff harmlessly past. Then she yanks Fuller off his feet and hurls him like a half-empty garbage bag. He spins twice in the air before hitting the ground.

Danny looks at him rolling on the ground, in pain. “I guess you’re not keeping any secrets now.”

Alana shrugs. “I don’t live here anymore,” she says. “And I never liked these two.”

Lonnie, on his hands and knees, throws up again.

“Well. That’s disgusting,” Alana says. “You know, stuff like this is where you veer off into mad-scientist territory, Danny.”

“It’s possible he had a lot of ear infections as a kid. The vestibular system — ”

Alana gives him a look he hasn’t seen in a long time. He shuts up.

“You going to the Creek?” she asks.

“On my way.”

“My car is over there. I’ll follow you.”

She walks off, past the bodies of Lonnie and Fuller, who are trying to get up, but not very hard.

“Good to see you both,” Danny says to them, because he has to say something. He gets behind the wheel and pulls out, careful to steer around them.

He and Alana drive to meet the others.

11

Like Time-Lapse Photography

Carrie gets out of her Geo and looks at the Creek Bar & Grill.

This was where they drank when they were in high school. Back then, The Creek was the place the bartender would pretend you were 21 as long as you could pay for the $2.50 pitchers and the neon-yellow nachos he’d prep in the microwave. (You’d hear it every Monday morning: Hey, where were you Saturday night? Dude, I was up the Creek…)

It’s been remodeled. Now there’s a sign outside the Creek promising wi-fi, artisanal bourbons, local microbrews.

They all show up at about the same time. Danny appears from around the corner. Alana pulls her rental into a spot that opens up as she arrives. Eric steps out of the alley.

They stand in a loose square in the parking lot, four points on the compass, a few feet apart. For a moment, nobody moves any closer. They just look at each other. None of them are really the hugging type.

For a moment, Carrie’s memory strobes over the present. It happens sometimes, like time-lapse photography. She sees them as kids in high school, and then she sees them now.

Danny hasn’t changed at all from their last awkward visit, aside from the cuts and bruises. Still handsome. He’s a little heavier, but he was always a skinny kid. He was so angular and bony she thought she’d get cut that first time underneath him, both of them fumbling and hesitant.

They got better with practice. She shoves the images away before they get too detailed.

Alana is stunning, of course; she’s aged maybe five years in the last twenty. She must get carded all the time.

Even Eric looks good, although the goatee is ridiculous. At least he finally got rid of those dorky glasses.

She realizes, despite everything, she is glad to see them. They are the only people in the world who know exactly what she has been through. No one else has ever seen what they have seen. Whatever grudges or betrayals or wounds they’re still nursing, they’re a family — a fucked-up, strange, damaged (and, yes, it has to be admitted, incestuous) group of siblings, welded together by the worst and best days of their lives.

“Well, I guess we all got the invitation,” Danny says. He reaches into his pocket and comes out with the card. Carrie and the others, one by one, do the same.

It all becomes one message, one cry for help:

IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN

YOU HAVE TO STOP IT

YOU HAVE TO SAVE US

YOU HAVE TO COME BACK

That makes it official, Carrie thinks.

Eric looks longingly at the bar. “Can we go inside? I’d really prefer to have a drink in front of me when we discuss this.”

They step up to the door. They can hear familiar voices and old songs from inside. A playlist heavy on Sugar Ray and Backstreet Boys. A lot of their former classmates have showed up early for the reunion as well.

Carrie hesitates, and the others aren’t exactly shoving at her back to get in. They’ve fought monsters, but facing their past — that’s harder.

But one is pretty much the same as the other, so Carrie shoves the door open and walks inside.

They’re back. They might as well get this started.

The Creek is filled with laughter and warmth, and nostalgia so thick you can almost choke on it. There’s Megan and Jennifer and Kylie, the cheerleaders all together again, with the notable exception of Hailey. They don’t seem to miss her. They’re busy shrieking with laughter at something Justin Ward said. There’s Josh Malone, welling up while singing karaoke, tears spilling down his cheeks while he belts his way through “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the crowd cheers. There’s Darren Hofstadt, still the same shifty little weasel he always was, coming out of the bathroom with coke on his nose.

Carrie casts an unforgiving eye around the room. She can remember everyone perfectly, exactly the way they were twenty years ago, so she knows that they’re all lying when they say to each other, “You haven’t changed a bit.” And yes, she knows it’s unfair as she looks at her classmates. They’re all pushing forty. But most of the people here are pushing Middle America forty, while she and the others are not. It’s the difference between McDonald’s for dinner and quinoa. It’s five beers and falling asleep in front of the TV versus I-gotta-get-up-early-for-that-meeting. And more than anything else, it’s having kids and the lack of time and all the stress and worry and expense that goes with it. It’s the difference between stayed home and went off to the big city.

Some people look back at Carrie. A couple even nod. But no one comes near them. Nobody wants to catch up.

They find a table in the back. The music is like a curtain separating them from the rest of the bar, offering a little privacy. For a moment, it’s just the four of them. As if they were normal.

Carrie picks up the menu. Jesus Christ, the Creek is offering bourbon pairings. You really can’t go home again. The waitress, a girl who was a toddler the last time Carrie was inside this place, hustles back and forth with their orders.

Eric gets a shot and a beer, slams the whiskey, then downs half his beer in a single gulp before he begins talking.

“So yeah,” he says. “Colchester is back.”

Charles Colchester.

Carrie’s surprised that she’s so frightened when it was so obvious. It’s not like she didn’t see this coming, that the clues didn’t all add up. But some small part of her hoped it wasn’t true, like a little girl who hides under the covers from the monsters.

Some monsters are real. Colchester is one of them. He’s the source of all their nightmares, in one way or another. She and Danny had been forced to expand their worldviews to include magic and horror and demons smiling back at them, to see parts of their small town they’d never imagined before. Colchester was the evil that wormed through all of Middleton when they were kids. He’d lived in the town for at least a century, wearing a human face like a mask. Impossible, but very, very real.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, their senior year, they stood together and stood in his way as he tried to drown them all, the whole world, in darkness.

They won. Barely. To everyone else, it looked like a tragedy, the most horrible thing ever to happen in Middleton’s charmed history. The only other people who knew the truth were dead. Which is why their classmates look at them funny. All anyone knows is that the four of them were involved, somehow. And whatever else happened, they hadn’t stopped it. Whatever they’d done, it wasn’t enough.

Carrie and the others knew better. Despite the bodies and the blood, it could have been so much worse. The cost was high — way too high — but they won. They killed Colchester.

It was probably too much to ask that he’d stay dead.

“How?” is all Carrie says.

“Merlin said he’s using a kid like me,” Eric says.

“Disturbed?” Danny asks.

Eric gives him the finger. “You know. Magic. He’s tapping into the kid’s power to bring himself back to life. Like a parasite. Then he’ll be the new servant of The End, and they’ll try to do it all again. The death, the ritual, the destruction. End of the World, Part Two: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.”

“Dr. Edgar Sax is back, too,” Danny says. “Or at least, some version of him.”

Alana frowns. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Danny says. “He seems to be a ghost. But ghosts don’t exist. So clearly that can’t be it.”

Carrie knows it’s useless to press for details. Danny won’t commit to saying anything if he’s not sure of his hypothesis. And it’s enough to know that a sociopathic genius has apparently come back from the dead as well.

Alana rolls her eyes at him, then rolls up her sleeve. There’s a bite mark, already fading, but it had to have been deep if they can see it at all. “Hellhounds,” she says. “Things are out there, bumping in the night.”

“And the Followers are active,” Carrie says. “Three dead so far. At least.”

“You sure?” Danny asks.

She gives him a look. “Please. Who are you talking to here?”

“Right. Stupid question. Sorry. What about the police?” he says. “Do they know?”

“Carl Stuckey is the chief now.”

Eric almost, but not quite, does a spit-take. “Oh, terrific.”

“They’re useless then,” Alana says. “So who wanted us here? Who called us back?”

“It was Hailey Thomas. She sent the invites.”

Eric wipes beer from his mouth. “Miss Perfect Cheerleader. God, I hated her when we were kids.”

“She’s dead,” Carrie says. “And so is her nine-year-old daughter.”

There’s a moment of silence. Carrie sees that register on Alana’s face. Thinking of her own daughter, probably.

“Well, I guess I’m the asshole again,” Eric says. He picks up the pitcher, pours himself another, and drinks most of it.

“How’s that sobriety going, Eric?” Danny asks.

Eric glares. “I’m on vacation.”

Carrie takes another drink herself. She has a whole line of the dead who follow her to sleep most nights, all the people she couldn’t save, both here and in her grown-up life. Unlike the others, she can name and number every one. Now Hailey and her daughter have joined the crowd. She can almost hear Hailey’s voice, dripping with faux-sweetness: “Oh, don’t worry about it, Carrie. I’m sure you did your best. It just wasn’t good enough. What’s important is you tried. Is there a participation trophy for detective work?”

The others are waiting for her to offer details, she realizes. She puts the guilt aside. She’ll have plenty of time to wallow later.

“Someone wanted to make sure we couldn’t talk to Hailey,” she says. “And they used Shadowmen to do it. I found their claw marks on her patio door. She wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

Eric looks thoughtful. “Makes sense,” he says. “If I’ve got magic back, and monsters are crawling around in the dark again, that means the door is opening. Which means the Followers could have limited use of the Shadowmen, too, or Colchester could — ”

“Colchester?” a voice says from above their table. “You mean that old fossil they used to wheel out every Fourth of July?”

Carrie looks up as someone sits with them without asking. He can’t imagine a table where he wouldn’t be welcome.

Buzz Bixby. The all-around, all-American boy of Middleton high. Quarterback, MVP of every team (a goddamn miracle at shortstop, even Carrie had to admit), student-body president, Homecoming King.

And, despite all that, not a dick. He never crammed weaker kids into lockers or gave them swirlies in the toilets. (Lonnie Decker and Mike Fuller had that covered.) He was affable and decent. He was the nucleus that all the other popular kids revolved around. He was always a nice guy.

Carrie never trusted him. He always smiled a little too readily at everyone. He got along. Sure, he wasn’t a bully like the other jocks, but he never stood in their way, either. The niceness was like a Teflon coating that enabled him to slide past any hard feelings or tough choices.

Except one time, after Carrie ruined his plan for the fall football kegger. She’d tipped her dad off, and the cops showed up. Buzz walked past her Monday at school, smiling, no hard feelings. Then he hissed the words, barely audible, “Fucking snitch bitch.” The nickname they gave her. Too soft for anyone else to hear. Totally deniable.

But that was the first time that Carrie thought Buzz might have vast, subterranean pressures building inside him, and that little hiss was only the slightest release.

Now, however, he’s smiling at her. “That was his name, right? Colchester? From one of the town’s first families. Why the hell would you guys be talking about him?”

He’s going to try to kill us all, Carrie almost says, and stifles a completely inappropriate laugh. The normies don’t need to know.

“We were talking about the parade,” she lies. “How that guy must be dead now. How are you doing, Buzz? You look good.”

He does. He’s starting to go a little gray in places, but it suits him. He could be the hot dad on a TV commercial. He wears a suit with his tie pulled to half-mast.

“Thank you,” he says, “but I look at the four of you and I think I’m the only one from our class who’s aging.”

Buzz offers Danny his hand. “Danny goddamn Sharp,” he says.

Danny takes the handshake. They were never close, but they got along, mostly because Danny was too rich not to be included with the cool kids. “Buzz,” he says.

“Actually, it’s Robert now. We’re a little past high school nicknames, I hope. I hear you’re the King of Silicon Valley.”

“Not really,” Danny says. “I sold my company to Facebook.”

That stops them all cold for a second. “It wasn’t for much,” Danny says. “It’s not like I’m a billionaire now.”

Buzz smirks at him. “Yeah, but you’re still the richest person in this room, right?”

“Yes,” Danny says.

“How much was the sale, Danny?” Eric asks, his voice very tight.

Danny tells them, and they all go quiet for a second.

“Like I said, I’m not a billionaire,” Danny says again, as if he cannot understand why they are all staring at him.

He really can’t, Carrie knows. Danny has been so rich for so long that he really only thinks of money as a way to keep score. He is genuinely puzzled why they don’t see the difference between a billion dollars and anything less, she reminds herself. He’s not trying to be an asshole.

But she also has $35,000 in student loan debt, so she decides to change the subject before she forgets that.

“So what are you doing these days, Buzz?” she asks.

“It’s Robert,” he says again. “I did construction for a while, but it turns out it was a lot smarter to be the guy in charge of building the house than the guy building the house. I got lucky.”

He takes a card from his suit jacket, puts it on the table. It reads BIXBY DEVELOPMENTS. “If any of you are thinking about moving back here, I have some really nice places going up.”

Eric looks at the card. “Yeah, I’ve seen your work,” he says, with more anger than Carrie can understand. “Out in the forest. What’s left of it.”

“Can’t stop progress,” Buzz says, as if he doesn’t catch the tone. “You look great, Eric. I saw your act in Vegas last year. You killed it. Who knew you’d be a star, right?”

Eric was clearly prepared for insults rather than compliments. It short-circuits whatever he was going to say next.

“I know it’s hard to see the old places get torn up, but honestly, we’re fortunate to have so many people coming to Middleton,” Buzz says, helping himself to a glass from the pitcher. “We nearly didn’t make it.”

Buzz tells them about the layoffs, the stores closing on Main Street, the people lining up at the food bank, never making eye contact with each other. He’d blown out his knee during his sophomore year, so he’d lost his scholarship. He worked construction jobs when there were any. Most of the time, there weren’t.

“Some people just gave up,” Buzz says. “You remember Coach Burland?”

Their youth soccer coach when they were all at Middleton Elementary. He took them to Grizzly Bear Pizza after every game, win or lose.

“Well, one day he got out all his Christmas decorations and put them up. Middle of March. Plugs them all in and lights them up. Even that big electronic Santa he had, going ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’ on the roof. Remember that?”

They smile. They all remember.

Buzz smiles too. “And then he went inside, took his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

That last part he says while looking right at Danny.

Danny’s face remains perfectly blank.

Buzz laughs and shakes his head quickly.

“Oh, Danny, I’m not blaming you. I mean, you did what you had to do, right? Just business. I’ve made those calls myself. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. There are people who are mad at you, but I’m not one of them. I’m only telling you what happened. None of you were here. You didn’t know.”

There’s nothing in his tone that sounds angry or false. But Carrie thinks she catches a little gleam in the corner of his eye.

“And suddenly, everything got good again,” Buzz says, the smile coming back. “I’m selling houses faster than we can build them. Everyone wants to live in Middleton again. We’re blessed. Truly.”

Carrie feels the need for a change of subject. “So, where’s Mrs. Bixby?”

For a moment, Buzz looks as if he’s been caught. His mouth opens and closes. He sees where Carrie is looking. At his ring finger, where he wears a gold band.

“Oh. This?” He holds his hand up. “Yeah, sadly, that didn’t work out. No good marriage ever ends in divorce, right? But I still wear the ring. People trust a family man, you know?”

Carrie and Alana exchange a look. Yeah. They’ve both known guys who keep their wedding rings on.

“And we’re still parents to a terrific kid,” Buzz says. “That’s the important thing.” He stands. “I’m really glad you’re all here. It wouldn’t be a reunion without you.”

Again, there’s no tone. Buzz doesn’t really do irony, as far as Carrie recalls. But something kicks over in her brain, like it always does. She’s beginning to see the shape of it. The inevitable fall of dominoes that will lead to the answer.

Then the door slams open, and two big, angry figures stomp through.

Mike Fuller and Lonnie Decker.

There isn’t a literal record scratch. The bar doesn’t actually go silent. But it’s close enough. People turn and stare, and the music is suddenly painfully loud as conversation dies down while they all gawk.

They scan around the bar, until their eyes lock on Danny and Alana.

“You motherfuckers,” Fuller shouts.

“Oh, right,” Danny says. “Alana and I ran into these two at the airport.”

Fuller and Lonnie stalk over to the table. A good chunk of the crowd comes with them.

Carrie finds it difficult to take them too seriously. They look ridiculous, a bad parody of their former selves. They’re still wearing their high school letterman jackets, even if they can’t close them over their beer guts. They’re still bullies. Alana or Eric could skin them alive without any trouble.

“You think that was funny, Sharp?” Fuller screams. “You always let a woman do your fighting for you, you pussy?”

“Her?” Danny says, looking at Alana. “Absolutely.”

Eric smirks. Lonnie catches it.

“Something funny, Jewboy?” Lonnie says, squaring off.

Eric always let Lonnie get away with that in high school, because didn’t want to let anyone know his secret. But they’re not in high school anymore.

Eric stands up and takes a step closer to Lonnie. “Fuck you,” he says.

“What?” Lonnie looks like he’s been slapped. Eric never spoke to him like this before. Not ever.

“Fuck you,” Eric says again, slowly and distinctly, grinning like an idiot. “You might be the toughest dad at Applebee’s, but it’s not nearly enough. Believe me.”

Lonnie regains a little composure. “See, this is why you shouldn’t have come,” he says. “You’re not welcome. You think anyone here wants to remember what you did?”

He opens his arms wide, creating an imaginary line: Eric and Danny and Alana and Carrie on one side, himself and Mike Fuller and the rest of their graduating class on the other. They stand behind Lonnie as if waiting for an excuse to move, to start throwing punches and furniture. Tommy Taylor picks up a steak knife from the nearest table, a serrated blade with a chunky, olive-wood handle that probably retails for sixteen bucks at Pottery Barn. Others hold their craft-brew bottles by the necks like they’re trying to figure out how to break them.

Something else is going on here, Carrie realizes. Something is pushing their buttons.

Surprisingly, Buzz Bixby whistles loudly and plants himself right in between them all.

He speaks to Lonnie, but he’s addressing the whole crowd. “Shut up,” he says. “Seriously. All of you. Of course they’re here. And we should be glad.”

That sets off a round of grumbling. The word “bullshit” is repeated more than once.

“You are a bunch of ungrateful dicks, you know that?” he says, smiling but shaking his head. “How many times did these people save you when we were growing up?”

Buzz points at a random guy. “John Dennis,” he says. “Who got you out of the caves under Snake Hill when you were ten?”

John Dennis mumbles something and looks away from Buzz.

“That’s right. My man Danny built a robot that went down there and dragged your dumb ass out. And Mark,” Buzz says, pointing at Mark Hall. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but who did you ask for help when you found that weird chess set and you were crying all the time, talking about your nightmares — ”

“All right, all right,” Mark says, embarrassed. “It was Eric.”

“Damn right. And Darcy,” he says, turning to a blonde woman by the bar. “Who did you go to when your dad’s store was robbed? That’s right: Carrie. And Brandi, what about that creepy guy you said kept following you home, even though nobody else saw it, and you asked Alana to — ”

Then one small voice in the back of the crowd says it: “But what about New Year’s?”

Buzz’s smile switches off. “A lot of bad things happened on New Year’s.”

“Yeah,” someone else says, louder and more belligerent. “But they left.”

And the shouting starts again.

Buzz looks back at Carrie. He steps aside, with a shrug and an expression like, Well, I tried.

With Buzz out of the way, people begin shoving, crowding toward them. Someone flings a bottle. The bartender produces a baseball bat from under the cash register.

And Eric and Alana smile in a way that Carrie really doesn’t like.

This is going to get bad.

This is going to get bad, Danny thinks.

There has to be a way to stop it. Preferably without Alana removing anyone’s limbs or Eric turning anyone inside out. Eric could probably beat the crap out of Lonnie and Mike even if he didn’t use his powers. He’s spent years untangling himself from straightjackets, breaking out of deathtraps, and hanging from high wires. (And getting into bar fights and occasionally spending the night in jail.) He’s not the skinny kid he used to be.

Danny can’t use his vomit ringtone in here. There are too many people making too much noise. He wonders how fast he could rig up a taser using the battery from his watch.

Probably not as fast as Carrie could pull that gun she’s got in the concealed-carry holster hidden by her untucked blouse.

But that would be wrong. Right?

They’re supposed to be here to help these people. These are their classmates. Kids they grew up with, in most cases from kindergarten. They’re not here to fight these people. Something else is pulling on their strings, cranking up their adrenaline.

So Danny thinks harder. He searches for a less permanent answer. Looks up. Finds it.

He grabs Eric by the shoulder, hard, as the crowd jostles and pushes and shoves forward. Alana whisks the big table into their path as if it weighs nothing, but that won’t stop them.

“Eric, can you cool things off a bit?”

“What?” Eric says, annoyed.

Danny looks up at the ceiling. Eric looks up. The sprinkler system.

Danny knows Eric hates it when Danny tells him what to do.

But he’ll do it.

Eric hates it when Danny tells him what to do. He always acts like he’s in charge, even when he doesn’t have a clue. It hasn’t gotten any less annoying over twenty years. Some answers aren’t on the SATs, he always wants to tell Danny.

But he’s right. Which also hasn’t gotten any less annoying.

And besides, this will be nothing. He sees the water pipe above and knows exactly what to do. It’s easy.

Magic always has a price, but this barely costs him anything. No future children, no lost loves, no plane crashes or midnight phone calls in his future. This is the equivalent of a cigarette: ten minutes off his life somewhere.

He reaches with his mind and finds the water waiting behind the valves. Eric imagines a faulty switch, a weak spot in a support brace. He imagines that nobody has maintained it for a long time, and the pipe sags and grows too heavy as it fills.

And as he imagines it, it becomes real.

Eric can feel it, as if it’s in his hand. In his mind, he pulls —

And suddenly the pipe breaks and water rains down.

Eric takes the water and whips it into a thunderstorm. Which is a neat trick, considering they’re indoors. There is suddenly too much weather for the confined space. Sixty, seventy mile-per-hour winds blast through the Creek, water lashing everyone like a high-pressure hose. Lonnie gets thrown back by a tidal wave. The rest of the crowd is soaked like they’re standing in a hurricane while the fire alarm whoops. People are knocked to the ground, gasping for air.

That’s enough, Eric thinks, even though it’s not. There’s a part of him that wants to keep pushing, wants to keep pelting them all, slamming them against the walls and tables and chairs until they’re battered to pieces —

Enough, he thinks again, and the storm kicks once before it complies. The howling wind dies down, enough that people can see again, and move. People wash out the front door as it opens. Drenched, they retreat, crowding out into the parking lot. Nobody’s even looking at the four of them anymore.

Except Buzz.

Buzz stands very still, staring at them. His hair is plastered to his skull, his perfect suit is soaking wet, and he doesn’t appear to care at all.

Danny grabs Eric’s shoulder again, and pulls him toward the exit with the others.

12

You Don’t Have to Go Home but You Can’t Stay Here

Outside, they watch their classmates stomp to their cars, dripping wet. A few of them glare. Lonnie flips them off, then slams the door of his SUV before he revs the engine and peels away.

A moment later, they are alone in the parking lot again. Eric looks at Danny and Alana and Carrie.

“I have a question,” he says. “Are we absolutely sure we want to save these people?”

“Not funny, Eric,” Carrie says.

“I’m not joking. We know how grateful they were last time. I’ve never gotten anything but pain from doing this. Can any of you tell me why we should keep slamming our heads into the same brick wall?”

“Because it’s what we do,” Alana says. “It’s what we’ve always done.”

“And what happens if we don’t? What happens if we just walk away this time?”

They all stare at him. Judging him. He can feel it.

“You can’t be serious,” Carrie says. “That wasn’t them. It was him. You saw how they reacted in there. He’s back. He’s tugging at all of us, he’s pushing us — ”

“And I don’t care,” Eric shouts. He has been back for less than a day, and he is so fucking sick of this place already. “Here’s the big secret answer to all the mysteries of Middleton, Carrie: they like it this way. They let this happen. Over and over. You know that.”

“That’s not true — ” Carrie says.

“Stop fucking lying,” Eric hisses. “You were the one who told me. Before your dad was police chief. Before they put kids on milk cartons. How many runaways did this town have? How many kids went off to join the circus? As if that was really something that nine-year-olds do? They let it happen.”

“Not everyone knew,” Carrie says, not looking at him.

“Enough of them did. So why do we keep saving them if they won’t stay saved? Why don’t we let them pay the bill for their own deal with the devil?”

“Just take a breath,” Danny says. “You’re drunk — ”

“And you’re a sanctimonious asshole, you know that?” Eric says, wheeling on him. “The great Danny Sharp. Sad because you only made half a billion dollars for selling your company. Jesus Christ. You could lose a million dollars a year for the next 500 years before you run out of money, and you’re complaining? You were born rich and you act like you’re owed even more. Well, here’s a fact for you, genius: you were twenty years ahead of your time — twenty years ago. You haven’t had a good idea since.”

Danny looks at him calmly. Fucking robot.

“Eric — ” Carrie begins, a warning tone in her voice.

But he blows right past it.

“And you. The snitch bitch. Always asking questions with that little frown of yours. Always telling people the rules. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be the only one who gives a damn?”

He turns and sees Alana, watching him. Jesus, he really is drunk. He should stop. He knows he should stop.

“Come on,” she says. “Do me next, Eric. I’d love to hear it.”

“You know I’m right,” he tells her. “Everyone hated you, too. No matter what you did for them. They all hated you.”

She shrugs.

“Then why are you here?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Eric admits. “I am just so tired of this. I did enough. I did my part. And I’m the one who had to pay the biggest price for what we all went through.”

Whoops. That might have been a little too much. Eric knows it the instant when he sees Alana’s face.

“What?” she says.

He tries to explain. “Come on. Look at you. You’re still strong. Carrie’s still smart, and Danny’s still rich. I’m the only one who lost anything.”

Yeah, that didn’t help. She considers him for a long moment, as if trying to decide if he was really stupid enough to say that.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” he says, and it sounds feeble, even to him. “You know what I mean.”

Alana walks over to Eric and looks down on him. For a second, her eyes are full of wrath. For that second, there is a potential in the air, like a gathering of static before lightning jumps from storm to ground.

Eric is pretty sure she’s going to kill him where he stands. He tries to think of a spell, a countersign, anything. Nothing comes to mind.

Alana takes a deep, shuddering breath, and some of the murder leaves her eyes.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she says. “I paid more than any of you to save this town. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Eric should shut up. He really should.

“Then why do we have to do this all again?” he asks.

Alana trembles. “There is exactly one reason we are here again. And you know what it is.”

Eric feels the blood drop out of his face. He swallows hard.

Alana turns to the others. “Did he ever tell you? It’s him. He was supposed to die that night. He was supposed to break the cycle. We all could have moved on, and led normal lives. But he wouldn’t. He was too scared. We had to save him. And that’s why we’re all here again. Because he couldn’t do what he was born to do.”

She looks back at Eric, as if deciding whether or not to hurt him. Then she shakes it off and walks away.

She’s around the corner before any of them exhale again.

Carrie turns to Eric. “Is this true?” she demands. “You could have ended it all that night?”

He shrugs. Might as well come clean. “Hey, sue me. I didn’t want to die at seventeen. Did you?”

“No,” Carrie says. “But I would have. I was ready. I was prepared. I thought you were, too. If it would have kept this from happening again.”

“That’s the point: nothing would have kept this from happening again,” Eric says. “I don’t need you to tell me how wrong I am. Nobody does. Why don’t you finally get a life of your own so you can stop fucking with everyone else’s?”

Carrie stares at him for a moment. “Wow,” she says. Something seems to occur to her. She looks at Danny. “Did you know about this?”

Danny, astonishingly, looks embarrassed. “I had an idea.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“Obviously not.”

Carrie shakes her head. Somehow she still has the Creek’s soggy, crumpled menu in one hand. She flings it at Danny, and it smacks wetly against his chest. “You colossal asshole.”

Without another word, she goes to her little blue car and drives off.

Danny looks at Eric.

“Shut up,” Eric says, and walks away, just so he’s not the last to leave.

13

This is Where She Gets It

Carrie finds her dad in the kitchen when she gets home. Former Chief of Police Mike Keene stares at his tablet, reading, while Pearl v3.0 sits at his feet. This one is some kind of a pit bull/shepherd mix, with maybe a bit of Chihuahua or something weirder thrown in. Like the last two dogs named Pearl, it’s a collection of mismatched parts, taken from the shelter by Carrie’s dad because it had no chance of being adopted by anyone else.

Carrie gets a glass of water and sits down across from him. The dog shoves its head against her leg. She pets it and it rearranges itself by her father, grumbling a little as it settles on the floor again.

They’re always named Pearl. They keep the name the same to avoid confusing her mom. Carrie had a dog named Bailey when she was a kid. But her dad would never give another dog that name. That would be almost sacrilegious. There was only one Bailey.

Her dad looks up at her, sees her wet hair and generally bedraggled appearance, and frowns at his tablet again.

“If you’re moving back in, we may need to discuss a curfew again,” he says.

“I thought you old guys went to bed after the evening news.”

“Dog needs a walk,” he says. “I was waiting for you. Can you keep an eye on your mom?”

“Of course.”

“Good. We’re not running a crash pad for ex-FBI agents here.”

It might be a joke, but his tone isn’t funny.

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not asking for my old room.”

“You sure?” he says. He shows her the news story on his tablet. It’s an article in the Washington Post. Something about the dismissal of the charges against Gannon. (Her father doesn’t read the Middleton Daily News, and hasn’t for years due to long-standing grudges.) She’s not named, but the entire prosecution is being blamed on “an overzealous agent with an axe to grind.”

But she can’t think about that right now. If she survives whatever’s coming, she’ll consider her career choices.

“Maybe I’ll go into local police work,” she says, trying to lighten the mood.

He doesn’t smile. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Yeah. He’s definitely pissed. She doesn’t have to be a detective to figure that one out. “Something on your mind, Dad?”

He takes a second, deciding whether or not to speak. Carrie doesn’t want to push him over the edge one way or another. She can wait him out.

“Carrie,” he says, and his voice gets deeper, and a little of his anger breaks through. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Carl told me you were snooping inside someone’s house.”

Snitch, Carrie thinks. For a moment, it’s all too familiar. How many times did they have this exact conversation at this table, late at night?

“I was just looking to say hi to Hailey,” she says. “You know. Catch up.”

Her father sighs and looks away. With a small start, Carrie realizes, for the first time in her life, that this is where she gets that little mannerism. They have exactly the same response to bullshit. She wonders how it took her this long to see it.

“You know, it’s always hurt a little that you think I’m stupid.”

“Dad, I don’t — ”

“You think I don’t know what it looks like when you’re working a case? After all this time? For God’s sake, Carrie.”

“All right,” she says, “I’ll level with you.” She takes out her phone, and taps over to the photos. She takes a deep breath. This is going to require a lot of explanation, going back a long way.

But when she looks up, she sees him shaking his head. His face is tight with anger.

“Don’t,” he says. “Whatever this is, whatever you’ve gotten mixed up in, do me a favor: keep it to yourself.”

Carrie is baffled for a moment. He’s her dad. He needs to know about this. She needs his help. This was the way it always worked. She would uncover the problem. He would tell her to stop, to leave it to the professionals. Then she’d solve the crime, and he’d snap on the cuffs.

“Carrie, you’re my daughter and I love you, and I always will. But this is not my job anymore. And it’s not yours, either. Leave it alone. For once in your life, please, I am begging you. Leave it alone. ”

“Dad, there are people in danger. Middleton — ”

He pounds his hand down on the table, cutting her off. Pearl jumps, looks scared. “Oh, you don’t give a damn about anyone here, Carrie. You only want to solve the puzzle. You want answers. And you don’t care what happens to anyone else as long as you get them.”

Carrie feels like she’s been slapped. “That’s not true,” she says. At least, not all of it.

“Really?” he says. “Because that’s how it always looked to me.”

There it is. It’s been twenty years, but the wound hasn’t ever healed for him.

Carrie still believes that Mike Keene was one of the best cops she’s ever seen, and not because he’s her dad. She’s met literally hundreds of people in law enforcement since she was a kid, and she can remember them all perfectly (of course). He loved the job. He was, as she once heard on her all-time favorite TV show, “natural police.” Witnesses talked to him. Even the angry drunks respected him. He knew the people on his beat. He knew when to punish them, and when to let them get away with it. He would have been a star in any department.

And she took that away from him. His whole career. His whole purpose in life.

It doesn’t help that he suspects Carrie has never told him the whole truth about what happened that night. He’s right, of course.

Before New Year’s Evil, they were more like partners than parent and daughter. They always had each other’s backs. He let her follow her hunches, and she delivered the bad guys to him. It drove her mother nuts. But her father would always forgive her if she bent or broke the rules, and she would always tell him where the clues took her.

Until everything exploded, too many people died, and it turned out she knew it was coming.

He said he did not blame her — said it so often, in fact, that it was like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. He was still trying to be on her side. Trying to be the reliable, faithful man she’d always known.

Once, however, that mask slipped. It was the day he’d had to turn in his badge, a completely unnecessary public humiliation that the mayor orchestrated for the local paper and the cameras of the TV stations. Mike was home and out of uniform when Carrie got back from school, the first time that had happened since she was in third grade, and he’d had to stay with her while she recovered from a tonsillectomy.

He sat at this kitchen table, a beer open in front of him, half-finished. He looked at her, and for a moment, neither of them said anything. There was genuine confusion in his eyes when he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She turned away from him, and they both pretended he’d never asked the question. She didn’t know what to say. The obvious answer was, of course, “Because you never would have believed me.” Her father was a smart man and a competent, solid police officer. But he lived in the real world. How would he have reacted if she’d told him that literal fucking evil was coming for all of them, that the Devil was real and so much worse than anything they ever taught in Sunday School? She wanted to say that he would have had her committed or searched her room for drugs.

The problem was, she knew that was not true. He would have listened. He might not have believed her, but he would have listened. She had earned that much respect from him. He would have been afraid for his daughter’s sanity, but he would have let her speak.

She didn’t tell him because she didn’t think he would be able to stop it. Or even slow it down.

And there was always that nagging little voice, asking the question she never wanted to face: what if he was in on it?

It seemed impossible to her, but she had to consider even the impossibilities.

She never told him. He couldn’t help. He might have made things much worse. He would have trusted her, but she didn’t trust him.

Now he’s telling her to leave town, to go away, to leave it all be. As if he doesn’t even know her. Which raises that same little nagging question again.

So, fuck it, she might as well ask. “Did you know about it, Dad? Did you know about the Followers?”

She could have shot him in the stomach for the pain and shock that flickers across his face. He seems to age another twenty years in the space of a second.

“God,” he says. “Damn.”

That look is all the answer she can bear. She wishes, not for the first time, that she could take back the words that came out of her mouth.

“Dad,” she says. “I’m sorry, I just wanted — ”

Compounding her shame, he tries to comfort her. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he says quickly. “You had to ask.”

He takes a deep breath. “Everything I’ve ever done has been to keep you safe. You and your mother. I can’t lose either of you. I am begging you. Would you please walk away from this? For me?”

She looks at him, helpless. She would like to tell him what he wants to hear. But somehow that seems like it would hurt more than the disappointment and pain she sees in his eyes right now.

“Dad, come on. You know I can’t.”

That is the difference between them. Her dad is a cop, not a detective; they are not always the same thing, and this has been a divide between them since she hung up her first hand-drawn poster offering to help her classmates find their missing pets and recover stolen lunch money. A cop wants to keep the peace, above all else, even if that sometimes means ignoring things happening out of their line of sight. A detective, on the other hand, wants answers, even if that means disturbing the peace and digging up graves.

He rubs his eyes, then gets up from his chair.

“Well, I tried,” he says. He takes Pearl’s leash off a hook by the door. “I should get going before it’s too late. Take care of your mom, please.”

“Dad — ”

His voice rises. “Can you at least do that, Carrie?”

“Sure,” she says quietly. “Of course.”

He tries to smile at her. “Thank you.”

He walks Pearl out the front door. He closes it carefully, so that it doesn’t slam.

Carrie sits for a moment longer. She will remember this moment forever. She remembers them all, of course. But this one will always hurt the most.

14

I Never Believed in Prophecies

Eric gets as far as the front desk of the hotel before he remembers he already maxed out his credit card on the rental car. He opens his wallet and counts the bills. He thinks of old cartoons where a character would do that and a moth would fly out. He’s not quite that broke, but he’s down to his last hundred bucks.

Everything he knows about magic, and he still hasn’t mastered the art of turning lead into gold.

“How much for the night?” he asks the teenaged desk clerk.

“Don’t worry about it,” Danny says, only a step or two behind him. “Can we get a room for my friend here? I’ll cover it.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” Eric says, wondering why he can’t just shut up and take the peace offering.

“No, I owe you,” Danny says. “I was almost the biggest asshole there tonight, but you saved me.”

And there it is. With Danny there’s always a kick to the teeth, so you know how much smarter he is.

“You know, maybe I should have let the lynch mob at the bar have you.”

“Then who would have paid for your room?”

The clerk ignores their conversation — she probably gets a lot of practice — and asks Danny for his credit card. Danny slaps down a black AmEx.

Eric’s mouth goes a little dry, thinking of the money behind that flat rectangle of plastic. He’s seen them in the casinos before, but never up close.

Something occurs to Eric. “Why aren’t you staying at your dad’s place?”

“Walking into haunted houses was always your deal, not mine.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“Ghosts, no. Memories, yes.”

A wall goes up behind Danny’s eyes, like it always did when they were kids. Eric knew his relationship with his parents was screwed up, but he couldn’t imagine what it was like growing up as the latest model in the Sharp product line.

The clerk goes into the back room, doing whatever it is hotel clerks do back there — honestly, Eric has worked in hotels in Vegas for more than a decade, and he still has no clue — giving them a moment to talk.

“Look,” he says, “about what Alana said — ”

“It doesn’t matter,” Danny says.

“It kind of does. She’s not wrong, Danny. This is all my fault. If I’d died, like I was supposed to, maybe Colchester would have stayed dead.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. I never believed in prophecies. I barely believed in what you could do, and I saw it. It seems a little vain to assume that an entire Apocalypse depends on one person. But it doesn’t matter now. The town is still here. We’re still here. We’ll deal with it.”

He shrugs, as if that settles it. God, Eric has almost missed Danny’s lunatic self-assurance, his arrogant belief that every problem can be solved with the right application of knowledge and effort.

“Why are you doing this?” Eric asks, which he has to admit is not terribly gracious. But he really wants to know.

Danny gives him a does-not-compute look. “What do you mean?”

“Why do you keep helping me? The rehab, the loans, the car I crashed — ”

Danny looks annoyed, like he can’t believe they’re still talking about this. “You’re my friend.”

That’s probably the scariest thing Eric has ever heard come out of Danny’s mouth.

Danny smiles. “Anyway. There are a lot of other people I’d rather see dead than you.”

Eric smiles back, despite himself. “You know, just because you’re the smartest guy in the room doesn’t mean you’re always right.”

“Only 99 percent of the time. And just because you’re a magician doesn’t mean you can wave a wand and solve everything.”

“Wands are for losers.”

The clerk returns with their keys. Danny signs the receipt.

They don’t talk as they ride in the elevator together. Eric’s room is a few doors down from Danny’s.

“I don’t want to see any porn on the bill,” Danny says before his door clicks shut.

Still a prick, Eric thinks.

There’s a room-service tray sitting on the floor in the hall. Eric stops and picks up the salt shaker. Unscrewing the cap, he pours a thin line across the threshold of his room. He hesitates for a moment, and does the same in front of Danny’s room, even if he is a prick.

Then he goes down the hall to sleep it off. He steps into his hotel room without disturbing the salt at the threshold.

But as soon as he places his foot over the line, he knows it’s too late. A chill runs through him that isn’t from the hotel air-conditioning. The hairs go up on the back of his neck. There is a sudden, staggering pain in the center of his forehead, a pressure inside his skull that tells him his third eye is open wide again.

The devil is already waiting inside.

He doesn’t look like much. There is only what appears to be a small boy, sitting on the bed, flicking through the channels on the TV. He’s a perfect blond angel. He looks like he should be asleep at the foot of a Christmas tree while waiting for Santa. Casting agents should be fighting to get him in commercials. You could wrap him in an American flag and sell anything.

Eric isn’t fooled. He looks with his third eye.

The boy — or whatever’s riding him — is crackling with dark energy, spikes of black radiating from his aura and snapping off into the air. It is almost too much. It hurts to look at him closely.

But if Eric focuses, he can see that this is only the smallest part of something else that is pushing its way into this world.

It’s familiar.

He shuts down his third eye with effort, and the pain subsides. It’s only a little boy on the bedspread again. He sits up, swings his short legs to the edge of the bed, and stares at Eric. Eric has the uncomfortable feeling that something is examining him all the way down to his bones.

“You know who I am?” the boy says. He smiles, milk-white teeth gleaming.

Eric recognizes that smile. Now he sees the skull beneath the skin. Charles Colchester: the servant of The End, the hand of darkness, the Good Man, the leader of the Followers. The enemy he thought they destroyed twenty years ago, now wrapped in a shiny new package.

Eric spent the best part of his childhood trying to avoid being murdered by this guy. He recognizes the mannerisms and the expressions. He knows the hard, ugly intelligence behind those angelic blue eyes, and hears the same antique, Midwestern twang coming out of that mouth. It’s possibly the creepiest thing he’s ever seen, and he’s watched the dead rise from their graves.

What is speaking through the boy isn’t the full measure of Colchester. It’s an echo, a ghost, mixed into the child’s own soul. But it’s unmistakably him in there, sharing space, crowding out the body’s real owner.

Growing up as he did, Eric doesn’t bother thinking it’s impossible. He was haunted by Colchester for too long. Eric never really believed he was dead, despite everything that happened. He should have known it wasn’t enough.

Colchester could never be dead enough.

“I know who you were,” Eric says. “I’d know you whatever face you were wearing. Who’s the kid?”

“Does it matter?”

“That’s the new Merlin, isn’t it?”

“He was.”

“I’d heard you took his body. You need a host.”

“I was invited. We came to an arrangement. It’s delicate, but it works. He’s even stronger than you were.”

Eric summons his first defense, a magic shield to ward off evil, and holds it ready. He knows he’s already at a disadvantage, but he goes through the old moves anyway. He always figured something would come for him. It turned out to be later rather than sooner. The attitude slides back over him like a suit of armor. He knows how to talk to demons and monsters. He knows never to show fear.

The boy seems to feel the gathering power in the air. He smirks, an expression far too cynical for his angelic little face.

“You don’t need that. I’m not here for a fight.”

Eric hesitates. Then he laughs. “Yeah. Sure.”

The boy snickers, a nasty little sound. “I wouldn’t believe me either. But I’m not here to kill you.” He hops off the bed, and takes a few steps. “Come with me.”

“What?” Eric asks, because it’s the most intelligent thing he can think to say.

The boy makes a face like he can’t believe this is what he has to work with. “I’m not here to kill you,” he says again, slowly. “I’m here to make you an offer.”

The room tilts, and Eric finds himself someplace else.

Eric is shaken to realize he’s now at Snake Hill, shifted in space so quickly he barely noticed the transition.

The boy keeps walking, as if he had not taken one step in a room miles away and put the other foot down here.

Eric spent a full year mastering that trick, and he always needed a door to use as a prop. Whoever or whatever this kid is, he’s incredibly powerful.

“Come on,” the boy says again, and begins climbing up the grassy hill.

Eric knows he should try to get away from here. Find the others. Or he could start throwing magic around, and begin the fight that he’ll probably lose.

Instead, Eric follows and they walk in silence toward the top of the mound.

I’m stalling him, Eric thinks. I’m getting more information from him. I’m learning about his evil plan so I can stop him.

But that doesn’t sound terribly convincing, even to himself.

Snake Hill is not technically a hill. It’s a raised pile of earth, about the length of thirteen football fields, deliberately sculpted in the shape of a snake. When the first settlers in Middleton showed up, they assumed the Indians made it. But the local Plains tribes wanted nothing to do with it; they stayed away from it, and warned the first white people in the area to do the same.

For about a hundred years, it was just a weird thing in the distance, a landmark that people didn’t especially like to visit. Eventually, a couple of archaeologists from a university back in Rhode Island showed up and declared it an earthwork built by the first indigenous people to settle in the valley. They were part of a culture that made metal tools and weapons, carved stone tablets, and traded with other settlements up and down the continent, all the way to Mexico.

The archaeologists dug in the dirt and found copper jewelry. And religious icons. And bones. Thousands of bones. They discovered the remains of hundreds of men, women, and children. All of them ritually sacrificed in religious ceremonies, like others were by the Incas and Aztecs.

The archaeologists quickly filled the holes they’d dug and left town. They later wrote up a report calling it a burial mound and a primitive observatory, like Stonehenge. Snake Hill was declared a historic site, to keep anyone from putting houses on top of it. But nobody really wanted to live there anyway.

Whatever the first natives were trying to appease or bribe with their ceremonies, it didn’t work. The tribe disappeared from history, almost all at once, as if everyone who lived in the valley walked away at the same time. It’s an academic mystery that occasionally gets debated in a few obscure journals.

Eric knows what really happened. He knows what the people here were trying to keep down. Snake Hill is a burial site, true. But not for anything remotely human.

They are at a flattened area where a stone table once stood, about 300 years before the birth of Christ. There is now a fairy ring of plants and long-stemmed grass in a wide, near-perfect circle that marks the spot. It’s called the Serpent’s Crown by some people. Alana’s people, the Fair Folk, call it the Well of Stars.

Whatever you call it, this is where the serpent was fed.

Eric is not thrilled to be back. He can feel the power running under his feet, feel the thing writhing and straining again under the dirt, still waiting to get out. There is old, dark magic in the ground, rooted deep in the pain and suffering of innocents, and it would bend easily toward extinguishing whatever light is left in him.

Danny wanted to bulldoze the entire place after New Year’s Evil, send a battalion of heavy equipment to churn it into mud and broken pottery. That was his answer for everything: machinery. Eric had to talk him out of it. Merlin had warned him: the things down here had to stay buried. You couldn’t destroy what had been contained in the earth for that long.

The boy — screw it, just call him Colchester, that’s who he is — stops at the top of the serpent’s head and looks at the sky. He holds up his hands, a gesture of peace. “I want you to know this is not about revenge. I am not that petty.”

Eric laughs, because if Colchester is going to kill him anyway, he might as well be honest. “Bullshit.”

“You know, you never understood me, son,” Colchester says, his voice warm and folksy and old, no trace of the child in it now. “You never knew what I was doing. You only thought you did.”

“I remember you trying to kill me. A lot.”

“Well. You were an annoying little shit.”

Eric can’t argue with that.

“But that’s not why. We were on opposite sides. It was a war. Wars have casualties.”

“Yeah. I know. The war between good and evil, light and dark, the beginning and The End — ”

Colchester lets out a laugh that reminds Eric of the bray of a donkey. “That’s what that old fraud Merlin told you. Children are made for fairy tales like that. Admit it, you loved the idea that you were the chosen one, battling to save the world from evil.”

“Are you seriously trying to tell me you were the good guy? I saw the people you killed.”

“I’m saying that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are too small for what we are. Let me ask you this: all my Followers. Why do you think they joined me? Why do they do everything I ask, no matter how horrible?”

“I always assumed they’re sick fucks who enjoy it. Or they thought they’d get eternal life and they didn’t care who else had to die.”

“That’s a fairly ugly view of humanity for someone who’s supposed to be a hero.”

“Yeah, well. People suck.”

“You’re wrong,” Colchester says. “Not about people. They’ll do anything if they’re given the right motivation. That’s why I had them kill each other. You have to get the buy-in. The bigger the atrocity, the better. They figure it must be worth it. Because it has to be.”

Living in Vegas, Eric has seen a lot of that. Unfortunately.

“But you’re wrong about why they follow me,” Colchester says. “They follow me because I offer them true peace and happiness. Not eternal life, or immortality, or anything like that. I never lied to any of them, son. I only ever gave them the truth.”

This is too much for Eric, and not just because a necromancer inside the body of a tiny child keeps calling him son. A good magician never reveals his secrets. An evil one, apparently, never shuts up about them.

“Right. You told them you were going to kill them?”

“I told them I would lead them to The End. The End to all their problems. To their pain. Their suffering. The end of strife, of hunger, of hate, of unhappiness. I promised them what they have always wanted. I offered them peace.”

“The peace of the grave.”

“Oh, aren’t you dramatic,” Colchester says. “Is that really so terrible? Isn’t this what they want? Every one of them longs for Heaven, but no one understands it. This is what they have been praying for all this time. They will finally sink into the soft earth and they will pull up their shrouds like warm blankets. They will be reunited with their mothers and fathers and their dead pets, all together again at last. They will be happy, because their struggle will be over. They will be over.”

“And so will everyone who gets in their way. I remember what your gift looks like. But somehow you managed to stay alive. You got stronger with every corpse.”

“You still don’t understand,” Colchester says, his voice actually pleading now, the little boy’s eyes shining with tears. “I have to see it completed before I can share it. I have endured centuries of pain. Tell me, how is that not love? One battle after the next with self-righteous magicians like you. I have committed atrocities for the greater good. The End is for everyone. Including me. That’s what I want. That is my great, evil plan: to die.”

“Right. And the kid you’re wearing right now? What does he want?”

Colchester looks surprised by the question. “Do you really care?”

“I’m curious.”

“He thinks he will be reunited with his parents.”

Eric smirks. Colchester looks wounded.

“It’s true,” he insists.

“Just not the way he thinks.”

“He’s a child, like you were. He needs the fairy tale.”

“But now that I’m all grown up, you’re willing to tell me the truth. I get it. Well, that’s really generous of you, but what if I’m not ready to die?”

“That was always your problem, wasn’t it?” Colchester says. “You weren’t willing to sacrifice yourself last time. You didn’t want to continue the cycle. So you dodged the choice.”

“Call me a coward,” Eric says, summoning power into his fist. “Please.”

“I never would. You gave me the opportunity to stop this endless fighting. I sent my essence out into the world and found this boy. It’s taken twenty years, but my Followers have sacrificed and performed the rituals, and we have wedged the door to the Other Side open again. Now I have a chance to tip the scales, to alter the rules. I have the chance to end it all. Permanently. Thanks to you. And I’m willing to offer you a reward.”

“Like what?”

“There are other worlds than this one,” Colchester says. “You know that. You want to leave this world and find another, I will not stop you. I will even hold the door open for you. I’ll have the power to do it.”

Eric thinks about that. He’s always known that he could — in theory — bend his way into an entirely new existence with his abilities. Now that they are working again, and with the raw power that the boy represents, and Colchester’s knowledge, he could go anywhere. He could find himself a perfect world. His idea of Heaven. A place where he is immortal, all-powerful, or merely rich and famous with a supermodel wife. He could have literally anything.

He could be happy there.

Eric looks at Colchester warily. “What do I have to do in return?”

Colchester smiles as if Eric is finally getting the right answers on a game show. “All magic comes with a cost. You know that. The price of power for you: your three friends. You deliver them.”

“For what?”

Behind the innocent blue eyes, Colchester gives him a look as cold as any reptile’s. “You already know the answer to that. Magic requires a sacrifice. Your friends are special. They’ll be enough.”

Eric knows this is the part where he is supposed to tell the evil mastermind to go fuck himself. Where he is supposed to say he’d die before he would betray his friends.

But he doesn’t. It doesn’t leap from his throat the way it’s supposed to.

Colchester senses his hesitation. “Or you can say no. You can try to stop me. We can fight it out right here. It will save me the trouble of tracking you down later.”

The boy’s body begins to glow, and he hovers a few feet off the ground, so they are eye to eye. Eric can feel the ground rumble, like a fighter jet is about to take off nearby. He has been outmaneuvered completely. This is Colchester’s seat of power. He can do almost anything here.

He could certainly kill Eric.

Which isn’t to say Colchester is invincible here. He’s locked into the body of the boy. If Eric kills the child, Colchester dies too.

Colchester inches a bit closer. “You want me dead, boy, this is the only way to do it. You help me. Deliver your friends for the ritual, and you get a ticket to a brand-new world. I give you my word, and you give me yours.”

He puts out his tiny little hand to shake. Sparks leap from his fingers.

Eric goes over the words in his mind. As Merlin always said, words have power. Words can bind you. Bad things happen to a magician who breaks a contract.

This is why Merlin always said: never make a deal with a demon.

But Merlin’s dead, and Eric isn’t. Not yet.

He has been so empty for so long. The past two decades have been an open wound, a constant reminder that he used to be more. Now that he has magic back, he’s not sure he could survive giving it up again. He’s spent so much of his life worrying about other people. Trying to save them. Trying to please them. Trying to be like them.

And what does he have to show for it? A one-bedroom in Vegas and some Starbucks loyalty points.

Colchester is giving him a chance to never worry about anything again. To be safe. To be happy. To live his whole life over again, if he wants. To get it right this time.

Eric thinks it over for a moment. He takes the boy’s hand in his own.

He says, “Sure.”

15

Normal People Stumble Along

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The word keeps bouncing through Mike Keene’s head. He shamed his daughter and yelled at her and generally acted like an asshole.

All because he’s still guilty for what he did.

Part of him screams that he did his penance, that his punishment was more than his crime. It’s the small, selfish part of him, though. The little voice he’s always tried to crush, the part of him that is greedy and fallible and afraid. He knows when he’s about to get into trouble. It’s when he listens to that voice.

But he still hears it. It says things he’d never say out loud and this is one of them: there are times when he wishes his daughter was someone else. He knows it is not especially fair, and he doesn’t feel like a great dad at these moments, but he can’t get over it, either. There are parents who used to envy him. Carrie was so smart, so perfect, so good. She was a rule-follower, she was scrupulously honest, she was a top student. They wished their kids were more like her.

They had no idea. They couldn’t imagine what it was like, having to live up to the example set by your own child.

Mike is fairly sure Carrie never has these moments of weakness. She always does the right thing, no matter what the cost, which is why she’s looking at unemployment, and why she’s back in town to solve another mystery.

This is what Carrie never saw, why he can’t quite forgive her — or Danny, or the Bright girl, or the Weiss kid. (He was a cop and a father. He knew more than any of them thought. He knew. He kept their secrets for years without them ever knowing it. And he’s never asked for so much as a thank you.)

They never understood the cost they inflicted on everyone else around them, just by doing what they did. Just by existing.

They almost always won, and when they lost, they had their terrible certainty that it was only temporary. Because they didn’t understand failure, even when they failed. They would always get back up again. They’d get the bad guys eventually.

Carrie and her friends don’t realize that normal people give up all the time. That’s what makes them human. Normal people stumble along, learning as they go. They get knocked down, and sometimes they stay down. Normal people make accommodations. They compromise.

Carrie won’t. None of them will. They have the same childish insistence that the world should be different, that it should be the way they see it. And they will never quit. No matter what.

Even today, she never flinches from the truth. She doesn’t understand how other people can see it as uncomfortable, how they can prefer the shadows to the bright glare. There isn’t room for so much as a little white lie in her world — and she can’t understand why anyone would live any other way.

He compromised. He can admit it. The morning after the massacre, when the rest of the town was still in shock, Mike was called to a meeting in the mayor’s office. Together, they engineered the cover story.

Mayor Irene Massey had her sights on bigger things than Middleton. She wanted to be a congresswoman or a senator. She didn’t see anything that should stop her. Not even the bodies cooling in a refrigerated truck because there wasn’t enough room in the coroner’s office.

First, she said, the shootings and the pipe bombs were all the work of Wade Wellman. One boy. One shooter. A lone gunman.

Mike tried to tell her that’s not what the investigation showed. He said there was evidence of a conspiracy. Adults who encouraged, maybe helped the Wellman kid —

The mayor stared at him until he stopped talking, and spoke in a flat, calm voice. “A lot of people saw your daughter out there, Mike. Several witnesses saw her with a gun. Right before the big explosion.”

“Carrie would never be involved. She would never hurt anyone — ” Mike started to say.

Massey cut him off. “Of course she wouldn’t. I know that. And you know that. But you know how it looks. You know how the media is. They don’t care about the truth. They want a good story. If you start on all this conspiracy-theory nonsense, who knows where it might lead? Everyone knows that your girl has had dealings with that kid and his little gang before. She’s always sticking her nose into things, stirring up trouble. What if someone with a grudge decides to blame her for what happened? What if they say she’s involved? The daughter of the chief of police, a mass shooter? That would be some headline.”

Mike sat back and closed his mouth. He understood.

He listened quietly through the rest of the meeting, as they locked down all the details, so no one outside Middleton would ever know how bad it was or what really happened. Even when they got to the part about him turning in his badge in front of the media, he didn’t say anything. He behaved. He got his pension. He protected his daughter.

He went along quietly. He let them bury the truth.

God, Carrie would be so disappointed in him. He’s carried this shame around with him for twenty years. He would like to blame Carrie for all of it. It would be easier.

But it wouldn’t be true. He’s the one who fell short. Not her.

And he’s afraid that if she’s back, if it’s all starting again, she will find out.

Mike turns around, ready to go home.

That’s when he sees it for the first time. He’s been so deep in thought that he didn’t notice the car trailing him.

He raises a hand and waves, and the car rolls forward silently. It’s moving fast enough that it disturbs him. He casually glances over his shoulder and sees another vehicle, a white van. There is no one on the street. There are no houses, only the golf course and, on the other side, the back of a strip mall.

He’s in trouble. It dawns on him only now, too late to do any good.

Stupid, he thinks. It’s a kind of arrogance he’s seen in other old cops. They think nothing can hurt them because they used to be the toughest guy on the block.

He bends over, still smiling, still acting friendly, as if to clean up after Pearl. Instead, he unhooks her leash. He tells her to run. She looks up at him with the blind loyalty of a dog, as if she smells something wrong in the air. But he tells her to go again and she does. She always bolts for home when she gets a chance. Usually it’s a pain in the ass. Now he’s glad.

He hears the van’s door roll open behind him. He’s boxed in. They step out, guns drawn, making it clear that even if he carried a weapon — he doesn’t, he’s never thought of himself as a gunslinger — there is no chance. They have him.

Mike is going to die, and he knows it.

He’s always hated those moments in old movies where the hero faces down impossible odds, knowing he’s about to die, and still says something clever and brave. It never made sense to him. His life has been, if anything, a mission to prevent people from dying too soon, and if there’s one thing he’s learned, it is always too soon. He’s seen people die, and he’s never believed in any such thing as a good ending. No matter how it comes, quick and violent or slow and painful, it’s still an ending.

He never saw the point of uttering famous last words. Not until now. Now he does.

So as much as he wants to curl into a ball, or at least spend his last moments thinking of his wife and all the good moments they shared, he knows he has to do something else. He said goodbye to Mary a long time ago. He’s done his mourning for her already.

Instead, he tells them, “She will find you.”

They hesitate, for a moment, and he’d smile if he weren’t shaking.

“You’ll never be safe. You’ll never get away,” he says. “She will find you. It’s what she does.”

He senses their discomfort. Their hesitation. He knows it because, despite his great, fierce love for his daughter, he shares it. He always has.

She will never give up. Never compromise. Never stop.

These people in the dark. They know it too. They’re scared. They get over it quickly, but they’re scared. They’re scared of her. She will solve this crime, and she will find them.

When the bullet comes, that’s almost enough.

INTERLUDE

The Case of the Candy Cult

MIDDLETON. THEN.

The big ugly guy raised his shotgun as Carrie steered her little blue Geo Metro into the parking lot of the No-Tell Motel. She didn’t even slow down.

She saw his eyes get wide, and then there was a hard thump as she hit him with the front bumper. He went flying in one direction, the shotgun in the other.

Carrie finally hit the brakes and skidded into a parking spot not far from the white van.

She’d called her father, of course, but she couldn’t wait. She ran over to the van and yanked open the doors.

A half-dozen kids from Middleton High were inside. They looked terrified. But they weren’t handcuffed or tied up. They stared at her for a long moment.

“Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for? Come on!”

They still hesitated. Brianna Matthews, who had the locker next to Carrie’s, finally spoke up.

“They said they would do stuff to us if we ran,” she said in a hollow, whispery voice.

Carrie rolled her eyes. “Well, they will definitely do stuff to you if stay here, so move your ass.”

Brianna and the others got up — so damn slowly — and finally, finally, began hustling out of the back of the van.

“Thank you, Carrie,” Brianna said, teary-eyed. “Thank you.”

Carrie resisted the urge to bellow “I told you so” at the top of her lungs. “Where are the others?” she said.

Brianna pointed at the motel buildings. “I think they’re in there,” she said.

“Great. Run,” Carrie said. She headed in the opposite direction, scooped up the shotgun from the ground, and carefully but quickly moved toward the motel.

She hid at the corner of the nearest building, holding the shotgun like her father had taught her, wondering if she’d be able to use it.

All this over candy bars, she thought.

It had all started innocently enough. A guy named Adam Goodson came to town, offering cash and prizes and part-time work to everyone at the high school, selling candy bars door-to-door. He drove a bright-red Porsche 914, wore his thick, blond hair in a ponytail, and he smiled a lot. The rich kids, like Danny, and the jocks and popular kids, like Buzz, didn’t bother to join up.

But Wade Wellman and the Warriors did.

They were always up for any scam. They got their boxes of candy and their T-shirts that said SALES FORCE in neon lettering. They bullied and they threatened. They stood over the youngest and smallest kids and shook them down. They went to the homes of senior citizens and loomed on their front steps until the old people bought something.

They weren’t breaking the law, Carrie noticed. They were very careful.

They began flashing the cash they’d made around school. They showed off their new toys, bonuses from Goodson: Walkmans, CDs, Game Boys, fresh new Nikes. Carrie thought of a brochure her dad had brought home from a conference about pedophile grooming behaviors.

But it was hard to argue with success. More and more people joined in. Within a couple of weeks, it was like half the school was involved.

Carrie wasn’t surprised Wade and the others were acting like shitheads; that’s what they did. What surprised her was how fast other people went along with it.

Case in point: one day, after school, Wade went into the parking lot and began asking kids to sign up while they were waiting for the bus. They worked their way down the line until they got to Ryan Ortega, a sophomore who’d made the junior varsity football team. Ryan wasn’t a dork or a geek; he was mildly popular, a decent athlete, got pretty good grades. He was normal.

That’s probably why he thought he could get away with telling them no.

They told him to buy a candy bar. He told them to get stuffed.

“You sure about that?” Wade had asked.

Ryan said, “What, you gonna hit me over some candy?” Someone laughed.

Wade turned away. It looked like Ryan had called his bluff.

Then Wade shoved Ryan off the sidewalk and into the path of an oncoming car.

The car hit its brakes almost instantly. It was driven by a senior who was on his way out of the parking lot. It wasn’t going too fast. Still, Ryan suffered a broken leg and collarbone. He would miss about a week of school plus the rest of the football season.

Carrie didn’t witness it, but she heard about it the next day. Everyone did.

But nobody ratted out Wade.

Ryan said he slipped. He was scared. Nobody who was in line said anything different.

And the other Sales Force kids — not the Warriors, but ordinary kids, ones Carrie had known since grade school — they laughed.

She saw them in the hallway, imitating Ryan’s surprised lurch in front of the car, his screams of pain, his limp as he walked in his cast.

They thought it was hilarious.

The Sales Force began moving in packs, carrying thermos mugs of coffee, muttering phrases like “ABC: Always Be Closing” and “Business is war.” They clustered together in the halls, the lunchroom, the gym. They looked at other people with smirking contempt, commented on their clothes, their shoes, their hair. The Sales Force gathered up a lot of people who were used to being ignored, the kids who didn’t get elected to student council, who never had anyone decorate their lockers on their birthdays, who never heard their name on the announcements for winning a game or taking some top academic honor. Suddenly, they belonged; they had their own clique.

And they had money. A lot of it. Goodson handed out fat stacks of cash to his people. There was enormous pressure to sell, and to find new recruits, and to join up. Carrie was soon the only one in her homeroom without a T-shirt.

It got weird fast.

The students pounded on their lockers as Carrie walked down the hall. All together, like the drumbeat at a football game, or in some kind of tribal ritual. They all stared at her as she went past.

And they chanted. “HOW MANY? HOW MANY? HOW MANY?” Bam-bam-bam. Bam-bam-bam. Bam-bam-bam. A steady pulse, almost in time with her footsteps, following her all the way to her own locker.

Boxes, they meant. How many boxes had she sold.

Carrie wasn’t selling, so she went through this every day. She walked past all the other students as they stomped and pounded and glared at her.

Everyone she saw wore the SALES FORCE T-shirts now, neon-green with the lettering like a heavy-metal album cover. The ones they got for selling their first box of chocolates. It had become a uniform at Middleton. Carrie could hardly believe it. Only a couple of weeks, and everyone was singing the monorail song.

Carrie spun her combination lock, grateful to have an excuse to look away from all the accusing eyes.

The doors opened at the end of the hall again, and the pounding took on a new urgency. “HOW MANY? HOW MANY? HOW MANY?”

Wade entered and held up his hands. “Fifteen!” he shouted, and a deafening cheer went up.

Carrie stashed her homework in her locker, ignoring the hate-mail that fell out. (She got three or four notes a day now, all of them calling her a bitch for not selling the candy bars.) Unbelievable, she thought. Wade had become a hero. All his past sins forgotten because he turned out to be a natural salesman.

Other people came in the door, and they all shouted their totals as well. They high-fived and ran and cheered their way down the hall. It really hadn’t taken that long for Middleton High to become the home of a cult.

Brianna walked up wearing one of the Sales Force T-shirts.

Carrie was surprised. “You too?”

Brianna was a perfectly average girl. Average grades, average looks. Invisible most of the time. She and Carrie got along. In fourth grade, Carrie had proven Brianna’s innocence when she was accused of cheating on a test. (The stolen answer key had been hidden in her desk by another student. Wade, of course.) They were friendly, if not exactly close.

But now Brianna was different. Brianna looked…mean.

“You got a problem with it?” she said. “You going to snitch on me, like you always do on Wade?”

“Wade is an asshole,” Carrie said, a little taken aback by the attitude. “You used to know that.”

“Maybe I grew up,” Brianna shot back in her very best snotty-girl voice. “Maybe I didn’t want to be a sad loser like you. Look around. You’re the only one who’s not on board.”

Carrie did. Brianna was right. Everyone within a hundred yards was wearing Sales Force gear. They were all on the same team. Carrie was alone in a sea of fluorescent green and lightning bolts.

“But why?” Carrie asked. “You know what they did. You know what they’re doing. Why would you want to be a part of that?”

Brianna’s tough-girl mask seemed to slip. “I dunno,” she said, looking away.

“You saw what happened to Ryan. You like Ryan. Why would you be okay with that?”

“It feels better than being left out,” she said quietly.

“What? You’d rather have someone order you around? That’s better?”

Brianna turned, her mouth drawn down into an ugly scowl. Something seemed to snap in her. It was as if a light turned off overhead. Shadows seemed to fill the hollows of her eyes and nose and mouth, like black ink spilled over her face. For that instant, Carrie looked at Brianna and saw a skull staring back.

“Why can’t you do as you’re told, Carrie?” she said, in a voice far colder than Carrie had ever heard from her.

Carrie stepped back. “Jesus. What the hell is wrong with you?”

But just like that, Brianna was fine again. Normal. Another fresh-faced young girl in Middleton. Whatever shadows had covered her face a moment earlier were gone. She rolled her eyes at Carrie. “God,” she said. “No wonder you have no friends. You can never go along with anything.”

She spun on one heel and walked away from Carrie. Carrie looked around the hallway, wondering if anyone else saw what she did.

Nobody would look at her. She was more than unpopular. She didn’t exist anymore.

One good thing her parents did was buy her a car. It was only a Geo Metro, true, and looked more like a plastic Easter egg with wheels than actual transportation, but despite its 3-cylinder engine, she still managed to break speed limits all over town. She wasn’t above abusing her privileges as the chief’s daughter to get out of tickets. She had important work to do.

After school, she drove straight to the place where Goodson was staying. He’d set up camp at a motel just past the city limits, where the Middleton Police Department’s jurisdiction was supposed to end. It was a run-down, slapped-together structure, two floors of cheap rooms in a horseshoe shape around the parking lot. Some of the guys on the football team called it the No-Tell Motel and swore they’d had sex with actual hookers out there.

Goodson’s room was on the first floor, and the door was covered with laminated posters and stickers, all reading MIDDLETON SALES FORCE! in the same extreme font as the T-shirts.

She knocked. He opened the door, wearing only a towel around his waist.

“I didn’t know this place had room service,” he said, and gave her what he must have thought was a charming grin.

“Wow,” Carrie said. “You always greet high school girls like this? Because that would not surprise me, honestly.”

The oily smile vanished. “I was going to take a shower. You interrupted me.”

“There’s this new invention you might have heard of. It’s called pants. Most people put them on before answering the door.”

“Maybe I was afraid you’d break it down. You’re the police chief’s daughter, right? The one who won’t sell. I hear you’re some kind of junior Sherlock Holmes.”

“Compared to me, Sherlock Holmes is a rank fucking amateur.”

That made him laugh. “You’ve got quite a mouth. What do you want?”

“Why are you here?”

Goodson took an exaggerated look around himself, eyebrows raised. “Reasonable rates.”

“No,” Carrie said. “Why are you here? In Middleton. Why are you doing this?”

He smirked. “We’re just selling some candy. Do you have a problem with that?”

“People are getting hurt. You know that.”

“Hey, I can’t be held responsible if some kids get overzealous,” Goodson said. “They’re all subcontractors. Says so right on the papers they signed.”

“How can you afford this? You’re paying kids way too much money for candy.”

“Well, it’s really good candy.” Goodson reached into his room, and came out with one of the foil-wrapped bars. He peeled it open, and offered it to Carrie. “Here,” he said, voice taunting. “See for yourself.”

Every old saying about candy and strangers came to Carrie’s mind. Was it something in the chocolate? Was that actually it? If that was the case, what would happen if she did eat it? Would she go soft-headed too? Another zombie in the candy-bar army?

But she wanted to know. And she couldn’t stand the thought of backing down from this jagoff.

She took the bar, broke off a chunk, and popped it in her mouth. She chewed. Swallowed. Waited a moment.

Goodson smiled as if he’d won something.

Nothing happened. The world didn’t spin. She didn’t pass out. It was…just candy. Just cheap, ordinary chocolate. A little chalkier than your average Hershey bar.

“I don’t see what’s so special about it,” she said.

“Ah. You don’t taste the secret ingredient.”

“What’s that?”

He bent toward her. Carrie leaned a little closer, despite herself.

He stage-whispered one word: “Salesmanship.”

Carrie recoiled. “Seriously?”

“That’s it,” he said. “What makes America great.”

Carrie gave him her best withering stare. His whole face became a shit-eating grin, happy now. He thought he’d won.

“Why?” Carrie asked. “Why are you doing this? What do you possibly get out of it?”

His grin grew wider and he stood taller. Carrie honestly loved these moments. She’d been here before. And this was always when the guy decided he was smarter than some little girl. This was always the moment when they thought they were so far ahead that there was nothing they could do to screw it up.

This was that moment. He looked at Carrie like she was something that had been set down in front of him on a plate.

“I’m the collector. That’s all.”

Carrie had no idea what that meant.

Then she noticed something. When she met Goodson before, he wore long sleeves. Now, of course, he was almost naked. She could see he had a tattoo on one wrist. It instantly went into her mental database, along with everything else. A distinguishing mark for her files.

It was a circle with a slash through it, like the sign for something that wasn’t allowed.

She stared at it. Goodson began to look uncomfortable.

“Well. I got people to do and things to see, sweetheart. So if you’re not buying or selling, we’re done here.”

But before he closed the door, he winked at Carrie. Actually winked at her.

All right, she decided. Game on.

Carrie looked for every possible clue. She dusted the sales brochures for Goodson’s fingerprints. Her father ran them, and found no arrests. (“Nothing? At all? Jesus Christ, Dad,” she’d yelled at him. He’d given her that look between amused and annoyed, and said, “I thought it would be good news that a guy who works with kids doesn’t have a criminal record.”)

She staked out the hotel, watching from her Geo parked across the street. Unfortunately, there was nothing criminal that she could see. She recognized some dads checking in with women who were not their wives, but other than that, she got nothing.

Goodson had two helpers. Big guys. There was a wide, bald guy, thick with muscle, who favored white T-shirts and tight blue jeans, and a tall, skinny guy with a greaser haircut who preferred gray coveralls. She called them Thing One and Thing Two. They unloaded boxes of candy from a big, white van. Business was apparently booming. She took photos with her LookSharp digital camera, another gift from her parents. (It could hold more than a hundred photos on a card a little bigger than her thumbnail.)

She called police departments in the cities where Goodson had been in the past: Adenville, Bayport, Midston, Rocky Beach, Stoneybrook. The bored staff who answered promised someone would get back to her. Nobody did.

Maybe they were moving drugs. She wondered how she could get into that van. She couldn’t figure it out, and it was driving her nuts.

Then she was out of time. A day later, it was all over.

The kids in her hallway weren’t chanting anymore. They were cheering. Twenty of them had been selected — Brianna was one of them — for the Grand Prize Vacation package. Wade and the Warriors had made the cut as well. They’d sold hundreds of boxes. They were all going to drive to the airport later that day, and then fly to Los Angeles, and then drive to Disneyland. Their parents had all signed permission slips.

“Congratulations,” she told Brianna when she saw her at their lockers.

“Thanks, Carrie,” she said, the first time she’d spoken to Carrie in weeks.

“I was being sarcastic. Don’t go,” Carrie said. “He’s still a sleaze. I just can’t prove it.”

Brianna slammed her locker door shut and stalked off.

Later, in the parking lot, Carrie watched as Brianna and nineteen other kids piled into two white vans and drove away, whooping and hollering and celebrating.

Goodson led the way in his red convertible. He waved at Carrie as he turned onto the road.

When she got home, there was a message on the machine.

It was an assistant from the Stoneybrook PD. She asked for Carrie and told her to call right away. She did.

This time, the woman put Carrie through directly to the chief, a man named Sherman.

“You’re with Middleton PD?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly strained and tentative.

Carrie knew when it was time to stretch the truth, and when it was time to play it straight. “No,” Carrie said. “I’m the daughter of Mike Keene. He’s the chief of police here.”

“Oh,” he said. You could tell he was trying to decide how to digest that. He apparently decided it didn’t matter. “Well, this man you described. You said he’s calling himself Adam Goodson? And he’s selling candy bars?”

“Right. He’s recruiting kids. Hiring them as his salespeople.”

Sherman’s voice broke. “Does he…did he show up with any kids? Did he bring anyone with him?”

“No,” Carrie said. “Why? Do you know him?”

The chief sounded distressed. Which is probably why he told Carrie what he did. “No, not under that name. But it sounds a lot like a man we had here this summer. He was selling magazine subscriptions. He, uh, he had a lot of kids sign up to help him. He took them on a business trip, to go to other cities, and work there. Parents signed permission slips, all that.”

Sherman paused. “You’re sure he didn’t have any kids with him?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He’s alone, except for a couple guys he hired to help him. But I’m pretty sure they’re local.”

“See, the thing is…we haven’t heard from any of our kids since. We’ve been looking for them. We…we’re getting pretty desperate. And I finally found your message — ”

Sherman was still talking, but Carrie had already hung up on him. She called her dad’s assistant, explained as fast as she could, and hung up on him, too. Her dad would mobilize the whole department once he got the message — she’d been right too often for him to ignore her — but it would take time. Carrie was already out the door.

It wasn’t about the candy, or the boxes, or smuggling. He wanted the kids.

He’d literally lured kids to a white van with candy — and she hadn’t seen it.

Carrie took a deep breath, then ducked around the corner, shotgun ready.

She pointed it right in the face of Wade Wellman.

He didn’t look happy to be rescued. Carrie wondered how he got out of his motel room, but decided it didn’t matter.

“Wade,” she said. “Run. Get out of here. I’ll get the others.”

She moved to go around him, but Wade blocked her path. He stepped forward, scowling. Angry. Almost boiling over.

“You know,” he said, his jaw and fists clenched, “you always ruin everything.”

She didn’t get it. Was he really upset that he wasn’t going to be kidnapped and tortured?

He took another step, and looked as if he intended to hit her. Carrie assembled everything her father and every other cop had ever taught her about fighting. She was reasonably sure she could take him.

Then they heard the sirens. She and Wade both turned and saw the first Middleton squad cars come screaming down the off-ramp and into the parking lot. Better late than never.

Wade moved back. His anger seemed to vanish as quickly as it came. When he looked at her again, his usual smart-ass smirk was in place. “Thank God you’re here,” he said to Carrie. “You saved us.”

A moment later, the parking lot was swarming with cops. Carrie put the shotgun down and watched. She’d never seen the entire department mobilized like this before. Officers were wearing SWAT gear that had never been out of the box before. They used battering rams to break open doors and pulled everyone out of the locked motel rooms. Paramedics were checking the kids. Even Carl Stuckey was there, running around the scene, gun in hand, a look of triumph and panic on his face. “I heard the call, Chief,” he kept saying to Carrie’s dad. “I got here right away, I was covering the back, nobody got past me, I was on the case.” And so on. Babbling idiot.

Carrie saw her father. She pointed at the room at the end of the row. “That’s Goodson’s,” she shouted. Her dad nodded at her, gave a signal, and two cops wearing bulletproof vests broke open the door. Her father ran in before anyone else.

She took a few steps to get a better look. She could see inside the room at her angle, but she couldn’t see what was happening.

She couldn’t figure out why there was chocolate all over the walls. Big smears of it. Like someone had eaten a whole bunch of those stupid candy bars and wiped their hands on every surface. She could see the prints.

On one wall, she saw that same symbol, the one Goodson had tattooed on his wrist: the circle with a slash, drawn in chocolate.

Her father came running back out of the room.

He saw her looking, and sprinted over to her. He bellowed at his officers to secure the scene. Fred Larson ran to the door, took a look inside, and turned away and vomited.

By then, her father had picked her up like he did when she was a little girl, and carried her off. Despite her struggles, he carried her all the way around to the side of the motel, where she couldn’t see a damn thing. A squad car was parked there, lights flashing.

He placed her in the back.

“Dad, what’s happening?” she demanded. “Tell me!”

“Stay here,” he said, and slammed the door shut so she didn’t have a choice. It locked automatically, and there was no handle on the inside.

That’s when it hit her. She felt like an idiot.

It wasn’t chocolate on the walls.

Blood just looks like that when it dries.

This case didn’t wrap up as neatly or as cleanly as her others usually did.

Her father, bleary-eyed at the table the next morning, would only give her the barest details. They’d found Goodson’s body in his motel room. Apparently someone got to him before Carrie and the police arrived. Maybe his accomplices fought with him. Thing One and Thing Two turned out to be a couple of local thugs who’d been arrested before. They were currently exercising their right to remain silent. Maybe they had a last-second attack of conscience. More likely they argued over money — there was no sign of any of the cash Goodson had been flashing around town.

But this meant that if Goodson was a part of a larger network of human trafficking — people who literally stole children and sold them — then there was no way to find it. They would probably never learn what happened to those kids from Stoneybrook. Or from any of the other towns Goodson visited. He was literally a dead end now.

“What did they do to him?” Carrie asked.

Her father grimaced, as if seeing it again. Carrie thought of the smears and stains on the walls.

“It wasn’t pretty.”

That’s all he would say.

She cornered Brianna in the hallway at school. She clearly wanted to get away, but Carrie wouldn’t let her pass. “What did they do to you?” she asked.

Brianna looked around desperately, as if she needed rescuing, as if Carrie hadn’t saved her. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she whispered.

“Tough shit,” Carrie said. She wanted to know how three men managed to keep all of those kids so docile and frightened. Surely there was a moment when the students realized what was happening — when they went from willing members of the group to victims. So why didn’t they fight? Why didn’t they run? “I need to know. What did they do to you?”

“They showed us things,” Brianna said. Tears welled up in her eyes as she thought about it. “Terrible things.”

She shoved her way past Carrie and ran down the hall, crying.

Nobody apologized to her, of course. Nobody liked to be reminded of their mistakes. Nobody wanted to admit that Carrie had been right all along. She ate lunch alone, as usual.

Wade Wellman looked at her like he wanted to kill her. That’s not what he said, of course. He yelled at her from across the cafeteria.

“We wanted say thank you again, Carrie,” he shouted. “Thank you for saving us. For rescuing us from that awful, awful man. You don’t know the plans he had for us. I sure hope we can find a way to repay you. I want to be sure you get what’s coming to you.”

But Wade was all talk. Everyone knew that.

Then Carrie found her dog, Bailey, in her backyard. Eyes open, tongue lolling out of his mouth, body already going stiff. The vet said Bailey died of a crushed windpipe.

Carrie had never heard her mother scream at her father like that, ever. She insisted he go “arrest that little bastard.”

But Carrie knew her dad couldn’t. They couldn’t prove anything.

Which is why Wade did it. He knew it would hurt so much more this way.

Carrie thought about evil. She had watched Wade evolve from a nuisance — a schoolyard bully and a mean little shit — into something much worse. She thought about how so many people in her school, people she had known her whole life, had been ready to do horrible things because someone else gave them permission to be cruel.

She thought of Adam Goodson, whoever he really was, and how someone was willing to smear him all over the walls to keep him from talking.

She thought of what was scary enough to terrify a whole bunch of high school kids into silence.

She hated the idea of intuition, of hunches, of gut feelings. She believed in a rational world. She put together clues to make concrete deductions. Carrie didn’t go looking for crimes; there were plenty that found her already.

But she could not get past the feeling that something else was moving pieces on the board, that there was an intent behind all of this.

There was a pattern that she couldn’t yet see, a kind of shadow that hung over the data. Someone — or something — wanted all of this to happen. She knew it with a cold certainty.

There was a bigger bad guy out there. A network. People willing to use kids as currency, to steal them and ship them and do God knows what else.

Something had crawled into Middleton, or had always been there, hiding beneath the surface.

This wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

16

That’s How Her Story Ought to Go

Carrie is up late the next morning. It takes time for her to link up the long daisy chain of her memories until she gets to the present. When she arrives at the end, she remembers the fight with her father, and why she has the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She thinks he must be out walking the dog, which is why he didn’t wake her. She could have set her own alarm, but a couple of nights in her parents’ house and she’s fallen back into old habits, acting like a kid again.

She showers and dresses, ready to get back to work, and to hell with her dad and his objections. She never let them stop her before. She plans to talk her way into the police station, look at the records, see if there have been any other missing people.

There’s no coffee in the kitchen, which adds to her foul mood. Her mother is still asleep in her bedroom — her hours are all over the place, another symptom of her ongoing degeneration — but her father is nowhere to be seen.

She notices Pearl, curled in a ball on her doggie bed. But her dad’s keys are not on the counter where he keeps them. Carrie checks her phone. It’s 7:34 a.m. He’s been out all night. Impossible. Her dad never stays out all night.

Carrie is about to call him when someone knocks on the front door.

She opens it, and Carl Stuckey stands there, mouth open, eyes red. He can’t bring himself to say it.

He doesn’t have to.

Her mother steps tentatively into the living room behind Carrie, still in her nightgown. She’s asking who’s at the door, even though she can see Carl perfectly. She needs to be told.

Carrie knows that’s the first thing she has to do.

She knows other things, too. She knows that this was done to her deliberately, that it is not a coincidence, that her presence here has ended her father’s life.

She ought to be moving. She ought to find her father’s backup weapon in the gun safe — he has never changed the combination — and she ought to strap it on and start looking for the killer, looking for vengeance. She knows that’s how her story ought to go.

But right now, none of it seems to matter, because she doesn’t know how she will do the first thing. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother.

She knows this is what they wanted. Whoever did this, they did it to stop her. But it doesn’t help.

The girl detective, for all the times she has been tied up and threatened and punched and shot at, has never actually felt like a victim until this moment.

17

Normal Is Whatever You Grow Up With

Alana steels herself. This will not be easy. But she has to do it. There is no one else.

She gets out of the car and walks up to the trailer.

There are other trailers in the park, over here by the woods near Shadow Bluffs, that look like well-kept, tiny homes. They have little gardens and tiny porches attached to their front steps. They’re places where grandchildren can visit. Alana can imagine the small, busy lives of the people inside, people who have limited their options on purpose, who are happy within a more manageable world.

This trailer is nothing like that. Its metal roof sags, it is flecked with rust and patches of bonding agent, and its windows are crusted with hard-water stains that don’t wash away. It resembles nothing so much as an aluminum can crumpled and abandoned on the gravel.

She knocks on the door and the whole structure shakes. She knocks again, and waits. Just when she is about to give up and go back to her car, the door opens and Alana’s father appears.

Richard Bright blinks. It takes him a moment to realize who he’s looking at. He beams as if he’s won the lottery.

He throws open the screen door, and takes her in his arms and hugs her for the longest time. He breaks away to look at her again. “I missed you,” he says.

“I know,” she says, and follows him inside.

Alana’s father was the one who took care of her, who did all the necessary things that were too mundane for her mother. He always had a complete nutritious dinner on the table by six, and all the appointments on the big calendar in the kitchen. He filled out her permission slips, bought her clothes, and packed her lunches. He bandaged her wounds, drilled her on the creatures in the big, leather-bound book called the Compendium, and held her when she cried in pain or frustration or fear.

She remembers the first time she was away from home, living on her own, without her parents or a roommate. She’d been unpacking all day and she didn’t want fast food and she didn’t really feel like cooking, so she made a bowl of chocolate pudding. She sat down on the floor of her cruddy little studio apartment because she didn’t own a couch and ate it in front of the TV. She called her dad during a commercial and told him, “I’m having chocolate for dinner and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He laughed like a little kid. It was the most irresponsible thing she’d ever done in her life, up to that point. And he was so happy for her.

She wipes away a few tears. If he notices, he doesn’t comment on it.

Alana is old enough to understand now that everyone uses their own childhood as a benchmark for normal. A four-year-old in South Central sleeps on the floor to avoid stray bullets. A six-year-old on New York’s Upper East Side has a private chef to make him breakfast every day. A seven-year-old in Cambodia collects shrapnel left by American bombs a half-century earlier so her family will be able to buy food. And none of them ever question it, because it’s all they know.

That’s why Alana never really wondered why she and her mom would get up to run twenty miles before dawn every day. Or why she could lift so much more and throw so much further and move so much faster if she wanted to. She learned to read by studying the monsters in the Compendium, which included anatomical drawings that highlighted nerve clusters and major arteries. And she kept it all a secret, because her mother told her to.

Then, on the night of her first period, her mother locked her out of the house when the Shadowmen came in response to her scent. She fought for her life, slashing desperately with her sword for eight hours until the dawn broke. But she survived.

That morning, while Alana slept, exhausted, her mother walked back into the forest and left her, because her training was complete.

Normal is whatever you grow up with.

It’s much neater inside the trailer, everything squared away and in its place, like the suitcase of a veteran traveler. But it’s impossible to scrub away the look of cheap stuff made to last long past its useful shelf life, or paint over the holes that have rusted right through the walls.

Every time she sees this place, it breaks her heart. They never had a lot of money when she was a kid. Hailey Thomas made fun of her winter coat because it had another kid’s name written in it. In her whole childhood, she never had an Oreo in her house. She had “Chocolate Sandwich Cookies” and “Cola-Soda” and “Dr. Diablo” when her dad wanted to spoil her. Playdates at her classmates’ houses were like field trips into a world with actual brand names instead of dollar-store knockoffs.

But they were never this poor. Her dad lost the house in 2009 when his refinancing deal turned into a balloon payment that would have consumed his entire retirement fund. Rather than admit he couldn’t pay his debts, he mailed his house key to the bank. Alana blames herself, even though he signed the documents without telling her.

She’s offered to find him a better place, or fix this one up. She’s not rich, but she can afford to do that, despite her student loan payments. He insists he’s happy here. She’s tired of fighting about it. He’s determined to live out the rest of his days, right here, waiting by the forest.

Where he first met Alana’s mother. Where he saved her, and she saved him. Where she vanished.

And where he fully expects she will return, someday.

People were always asking Alana where her people came from, trying to figure out what she was without being too obvious. She looked different than the overwhelmingly white-bread majority of Middleton. She lost count of how many times people said she was “exotic,” like she was some kind of stripper.

For the outside world, her parents had rehearsed a vague story about Gabrielle coming to Middleton as an exchange student. For those who got curious, they had a few specifics (“Greece.” “A very small village. You’ve probably never heard of it.”) and one wholly imaginary account of their wedding day, complete with a cliff-side ceremony by the Aegean Sea. (“And your uncle got so drunk he fell into the pool at the hotel.”)

Her dad did not have many people who would call him out on the inconsistencies. His father left before he was two and never sent so much as a postcard. His mother died of cirrhosis of the liver not long after he was out of high school. Any other uncles, aunts, or cousins kept a healthy distance, as if they were afraid that misery was catching.

Richard, with his size and history, could have been a small-town thug, the kind of guy who resigns from a job by punching the boss in the face. Nobody would have been surprised.

But by some twist of personality, he was moral and decent to the point where he was boring to most people. He worked building houses and studied at the local college until he got his nursing certificate. Then he began caring for the sick and broken full-time. He was quiet. He was kind. He read. He fed stray cats and dogs and patched their wounds and never tried to keep them when they wandered away again.

He was alone most of the time, but not lonely. Or not so much that he was willing to do anything to change it.

One day, he was walking in the woods when he found Gabrielle, bloodied and broken, wearing what was left of her armor, carrying only her sword.

She probably would have killed him if she’d had the strength. She had been fighting for what seemed like years to her at that point, and had only stumbled into this world when it was clear that her side was completely lost to The End.

Gabrielle was an orphan, like Richard. What else she was is not easy to say, even for Alana, who should know. The words and the concepts didn’t necessarily translate, and the best explanations were only approximations, using terms that were too limited, too human, in scope to convey their true meaning. Alana, being raised in this world, half-human, lacked the framework, and possibly the right DNA, to fully understand.

But her mother put it this way: her kind, the Fair Folk, had existed just to the side of humanity since before recorded history. They were the source of legends of fairies, of Nephilim, of ancient heroes and monsters. They slipped in and out of this world physically, and sometimes they took people with them, or left their own behind. As people began to leave villages and firepits for cities with electric light, Gabrielle’s kind stopped visiting as much. Human lives didn’t have the same kind of space for them anymore.

But her world was still there, at the edges, and sometimes people would take a wrong turn on the road home and find themselves in a place where the whispers in the trees didn’t sound like any language they’d ever heard before. Sometimes children would go out playing and find a talking rabbit and follow it through a hole. Sometimes they’d come back. Sometimes they wouldn’t.

As the human world filled with light, however, the Fair world got darker. The small creatures that once seemed funny or mischievous grew cold and sly and sinister. Deals were struck with something older, something that grew every night, cloaking more and more of Gabrielle’s world in black. Before she and her people knew it, they were almost the only ones left to stand against The End.

There was a war. Gabrielle’s people fought. They spilled their blood and spent their lives. They stood for light and purity in the face of evil.

They lost.

Gabrielle made her way to the Well of Stars and dove in, hoping for the best, hoping for some chance of escape. By this time, it had been decades — centuries — since anyone had made the journey. Earth was only a legend to her.

But somehow, she found her way here. Battered, broken, and beaten, she staggered through the woods, until she found Richard.

He spent a lot of time walking alone on the paths through the woods. He never knew why, only that he felt more at home, more at peace out there. Then he saw her, and he knew what he’d been waiting for.

He took care of her. He helped her adjust to her new world. People assumed they were a couple long before they ever held hands. But Richard waited. Patiently. He couldn’t help but love her. He’d stumbled across a goddess, and no matter what she thought of him, he would never see anyone the way he saw her.

Gabrielle was a princess in her world, and a warrior. She also wasn’t the only one who made it across. For a long time, she was distracted by her mission, which was to keep the things from the Other Side from spreading. She was always busy, off having adventures, hunting the creatures that made their way into Middleton, fighting the Shadowmen when they would show up.

But one day, she looked up at Richard as he was tending her wounds for what must have been the hundredth time, reliably and without complaint, the same way he kept her secrets. The same way he helped her navigate this new world and set up her human identity and find a job between monsters. (Sometimes Alana thinks how lucky her dad was that this was all pre-9/11; she can’t imagine how he would ever be able to get her mom a fake ID and papers now.)

She looked into his blue eyes as if for the first time, and put her hands on his face, and kissed him deeply.

Nine months later, their baby girl was born. They named her Alana, which means “precious” and “child.”

And also “offering.”

Richard sits down across from Alana. They’re both careful not to put too much weight on the foldout table. He puts a plate of cookies in front of her. She shoves it back at him. “You’re too skinny.”

“I’m not hungry,” he says. She scowls. His clothes hang on him. He wears a belt with his jeans, and it’s cinched tight. Her father was always a big man, but now he looks like a scarecrow dressed in thrift-store clothes.

“So why the visit? And where’s the munchkin?” he asks.

She reaches into her bag and takes out her invite, and shows him the message carefully printed on the back. “It’s happening again,” she says.

“You’re sure?”

“I was attacked back in San Diego. Whatever is happening, the door is open again. They didn’t want me here.”

He’s not surprised. He’d seen the darker side of Middleton before she was born. He never really believed that her last battle was the end of it. It was just another skirmish.

“Will Grace be safe?”

She considers the question carefully, going over it in her head once more. “I’m pretty sure. They came after me. I think they’ll stay focused on me. But I wanted to tell you to be careful, too. No answering the door at night. Keep your knife handy. And you have your backup generator fueled?”

He smiles at her patiently. These are all essential protections. Cold iron in the knife — it’s not as good as her sword, but it will slow most things from the Other Side down. The generator will keep the lights going even if the main power from the road is cut.

They talk a little more, but there’s never much to say. His world is this tiny space, the public library, the grocery store. They don’t have anything in common but the past now.

She goes outside, finds a bag of rock salt, and pours a protective circle around his trailer. He’ll tell people it’s for slugs, if they ask, but no one ever asks. He is alone here. And will be until he dies.

He’s waiting for her mother to return.

It doesn’t matter how many times Alana’s told him that she’s dead.

Alana knows because Alana killed her.

She’s told him this, repeatedly. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t do a gods-damned thing.

He simply doesn’t believe her.

Alana gives him one more hug before she leaves. “Be safe,” she tells him again.

He’s not worried. “They won’t care about me. They never did.”

The sad part is he’s right.

There’s always a cost in those old stories, Alana knows — not the Disneyfied versions that are made into cartoons, but the original tales of faes and sprites and piskies who come to the village and grant wishes. Nobody gets touched by magic without paying a price. The man who visits Fairyland for a night gets to dance with the queen and see the most beautiful things. Then he wakes up the next morning and realizes his whole life has passed him by.

That’s her dad. He’s the guy at the end of the story. How in the Seven Hells is he supposed to go to a speed-dating mixer at the Middleton Community Center after living in a storybook brought to life? He has been ruined for anything less than true love and real magic.

Most of him is already someplace else, waiting to be reunited with her. He doesn’t care what happens to him here.

And to be completely honest, neither does she.

Whoever is out there, they will not come for Alana’s dad, because they can see it in the crappy trailer, the lack of visits, her quick exit. On some basic level, she does not care about him. Alana is ashamed of it, but she can’t change it. She cannot help despising him for his weakness, for his inability to let go of the past and move on.

He is waiting for a dead woman who left him decades ago, once she was done with him, and he knows it. If someone killed him, it would be a mercy. He’s empty.

She doesn’t like thinking this way. She remembers the times he would mend her wounds and hold ice to the bruises on her face when her mother punched her. It’s not enough.

He is just so pathetically human.

Alana is her mother’s daughter. She can’t forgive that, no matter how hard she tries.

She watches her father wave goodbye in the rearview mirror, standing by his trailer. She checks her phone, and wonders if she will be able to get hold of Grace. She feels the need to talk to her daughter.

18

Even Good Kids Have Their Limits

Grace didn’t actually want to go to Rockin’ Jump today, but her father had already bought the tickets. So she’s at the trampoline park with a hundred screaming, running, jumping kids. She doesn’t know how to tell her dad she’s eleven now — which is to say, she is too old for this.

It seriously does not help that Candace is trying to prove she can be the cool stepmom. She’s clingy, standing too close to Grace all the time, acting like they’re besties — “So who are you crushing on, Grace? What’s his name? Is he cuuuuuute?” Gag.

Candace doesn’t realize that it’s already over. Her attempts at parenting, cooking, and tantric yoga — none of those will save her. Grace has seen the process several times now. Her dad has pulled the trigger inside his head.

Which is why Grace wanders off on her own inside the cavernous building when the fight begins. She figures they need a little space for the inevitable final sequence. By the time she gets back, Candace will be crying in an Uber, and her dad will be guilty and relieved. Then they’ll go for pizza.

Her dad doesn’t mean to be such a jerk. He knows he made a huge mistake when he left her mom; he’s said as much to her, thinking she was too young to understand. She suspects he’d like a do-over. But that’s never going to happen.

Her mom, Grace has noticed, has this sometimes scary ability to not need anyone else, to get along fine on her own, no matter what. There are moments when she’s come home early from fencing practice or soccer and caught her mother off guard. Not much, because nobody ever catches her mom completely off guard. But in those moments, she gets a chance to see her when the Mom Face is down. And her mother seems…perfect. Untouchable, in some way that Grace can’t fully explain.

Grace wonders if someone that untouchable can ever be close to anyone, no matter how hard they try.

She thinks about this as she stands in line for the Gladiator Challenge. It’s a balance beam over a big pit full of foam blocks. Kids line up on either side, and they’re given foam-covered poles with big pads on the ends, like giant Q-tips, and they whack the crap out of each other until one of them falls in the pit.

It’s her favorite thing here, honestly. She’s not sure why. She’s very good at it, though.

She gets to stand on the balance beam until she’s knocked off, or until one of the bored-looking attendants finally decides her turn has lasted long enough, which is usually quite a while, because she’s never been knocked off. Not even when she was four and they first started coming here on Daddy-Daughter Days. (Which she later amended, in her head, to Divorced Daddy-Daughter Days.)

She barely has to pay attention now. She’s thinking about her math homework, in fact, when she sends the latest kid falling into the pit, and her newest challenger steps up.

He’s taller than her, and much heavier, at least thirteen years old. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says NO FAT CHICKS and he smirks at her when he takes his pole.

Immediately, he cheats. You’re not supposed to hit people in the head or poke the baton in their faces, but he starts out by trying to do both. Grace steps back, frowning.

Then he spits in her face.

She can’t believe it. She’s so stunned that she stands there as he tags her a good one on her shoulder.

“Hey!” she shouts.

He grins like he’s proud of himself, and she figures it out. This is his idea of a brilliant strategy.

Grace is a thoughtful, patient kid. Everyone says so. Her teachers consistently call her the rule-follower in their classes, the one who sits quietly when the other students are running riot. Grace has always been the responsible one.

But there are moments when she feels something wild rise up in her. When she wants to let loose, to scream, to yell, and to unleash all her strength on a deserving target.

She is a good kid. She works hard at holding that feeling back.

But even good kids have their limits.

Moving faster than most of the people watching can see, she spins and strikes, and the boy is lifted off his feet as he goes sailing from the beam.

He lands hard, despite all the foam blocks, and it takes him a moment to get his breath. Then he starts wailing like a toddler who’s lost his ice cream cone.

Everyone looks at her.

She probably shouldn’t be grinning.

The attendant finally wakes up, of course, and he yells at Grace, and the boy’s mother appears and starts shouting at the attendant about a lawsuit.

Out of nowhere, a stern-looking man in a white button-down shirt and slacks approaches her and says, “Come with me.”

She assumes he’s one of the managers, and he takes her toward the back of the building.

He looks a little skeevy for a manager, actually. Grace was taught by her mom, at a very early age, about “yellow-light people” and “red-light people.” If someone gives you a creepy feeling, her mom always said, trust that feeling. If they try to take you someplace you don’t want to go, you scream, you holler, you kick, you hit. Do whatever you have to do, but get away from him.

This guy would be a definite red-light person if he wasn’t wearing the shirt and slacks. The clothes are very nice, like what her father wears, but his hair is long, and he has tattoos under the collar of his shirt, as well as peeking out from the cuffs of his sleeves. He keeps a firm grip on her arm.

And he stinks. He absolutely reeks. He smells like a garbage bag stuffed with rotting meat.

“Where are we going?” Grace asks, trying to breathe through her mouth.

“The office,” the man says. “We’re going to call your parents.”

“I can find my dad. He’s around here somewhere — ”

“You should have thought of that before you broke the rules,” the man says, smiling like this is the funniest joke he’s heard in a long time.

He brings her to the side of the building, to a door that says EMPLOYEES ONLY. Nobody else is there.

He passes by that door. “Come on,” he mutters. He keeps a hard grip on her arm.

Grace’s internal alarms are going off full-blast now. “I better go find my dad,” she says.

She starts to pull away. He clenches harder, and begins dragging her toward the back door that says EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

Grace knows this is wrong. She fills her lungs to scream, like her mother told her.

But the man does something surprising.

He lets her go.

He kneels down to look her in the eye, and he smiles. “Grace,” he says. Her skin goes cold. He knows her name. He shouldn’t know her name.

She steps back, unsure of what to do.

He points. She follows the line of his finger with a quick glance — she doesn’t want to take her eyes off him for too long — and she sees he is pointing out on the main floor at her dad, who stands there in his bright white polo shirt, arguing with Candace.

“That’s your dad, right? Nice shirt. So clean. Probably expensive, too,” the man says, quiet and calm. “I know you want to call him. I know you want to run back to him. But that’s a bad idea.”

“What?” Grace says. She isn’t quite sure she believes this is real. She feels like she is sinking, like she is going all the way to the deep end of the pool and the pressure is building all around her.

He smiles that not-funny smile again.

“This is what’s happening next. You’re going to leave here with me. You don’t have a choice about that. But if you fight me — if you struggle, or make a sound, or bring anyone else over here — I promise I will leave bodies all over this place.”

He stops, swallows, seems to choke something back, then looks at her again.

“I will make a point of hurting your father. I will do such awful things to him. You can’t even imagine. I will absolutely ruin that clean, white shirt. And you will still have to come with me. The only difference will be that he’ll be dead, and it will be your fault.”

He looks at her, and closes his mouth with another wet smack.

Grace understands, suddenly, why he sounds like he’s choking. His mouth is filled with saliva, and he has to swallow it all. He’s literally drooling at the thought of hurting her father and all these people.

She knows, without a doubt, that he is not lying.

He sees the truth settle on her and smiles.

“But if you come with me, quietly, right now, I promise I won’t touch another person here. I won’t hurt any of these other kids, or the employees, or your dad and his girlfriend. I swear. That’s what you can choose. You can choose how many other people die here today.”

He takes a deep breath, and offers her his hand.

Grace only hesitates a little before she takes it.

He stands and opens the door, pulling her along with him. There is no alarm. No one notices them leave.

In the sudden brightness of the parking lot, the man hesitates. Grace sees another man standing by a white van with the words HOGAN CATERING on the side. He is smaller, thinner, neater. He has dark hair and a handsome face. He wears a T-shirt and jeans. She wants to say something, but she still believes her father’s life is in her hands.

And it turns out he’s not on her side anyway.

“I came to bring you back,” he says.

The other man holds Grace’s hand even more tightly. “I don’t need any help.”

The new guy makes a face. “Yeah, well, as it turns out, nobody wants to wait for you to drive your serial killer van all the way back across the country. We don’t have that kind of time. So I’m here,” he says. But he opens the door of the van anyway.

Grace thinks that something is wrong with her eyes. It doesn’t open into the metal interior of a van. It opens into a warm, summer day someplace else. She can see a green pasture, and a blue sky with white clouds. It looks strangely familiar to her.

“Let’s go,” the new guy says, and points at the impossible doorway.

The bigger man shrugs, pulls her along, and they step through the door in the van, and walk out into a hotter, muggier day, thousands of miles from her home. She knows this place. It’s where her grandfather lives, where she visits with her mom sometimes.

The guy in the T-shirt steps through the hole in the air. The doorway closes behind him, and her view of the parking lot vanishes like the picture on a TV being shut off.

“I’ll take her now,” he says.

“You don’t trust me with her, do you?” the bigger man says.

“You’re right,” the guy says. “I don’t.”

The bigger man seems to think that’s hilarious.

“You need to remember which side you’re on now. You’re not a good guy anymore.”

“No, I’m not. But I’m still taking her.”

When Grace hears that, her heart sinks again.

The bigger man releases her arm.

Grace could run. She could still fight, like her mother told her. Her father is safe, or at least a long way away.

But she knows it would be useless. The impossibility is beside the point. There is no going back now. She has not found a hero.

This is what’s happening next.

INTERLUDE

The Menace of the Middleton Monster

MIDDLETON. THEN.

The beast hunched and snarled, then began leaping across the open ground, eating up the distance between itself and Eric.

It had a human shape, but its back legs were bent like a dog’s. Its head looked like a wolf’s, with a mouth full of sharp fangs. Slobber and blood trickled down its muzzle. It wore a letterman jacket with a big M on the front, and a T-shirt and jeans. Its hands were claws. Its feet — paws — had torn free of whatever shoes it had worn.

It should have been funny, like when people dress up their pets. Instead, it looked sick and wrong. It howled like the Wolfman in the old Creature Feature movies. And that wasn’t funny, either.

Eric saw the glint of moonlight in its eyes, its mouth open in a dog’s drooling grin. It looked happy. Eager.

Eric stood his ground. This was everything he was supposed to prevent. Weird stuff leaked out all around Middleton, and he cleaned up the mess.

This was his job. This is what he was for.

The Middleton Monster. Of course nobody took it seriously at first. It sounded ridiculous. Five students from Middleton High were parked at Shadow Bluffs, drinking beer. They came roaring back down the hill, doing ninety as they skidded onto Main right in front of a patrol car. When the cop pulled them over, they were all talking over one another, babbling and terrified.

The cop gave them breathalyzer tests and called their parents to pick them up. He said it was the worst excuse for speeding he’d ever heard. A werewolf? Seriously? It was almost Halloween. It had to be a joke. Someone wearing a mask.

Eric knew it wasn’t. His third eye ached in the center of his forehead, telling him something was wrong, out in the night.

And, as if on cue, the first victims showed up in the emergency room.

They were slashed and bitten and developing weird, rabies-like symptoms. Eric heard about them at school. Kids in his class who’d been out on Shadow Bluffs. One rumor said that Brad Cohen and Ashley Burke had been dragged out of Brad’s Mustang, that the thing had pulled the door clean off its hinges.

Late that night, when his mom was watching Leno, Eric went to his room. He should have been studying for midterms. Instead, he dressed in a black sweatshirt and his darkest jeans. He found the quiet place inside himself, drew a glyph in the air, and reached for his door. When he turned the knob, a portal opened onto a dim corridor in the hospital. He’d spent a lot of time there during the vampire summer of ’96. (That finally ended when he staked the head vampire — a hematologist, believe it or not.) He crept down the hallway and into the rooms of the monster’s victims.

They sweated and snarled in their sleep. They burned with fever, and their charts said they would eat nothing but rare, red meat.

They were infected. They would spread the disease when they rose up, the next full moon. This was the darkness crawling out into the light, bringing a little more of the Other Side into this world.

Unless he stopped it at the source.

So he gestured and opened another door, and walked out onto Shadow Bluffs.

He found the beast almost immediately. It wasn’t hiding. It was hunting.

There was a crunching noise behind him in the dark. Footsteps in the dead leaves. Eric felt cold. Fear suddenly coated him like ice.

He’d felt this before. The things he fought carried it, an almost tangible cloud that floated around them, covering everything with horror and dread. Eric had seen it turn people into gibbering, sobbing, hysterical wrecks. It was like being trapped in a nightmare. It could paralyze you if you weren’t careful.

Eric shook it off, and forced himself to turn and look.

The Middleton Monster appeared at the edge of the tree line, about a hundred yards away from him. It took slow steps at first — quiet and careful, making sure that this was no trap.

Then it went for him.

Eric forced himself to stay right where he was. All he had to do was stop 220 pounds of werewolf from turning him into dinner. He needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

This is how magic works:

Reality, Eric had learned from Merlin, is a massive, ongoing, limitless range of possibilities at any given moment. There are infinite universes, and only the limited senses of human beings narrow them down to what we see in front of us, the gross and simple world where things are shoved around by the blunt instruments of Newtonian physics.

But everything — every universe, and every moment in them — actually begins with information, which tells reality how to behave, and what shapes to take from the quantum level on up. Before anything exists, something has to instruct it how to fall into place.

The first element of reality isn’t time or space or gravity. It’s story.

Magic, Eric discovered, is nothing more than rewriting the story at that very basic level: using specialized information to create a new set of rules, creating a world out of the trillions of possible ones that exist.

This was much easier in places like Middleton, where the membranes between worlds were already thin.

There were different names for the ways to do this. Spells, sigils, rituals, sacrifices, magic words. All of them were different ways of doing the same thing: changing the story that holds the world together, or replacing it with a new one.

Merlin described it as weaving new threads into a pattern. Or he talked about writing in chalk on an engraved stone tablet. Or he would tell Eric about shaping clay into new forms.

Eric thought of it like cheat codes in video games. There were shortcuts that could change the rules, or alter the landscape of the game itself, if he pressed the right sequence on his controller. He could summon a big gun that never needed reloading, or get unlimited lives, or jump all the way to the boss level at the end. Magic was the same way. All the glyphs, spells, incantations, sigils, and rituals that Merlin showed him were like secret combo moves he could unlock. Eric could cancel gravity, push the weather around, and pick and choose from quantum probabilities.

Magic was possibility. All Eric had learned, really, was how to pick the right one. Sometimes.

But there was always a cost. Every roll of the dice, every rearrangement of the world, required a sacrifice. All that antichance had to be balanced. In this way, magic was depressingly like double-entry bookkeeping. The math had to even out somewhere. Merlin was still paying his debt for changing the world in the fifth century. Dark magicians, like Colchester, paid that price with the blood of others, because they honestly did not give a damn and they did not expect to be around when the final bill came due.

Eric paid by narrowing his own possibilities. He had a whole life ahead of him, filled with choices, any one of which could generate a whole new universe at a quantum level. But every time he used his powers, he eliminated some of those alternate worlds, shutting down those possibilities permanently and irrevocably.

So if saving Middleton meant he gave up any chance of meeting his true love in college and that their beautiful little boy named Caleb with a sunny smile would never be born, well, that’s the cost Eric had to bear. He’d gamble his chances at happiness, at peace. That was fine, he’d gotten used to that. He’d lost chunks of his soul as he felt alternate versions of himself die, one by one, and he’d gotten used to that, too.

It didn’t matter. Merlin had already told him: he’d be dead before he saw eighteen. The final battle was coming, and he was not going to survive it.

The only things that bothered him any more were the other realities that occasionally intruded because of all his magical juggling. He’d seen passenger pigeons fly past under green skies. He’d glimpsed the glowing rubble of a post-nuclear Middleton. He’d heard strange languages spoken in the halls of his school and seen his classmates pledge allegiance to a flag with a swastika. Once he saw squid-faced aliens at the country club, playing golf. Fortunately, these soap-bubble worlds appeared and popped and vanished in a matter of seconds.

So Eric took a deep breath, and used a cheat code. He whispered, “Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start.” His Abracadabra, his Alakazam.

The easiest things to manipulate, oddly enough, were the fundamental forces. Energy was everywhere, ready to be tapped at a moment’s notice. He could bring pure, unfiltered sunlight from outside the atmosphere, or gravity from a distant black hole, or fire from inside the earth’s crust. The only trick was controlling all the power. It was like trying to direct a tidal wave through a garden hose. Nobody knew that the tornado that nearly hit the town in ’95 was entirely his fault.

But with a werewolf bearing down on him, Eric decided it was okay to risk a little damage.

He snapped his fingers. Lightning gathered in a ball above his hand, and he hurled that sucker as hard as he could.

The ball of lightning shot through the darkness. The beast ducked its head at the last moment, preternaturally fast, and the ball tore a chunk out of the hillside instead.

Eric didn’t panic. He gathered another ball of lightning and threw again. Missed again.

Now there were barely a dozen yards between him and the beast. He was out of tricks, out of time.

He started to panic a little.

Then Eric remembered something his father once told him. The Middleton Mall was supposed to go up on this side of town, but the forest was protected by a conservation easement. (His dad had spent a long time explaining the legal implications of this.) So the mall was moved to the empty cornfields out by the freeway instead.

But what if it didn’t happen that way? What if there was a world where the mall was built here as originally planned?

Eric could almost see it. The hill flattened, the ground leveled and paved, and walls built up everywhere, all around. People shopping, kids hanging out in the food court.

Eric could see it. Right in front of him. A wall made of cinderblock and concrete and brick, separating the parking lot from the main entrance.

Right between him and the monster.

With a bone-breaking crunch, the beast ran full-speed into a wall that appeared out of nowhere.

It hit the ground hard and did not get up.

Eric relaxed, and the wall faded back into the world where it belonged, along with the rest of the mall.

The beast lay on the ground, completely still.

Eric walked over, ready to jump if it so much as twitched. He didn’t think it was smart enough to play dead, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He gathered another ball of lightning in his hand.

Standing over the creature, its body wrapped in its human clothes, he could see it was out cold. Its eyes were closed, its breathing shallow. It seemed to be badly hurt. One of its hind legs was broken and twisted, and it had lost several fangs where it hit the wall.

But there was no mistaking it. This was a werewolf. This was one of Colchester’s creations. He could sense the dark magic all over the body, like a familiar and unpleasant odor.

Eric kneeled down, and — after making very sure the creature was completely unconscious — searched through its pockets and found a wallet. Inside, the Middleton student ID card showed a grinning jock that Eric recognized from the hallways at school: BRANDON RIVERS.

Eric poked around where Brandon’s hairline would have been, under the matted fur on his scalp. He found what he expected. That little circle-slash symbol he’d been seeing everywhere lately. It was always on the people and things that Colchester used to carry out his plans. Eric had no idea what it meant, only that Colchester could work his magic through anyone with the symbol.

Eric didn’t think Brandon signed up for this willingly. He suspected someone had done this to him. Someone had sold Brandon to Colchester. This was a mark of ownership.

Eric heard sirens in the distance. He remembered that there were regular patrols out on the Bluffs now. Someone had called the cops.

He was out of time. It wasn’t fair. Even when Colchester lost, he won.

Even if Brandon turned back into a human at dawn, what were they supposed to do? Lock him up? Wait for the next full moon? Anyone who’d seen the movies knew that never worked. And what about the people who were already injured? The infection had spread to them, too.

Colchester would be laughing his ass off. If anyone learned about this, if anyone saw that monsters were real, then the world became a little darker. People would have to admit they lived in a place where all the old superstitions were true, all the legends and myths had teeth, and that the nightmares out there could bite. It was like losing territory in a war. The End would advance a little closer to now, and it would poison everything it touched.

And Eric would have to admit that he’d lost an innocent life. That he had failed.

The sirens were getting louder. Eric could see the lights of the police cars, coming up the road to the Bluffs.

For a moment, Eric felt nothing but despair. There was no way he could fix this. Not in time. There was no way anyone would mistake this thing for a kid in a mask.

Eric hesitated. A thought occurred to him.

What if it was just a kid in a mask?

Then all the horror, all the fear, it would all…evaporate. Everyone would go back to their lives. The people in the hospital would not become monsters themselves. They would heal. They would all get better. This would all be written off as a terrible prank that went too far, and everyone could go back to normal.

Especially the thing lying on the ground before him now.

It would cost him, but he could make that world a reality. He could make this happen.

Eric concentrated. He imagined it. He saw the world where it happened that way, where everyone laughed it off. Where they told stories about it, eventually. About that crazy kid who scared the whole town.

But first, he had to take that mask off.

Eric imagined it. Rubber and nylon fur instead of coarse hair. Plastic fangs instead of bone-white teeth. Red corn syrup on the collar of the letterman’s jacket instead of blood.

Eric saw it. It was cheap. it was fake. It wouldn’t fool a little kid.

He saw the beast’s shape change and shift, like a slowly deflating tire. The face of the beast peeled away and separated from the skull underneath. A seam formed at the neck.

The sirens stopped. Eric heard car doors slamming and people shouting. Spotlights began to dance over the hillside. He didn’t have any more time.

He reached for the seam and pulled.

There was Brandon’s face, his human face, his features smoothed by his deep sleep. He’d be in trouble for this.

But he’d live.

Eric felt something come undone in the five patients back in town, on the second floor of the Middleton Hospital, as well — a cord being snipped between them and the creature. The unnatural hair, the infections, the nightmares, the fever sweat — it all went away, just like that. Because if there was no werewolf, there was no way for the curse to spread. He felt their wounds vanish, turn into superficial scratches and bruises. He could almost hear them sigh with relief in their sleep.

Eric yanked the mask back down over Brandon’s face. He felt a whole bunch of possible lives of his own slip away, felt the path to a couple of good futures close forever. He told himself it didn’t matter.

He wondered when Colchester had gotten to Brandon, who’d given him away. And when Colchester had learned to make a werewolf. That was the frustrating part of the job. Trying to keep up with a dark sorcerer with a seemingly infinite amount of time on his hands to pull crap like this.

Sooner or later, he was going to have to deal with Colchester. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

Eric heard voices coming up the hill behind him. He got up and ran, imagining deeper shadows all around him, hiding him from view. He made it behind a nearby stand of trees as a group of people carrying flashlights came over the hill. There were police in uniforms, and some other men in ordinary clothes with hunting rifles — the citizen patrols, now out in force.

One of the men in the group saw Brandon laying there on the ground and raised his rifle.

“Don’t!” someone shouted, and knocked the barrel of the rifle toward the sky.

It was Chief Keene. He shoved the man back. Eric saw Carrie break from the pack and run toward Brandon’s fallen body.

“Carrie, wait!” Chief Keene shouted. But Carrie was already at Brandon’s side.

“I knew it!” she yelled. The rest of the group caught up with her, just in time to see her pull the mask off Brandon. “See?” Carrie said to them, triumphant. “It was someone in a mask the whole time!”

Brandon groaned and began to stir. One of Chief Keene’s uniformed officers pulled him off the ground and put him in cuffs. Chief Keene took Carrie aside and spoke to her angrily, lecturing her about how she had to be more careful, how she couldn’t go charging ahead like that.

But Eric could see her grinning. She’d solved the case. That was all that mattered to her. He found he was smiling too. If she only knew.

Whatever. He didn’t need to be around anymore. He calmed his mind and imagined a door in front of him, and walked through it to the sacred grove, where he told Merlin everything.

Merlin pretended not to be pleased, but Eric could tell he was at least a little proud.

Right before dawn, Eric opened another portal. He closed his eyes, reached out, and felt the knob in his hand. He turned it and stepped through. When he opened his eyes, he was in his room again.

Everything was back to normal. He’d done his job.

“That was a neat trick with the mask,” someone said.

He turned and saw Carrie Keene yawning, sitting on his bed. He jumped and let out a strangled little yelp. He hoped he hadn’t woken his mom.

Carrie looked like she was trying not to laugh. “You fight demons every night but you’re scared to find a girl in your room?”

Eric’s mouth was open. He and Carrie had known each other since grade school, but they weren’t friends. They’d barely passed two words outside of class or in the hallways. He wasn’t prepared to see her in his room. So he didn’t have the cleverest response.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She ignored the question. “I never would have believed Brandon was a real werewolf if I hadn’t seen it myself. How did you change him back?”

“But you said — I heard you — ”

“Duh. I’m not going to tell my dad that werewolves are real. He’d think I was crazy.”

Eric tried to regain control of the conversation. And hopefully, his life, which seemed to have changed irrevocably in the last minute or so. “Wait. How did you get in my room?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on, Eric. You know nobody in Middleton locks their doors.”

“Maybe I should start. Answer me: What are you doing here?”

She stopped smiling and took a piece of paper out of her pocket. On it was that same circle-slash symbol that had been burned into Brandon’s scalp.

“Well, Eric,” Carrie said, “it turns out I need a magician.”

19

Alanis Morissette Irony or the Other Kind

Carrie still hasn’t cried.

Not when she had to leave the house for a few hours to identify the body earlier today. There were other people who could do it, but she wanted to see him for herself. She did, and she didn’t cry. The coroner agreed to release the body before the end of the week. (It’s not like there’s a lot of dispute about the cause of death. There was an exit wound the size of a softball in the back of his skull.) While she was out, Carrie had a woman from a home health agency look after her mom.

When she got back, she found her mother had the nurse cornered with a knife. Mary Keene, despite all she’d forgotten, still knew how to hold a scalpel. (She had them stashed all over the house, apparently.) She thought the nurse was a burglar. Carrie apologized profusely, but the agency won’t send a replacement now.

The problem is, her mom will not remember that her father is dead. Mary is suspicious and mean, thinking Carrie is keeping something from her. She demands to know where her husband is.

So, in a special kind of torture she never imagined before today, Carrie has to break the news of her father’s death to her mother over and over. Every time, Mary Keene sobs, and her heart breaks, and she slowly, agonizingly, pulls herself together and reconciles herself to a world without her husband.

Then ten or fifteen minutes later, she asks where he is, and Carrie goes through it all again.

Despite repeating herself over and over, Carrie hasn’t cried once. Not once.

For Carrie, her father’s death is a wall she keeps running into, bloodying her nose every time. She realizes that someone will have to do her father’s laundry since he won’t be able to (because he’s dead). Someone will have to pack up his clothes (because he’s dead). Someone will have to sell his car, because he’ll never drive it again (because he’s dead). And so on.

Everything else that brought her here — the mystery, the murder of Hailey and her daughter, the feeling of doom barreling down toward Middleton like a meteor in the sky above — has been pushed back. She knows her father’s death is a part of it. But she cannot do anything about it.

Her mother finally goes off to the kitchen, where she will start washing the already-clean dishes. She does this sometimes, Carrie’s dad said. Fine, Carrie thinks. At least it will keep her occupied.

Carrie sits in the living room, and looks at the family photos on the wall. In one, she stands next to her father while he wears his chief’s uniform; they have just cracked a case together. She remembers (of course) every detail (escaped prisoner, twin brother, shaved beard, left-handed) and the feeling of pride that came when they worked together.

Nothing.

Carrie tries again. She selects one memory in particular. There was a day in second grade when she and her dad drove to Centerville. Not for a case, or to follow a lead. He was giving a talk at the community college there, and she wanted to go. She remembers how that made him proud, and he pulled her out of school for the day. She can recall the golden light over the fields by the highway — the ones that have been plowed under and turned into subdivisions now — as they drove, sharing a bag of potato chips on the front seat between them. He told jokes. She knew the punchlines to all of them, but laughed anyway.

She can see his face. She can see the lines crinkling by his eyes as he laughs with her. He will never smile in that way again. She will never hear him laugh again.

Still nothing.

Ironically, it was her dad who told her that crying for the dead was useless. They’re gone, he always said. They don’t miss us; we miss them. (Was that Alanis Morissette irony or the actual kind? She’d never really learned the difference. Danny always used to make fun of her for that in high school.)

The doorbell rings. Her mother gets there before she does.

Danny stands in the doorway, facing her mom. Mary has a dishtowel and a plate in her hands. Carrie rushes to her side.

“Why, Dan, what are you doing here? Did something happen to Danny?” her mother asks.

Danny looks at Carrie, and she knows he’s already figured it out. Mary thinks Danny is his father. Dementia patients often fake their way around the gaps when they can’t remember, she knows, but it is a little creepy how much they look alike.

“Mom,” Carrie says. She tries to put a protective arm around her, but Mary shrugs it off. She looks at Carrie with an expression Carrie recognizes: impatience, exasperation, and a little irritation.

Carrie is able, from that look, to pinpoint her in time. The version of Mary that is closest to the surface right now is the one that Carrie saw a lot in high school, when her mother was at the limits of her tolerance for Carrie’s detective work, her disregard for rules and curfews, her smart-ass replies to simple questions. Mary was basically tired of Carrie and counting the days until she left for college. Carrie is talking to her mother from twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, that makes it a lot harder to get her out of the way.

“Carrie, do you know something about this? When did you last see Danny?”

“I’ll talk to him and find out what he wants, Mom,” she says.

“No,” Mary says, suddenly stubborn. “I want to know what’s going on. You never tell me anything. I swear to God, it feels like the only thing we have in this family is secrets!” Now the anger is rising, along with the confusion. Carrie reaches for the plate, to make sure it doesn’t end up shattered on the floor.

Mary raises the plate in her hand, as if cornered. It looks like it’s about to get ugly when Danny speaks up.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Keene. I should have called. I really needed to speak to Carrie right away.”

Somehow, hearing his voice snaps Mary out of her fearful crouch. She turns and blinks, and a dim little sunbeam of recognition dawns in her eyes. “Oh, all right, Danny,” she says. “But make it fast, okay? Carrie has homework.”

She’s skipped around in time again. At least she knows it’s Danny, not Dan.

“Yes, ma’am, I sure will, ” Danny says, without a trace of sarcasm. Danny always did the best Eddie Haskell, Carrie remembers.

Mary goes back into the kitchen and returns to washing the dishes. Carrie watches her walk away, and turns back on Danny. “You here to offer your condolences?”

“No. I’m sorry. That’s not why I’m here.”

“I figured. What do you want?”

“We need to get Eric and Alana. The reunion is tomorrow. We don’t have much time to stop this.”

“You’re joking, right? No, of course you’re not. You never installed a sense of humor.”

“I know this is a bad time — ”

“You think? Wow, it’s like you’re a genius.”

He blinks once, like a computer registering input. Something finally occurs to him. “You’re angry.”

“My father was murdered, you cyborg. Normal people get upset by that.”

“Carrie, I know. I know how you feel.”

“Oh, you’re going to tell me about feelings? You? Please.”

“My father was murdered too. I know you remember.”

Touché. But screw him, her dad was killed yesterday. Her pain is first in line.

“Yeah. I remember. I remember you shut down your father’s company and ran like something was chasing you. People here lost their jobs and they suffered and they died while you got richer and fucked off to California and got a tan and dated your porn-star girlfriend — ”

“She was a model — ”

“You have to wear clothes to be a model. She posed naked on Instagram — and you left us all behind. And I remember: you left me, Danny.”

“Ah,” he says. “You’re angry at me.” He looks hurt, and Carrie would feel bad if she didn’t know that he’d practiced all his expressions in the mirror when he was a kid, trying to imitate the reactions of other people.

“Good boy. I knew you’d get there eventually.”

After New Year’s, Carrie and Danny had been (almost literally, physically) inseparable. Nobody really cared where they spent their time. Danny was an orphan. For the first time in her life, Carrie and her dad had a chasm between them. School barely existed. Classes were moved to empty rooms at the community college while the damage at Middleton High was being repaired. Their teachers were in a post-traumatic daze; it was all they could do to put a movie in the VCR in most classes. Nobody took attendance.

She and Danny spent all of that spring mapping out each other’s bodies. They basically lived together in the king-size bed of a guest room in Danny’s empty house, a soft, pillowed refuge from the rest of the world, shades drawn halfway until the afternoon light turned red at sunset.

She remembers she had to teach him how to hug. Nobody did that for him when he was growing up, and he was crap at it.

Then Danny left for Stanford without telling her.

One day, she went to Danny’s house and the shutters were down and he wasn’t there. The security system was activated. It looked abandoned. She called, and his number had been disconnected.

It took her an embarrassingly long time to put the clues together.

The sale of Sharp Industries was announced a week later.

To tell the truth, she never expected it to last between them. It wasn’t like they were going to get married. Who actually meets the love of their life in high school? She got over it. They grew up. They’ve even become friends, with a few awkward visits here and there to prove it.

Still, a goodbye would have been nice.

“I saved your life, and you left me,” Carrie says. “I didn’t drag your ass out of that gym so you could make cat videos for Facebook.”

“Actually, they’re going to use my AI program to make fake friends.”

Curiosity overwhelms her for a moment. “Fake friends?”

“A lot of people get into fights on Facebook with their actual friends and families. They stop talking to each other. So the company is experimenting with a chatbot that’s always there for you; a friend who never disagrees, or gets angry, or argues. They were talking about adding it to appliances, too. Like, a coffeemaker that will greet you in the morning, a speaker that knows what kind of music you like, a mirror that says you look great — ”

Like he’s reading from a product manual. Jesus. “Oh my God, will you shut up? That’s not the point and you know it. You were supposed to do so much more.”

“Like what?”

“Anything,” she says. “The world is on fire and the oceans are rising. You could invent plants that suck carbon from the atmosphere. Solar panels you can paint on a house. Antivirals that shape-shift to keep up with pandemics. A cure for cancer. I don’t know, you’re the genius. You were supposed to be building cities on the moon by now.”

He looks away, and takes a deep breath. Anger was the only emotion he was ever any good at. Good, Carrie thinks. He’s not a robot.

“You know I met Steve Jobs once? Before he died?” he says.

“That must have been a thrill.”

He either doesn’t pick up on her tone or doesn’t want to be thrown off track. “He was kind of a jerk, actually. We got to talking at a conference. He knew my dad. I told him what I had planned for SharpTech, and he gave me this smile that said he was so much smarter than me, than everyone else in the room.”

“Wow. How annoying.”

Again, nothing.

“He said — and I remember this exactly — ‘It’s not enough to see the future, Danny. It’s far more important to be able to sell it.’ So that’s what happened. I wanted flying cars and smart antibiotics and personal robot helpers and clean energy from fuel cells. They wanted apps. Everyone has a pocket computer now and all we do is use it to make each other miserable. I tried to build a better future. And nobody wanted it.”

She nods. “Yeah, well. That’s why saving the world is for kids, Danny. Maybe we all need to grow up now.”

“Has it occurred to you that this is what the Followers want?” he says. “They want us distracted and unfocused. They want us divided. So we can’t stop them.”

“Has it occurred to you,” she says, teeth clenched, “that maybe Eric was right? That we shouldn’t be here at all? Maybe this town deserves whatever it gets.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I believe. You ran off and pouted for decades and now you’re telling me that I have to suck it up and get over it in less than twenty-four hours?”

“Yes,” he says. “Because you are better than I am. You always have been.”

That actually leaves her speechless. She does not know what to say to that.

“You have every right to be pissed at me,” he says. “I left. I know that. I killed Sharp Industries, and nearly killed the town. And you’re right. I was angry. And selfish. I just wanted to leave all this behind, and I didn’t care what happened to anyone else. And that included you. I’m sorry.”

She never thought she’d hear that. As it turns out, late is not better than never.

And as usual, he never knows when to shut up.

“But we need you right now. I can’t put the pieces together the way you can,” he says. “You asked Eric at the bar last night. Why are we here? There has to be a reason, Carrie. It has to mean something. And if we don’t figure it out, they win.”

They used to do this back when they were trying to solve a problem that was too big for either of them alone. They would check each other’s work: his raw processing power and internal database against her deductive reasoning and huge stores of memory.

But she doesn’t need this. She is tired. She doesn’t want any eureka moments or sudden breakthroughs. She wants to go to sleep. She wants to wake up and be normal.

“Stop,” she says. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late. We can still beat them. But we have to do it together.”

She looks at him. It isn’t a programmed response on his face right now. He is pleading with her. He doesn’t have the words for this. But he’s trying. He’s really trying.

“It’s too late, Danny,” she says again, emphasizing the words. “It’s twenty years too late. My father is dead. I’m not coming out to catch bad guys today.”

He slumps visibly. He’s at least smart enough to know he’s blown it.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Yeah. You said that.”

She shuts the door on him, because she doesn’t have the patience to see him looking sad.

But as soon as she turns around, it comes to her, like it always does, even when she doesn’t want it to. The answer to the question: Why are they here?

Who gains? Who benefits?

Who would kill her father just to knock her sideways, to keep her from thinking straight?

It’s like a piece of paper folds itself into an origami swan, right in front of her eyes, untouched by any human hand. All of the clues intersect and lock into place. She sees it all in an instant, crystal clear, and feels herself go cold. There is a sinking feeling in her gut and the room spins, and she actually slides to the floor to sit down

She always finds the answers. She always solves the mystery.

She thinks, Of course. Of course.

She shouldn’t be surprised.

It is all so much worse than she thought.

Carrie hears her mother drop a dish in the kitchen, shattering it.

She still doesn’t cry.

20

What You Want Is Not the Most Important Thing

In Alana’s room at the Motel 6 — cheaper than the business-class place where Danny is staying, because Alana is much further from a billion dollars than he is — her phone rings. She sees that it’s Peter calling. Finally. There was no answer before, so she left a voicemail. She smiles. She really needs to hear her daughter’s voice.

“Is she driving you crazy yet?” she asks Peter, still smiling.

Peter doesn’t say anything for so long she thinks the call has dropped. Then he makes a strangled noise that she recognizes as a sob.

Her heart sinks and a dozen different parental fears race through her brain all at once: a car crash a tumor a shooting a hit-and-run a vicious dog an accident in the kitchen a fire she choked she fell she ran with scissors she —

But no, it’s so much worse.

“Grace is missing,” Peter finally says.

“What?”

“The police are looking for her now. I…we…we don’t know exactly what happened. There was…there was someone at the trampoline place. We think.”

Oh no. He will not use that lawyer’s passive voice. He did that all through their divorce: things have changed; mistakes were made; priorities have shifted in my life…

He will not get away with that shit today.

“Peter,” she says as calmly as she can manage, “tell me everything you know. Now.”

He spills out the details. The trampoline place. He let Grace go play on her own. He always does. It’s never been a problem before. Grace got into an altercation and while the other kid was wailing and carrying on, someone led her away. For some reason, the security cameras were down. Nobody got a very good look at him.

He’s so sorry, he says. He wishes he was dead. He promises that he only left her alone for ten minutes — twenty minutes, tops.

Godsdamn it. She wants to reach through the phone and shake him. She is not interested in how he failed. All she wants to know is where her daughter is now.

But he doesn’t know. The police are here. Candace is crying, Alana can hear her wailing in the background. Peter is doing everything he can. He swears.

It’s not nearly good enough.

Alana remembers holding Grace in her arms after she was born. How her doubts about motherhood, about raising a child after her own fucked-up upbringing, all seemed to melt away in that moment. Because she was dizzy with relief at the thought of it: she would only have to be responsible for one life. She was no longer protector of an entire town’s worth of people, all of whom could wander off into the dark at any moment. All she had to do was keep Grace alive.

It was terrifying in its own way, because she never loved anyone or anything as much as she loved that tiny, scrunched-up little human in her arms.

But it was only one person. She could handle that.

Peter says he’s so sorry. But he never understood his responsibility. She doesn’t know if that was because he wasn’t raised as a warrior/savior/monster-hunter, or if it was part of the general cluelessness of fathers. He would walk away while Grace was at the park, or while she was climbing a tree, or riding her bike. “I need to take this call,” he’d say.

At those moments, she wanted to scream, It doesn’t matter what you need!

It would have been pointless. He would have sulked and been hurt and she would have had to make it up to him later (and yes, this was one of the many stones laid down on the path to their divorce).

Alana could never explain to him, never make him see, that when you are given another life, some options are then closed to you. What you want is not the most important thing in the world anymore. Some days, it doesn’t even make the top ten.

Now Grace is gone. Because she’d trusted him to look after her. All he had to do was keep her safe, and he couldn’t manage it. He’d been too busy. Too focused on his own needs.

She’s glad he’s not within reach. She wants to kill him. She still might, next time she sees him.

“I’ll be back before tomorrow,” she says, cutting off his stream of apologies. “Go home,” she says. “Wait for her, in case she manages to get away.”

She methodically shuts down all the dark possibilities coming to life in her head, one by one. She has to focus. She has to find her daughter and bring her home, and it will not help to panic. She is already planning her next moves, her trip to the airport, what she will do when she lands in San Diego.

“Do you think she might get away? Could she really do that?” Peter asks. She hears the gratitude in his voice. She’s given him hope.

“She’s stronger than you think,” Alana says, and hangs up. She can’t stomach listening to another word from him.

Deep down, a part of her knows that she’s blaming Peter when she should be blaming herself. This would not have happened if she’d been there. She left her true responsibility to take care of Middleton. She picked up the sword and came running back home, as if nothing had changed.

She knows she screwed up. Now she hopes Grace will not die for it.

She throws clothes into her bag, on hold with the airline. There’s a knock at the hotel room door.

Alana opens it. It’s Eric. She’s about to tell him she’s glad to see him, that she could use a little magic on her side right now.

But something in his face stops her cold.

He looks guilty and sick.

“I have something to tell you,” he says. “You’re not going to like it.”

An hour later, Eric’s throat and face are mottled with bruises that are already a violent purple. He’s limping as they walk through the woods.

“How much further?” Alana asks.

“Not far,” he rasps.

His voice sounds like a rusty hinge. Probably because she nearly strangled him when he first told her what he’d done. He also looks sore from where she tossed him around the hotel room. Good, she thinks. It’s a hell of a lot less than he deserves.

A hundred yards later, he makes a turn at the base of a small hill, and she sees their destination: a small cave that was known as the Smuggler’s Port on an old map of Middleton. The woods are filled with tunnels and caverns that run through the foothills. They all used to play in them as kids. Until John Dennis nearly died in one. Then the city declared all the caves off limits.

It didn’t stop kids from exploring them, of course. The evidence is by Alana’s feet, scattered all over the cavern floor. Condom wrappers, broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, years of teenage rebellion arranged in sedimentary layers. She could probably find crushed empties of Keystone Light from when she drank out here, deep under the used Juul pods.

Eric throws up his hand, and a ball of glowing light appears and hangs in the air, illuminating the cave. She scowls at him. She knows his powers have returned. She’s not thrilled with how he’s been using them.

From the deep shadows at the back, beyond where the light can reach, a small figure steps forward: a small boy with golden-blond hair, younger than Grace, but moving with an adult’s confidence.

“You’re him,” she says simply. “You’re back.”

“I am,” Colchester says. “I’d say it was nice to see you again, but the last time we met, you put a sword in my chest.”

“Good times,” Alana says.

The little-boy face twists into something uglier. “You want to watch that mouth of yours, missy. Considering.”

It’s so fucking obscene, watching his expressions on that little face, hearing his voice come out of that little body. Alana is tempted to kill him just to end it.

But she restrains herself.

“I’m here,” she says. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get my daughter back.”

Colchester drops the ugly look on the boy’s face. “Well, hoo-ray,” he says, clapping his hands. “And it’s going to be so easy for you. I don’t even need you to kill anyone.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to promise not to interfere with me. You will not try to stop me from bringing about the ritual. You agree to this, and in return, I swear I will not harm your daughter or lift a hand against her.”

“We’re supposed to trust each other?”

Colchester smiles. “No. I expect you’d ram that sword of yours right through this darling little boy the second I turned my back.”

“You wouldn’t have to turn your back,” Alana says.

Colchester nods, acknowledging the point. “You don’t have to believe me. I have a way to ensure we both keep our ends of the bargain.”

He puts out his hand — the little boy’s hand, with its tiny fingers — palm up, toward her. He nods to Eric, who takes out a length of cord, and loops one end around the boy’s wrist.

She looks, for some reason, to Eric. Who nods, and Alana hesitates. Colchester smiles again. She hates how she can see the little boy’s teeth, so tiny and perfect, and yet hear an old voice coming from that mouth. “It’s hard to know who to trust, isn’t it? Well. Don’t worry. If either of us breaks the agreement, there are…penalties.”

“Is that right?” she asks Eric.

“It is,” Eric says. “It works for both of you. Alana, I promise you — ”

“Shut up,” she says.

“One more thing,” Colchester says. “I want your sword.”

“What?” Alana says.

Eric looks surprised as well. “We didn’t discuss — she might not have it on her.”

“Oh, she does,” Colchester says. “I can feel it.”

He’s right. Under her jacket, the sword hums softly between her shoulder blades in the special harness she made in high school. She can feel it glow in Colchester’s presence.

“You’d leave me defenseless,” Alana says.

“I won’t be able raise a hand against you,” Colchester reminds her. “But I’d feel better knowing that the thing that killed me is in a safe place.”

Eric looks at her. She knows she has no choice.

She pulls the sword from under her jacket. For a second, its potential sings to her. It gleams in the dim light of the cave, glowing in the presence of Colchester. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that it longed to carve him to pieces.

But that’s just her.

“Eric,” she says, “you keep it.”

Colchester narrows the boy’s eyes. “I’m not sure I agree with that.”

“Don’t be stubborn,” Alana says. “I know he’s your creature now. You can always order him to give it to you.”

“Fair enough,” Colchester concedes.

“A little hurtful,” Eric says.

She glares at him, but hands the sword over, hilt first. He takes it.

Only then does she put out her arm, and allow Eric to loop the cord around her wrist.

“By this tie, you are bound,” Eric says, and the cave gets darker. “By this tie, you, Alana, swear not to harm Colchester, or stop his sacrifice.”

The cord begins to feel hot on her skin. Alana can feel it digging in, tighter than it should be.

“Nor will you, Colchester, harm this mother standing before you, or raise a hand against her child.”

The cord begins to smoke. Alana can feel the burning heat all the way down to the bone.

“By this tie, you both swear.”

“I swear,” Colchester says.

Then he — and Eric — nod at Alana.

“I swear,” she says, hating it.

The cord bursts into flames, twisting and turning. Alana’s skin blackens beneath it, as does the boy’s.

Colchester keeps grinning. Alana grimaces. She can take the pain.

The cord smolders to ash and falls from their wrists. All that’s left are the charred marks on their flesh.

Colchester nods at her, pulling his Gymboree long-sleeve tee over the blackened skin.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he says. “You will be reunited with your daughter tomorrow night.”

He walks back into the shadows of the cave before he vanishes into the dark. Then she and Eric are alone again.

“Alana,” he says.

“Save it.” She turns toward the mouth of the cave and walks toward the light.

Her wrist throbs with pain with every step. She imagines killing Colchester, taking the small body and smashing it against the wall of the cave, bashing its brains out —

And the pain in her wrist grows exponentially worse. She looks down and sees the blistered wound glowing red, as if it’s still burning.

So that answers that.

Alana knows Colchester means to keep her from stopping whatever he has planned. He thinks she’s compromised her honor. He thinks she’s writhing inside at all of this. That he’s won, that he’s humbled and humiliated her. He probably thinks she’s plotting at this moment how to get around the deal, to save Middleton and stop him.

This is how she knows Colchester, in all his long life, never had children. Except as a snack, obviously.

If he had, he know she doesn’t care about any of that other crap at this moment. She will do whatever it takes to get Grace back. She was not lying about that.

To get her daughter back, she would let everything burn.

INTERLUDE

Trapped in the Goblin’s Lair

MIDDLETON. THEN.

Crime-scene tape wrapped the front porch of the Petersons’ home like ribbon on a gift. A police car sat in the street with an officer inside, watching the house. But Alana wouldn’t have gotten very far in her career if she couldn’t slide past the Middleton cops.

Alana had overheard all the details from Carrie Keene, who had been surprisingly loud in the library earlier that day. The Petersons’ dog had been found running around the neighborhood. Their front door was open, and there was a large smear of blood on the kitchen floor. The police were called, and they searched the house. It was empty. The Petersons — Donna and Steve and their three kids, Noah, David, and Riley — were gone.

Aside from the blood, there were no clues. Crime-scene techs went through the house. Nothing had been touched. They were baffled.

Alana had a bad feeling as soon as she heard about it. Her sword confirmed it; it hummed softly in her gym bag all day. When she took it out that night, it glowed as she put it in its scabbard and tied it to her back.

This was her job. This was what she was for.

She leaped the fence and landed in the backyard, dead silent in her Reeboks. The back door was locked, but opened easily with a shove.

Alana didn’t need to turn on any lights. Her vision extended well past human baseline. Nothing appeared to be disturbed, if you didn’t have Alana’s senses. The kids’ cereal boxes were lined up on the counter, right next to their bowls and spoons. Their backpacks were by the door, their homework still on the dining room table.

But there was the smell of dried blood, which Alana knew, and the scent of the Other Side, which unfortunately she knew even better.

She sniffed again, and caught something else. She thought, Oh, those morons.

She walked quickly down the hall and into the room of Riley Peterson, the youngest child. Five years old, she’d heard Carrie say. There were rainbows and stuffed animals and unicorns. (Which always baffled Alana, to be honest. Unicorns were assholes.) There was fingerprint powder left behind by the techs on every surface.

In the corner was Riley’s bed, a big, iron-framed, hand-me-down antique with a canopy, like something out of a story about a princess.

Alana went over to the bed and lifted it easily. Idiots.

Riley Peterson was curled in a tiny ball, clinging to one leg of the bedframe. Her arms were scratched, and her eyes were shut tight.

Middleton’s finest. Having someone else do all the hard work all the time made them lazy. They didn’t bother to look under the bed.

Alana gently but firmly pulled Riley free. Riley didn’t make a noise aside from a small squeak, but hung on as tightly as possible.

Alana sat her down gently in the center of the room. Riley opened one eye cautiously, and then the other.

“Hey,” Alana said.

Relief flooded into Riley’s face, and she threw her arms around Alana’s neck. It took another moment to disentangle her.

“Do you know me?” Alana asked. It was a small town, after all.

Riley shook her head.

“Okay,” Alana said. “Doesn’t matter. I need to ask you about what happened.”

Riley’s eyes went wide.

“I know. It sucks. But believe me, I am trying to help. I’m here to get rid of whatever took your family.”

For the first time, a little hope seeped into Riley’s expression. “You can do that?”

Alana nodded. “Yes. That’s my job. But I need to know what you saw.”

Riley hesitated again. She looked away. Then she began talking.

She’d woken up when she heard a loud thump. She thought it came from the direction of her brothers’ room. Possibly their closet. She heard a door slam, and wandered toward the hallway, still half-asleep, to tell them to be quiet.

She opened her door and saw her father rush past her, then her mother. They were running, because someone was yelling. It was quiet for a moment. There was another thud, and then something dark and heavy inside her brothers’ room. Riley stood frozen in her doorway and watched as her mother ran out. Riley saw the blood all down her side, but didn’t recognize it at first.

She doesn’t think her mother saw her. That was what was really scary. Donna Peterson was running in pure animal panic. She went right past her daughter.

Something went charging past Riley in pursuit, something awful. It didn’t look at Riley either.

Her mom got as far as the front door and opened it, and that’s when it got her. It pulled her back, and knocked her down in the kitchen, slashing at her with razor-like claws. It dragged her back, easily, though she was pulling at the rug with both hands.

The whole time, Riley stood, frozen, watching. She’d never seen so much blood. Not in her whole life.

Her mom looked up and screamed at her, “Riley, hide!”

Or maybe she said, “Riley, help!”

Riley wasn’t sure. She didn’t help. She hid. She ran under her bed and curled into a ball. She kept her eyes shut tight.

The thing came for her, but Riley held onto the bedframe. It scratched at her arms, but it kept jumping back like it was burned whenever it touched the frame. (Cold iron, Alana knew. Things from the Other Side hated it. That was the only reason Riley was spared.)

It gave up. Riley didn’t come out, though. She kept her eyes closed all night. She had to go to the bathroom really bad, but she held it until she couldn’t anymore, and she peed her pants. She heard the neighbor come in, she heard shouting, and she heard the police thumping around. But she thought it might be a trick. She didn’t come out. She was still terrified.

“Good girl,” Alana said. “You were smart, and you stayed safe. You did the right thing.”

Riley smiled a little at that.

“Now I need you to be brave for a little while longer. You have to stay here while I look for your family.”

Riley leaped into Alana’s arms again, and hung onto her neck. It took longer to pull free this time.

But she had to get to work. Time was against her. She managed to get Riley to hide under the bed again. She was at the door when Riley asked, “Can you get them back?”

Alana turned and saw her tiny face peering out from under the bed skirt. She’d hoped she would get out before this part. This part was the worst.

“I’ll try,” she said.

Silence. The expression on Riley’s face said it all. Alana was pretty sure she was old enough to know when people didn’t have the guts to flat-out lie. They said stuff like “We’ll see,” and “Maybe,” and “Let’s find out what happens.”

And “I’ll try.”

Alana waited for something else from the little girl, some further question or demand. But apparently Riley was willing to take whatever she could get.

Alana realized she had a question of her own. “Weren’t you scared of me?”

Riley rolled her eyes, a regular little girl again for a moment. “No,” she said. “You’re not a monster.”

Alana left. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in a long while.

She went down the hall, to the boys’ bedroom: clothing on the floor, a football, a lacrosse stick, CD cases littering a desk, a discarded tube of hair gel, posters of Pamela Anderson in her red lifeguard suit, the girl from Saved by the Bell, Urkel with a big word balloon: “DID I DO THAT?” If she lifted the mattress on either of the two beds, Alana bet she’d find copies of Penthouse or Playboy.

She was more interested in the closet.

It had been left open. It looked normal. Shirts and jeans crammed onto a single bar. The techs had moved everything. They were clearly baffled at this point.

Alana wasn’t.

The floorboards were all in place. But Alana looked at the edges.

The nails were all missing. Nothing was holding the boards in place. Something had meticulously taken the floor apart to make a passage into the house, using the chaos of the boys’ bedroom to cover its tracks. It had probably been lurking around the house for at least a week, waiting for its chance.

She sighed heavily. A goblin.

“Goblin” meant more than just the ugly little creatures from the fairy tales, of course. Alana had read about them in the Compendium. Every culture had a different name for them, but they were all more or less describing the same thing: the vermin of the supernatural world, a vicious little predator that lived alongside humanity, hiding in caves and holes, coming out at regular intervals to feed. It picked off the weak and the small who wandered away too far, and carried them back to its lair, where it stored them like meat in a slaughterhouse, which is where the stories of the “Goblin Markets” came from. Easily written off as a bad dream or a cautionary tale until it began to rack up a body count.

A goblin was clever, if not smart. It was good at taking things apart, working nails or screws from boards, unlocking doors, untying knots. It dug tunnels. It would stalk its prey carefully and cover its tracks. It was small, but a dozen times stronger than a full-grown man. And it would hide from hunters like Alana.

The authors of the Compendium speculated that goblins probably started as human beings. The things from the Other Side could inhabit almost anything and turn it into a monster. But once here, it had to follow the same physical laws as all living things, to eat and reproduce. For both food and a place to lay its eggs, goblins preferred the same thing: people.

Alana hoped it was still only feeding on the Petersons. That was the lesser of two evils.

She picked up the boards and began stacking them to one side.

Underneath, she found the hole in the subfloor, leading to the crawl space. And there, in the dirt and broken cement of the foundation, she saw the tunnel where the goblin had dug its way into the Petersons’ home.

The air from below rose into the house and hit her in the face, making her gag.

That was another thing the fairy tales never mentioned about goblins. They smelled like raw sewage left in the trunk of a car with a dead body in the middle of the summer.

The sword began to glow again, more brightly now. It was time to hunt.

She took her last, deep breath of clean air, then dropped down and began to crawl.

The walls of the tunnel were smooth, the dirt packed hard as stone as she made her way through. It pitched steeply downward, going beneath the houses of the neighborhood, the storm drains and concrete pipes, then the old landfill that had been flattened by bulldozers when they built the subdivision.

The air grew much colder, and more stale. The tunnel widened. Alana hesitated. She could hear something up ahead in the dark.

Crying.

It was one of the Peterson boys. He wept softly to himself, like a much younger child mourning a broken toy or a skinned knee.

“It will be all right, sweetie,” someone else said. “Just try to hold it together. We’ll be okay.”

A woman’s voice, saccharine-sweet. That had to be Donna Peterson. He tried to stop. He gulped audibly, and for a second there was silence. Then the whimpering began to leak out of him again, like air from a balloon, and he started again.

“I know it’s scary,” Donna said. “But we’ll be okay.”

It sounded like they were alone — or at least, like the goblin was asleep. Alana waited. She knew not to rush into a creature’s lair without checking first. She wasn’t ten anymore.

The scent of the goblin was all around her, but at least it wasn’t as rank, wasn’t clogging her nostrils with its stink. And there was no sound of its footsteps, or its oversized jaws working as it chewed. Most important, the sword was not throbbing with light.

It wasn’t here. The Petersons were alone.

Alana scurried forward, and found a cave where she could stand up easily. Holding up the sword, Alana could see four figures hanging from the ceiling by ropes woven from plastic bags scavenged from garbage cans and recycling bins. The Petersons turned and looked at her with equal parts fear and hope.

“Oh thank God, thank God, thank God,” Steve Peterson said. Then he looked confused. “Wait, is it just you? Who are you?”

“Explanations later,” Alana said, stepping forward and slicing at the strands holding him. He fell to the floor of the cave. “Come on. Help me with the others.”

He didn’t argue. Alana moved to Noah and cut him down first. He collapsed onto the floor, weeping.

“Dammit,” his mother snapped. “Get up! Get up and get me out of this!”

Noah looked up at her, hurt and betrayal on his face.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said, the sugar back in her voice. “I’m so sorry. I’m just scared. Please. Help me.”

Alana stepped between him and his mom.

“Help your dad with your brother,” she told him. “Hurry.”

He went over to Steve and began pulling at the strands that kept his brother captive. Alana stepped over to Donna.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to get me down or just stare at me?”

Alana didn’t respond. She held up her sword, bringing it closer to Donna.

It glowed brighter. Donna winced as if the light burned.

“Go,” she told Steve and the boys. “The tunnel leads back to your house. We’ll be right behind you.”

Steve hesitated, unwilling to leave his wife.

“You need to go now if you want your sons to live.” Alana pointed the sword at him, and that was enough. He began shoving the boys into the tunnel, and left behind them.

As soon as they were gone, Donna said, “That fucker.”

Alana brought the sword close to her again. She turned her head from the light. Alana pushed Donna’s hair to one side, and saw the mark tattooed into her scalp.

A circle and a slash. She’d seen this too many times now.

“You made an offering,” Alana said. It wasn’t a question. “But when you call these things, they don’t always do what you expect.”

Donna didn’t reply. She checked Donna’s arm, which was mangled from the elbow down, slashed open to the bone where the goblin had tagged her with its claws. There were tiny black spheres nestled in the fibers of her muscle.

She was infected.

“It was supposed to take the kids, wasn’t it?” Alana asked.

Donna mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said, only one,” Donna hissed.

“Gods,” Alana muttered. There were people making deals with the Other Side. Inevitably, it went wrong, and she had to deal with the consequences. But it always left her with this problem. She knew how to handle monsters. She wasn’t sure what to do about these alleged humans.

Alana’s sword began to flash like a strobe, filling the chamber with light. In the split-seconds that followed, she could see all of the cave, all the way to its edges. There were bones from animals and people, some with scraps of fur and flesh still hanging from them.

Then the goblin was on her, eyes red with hunger and rage.

Alana thought, Shit.

It was shorter than Alana, but longer-limbed, its arms and legs radiating out from its little body, covered in hide and twisted muscle. Its face was a leering parody of human features, stretched wide over distorted bones, pulled back from sharp, jagged teeth.

And God, did it reek.

It was tangled with her, too close for her to use her sword. She dropped her weapon, used both hands to defend herself from its claws and teeth.

She was on her back, with the goblin on top. It went for her throat, jaws clacking shut on empty air as she held it away. It spat and snarled. She had it by both arms. It would not let her up.

Alana began to pull.

It seemed to realize what was happening. The goblin screamed almost like a person, loud enough to hurt her ears.

With a wet slick pop, she tore its arms clean out of its sockets. She closed her eyes for a split-second as jets of black fluid and gore spattered the walls of the cave.

The stink was almost unbearable now. She tried to breathe through her mouth.

The goblin fell to the cavern floor. It was done, but it was too stubborn, too simple to realize it yet.

Alana picked up her sword again, and swung. Its head hit the floor. The rest of its body finally got the hint and died a second later.

She turned back to Donna Peterson. Donna looked scared.

“Why?” was all Alana could think to ask. “What could they possibly promise you that was worth this?”

That made Donna smile. “Everything, you dumb bitch.”

That was the darkness talking. Donna’s reptile brain, the part that governed aggression and fear, was swollen with hormones as the corruption fed upon her arm. Soon, she would forget why she cared at all about her family, and would see them as nothing more than protein. Alana had seen this in the Compendium.

“Were you like this before?” Stupid question. But she wondered. How could this woman raise Riley, who seemed like such a sweet kid?

She knew what she had to do. Her mother had been clear about this, from the very start. The evil could not be allowed to spread. No matter what.

“I’m sorry,” Alana said.

Donna looked confused, like she was about to protest, but Alana swung the sword without another word.

It was like pulling off a Band-Aid; it was always better to get it over with.

Alana found Carrie Keene waiting for her on the other side of the Petersons’ backyard fence.

“Did you find them?” she asked.

Ah, Alana thought. So that’s why Carrie was talking so loud in the library. Alana was too tired to be surprised. “How long have you known?”

“About you? Since Lonnie Decker tried to pants you in seventh grade. Normal people can’t throw another human being ten feet through the air. I started watching you after that.”

Alana nodded. She’d acted on reflex and regretted it instantly. Everyone was so worried about Lonnie and if he’d be able to play in the upcoming city championship, she thought she’d gotten away with it. Clearly not.

“But about all this?” Carrie made a gesture that encompassed the Peterson house, the night, all of Middleton. “Let’s say that’s a work in progress.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Well. That’s going to take a little time to explain. Can we talk?”

Alana nodded. They began walking together.

Alana had learned that people in Middleton had a vested interest in a happy ending to every story, and they’d ignore almost any evidence that contradicted their vision of a perfect, peaceful, little town. She’d seen police officers look the other way, scuff over strange footprints, or lose evidence. She’d seen the county coroner label all kinds of wounds as “post-mortem animal damage” when corpses came in with chunks missing. People would believe only what they were prepared to believe, and they’d shut their eyes to anything else.

But Carrie was different. She wanted an answer. “Did you save them?”

Alana told her the truth. “Most of them.”

Some nights, that had to be enough.

There were no monsters waiting in the closets in Middleton. That’s the story everyone wanted. Alana was there to make sure of it.

21

The Slowest Person in the Room

Hours later, Danny returns to his hotel and parks the rental car in the garage. He doesn’t feel very smart at the moment. It’s been a long afternoon, and he knows he screwed up with Carrie earlier. He remembers what it was like when his own father died, and they were never as close as Carrie and her dad.

His first invention was a homemade perpetual-motion generator he made out of Legos and blocks and magnets he found in the playroom. He showed it to his father, who immediately sat down and explained, in great and patient detail, how it would never work in the long term. He showed Danny how the top would eventually wind down, and used this as an illustration of the principle of entropy, as well as inertia, and simpler concepts like the inadvisability of trying to generate electricity with plastic bricks and paper clips.

“Danny, this is really only a toy,” he said. Then he left the room and went back to what he was doing.

Danny was three years old at the time.

This wasn’t anything his dad did on purpose. If he’d bothered to think about it — which he didn’t — he would have said he was treating his son as an equal, that he had faith in Danny’s ability to learn and figure out the answers.

Danny spent most of his time as a child with people who were decades older, who had multiple PhDs, and who usually didn’t have any idea how to talk to children. It was, after all, the way Danny’s father had been raised himself. If anything, Danny had it easier.

Danny learned a lot. He was working on grad-student level problems when most kids were still struggling with the concept of toilet training. He thought he was the slowest person in the room.

He was, however, smart enough to realize that his mother was ill. She spent as much time with him as she could, but she only had a few good hours a day by then. Nobody would tell him what was wrong, so he figured it out on his own after they moved a hospital bed into the downstairs guest room. He looked at the words on the labels of the bottles and the IV bag that hung from the pole, and looked them up in the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the house’s library. Carmustine, Prednisone, Compazine. He looked up the conditions the drugs were supposed to treat, and the answer was easy. His mom had a brain tumor.

In an online database he accessed through Usenet, Danny read the survival rate for the particular kind of brain tumor that his mother had: 27 percent.

That kind of math wasn’t hard. Even if he was a regular kid, he could have figured that out. He wasn’t surprised at all when she died. Not even a little bit.

He should have thought about what Carrie was feeling. But like she said, feeling has never been his strong suit.

As he gets out of the car, he notices a BMW parked a few spaces over. Buzz opens the door and stands up. Clearly, he has been waiting for Danny.

He walks over, and Danny thinks of the first time they met.

It was his mother’s last wish that Danny spend time with normal kids. His father dutifully enrolled him in Middleton Elementary, then retreated back into his lab and the business of Sharp Industries.

On his first day at school, Danny stood quietly on the playground. He was watching the sky. (Cumulonimbus clouds: from the Latin for “heaped” and “rainstorm”; large, fluffy, dense clouds signifying possible thunderstorms according to the dictionary; minimum height 6,500 feet, maximum height 60,000 feet, according to one of his father’s pilot’s manuals.) He had not yet invented the Human Emulation Program.

Lonnie Decker, an asshole right from the start, shoved him to the ground.

“You want to fight?” Lonnie asked.

“No, not really,” Danny said, as he got back to his feet.

Lonnie laughed. “Not really? Chicken.”

He shoved Danny again.

Danny stumbled but didn’t fall this time. He wondered why this big kid was calling him a bird.

Then Buzz stepped between them.

“Leave him alone,” Buzz said. “He didn’t do anything to you.”

Lonnie frowned. Buzz was bigger. But Mike Fuller joined him, and he found his nerve again.

Buzz stepped aside. He shrugged at Danny, as if to say “Well, I tried.”

Lonnie advanced on him, his fist cocked back, signaling his punch coming from a mile away

Danny knew he was about to get hit. He didn’t know how he was supposed to respond.

But he could figure it out. He thought fast. It was what he did. He thought about primate dominance rituals and the books he’d read about school and hazing, and he especially thought about the week he’d spent with his father’s bodyguard learning how to deal with possible kidnap attempts.

He kicked Lonnie hard in the knee, then in the groin, and then, when Lonnie was bent over in pain, once in the face.

Lonnie went down on the ground, crying. Mike Fuller walked away quickly.

Buzz laughed. “You said you didn’t know how to fight,” he said.

“No,” Danny said, slowly and patiently. “I said I didn’t want to. I never said I didn’t know how.”

Lonnie got much bigger and taller, and Danny never again came close to beating him in a fight. But Danny was more interested in Buzz. Here was a boy who seemed to know how to be normal. Everyone liked him. He even tried to help Danny, though there was nothing in it for him. Danny began using him as a model for the Human Emulation Program that day.

He and Buzz face each other in the parking garage. In spite of the soaking in the bar the night before, Buzz seems perfectly calm now. “I thought I’d find you here.”

Danny figures he owes Buzz an explanation, at the very least. He owes him a chance.

“Buzz,” he begins.

“Robert. My name is Robert.”

“Right. Sorry.” He starts again. “Robert. You need to know what’s going on here.”

“Let me guess,” Buzz says. “There’s something bad coming, and it’s going to kill everyone, and you need my help to stop it.”

Danny nods.

Buzz smiles. “Yeah. I know.”

For a moment, Danny is relieved. He thinks that this means Buzz is on his side. Together, they are about to start putting things right.

Then Buzz cracks him across the skull with the Beretta 9mm he had hidden in his pocket.

Danny’s head bounces off the side of his rental car, and he goes down on the concrete.

Sometimes, Danny thinks, right before everything goes dark, I am not very smart at all.

Buzz picks him up and slings him into the trunk of the BMW, then gets behind the wheel and drives away.

INTERLUDE

The Final Secret of Dr. Sax

MIDDLETON. THEN.

Something is different, Danny thought. Something is wrong.

They were in the office of Dr. Edgar Sax, who held a held a gun on him. His father sat in the chair before Sax’s desk, his arms and legs tied. Danny wore his SharpWatch, the wrist-top computer he’d invented, which could hack any system within a dozen yards. And of course there was RANN-D, his faithful personal robot, at his side, whirring and waiting for orders.

In other words, business as usual for the ongoing corporate struggle between Sharp Industries and Sax Enterprises.

Danny was grateful, at moments like this, for what had been diagnosed on a number of personality inventories as a “lack of affect” and “low stress reaction.” Put simply, he didn’t feel as much as other people did, and scary things usually didn’t scare him that much.

Those traits were also generally found in psychopaths, which, admittedly, was not great. He’d wondered for a while now if he had a hole inside him where other people had normal feelings. He’d been using his HEP for so long that it was almost automatic, but he still wondered if he was broken in some essential way.

On the upside, however, it meant he could think more clearly, especially when there were people chasing him, or explosions in the lab, or his father was tied to a chair with a gun to his head.

They’d been doing this since Danny was nine. Sax would steal their designs, or hire an industrial spy, or kidnap someone close to Danny, in an effort to get Sharp’s latest technology. This wasn’t even the first time his father had been tied up in the Sax Enterprises building. Danny always found a way out. He always thought of something.

Until today, Sax had never done anything personally incriminating. He was careful to use cutouts and henchmen. He had plausible deniability and a dozen high-priced lawyers. He was always smart enough to slide away from the consequences of the things he’d done.

Then he’d sent Danny the videotape. Showing his father bound in the chair. Giving Danny all the clues he needed to find him here, in Sax’s office.

Danny, of course, came running to the rescue. It was what he did. It was what he always did.

Still, it bothered him. Danny had never liked Sax, but he’d always been smart. Not as smart as Danny, of course, or Danny’s father — if he was, he’d have realized he could have built his own tech rather than spending all that time and money on his sleazy and desperate schemes. But he was smart enough to stay in the game.

This? This was just stupid.

Sax was different, too. Danny had seen him rant and rave and swear revenge against the Sharps. He’d threatened to kill Danny multiple times, screaming at the top of his lungs. Somehow none of it ever seemed serious.

Until today. Today, Sax didn’t seem angry or unhinged. This worried Danny a lot more. He saw no doubt or hesitation in this man.

He looked calm. Almost beatific.

He looked like a man who’d found an answer.

“Put the gun down, Dr. Sax,” Danny said. “It’s over.”

“Over?” Sax said. “No. It’s not. Not for me.”

Danny’s father, Dan Sr., gave a short, barking laugh. He hadn’t yet noticed the difference in Sax. Maybe he’d been in this situation too many times to take it seriously.

“Give it up, Edgar. I have things to do today, and you’ve already cost me the whole morning.”

That made Sax angry. Danny saw his eyes narrow and his nostrils flare.

Danny pressed a button on his SharpWatch, which was like a tiny portable keyboard strapped to his wrist. In response, RANN-D turned toward Sax.

RANN-D — Roving Automated Neural-Networked Droid; Danny loved his acronyms — was an ongoing project for Danny. He’d built the first model when he was four. It was a reassembled version of a toy all the kids his age wanted that year — an electronic teddy bear that recited stories from a cassette player installed in its back. Danny stripped away the fur, put solenoids on the frame, hooked up the voicebox to his computer, and taught it to speak its own words. It looked like a teddy bear that had been horribly mutilated, but it talked. That was the important thing.

He kept upgrading. He thought of his own Human Emulation Program, and wrote it out in computer code. He taught his robot how to imitate a human being, because he’d already been doing that his whole life.

The latest model, RANN-D v12.3, was now the size of a refrigerator and moved on all-terrain tracks. It could hold a conversation with 300 possible outcomes, deliver news and weather, make phone calls, and act as a personal security system.

Danny had known RANN-D longer than anyone other than his father. They’d grown up together. It was his best friend. It never let him down. It was always there when he needed it. Which was more than he could say for any of the human beings in his life.

Sax noticed RANN-D moving toward him. He glared at Danny, and cocked the hammer back on his pistol. “You must want your father dead more than I do.”

Danny raised his hands. RANN-D went still again.

“Dr. Sax, you don’t want to do this,” he said quickly. “I brought you the software you asked for. The Y2K repair program. Want to tell me your master plan for old times’ sake?”

Sax looked up, his eyes cold and angry, but he’d turned his attention back to Danny, which is what Danny wanted.

“It’s not my plan, Danny,” he said. “You have no idea what you are mocking.”

“Enlighten me.”

Sax’s smile grew brittle. “What a curious choice of words,” he said. “Enlighten you. Yes. I believe I will. You and your father have ruined me, you know. My finances are far worse than I reported on my balance sheets. I am deeply in debt to many people, some of whom are not at all pleasant. I was prepared to kill myself a few days ago. I had the gun in my hand, and I was ready to put it in my mouth and pull the trigger. I sat right here, at this desk, and I looked over everything I had, and everything I’d lost. And I wept. I am not ashamed to say that. I wept.”

“Jesus, shoot me now,” Danny’s father said loudly.

“Dad, shut up,” Danny hissed.

Sax ignored them. “But then, one of my…well, I suppose you could call him one of my creditors. A man I owed money to. I’d been borrowing from him in secret, for years. He wanted to fund my efforts against you, he said. And when I was at my lowest point, he came to me. He showed me the truth. He showed me how this place — this town — really works. There are things you cannot imagine, Danny, things beyond your concept of science. You think you are so smart. But you really are just a boy. You do not understand the depths of your own ignorance. You never would have given me the keys if you did.”

“I gave you a program that resets a clock,” Danny said.

“You gave me a back door into the computer of everyone who has loaded your Y2K software,” Sax said. “You’ve let me into their homes, their offices. But more than that, you’ve let me into their minds and souls. You do not realize it, but this town is a machine. It is a reality engine. And the person who controls it will be a god. He showed me that.”

It must have been a trick of the light: the sun through the window, casting a glare over Sax’s face as he sat there. Danny couldn’t explain it otherwise. But it looked as if Sax’s eyes suddenly went black, as if the hollows in his skull had filled with pools of darkness.

“Stretch out thine hand toward Heaven,” he said loudly, as if chanting, “that there may be darkness over the land.”

Danny felt something cold in the pit of his stomach.

This was more than Dan Sr. could take. “Holy shit, Edgar, you have lost it. Where did you get this garbage? Did someone give you a pamphlet? Or did you smoke something? I mean, really — ”

“Dad, I’m begging you, shut up,” Danny said. “Who? Who showed you this?”

“The Good Man,” Sax said, as if he was reciting Newton’s first law. “Your father should know better. He chooses to ignore the evidence he’s seen.”

Sax turned to his computer and tapped a few commands on the keyboard. “You see, I’m going to send a code through your software, across the Internet, to everyone who is subscribed to the Sharp Y2K updates. That is, what, approximately twelve million users at last count? The code will act as a virus, but one that works on people, not machines. It will burrow its way into their brains, and rewrite the operating systems in their minds. It will override their free will. It will turn them into living, breathing relays in a new network. My network. And they will do what is necessary to bring about the next world, the new age foreseen by the man who saved me. The Good Man.”

“Dr. Sax, you know that’s not possible,” Danny said. “Computer code doesn’t work like that. People don’t work like that.”

“As if you have any idea what human beings are like,” Sax said. “It’s going to be an entirely new world, Danny. I’m almost sorry you won’t be around to see it.”

Sax focused on his keyboard again, tapped a few more commands, and then appeared satisfied. He pressed one last button.

And waited.

Nothing happened.

“You having a little trouble booting up, Ed?” Dan Sr. asked. “Don’t worry, I hear it happens to lots of guys.”

Sax didn’t notice. His eyes were locked on his screen.

He looked at Danny with something like horror.

“How?” was all he said.

Danny smiled back. He knew it would make Sax angry. “What’s the one thing you should never give a hacker, Dr. Sax?” he said. “Access.”

Danny’s fingers danced on the keypad of his SharpWatch, typing rapidly, sending commands through Sax’s entire system.

The door behind them unlocked. The security cameras mounted on the ceiling swiveled toward Sax. And the building’s alarms all began going off at once.

“You think I wouldn’t put a little something of my own in any software I gave you? You also loaded my command protocols when you downloaded my code. I own this whole building now,” Danny said. To prove it, he pressed another key on his SharpWatch.

Sax’s computer fritzed and spat as its hard drive suddenly ate itself, overheating as it spun out of control.

“Like I said: It’s over, Dr. Sax. Average response time from the police to this address is seven minutes. Which means you’ve got about five left. Do the smart thing. Give up.”

Sax didn’t move. The gun didn’t waver from Danny’s father.

“Oh, Danny,” he said, and smiled. “It’s such a pleasure to see you finally get something so wrong.”

In that split-second, Danny knew what was coming. He pressed a button and yelled a command at RANN-D.

“Tasers now,” he shouted.

But he knew it was too late.

His brain was fast enough to slice the moment into one instant after another, freezing the images in front of him in a series of stop-motion photographs.

But his body was still painfully slow. He was not faster than a speeding bullet. Danny’s father was already rocking back in his chair, even as Danny leaped toward him.

So he could only watch the inevitable results of velocity and mass and impact, the physics simple and direct.

His father’s face opening in a blossom of red. The blood arcing high into the air, the warm wet spray hitting Danny, hitting the wall. The sound of the gun, finally reaching his ears as the speed of sound caught up.

Danny hit the floor and looked back. He watched the ghoulish smile on the face of Edgar Sax before he was hit with the 50,000-volt electrical charge of RANN-D’s tasers.

Danny would never know if he’d keyed in the command before or after he saw that. He was pretty sure before, but there was a lot going on.

All he could remember clearly was hearing RANN-D’s treads find traction, tearing up the thick carpet. He saw the robot accelerate in the limited space and lurch forward, shattering the glass surface of Sax’s desk.

Danny saw his robot’s arms lock around Sax’s body.

And then they both went out the window before falling through the empty air and vanishing from sight.

Danny rushed to the gaping hole in the plate glass. Middleton wasn’t a town for skyscrapers. Sax’s office was only on the third floor of his corporate HQ.

But three stories was still a pretty big drop. Especially when a 600-pound robot lands on top of you.

Danny looked at Sax’s body, leaking under the bulk of RANN-D’s torso. Sax’s dead eyes stared up at nothing.

Danny didn’t check on his father. There would be plenty of time to deal with the body, and everything it represented. Sirens sounded in the distance. He knew that Chief Keene would help him with this. He knew that it would all be called self-defense. The evidence was clear and obvious.

At that moment, he only waited for a twitch from RANN-D. Some sign of life.

There was nothing.

It was just another broken toy.

22

All Part of King Jeremy’s Land

Nobody hurts Grace in the house where they keep her. The creepy guy with the tattoos and the evil smile isn’t around. The other guy, the one who opened a magic door, left as soon as he could, as if he was ashamed.

Well, he should be.

She spends all her time locked in an upstairs room with bars on the windows. There is a man named Kirk, and a woman named Susan. They feed her, and make sure she doesn’t make a phone call or anything. Otherwise, they don’t care about her. She realizes quickly that she’s just the side gig.

Their real job is to watch Jeremy.

At first, she only catches glimpses of the little boy when she goes to the bathroom, or when she goes down to the kitchen to eat. (Susan walks her downstairs and back every time. She tells her to behave, or she’ll lock Grace in the basement with the rats. Grace doesn’t need any additional threats. She’s still terrified of what that man promised to do to her dad.)

There are long stretches when the little boy is gone from the house, but Grace doesn’t know where. When he is around, Kirk and Susan seem nervous and twitchy. They use his name over and over. “Jeremy, would you like more cookies? Jeremy, do you want some chocolate milk? Is everything okay, Jeremy?”

She’d think they were actually worried for him, but it’s something different.

Sometimes Grace hears another adult voice in the house, shouting orders, or making low, growly threats. She hasn’t seen this man, but she hears Kirk and Susan making obsequious noises in response. She doesn’t hear Jeremy’s little-boy voice at those times. She wonders if he’s scared and hiding in his room.

Kind of like she is.

She wonders how many people are actually living in this house, and what they’re doing to Jeremy.

Grace learns the answer the next morning, when Jeremy opens the door and walks in on her.

“Hi,” he says shyly.

“Hi,” she says back. He’s ridiculously cute, like a doll. She’s always liked little kids. She wanted a brother or sister, but her parents split up before that could happen. And she’s worried about him. The way they are treating him — it’s like they’re fattening him up for the witch’s oven.

“Do you want to play?” he asks. She says sure, and he comes inside and sits down on the carpet.

Her room is furnished like a hotel, minus anything interesting or useful that she might use to break out. So she doesn’t have any toys.

That’s okay, as it turns out. Jeremy has quite an imagination. He spins a long, complicated story about Jeremy’s Land, where he is King of Aleeservase (it takes her a minute to unwrap that: all he surveys) and everything works exactly as he commands, where he doesn’t have to pause for breakfast or lunch or dinner, and where he makes the rules. Mostly, all she needs to do is listen, as his stories twist and fold in on themselves, and come back to where they started.

After about an hour of this, or what feels like it, Grace thinks they’ve bonded enough to interrupt him with some questions.

“Jeremy, can I ask you something? Are Kirk and Susan your mom and dad?”

He gives her a sideways glare — he doesn’t like changing the subject — but answers anyway.

“No.”

He tries to start again, but she talks over him. “Where are your parents, then?”

He shrugs. He won’t meet her eyes now.

“Don’t you miss them?”

“Charlie says he’ll bring me back to them.”

“Charlie? Who’s Charlie?”

“He’s my friend.”

“Tell me about him.”

He does. He brightens up a little as he describes how they met. Charlie was his imaginary friend.

Charlie took him seriously. See, Jeremy could do things that other kids couldn’t do.

He moved things without touching them. He could hide in a closet so well that he came out a completely different closet in another room. He could talk to animals, like their cat, or the birds outside his window. He once turned a rainy, cloudy day bright and sunny so they could go to the park, but he was exhausted and hungry afterward.

His parents thought this was all part of King Jeremy's Land. They smiled when he told them about it, but they didn’t believe him. Not really.

Charlie believed him. Charlie told him he was special. Not many people could do what Jeremy did. Charlie wanted to help him make the whole world like King Jeremy's Land.

His parents, as much as they loved him, said Jeremy was getting too old for these things. They wanted him to play with the other kids at his preschool. They wanted him to listen to his teachers, who were boring, and never got his name right. (They called him Jerry sometimes. He hated being called Jerry.)

Jeremy preferred to spend his time in the corner of the preschool yard with Charlie, who told him how to use the things he could do.

Like when the bigger boy, Micah, shoved him off the swing set. Charlie told Jeremy to wait until Micah was at the very top of his swing, as high up as he could go — and then showed him how to nudge the chain in the right place so it broke.

Micah landed badly and broke his leg. Jeremy had to cover his mouth so he wouldn’t get in trouble for laughing. That was fun. That was great. Micah had it coming.

Jeremy wasn’t as sure about the other kids that Charlie told him to hurt. They’d never done anything to him, not really. But he had to admit, none of them ever got in his way, or fought him for a toy, ever again.

“Oh,” Grace said. “You mean — they were scared of you?”

Jeremy’s grin fades. He looks ashamed and angry. “I didn’t do it. It was Charlie.”

“Right,” she says quickly. “But you were telling me about your parents? About how Charlie was going to take you back to them.”

Jeremy looked at her suspiciously. She was steering him places he didn’t want to go.

“They left,” he says.

“They left you? Alone?”

“No,” Jeremy admitted. “Not really.”

Jeremy noticed that he was talking more and more like Charlie all the time. He was using words that only Charlie knew, and sometimes he got in trouble — like when he said bad words — and sometimes his parents didn’t understand him. And there were times when Charlie sort of…moved forward, and did the talking for both of them.

His parents also wanted to know what happened to the cat. One day it was in the house. Then it was gone all winter, and they only found its bones when the snow melted in the spring.

Jeremy couldn’t answer them.

They sent him to a doctor, and the doctor told Jeremy a lot of things he didn’t like. So Charlie helped Jeremy with that, too. He shoved Jeremy aside and took over. Jeremy remembers blinking, and seeing the doctor look at him as if he was scared.

Scared of Jeremy.

Jeremy didn’t know what Charlie said. It was like he was napping when Charlie did that. But the doctor told his parents he was very smart and a good boy and they shouldn’t try to control him so much.

It didn’t help. They paid more attention to him after that, not less. They scolded him. Punished him. Told him to think about what he was doing and saying.

He didn’t like that. He preferred to spend time in King Jeremy's Land, inside his head, which was always happy and nice, and he could do whatever he wanted. He was content to let Charlie do the boring stuff.

But his parents kept dragging him back to the dull, everyday world.

So one night, Charlie told Jeremy he could have new parents. Ones who would let him have ice cream whenever he wanted. Who’d buy new toys any time he asked. Who’d let him watch TV, anything he chose. Jeremy would be the boss. He could go off in his head any time, and Charlie would take care of the dull stuff, like brushing his teeth or changing into pajamas.

Jeremy wasn’t so sure about that. He still loved his mom and dad. Even if they were pretty mean sometimes.

Charlie promised he could have them back if he didn’t like the new ones.

Well, that sounded pretty reasonable to Jeremy. What did he have to do?

Let me out for a while, Charlie said. Let me talk to them.

When Jeremy woke, he was in his living room, alone. He looked around for his mom and dad. The TV was on, and one of their shows was playing. One of the shows he never liked. But they weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in the house. He was beginning to get scared, when Charlie came back and told him to open the front door.

There was a man and a woman there. This is your new mom and dad, Charlie said. Kirk and Susan. They’ll take care of you now. They’re going to take you to a new place to live.

Where are we going? Jeremy asked him.

It’s called Middleton, Charlie said. You’ll love it. It’s almost as good as King Jeremy's Land.

And he’s been here ever since, he says to Grace.

Grace thinks, Oh my God.

“Jeremy,” she says, “your friend Charlie — I don’t think he’s your friend.”

“He is,” Jeremy says, but he looks ready to cry. “He says he can fix everything. He can make it right.”

“Right? Make what right?”

“I — I’ve done some things. It’s not all Charlie. He said he would fix it. He promised.”

His breath is hitching in his chest now, on the verge of breaking into sobs. Oh, this poor goddamned kid.

“Jeremy. Listen to me. I don’t know what he did — I don’t know what you did — but it’s not important now. We have to get out of here before he comes back. I can help you. I can take you back to your parents, I can help you go back home — ”

Jeremy shudders and looks at her. The tears are still wet on his cheeks, but his face breaks out in a wide grin.

“And why the fuck,” he says, emphasizing every syllable, “would I ever want to do that?”

She realizes his eyes, his perfect blue eyes, are not blue anymore. They are lightless pools of black.

Grace recoils. She scoots away from the little boy, almost back to the wall.

“You had to keep poking, didn’t you, Grace?” Jeremy says now. “I could hear you, all the way down where I was. You really upset him. He came running to me all trembling and weepy.”

She recognizes him. It’s the deep, gravelly voice she hears yelling at Kirk and Susan.

“We haven’t met yet. I’m Charlie,” he says.

She can almost see another person now, hanging over Jeremy’s head, like a ghost. A man, grizzled and ancient, his hard eyes glaring at her.

She is shaking while he stares. She feels like she is being X-rayed, like something is scouring her bones.

“The boy is mine,” he says. “Do not ever test that again. Do you hear me, you half-bright mongrel? You don’t need to rush into dying. It’s coming for you soon enough.”

Grace nods quickly, still trembling. The boy and his spirit double nod, at the same time.

“Good,” he says. “I’m doing you a favor. You don’t want the boy either. If I was really cruel, I’d let him loose on you.”

Charlie pulls back. The vision of him fades from view. A moment later, Grace wonders if he was ever really there.

And Jeremy looks at her again with those wide innocent eyes. Which, she notices, are blue again.

“Grace?” He looks concerned. “Are you okay? Don’t you want to play with me anymore?”

Grace pulls herself together. She masks her fear with as happy a smile as she can manage.

And wonders what will happen if she says no.

INTERLUDE

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

MIDDLETON. THEN.

“Explain it to me again,” Danny said sharply. “Maybe this time it will make sense.”

Danny looked across the table at Eric and Alana. He’d known both of them since kindergarten. He’d even been close with Eric, before Eric started wearing black and looking haunted all the time. But he couldn’t say he knew either of them.

Carrie sat next to him. They were the only ones in the truck stop out by the highway, the last place in Middleton open past midnight. The hostess watched them with weary eyes from the glass-topped counter. Danny figured she was used to drunken kids who made a mess without leaving a tip. Her nametag read FAY.

Eric looked tired. “What do you need to hear?” he asked.

“You expect me to believe you’re a wizard, I’m going to need a little more proof.”

“Magician,” Eric said. “The term is magician.”

“You have magic powers.”

“Yes.”

“But you let Lonnie Decker shove you into the girl’s locker room every day in eighth grade.” Danny’s voice was flat. He didn’t sound sarcastic. He didn’t have to.

“Danny…” Carrie’s voice was a warning.

“No, no. I’m not making fun of him. If I had magic powers, I’m sure I’d want to hide them from everyone too,” Danny said.

She kicked him under the table, a pretty obvious message: Don’t piss off the wizard.

He didn’t care. Danny didn’t want to be here. He only came because Carrie had told him to, and he’d never known Carrie to be wrong about anything important, as annoying as that was. He’d learned that her deductions were correct as often as his own. He’d come to trust her.

Plus they were having sex now, and a part of his brain told him that might be jeopardized if he didn’t listen to her, no matter how stupid or insane it sounded.

So he listened. But he didn’t have to like it.

“I have to keep my powers secret,” Eric said.

“Sure. I can see why you’d say that.”

Eric glared at him, then put out his hand and made a small gesture. A tiny mushroom cloud, a miniature nuclear holocaust, bloomed in the middle of the table. Eric gestured again, and it was gone, leaving only a small wisp of smoke floating toward the ceiling.

Danny’s face felt hot, and he smelled the odor of his own burned eyebrows, familiar from a thousand small mishaps in his lab. He looked at his hands, saw they were red and sunburned in November.

“Hey,” the hostess shouted from the front counter. “No smoking in here.”

“Sorry,” all four of the kids said at once.

She went back to her copy of People.

“Neat trick,” Danny finally said.

“It’s not a trick,” Eric said.

Okay then, Danny thought.

He turned to Alana, who’d been silent this whole time. “And you’re, what, a refugee from Narnia?”

Carrie rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Danny.”

But Alana answered him patiently, as if she were talking to a toddler.

“I fight monsters,” she said simply. “There are things out there. Predators. They’ve been sniffing around our world forever. It’s my job to kill them. To keep them where they belong. In the dark.”

“Look,” Danny said, “I don’t want to insult you, but you know how that sounds, right? I mean — ”

Alana reached across the table and took his hand, forcing him to look her in the eyes.

“I am Alana of the Bright,” she said. “I carry the sword. I carry the burden. I keep the watch against the dark. It is all real. All of it.”

Danny swallowed. He couldn’t think of a smartass reply, as if the HEP was glitching. He saw something in her stare, something deeper and older than he’d ever expected to find in the eyes of a teenage girl.

“We don’t have time for your disbelief, Danny,” she said. “I can take you outside and show you how I can bench-press a car, or I can beat the holy living crap out of you without breathing hard, or I can crush every bone in your hand by gripping a little bit harder.”

He tried, experimentally, to pull his hand back. She didn’t let him.

“Or you can take my word for it,” she said. “Right now.”

Until that moment, Danny had never thought much about Alana. She was the slightly weird girl who wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans and carried that stupid duffel bag around with her wherever she went. He saw her, but he never really saw her.

Now he saw her.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Alana released her grip on his hand.

“Danny,” Carrie said quietly. “You know they’re not lying. You know that Middleton isn’t like anyplace else. You’ve seen things. You’ve told me. What about the Black Triangle? What about the Organization Men? What about — ”

Of course Carrie remembered those times. She remembered everything. He hated to think about them. They all left him with too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions.

“There were perfectly rational explanations — ”

“Mad scientists have tried to kill you, Danny. That’s not normal. All of us — everything we’ve done, everything we can do — you know we’re different, and there’s got to be a reason for it. This is the reason. This is why we’re here.”

Danny didn’t argue. Not with Carrie. “So what does it mean? What’s supposed to happen?”

“Charles Colchester,” Eric said. “He’s going to feed us all to his god.”

“Colchester? Come on. His family built this town. And he’s about a hundred years old.”

“No. He’s much, much older. There is no Colchester family. It’s just him. He’s been living here for more than a century, but I think he came from someplace else. He started out making guns, selling them. They were all touched by his rituals: every person that they killed, every life they claimed, was like throwing snacks to something inside a cage. Everything he’s ever done since, it’s the same exchange. In return for our pain here, he gets power. And time. He lives a little bit longer.”

“And what does he have to do for this magic Viagra?” Danny asked.

Eric gave him a look that said he was getting tired of Danny’s attitude. “He’s going to open the door to the other side, Danny. Where all the nightmares live.” His tone said, You dumbass. “He’s going to bring about The End.”

“The end of what?”

“The End. Of everything,” Alana said. “That’s what Colchester worships. That’s his god. My mother saw it. She told me. Imagine the opposite of all that we are. It’s a void that consumes everything it touches, and replaces it with more hunger and fear and despair. It’s been crawling around on the underside of the universe since creation. It seeks out any life it can find and corrupts it. She ran from it and came here because it destroyed everything she ever knew. It ate her world. Believe me. You don’t want that to happen.”

“You’ve heard stories. But you never saw it.”

Alana leaned forward, closer to Danny. “You saying my mother was lying?”

Carrie kicked him under the table again. Danny didn’t know why this time. He was only asking questions.

“Not lying, exactly. Maybe a little crazy. I mean, she abandoned you, didn’t she?”

Alana’s fists clenched. Danny realized he’d gone too far — somehow — but Carrie saved him by speaking up.

“I’ve seen it,” she said.

They all looked at her. “What?”

“‘The End Is Near.’ I’ve seen the graffiti all over town. Along with this.” She took out her notebook and drew the symbol she’d seen scrawled in blood in Goodson’s hotel room.

“This is the symbol of the Followers.”

“Who?”

“The same people who tried to kidnap everyone who sold the candy bars. The same ones who killed that guy. Whoever he was.” Carrie shuddered, then pushed on. “I’ve done some research on them. It’s a cult. They’ve been around since at least the 1920s. They worship the Good Man, the one who will bring them to the end of the road. They think he’s going to deliver them into some kind of paradise where they rule over the rest of us. It’s like turning Christianity on its head. They want to bring about the Apocalypse so they’ll get to their idea of Heaven quicker.”

“The Good Man?” Danny wanted to be sure he’d heard that right.

“Yes,” Carrie said. “Why?”

Danny hesitated, tried to assimilate this new bit of data. And failed. “I’ve heard it before. From Dr. Sax. Before I…” He stopped, not really wanting to get into what he’d done. “Before he died,” he finished.

He expected them to ask questions. They didn’t. He realized they were letting him off the hook. Despite how he’d behaved toward them.

He felt gratitude, like the effects of an unfamiliar drug.

Carrie began speaking again.

“The Followers are all over town,” she said. “There are people inside the police department and city hall. Probably our school. That’s why I can’t tell my dad. We can’t tell anyone. We can’t risk tipping them off.”

“In other words, our families, friends, and neighbors,” Eric said. “Maybe it’s mind control.”

Alana snorted. “And maybe it’s just how people are. The Khmer Rouge. The Nazis. The Cultural Revolution. Rwanda. All through history, there have been people who wake up one morning and decide they’re fine with slaughtering their friends and neighbors.”

They all stared at her.

“What? I did a term paper on it.”

They kept staring.

“Jesus, read a book sometime,” she said.

Danny scowled, but not at any of them. He hated this. He hated anything he couldn’t nail down. Couldn’t define. “This is what I don’t understand. What does Colchester gain? What could he possibly get out of this?”

Eric and Alana and Carrie looked at each other, all with the same expression. Danny had seen that a lot in his life, from all kinds of people, when he said something that should have been obvious. He still didn’t know exactly what it meant, but his rough translation was: It’s him, right? It’s not us? It was the surprise that someone who was supposed to be so smart couldn’t see something so obvious. It irritated the hell out of Danny.

“Because,” Eric finally answered, “Colchester is evil.”

That irritated Danny even more. Terms like evil, monster, and inhuman were placeholders, a way to avoid naming the real motivations of real people. They were cheap dodges in place of the facts.

“Yeah, I’m sure he’s very scary,” Danny said. “Right up there with the boogeyman.”

“No,” Eric said, his voice close to a shout. Everyone looked at him. Even the hostess.

Eric looked embarrassed, but still angry. He lowered his voice to an urgent whisper.

“I don’t mean that he’s a bad guy, or that he’s going to try to hurt people, or steal some shit. That’s who you deal with,” he said to Danny, pointing. “You deal with human beings. They think they’re going to get rich. Or they want revenge, or some dumbass thing. Colchester isn’t like that. This isn’t a mask he takes off at the end of the day when he’s done scaring kids. He’s evil. And that’s all he is.”

“So why don’t you just kill him? End of problem. He’s an old man. A very old man, according to you. How hard can it be?” Danny said.

That didn’t help. Eric only looked angrier. “You don’t think I’ve tried? I can’t get close to him. He stays in that mansion. It’s protected by magical wards and spells and enchantments that he’s been reinforcing since before I was born.”

“Wait a second,” Danny said. “I’ve seen him. We’ve all seen him. They bring him out for the Fourth of July parade every year. The Founder’s Day celebration.”

“Homunculus,” Eric said.

“A what?” Alana asked.

Eric blushed. “It’s a fake human being, conjured by magic. It’s made of straw and manure and…and, uh, other stuff.”

Danny smiled at the table. He knew what a homunculus was. He enjoyed seeing Eric squirm a bit.

Eric shook it off and kept talking.

“The only time he drops those shields is when he has to open himself up to perform certain rituals. He has to let the magic in. But that means he has to let everything else in, too. For those moments, he’s vulnerable. He can be touched. He’s going to try on New Year’s Eve. He has to come out of his protected space for whatever he’s going to do. He wants to set the course of the world. Which means he has to do something truly, massively, horrible. All magic has a cost. The more you ask, the more you pay. And you either pay with your own blood, or someone else’s. Colchester is going to sacrifice all of us to get what he wants. I guarantee it.”

Eric trailed off.

“So on New Year’s Eve, he’s going to turn Middleton into Hell on Earth, and he gets to be Satan?” Danny asked. “Is that how it works?”

Alana laughed. It was such an inappropriate sound, somehow, coming from her. Like someone belching in the middle of a sermon.

“You think this is funny?” Eric said. Danny was surprised, too. He thought she was on his side in this.

“I think it’s hilarious,” Alana said. “I think it’s so precious that Danny thinks it’s going to stop at Middleton. You think it’s going to be contained here? Middleton is only where it begins.”

Danny realized she was not smiling so much as baring her teeth.

“The beating heart,” Eric said. “Middleton is important.”

Alana nodded. “We are, for some reason, a place where things happen. Where Eric can do magic. Where the monsters try to get through. Where my mother’s world touches this one. We’re close to something vital here. And if Colchester wins, he brings about The End. For everyone. Everywhere. He’s selling out the whole human race.”

Danny didn’t have a smartass response to that. Maybe he was also a little afraid of Alana. She looked right at him again.

“Danny, I know you are smart. You can build things and hack computers and think fast, and you think you know everything. But this is…this is bigger than you can imagine. It’s out there. And it hates us just for existing. Jesus Christ, does it hate us. Whether you believe it or not. Colchester is going to open the cage. Then he gets everything he ever wanted. And the thing on the Other Side…it gets to feed.”

“And you can’t magic it away,” Danny said to Eric. “Wave a wand or something.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Eric said.

“Convenient.”

“Oh, bite me. There are no shortcuts, all right? That’s how you get some fucked-up, monkey’s-paw, Pet Sematary-type zombies knocking at your door. Magic always costs more than you’re willing to pay. Trust me.”

Danny drank the last of his coffee in silence. They all looked at him.

He knew they needed him. He had money, he had resources, and most importantly, he could plan. They didn’t necessarily like him, he knew. (Even Carrie was ambivalent about him sometimes, despite the sex. Did that bother him? A year ago, he never would have cared what they thought.) But they knew he could run everything through his brain like a computer, and come up with angles they would never see.

And he realized they were all connected. They had all been protecting Middleton. He and Carrie worked the day shift. Eric and Alana covered the nights.

It had to be all four of them. Somewhere deep inside, he knew that.

But admitting it — relying on something as illogical and irrational as instinct, admitting it was real — that was hard. Maybe too hard.

“What?” Eric finally asked. “What more do you need?”

“I don’t know, all right?” Danny said. Which for him was like giving blood. He hated not knowing. He fucking hated it. He wouldn’t look at any of them. “I just don’t know.”

They were all quiet for a moment.

Then they noticed the hostess standing at their table.

Later, Danny wondered why Colchester couldn’t simply leave them alone. And he finally figured it out. Like Eric said, Colchester was evil. And evil is reliably greedy.

Colchester couldn’t pass up a chance to hurt them all.

If nothing else had happened that night, Danny might have waited for more evidence before he joined the other three. Maybe he never would have gotten over his initial skepticism.

Maybe, viewed from that perspective, what happened next could have been a good thing.

Fay Wilson, the hostess, hated her job. She hated her husband for putting all their savings into Pets.com. The Followers promised her everything she wanted, and what she wanted was enough money to leave Middleton forever. Sure, it was a little weird when they tattooed their symbol under her hairline, and surrounded her with candles and chanted. But she agreed at all the right parts, and let a little of The End into her, and from then on, Colchester owned a little bit of her soul.

She didn’t know anything about the four kids who came in late and muttered to each other in the back.

Charles Colchester did. He kept a part of his consciousness on high alert for all of them. He could look through the eyes of any of his Followers at any time, and he saw the four people most likely to disrupt his long-planned ascension all in one place. Individually, they had all stood in the way of The End, and he had them marked for painful deaths.

But Colchester wanted them to suffer a little first.

So he took control of Fay, like he could any of the Followers, and he marched her over to the table. He put a smile on her face.

Carrie looked at Fay with a polite, eager expression. Such a good girl.

That’s when they noticed the darkness outside.

There was a slapping noise, as the shadows outside suddenly swarmed and flung themselves toward the table where the four kids sat. They smacked the window and flapped like fish in an aquarium. They looked like long, distorted silhouettes of men. They kept running into the glass, over and over, as they rushed forward and recoiled when the light from inside the truck stop touched them. The windows trembled every time.

The Shadowmen grinned with teeth that were black-on-black, and reached out with claw-like hands. The four kids knew that if they stepped outside, they would feel those teeth, those claws.

Colchester felt them cringe, felt their revulsion, and savored it. He spoke to them, using Fay’s mouth.

“You’ve found each other. But it’s too late,” Fay said, her voice deep, her eyes filled with darkness. “You can’t stop me now. None of you can.”

Their jaws dropped. Colchester loved that.

Somewhere deep inside her own mind, Fay didn’t know why she couldn’t make herself move. She was drowning in Colchester’s thoughts. She could feel his sticky delight at the scene playing out in front of her eyes; felt it drawing her down like quicksand all around her. She thrashed wildly but only sank deeper. And choked as Colchester’s laughter rose in her throat.

Colchester used Fay’s hand and picked a glass up off the table. Solid. Quality. Not cheap plastic, but real, heavy glass.

He shattered it in her grip. Blood and Coca-Cola ran over her fingers.

Merlin’s little apprentice began to cast a spell. The half-fairy princess reached below the table for the sword she carried in her bag everywhere. The other two were halfway out of their seats, probably about to do something boring and heroic as well.

Colchester didn’t care. He only wanted their fear. Inside her skull, there was a part of Fay that was screaming, but Colchester wouldn’t let that out.

Not yet.

He took a shard of the glass and gripped it like a knife.

Before any of them could stop her, Fay took the broken glass and jammed it deep into her own eye.

Only then did Colchester allow her to scream.

Amazing, Danny thought, as Chief Keene and the other cops stood around. He never would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself.

He always thought it was his father’s money that smoothed over the unpleasant aftermath of his adventures. Despite the property damage, or the laws broken, or whatever it took to solve the case or stop the threat, it always turned out okay. There were never any consequences for Danny. He figured it was because he was rich. Or because Chief Keene was Carrie’s dad, and they knew each other from school. He assumed he got away with bending a few rules because he was special.

But now he saw that it wasn’t just him. The police wanted to keep things quiet. They wanted Middleton to be a nice little place to live. They believed in that so much that they’d accept any story as long as it had a happier ending.

That was pretty hard work with Fay, but they managed it.

Colchester had laughed as they tried to help her, slashing at them with the shard of glass. The dark things pounded at the windows, trying to reach inside, only to be burned every time in the light. Eric finally cast an exorcism spell while Alana threatened Colchester with that sword she seemed to pull out of nowhere.

Colchester abandoned her body then. Danny could see it, like black smoke streaming out of her mouth and wisping up through the ceiling. At that same moment, the pounding at the windows stopped, and the dark shadows vanished. Fay woke up screaming and bleeding, with no memory of Colchester living inside her brain. They’d called 911, and the paramedics had been able to stabilize her.

They told the cops Fay had gone crazy. And everyone believed them, because she was shaking and sobbing and babbling like a lunatic. Chief Keene took Carrie aside and hugged her. That was all he really cared about. He wanted his daughter to be safe.

Danny finally understood.

The adults in Middleton could not solve this problem. They couldn’t comprehend it. They were locked into the wrong way of seeing the world. To them, Middleton was a town where nothing ever happened. That’s all it could be. Even though weird shit happened here all the time.

Carrie rejoined Danny and Alana and Eric, who stood apart from the cops, waiting to be dismissed. They watched the ambulance carry Fay off to the hospital.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” Alana said.

Carrie and Danny stared at her. Eric guffawed, with a guilty look.

“Okay,” Danny told them, quietly. “I’m in. What’s next?”

“On New Year’s Eve, Colchester is going to come out from his home. He’ll be vulnerable for the first time in a century,” Eric said.

“Then what do we do?”

Eric and Alana looked at him like he was an idiot. Even Carrie seemed embarrassed.

“Then we kill him,” Eric said.

“Duh,” Alana added.

23

You Breathed It In, All the Time

Danny wakes up in a great deal of pain. He used to be better at taking a blow to the head. First, he realizes that’s definitely an orbital fracture on the left side of his face, and one of his molars feels loose in his jaw.

Next, he notices he’s bound to a chair in a big, industrial space, with zip ties at his wrists and ankles, and what feels like duct-tape around his chest. Again, this is not an entirely new experience for him, but it’s been a while.

Then, of course, there are all the naked people on the floor.

There are at least two dozen men and women writhing around in front of him in some kind of mass orgy. The light is mercifully dim, but Danny sees plenty of his former classmates in the pileup. There is moaning and heavy bass music playing from hidden speakers.

“Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey, Danny,” Buzz says.

Buzz steps in front of Danny, wearing a robe that, unfortunately, is not tied tightly enough to conceal the fact that he’s naked underneath it, too.

“Buzz,” Danny says. He looks around the big, dark space. It’s familiar. “You’re looking fit.”

“I keep telling you: it’s Robert now.” He pats his own stomach under the robes. “Yeah, well, all this” — he gestures at the orgy behind him — “keeps me going to the gym. It’s also why Middleton’s only plastic surgeon is booked for a year in advance.” He smacks Danny on the thigh. “You’re looking good too. You must finally be working out.”

“I’ve got a trainer. We do weights, a little Krav Maga.”

Buzz nods. “Something they never tell you about being in a cult: it’s important to look good naked. Sorry they started without you. But you know, you’re on the clock once the Viagra kicks in. We needed to get the ceremony going, consecrate the bonds of obedience, yadda yadda yadda.”

“Buzz — ” Danny says.

Buzz scowls.

Danny takes a deep breath, starts again. “Robert. Whatever you’ve been promised. Whatever you think this is. They’re lying. They’re going to — ”

Buzz makes a jerking-off motion. “Oh, please, stop talking. For once in your life, just admit that you don’t know what the fuck is going on. Your know-it-all attitude. Did I ever tell you how much I hated that? Like you were so much smarter than everyone else.”

Danny should probably let that go, but he can’t. “I created a working artificial intelligence when I was four years old.”

Buzz leans down to look him in the eye. “And yet, here you are. So tell me: Who’s smarter now?”

“Look. I’m sorry I shut down Sharp Industries. But it was going to happen sooner or later. Whatever I can do to make it right, I’ll do — ”

Buzz smirks. “You think I give a shit about that? That was never the real problem. You interrupted the ritual, Danny. That’s where you fucked up. Now I’m doing what you never could: I’m going to save Middleton.”

It’s been a long night already, and that tips Danny over the edge. “What the hell are you talking about?”

So Buzz tells him.

Buzz went off to college, but it didn’t last long. He knew he wasn’t big enough or good enough to play for the pros. When his leg folded back like a paper clip during a game sophomore year, it was almost a relief. He was happy to stop being a jock. He came back home.

What he didn’t realize was how bad things had gotten in Middleton. When Sharp Industries and Sax Enterprises shut down, half the people in town lost their jobs. And no new businesses wanted to come to town. Not after New Year’s Evil. Nobody talked about it, but it hung over the whole town like smog. You breathed it in, all the time, until it became a part of you, living inside your bones and your blood.

He and Middleton limped along, both of them on the edge of bankruptcy, for ten years. He hooked up with his high school girlfriend at the ten-year reunion, and she got pregnant so fast that he knew she was lying about being on the pill. They got married anyway.

That’s when they came to him. The Followers.

It wasn’t that weird, really. He got the tattoo on his right ankle, where no one would see it. His wife got one too. They recruited other people. They went to the meetings and the orgies. They wore the robes and performed the rituals and spoke the words. Sometimes he thought it was like Amway, only with chanting and sex.

They gave him money and told him to start building. Houses, office complexes, mini-malls. They told him where and he rolled out the bulldozers and the construction crews.

It was like drilling for oil, only better. Every place he put up a building, he made ten times what he’d invested. He opened a real estate office, made his wife the manager, and soon she was selling houses as fast as she could put up signs. Middleton began to show up on a bunch of lists, like “Top 10 Places to Live that You’ve Never Heard Of,” and Forbes’ annual ranking of most livable cities. New people started moving to town. They were looking for “a nice place to raise a family.”

None of them knew the real price. They were better off.

It scared Buzz at first. He can admit that.

But they made it sound so reasonable. Every religion in the world was based on sacrifice, when you got right down to it. What was Abraham doing with Isaac? Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Why did He kill all those first-born sons on Passover?

To create something better. Buzz understood that. That was the hard truth of the field and the weight room: no pain, no gain. Winning required blood and muscle and violence; it was survival of the fittest out there.

The gods really did exist. They were happy to make your dreams and wishes come true — as long as you paid the bill. In return for their help, they wanted the good stuff, the freshest supply possible.

Because honestly, who doesn’t like kids?

He could live with it. If it meant staying rich, and keeping everything happy and prosperous in Middleton — well, there are always trade-offs, he told himself. That’s part of growing up.

The bitch of it was, they could have avoided most of this pain. If only Danny and the others had let the ritual be completed on New Year’s Eve. They’d meddled in something they didn’t understand. They’d tried to be heroes.

Now Buzz and the rest of the Followers are going to finish the job. They’re going to put it right.

Danny listens to all of it, with the slapping and the moaning and the grunting behind Buzz. Viagra is a hell of a drug, he thinks.

“You really mean it,” he says. “You think we should have let Colchester win.”

“Middleton would have been safe and wealthy. Forever,” Buzz says. “This is why we had to have you all back, Danny. We need you to complete the ritual. I was so goddamn mad at Lonnie and Mike when they tried to scare you off. They don’t understand how you operate the way I do. We had it all planned out. We knew just how to get you here. Because you need to save someone.”

“So you’re the leader of the Followers now? The Good Son?”

“No. But I’ll move up when the time comes.”

Danny laughs and shakes his head.

“What?”

“You sold your soul, and you’re not even in charge,” Danny says. “Jesus, Buzz. I hoped you’d be smarter than this.”

“Hey, eat me, Danny. I’m going to get everything I ever wanted, and you’re tied to a chair.”

“Buzz, they’re going to kill everyone. Everyone.”

“No. Not everyone. A couple hundred. Maybe more. And after that, a couple kids a year. Nobody who will be missed. Small price to pay, really.”

Something breaks loose in Danny. He does not calculate, does not plan his next words. He just shouts at Buzz.

“You’re killing children! Why would you ever do that?”

Buzz leans in close and screams right back. “Because that’s what it costs!”

He draws his fist to punch Danny again, and Danny sees the wedding ring on Buzz’s finger.

He has one of those flashes of insight he gets when he can be bothered to turn his high-powered brain on other people for a change.

“Oh God, Buzz,” he says, and there is such despair in his voice that Buzz actually stops himself from swinging. “Hailey. Your daughter. You married Hailey.”

Buzz looks confused. “We’re divorced. What the fuck do you — ”

“I’m so sorry.” Danny doesn’t feel like he’s using the HEP. None of this feels faked. He feels like there’s a hole inside him, but not the usual hole where nothing happens. This feels like a wound, throbbing with pain.

“What?” Buzz says, stupidly, although he was never stupid. He never had to work at anything, never had to be smart, because he had teachers who’d pass him no matter what he’d actually done in class, but he’s not dumb. He knows what Danny means.

“They killed her. Both of them.”

If Danny expects this to change something — if he expects Buzz to recoil in shock and horror — he’s disappointed.

“You really are an idiot, Danny,” Buzz says. “I told you: it’s all part of the plan.”

He punches Danny in the face. Because of the earlier concussion, Danny goes out like a light again.

Buzz keeps hitting him for a while anyway.

INTERLUDE

What Happened

MIDDLETON. THEN.

The plan was for Eric and Alana to take Colchester at Snake Hill. Carrie and Danny would stop the Followers at the school.

They knew that Colchester needed a lot of deaths to open the door to the Other Side. The Followers would provide the raw fuel for the magic spell by attacking someplace with a lot of people. And the place with the most people on New Year’s Eve was the Middleton High gym. The whole school would be there for the Party Like It’s 1999 dance. Hundreds of kids in one spot. A massive human sacrifice. Colchester would have to drop all of the magical protection that kept him safe and untouchable when the spell began. He had to lower his wards to gorge on all the power that would come from the ritual.

They’d show up, stop the sacrifice, save the people, and kill the bad guy. Everyone would live happily ever after.

They thought it would work because their plans had always worked. They always saved the day. They assumed gifted-child solutions worked for all real-world problems. They were extraordinary, but they had also always been extraordinarily lucky. And they made the fundamental mistake that lucky people always make: they assumed that because everything had always worked out for them, it always would. They’d always won before. They were seventeen.

At the end of the day, they thought this was just another adventure.

Still. They should have known better.

Eric could have levitated himself up Snake Hill. He could have brought Alana with him, in fact. It was one of the easiest tricks he knew these days.

But he worried that using his magic would warn Colchester they were coming. This was the only time he’d be vulnerable. When he’d drop his shields and wards long enough to let them take their shot. They couldn’t risk giving him any warning.

So they were walking up the trail to the snake’s head, the top of the hill, as quietly as they could manage.

Alana moved like liquid, flowing along the path without looking, completely silent.

Eric kept tripping over rocks. It was hard to look cool when you couldn’t see where you were going.

“You okay back there?” Alana said.

“I’m fine,” Eric whispered back, annoyed. “I’ve been doing this for a while, you know.”

“Just checking,” Alana said. Was she laughing at him? He couldn’t tell. He had a lot on his mind. He was supposed to die tonight, and sure, that should have been his biggest worry. But he’d been the Chosen One for a while now, and he’d nearly died a lot of times. He was getting used to that.

Apparently he wasn’t the only Chosen One, and he was still trying to deal with the idea. It was distracting. What was more distracting was the fact that Alana, whom he’d never really paid much attention to, was insanely hot underneath her baggy sweatshirt and oversized jeans. It took everything he had to keep from staring at her legs as they moved underneath her leather and chain-mail skirt.

“I’ve killed a vampire,” he said, out of nowhere.

She made a dismissive noise. “Who hasn’t?”

“Oh yeah? Where were you during the sleeping sickness? The summer before junior year?”

“I was putting the Hidden One back in his chamber at the bottom of the reservoir before he ate anyone else.”

“Oh.” Eric remembered those drownings. He never thought to investigate them. “You ever fought a Lurker?”

“Ugh, yes. Those things are disgusting.”

“I know, right? It’s not so much the smell, as the — ”

“The slime coming from their mouths, yeah. You know what I really hate, though?”

“The Demonized?”

“Yes. The Demonized! So creepy.”

“Totally. You know they’re vulnerable to fire, though? They’re, like, half sulfur inside. They explode.”

Alana signaled for Eric to be quiet. They were almost at the top of the hill. They left the trail and crept around the side. Crawling on their bellies, they looked through the tall grass at the meadow on top of the snake’s head.

A very old man stood in the center, gazing down at the fairy ring that was sometimes called the Serpent’s Crown, but whose true name was the Well of Stars.

Colchester.

He was like a tree at the top of the hill, twisted and gnarled and bent and ancient. He appeared completely at ease, leaning on his walking stick. He wore nothing other than his slightly ridiculous ceremonial robes. But he was not shivering in the wind and cold. He glowed with power and age and deep knowledge. And ownership. The whole night seemed to belong to him.

With his third eye, Eric could see the shields protecting Colchester. They were thick and interlocked, spheres and strange geometries traced faintly in the air, turning and rotating to cover him from every possible source of harm at every moment. It was impressive; almost beautiful, if not for the ghosts of the dead that made it all work. They clung to every corner of the entire astral machine, their souls bleeding into the gears.

At Colchester’s feet, the ground opened. One moment it was grass and dirt, the next it was like a swirling pool of dark water inside the fairy ring. It stabilized, and the darkness became flat and still. It looked like the view from a telescope into deep space.

Eric could feel the cold and distance inside it.

This was the Well of Stars. It was the portal to the place where Alana’s people lived, a doorway to another universe, where The End had already won. That whole side was filled with pain and loss and hunger.

There was a shimmer in the air as Colchester dropped his wards. He had to, if he wanted to take the energy from the ritual sacrifices. It took a few minutes as he undid the spells of decades. But when he was finished, he was unguarded and vulnerable, probably for the first time in a hundred years.

This was their only chance. This is what Merlin had been training him for.

So that meant these were the last few minutes of his life.

Everything looked too clear and too bright and he felt a pain in his chest. It felt like he was about to jump off a cliff.

Alana gave him an impatient look. But who wouldn’t hesitate before leaping to his certain doom?

“Alana,” he said. “There’s a prophecy — I mean, tonight, I — ” He swallowed, started again. “I can end this. All of it, right here, but — ”

There was something in his throat; it felt as if he was choking. He blurted it out: “I’m supposed to die tonight.”

To his surprise, she laughed. Quietly, but she laughed. “Join the club,” she said. “None of us are going to survive this.”

He looked at her, utterly baffled. She seemed almost…happy.

She must have seen it on his face. She shrugged.

“Come on,” she said. “Did you have any other plans for the rest of your life?”

She grinned and unsheathed her sword. Eric felt her courage flowing into him, like a transfusion.

She winked at him, and sprinted across the open ground toward Colchester. Eric gestured, and felt gravity release him as he rose into the air.

He still thought he was going to die. But at least he might impress Alana before he did.

Who knows, he thought. Maybe they would even win.

Carrie and Danny pulled up outside the gym in his BMW. They were armed and ready. They had their weapons. Carrie wore her bulletproof vest. Danny had on a Kevlar-weave jacket of his own design, filled with tools and gadgets.

They tested their communicators. They were ready for anything.

Then Carrie got out of the passenger side of the car and nearly ran right into the bomb.

“Danny,” she said quietly, as if any loud noise would set it off. “I think I found it.”

They were next to Wade Wellman’s monster pickup truck, jacked-up and gleaming as it sat in the handicapped spot, nestled against the wall of the gym. Carrie would know his ride anywhere.

In the bed of the truck, barely covered by a tarp, stood a half-dozen metal barrels, bound together by twisting strands of wire.

Danny took a deep breath and climbed, very carefully, into the back of the pickup and moved the tarp to one side.

On top of the tangle of wires was a cheap digital clock-radio. A Sharp Industries model, in fact. It was set on timer mode, and it was counting down, red neon numbers ticking away with each second.

It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t high-tech or complicated. It was simple. It was deadly.

And according to the clock, it was rigged to explode in ten minutes.

“Can you stop it?” Carrie asked.

Danny took a deep breath and looked at the wiring. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. Whoever had made this had done the sloppiest possible job. He should have known exactly how to defuse this bomb. If the wiring were as clean and elegant as a textbook diagram, he could have shut it down in a minute.

But this — this was garbage. He had no idea where to begin.

“Danny?”

Danny said the three words he hated most in the world: “I don’t know.”

Carrie lifted the communicator. “I’ll call my dad.”

“No!” Danny shouted. Carrie froze.

“The detonator might be rigged with a radio receiver,” Danny said. “Any radio signal — even from a cell phone — could set it off. We can’t use those.”

“I’ll go use the payphone,” Carrie said. “We’ll get a bomb technician out here.”

She took off running. Danny didn’t argue. He could have said there was no time. There was no way the Middleton PD would get a trained bomb disposal technician here in time. Danny calculated the closest qualified personnel were at the military base, and that was two hours away on the highway.

He didn’t say any of this because he wanted Carrie to get away, and she would never have left if he’d told her.

At least this way, she would be safe.

Danny took a multi-tool from his jacket. He leaned in close to the detonator and the fuses.

Then Danny heard two things.

Very close: gunfire. Shots, followed by screams, inside the school.

In the distance, above Snake Hill, thunder. He looked up, and saw lightning flash, and dark clouds rolling in, impossibly fast.

For a split-second, Danny wanted to go after Carrie, who’d run in the direction of the gunshots.

The clock ticked another minute off the countdown.

Nine minutes left.

He got to work.

Hope and Faith Latimer were twins, and they were perfect. Long blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes, tall, willowy bodies, flawless skin. Ever since they’d been wheeled around by their mother in their tandem stroller, they’d almost never seen a face look at them without a smile. Middleton High was no exception. They were two-sevenths of the cheerleading squad, two-fifths of the student council (Hope was the senior class treasurer, Faith was the secretary), and a fifth of the Homecoming Court.

They were working the reception table at the dance, taking tickets. They wore matching dresses, as always.

They were beloved. Because they were never cruel.

Despite how beautiful they were, and how popular, they never once went out of their way to hurt anyone else. They were kind to the mumbling boys who worked up the courage to ask them out, no matter how dorky. They never joined in the nuclear-grade annihilation of their classmates with the mean girls at the lunch table in the cafeteria. They were nice to everyone.

Even Wade Wellman. They smiled pleasantly as he entered the lobby of the gymnasium in his black leather trench coat.

Wade opened the coat and brought up the AR-15 and fired.

The first slug hit Hope in the face. She toppled over, dead in an instant, as the second round shattered her sister’s sternum before shredding her heart and lungs.

Wade fired off another burst. He tagged John Mercer in the leg, breaking his tibia and fibula, turning his calf into hamburger. A ricochet from the same burst sent splinters of cinder block from the wall into the face of Terri Rogers. She was blinded permanently in one eye, and John would need a cane to walk at graduation, but they would survive. Max Wagstaff, Jay Dreyer, Elena Santos, and Amy Parker did not.

The others in the lobby got away. They said later that Wade was smiling the whole time.

He was. He’d never felt better in his life.

Wade had been angry and lost after Goodson died. He’d felt something powerful when he worked with the salesman. He figured out very quickly that they were doing more than selling chocolates; it’s hard to con a con man, right? So Goodson had brought him into the scheme. He knew he was helping to sucker his classmates into something horrible.

But he didn’t care. He liked being on the inside. And he liked having real strength for the first time in his life.

When the other Followers in Middleton found Wade, they told him he could be part of something bigger on New Year’s Eve.

He jumped at the chance. The other Warriors went along with him. They had helped with the preparations for tonight. They’d bought the rifle and the ammo. They’d helped buy the fertilizer and the diesel fuel for the bomb.

But they’d all turned coward tonight. They’d all found reasons to avoid Wade in the past couple of days, as all the big talk got closer to reality. They were probably hiding in their bedrooms at this moment, hoping the worst would pass them by.

He didn’t care. Wade would be the only one left standing in the new world. He’d be a king, like the Followers promised.

Every time someone died, he felt it. He felt a piece of them torn out and sent spiraling away to Colchester, like a chunk of meat tossed to a wild animal.

He liked it a lot.

Colchester stood at the top of Snake Hill, looking down on the lights of Middleton. Every few seconds, his body would jolt as if he was on the receiving end of an electric shock, while another little life, down there in the town below, was offered up to him.

There went Annie Sung, a junior. She was an honor student who adored the Ramones. She volunteered at an animal shelter. Her parents loved her so much that they refused to put her down the first three days she was home from the hospital. Ten miles away, she coughed up blood and the light of her soul went down the Well.

Colchester stood up a bit straighter. In another moment, he would not need his cane.

The Well of Stars, at his feet, widened another few inches as the power passed from him into it. He knew that his limited, human eyes could not actually see what was in the Well. The stars and dark were a kind of placeholder for what was there.

But his other senses, the ones he’d been training for more than a century now, those could see the truth.

Middleton was special. He’d always known it, ever since he first walked into this valley behind a Conestoga wagon. He knew he’d come home.

He’d had to slaughter the people living here, of course. He used his magic and his hands to kill every last member of the tribe, down to their infant children. When he was done, he felt like an American for the first time since stepping on the continent.

Because this place belonged to him. It had drawn him across half the world. He knew he would find all the power he’d ever wanted here. The Well of Stars was a door to the Other Side, and once the ritual was complete, it would remain open. The End would finally begin. He was so close now.

He arched his spine as he felt the life flow from David Padgett into him. Padgett was a senior who could not believe his luck when Kristen Walker agreed to go with him to the New Year’s Dance. He’d been in love with her since sophomore year. He’d joined the football team, lifted weights, gained twenty pounds of muscle, all in hopes of being someone she would look at. But it was only when he made her laugh that she actually started talking to him. He was happier than he’d ever been in his life, doped up on hormones and sheer joy, holding her arm as they walked into the dance. He whispered that she was beautiful, and she blushed and pulled him closer.

Now he was dead, too, his eyes going dry as they stared lifelessly at the ceiling of the gym.

He was rapidly followed by Mark Burrows, whose mother had helped him tie his bowtie before he left, then Lori Easton, who had to be talked into going to the dance at the last minute by her friends, and Curt Chambers, who was miserable and drunk because he’d finally realized he was gay and could never possibly tell his parents, and then Kevin Hill and Brianna Matthews, who’d decided that this was the night they would actually do it.

Wade ended them all, and Colchester twitched as he swallowed their lives. He drank down their final moments and their memories and the thousands of small joys and sorrows that made them human.

Then the sky lit up. Something hit him from behind. Hard.

He was driven to the ground and his skin burned as he was flash-fried over ninety percent of his body. He realized, with a start, that he’d just been struck by lightning.

It hurt him. It hurt a lot.

But he hadn’t lived this long to die quickly or easily. He was filled to the back of his throat with the lives and blood of others, which took most of the sting out of the blast.

He managed to get up on his hands and knees. He turned his head to see what had happened, and heard his skin crack and split where it was crisp. He looked out of the eye that wasn’t burned shut, even though it was watering from the smoke rising from his roasting flesh.

He saw that little shit, Eric Weiss. The current Merlin.

The boy smiled at him. “Now, for my next trick.”

Cocky bastard.

He was the distraction. Then the real attack came.

The girl. That young woman who was one of the Bright. She didn’t waste time gloating. Off to his left, she leaped into the air, and came down at him with a sword that sang as it split the air, something he knew instinctively must never touch him.

He shrugged off the weakness of his flesh. Rose up. And flew out of her path.

She came down where he had been only a split-second before.

Colchester stood and faced them both. The girl crouched to spring and leap at him again. The boy summoned another ball of lightning in one hand.

They were too late. Years too late.

He raised his arms, and the Well of Stars erupted. Darkness, like a gusher of oil, shot into the air.

The hill bucked and heaved under their feet. Something that looked like thick, black smoke began to hiss from the ground all around them. Eric gagged as it filled the air, leaving a metallic taste at the back of this throat. It smelled like old pennies. It smelled like death.

The darkness flowed into the sky, joining the gusher, forming a giant mushroom cloud. The cloud twisted and boiled, forming a shape. Eric saw it grow a head, and a mouth, and the mouth opened to scream.

He felt more than heard its birth cry, like a knife ripping through his guts. It was such an insult, such a violation of everything he was bound to uphold. He heard the lives it had cost, the souls shrieking, a high-pitched wail that felt like it would break his skull like an eggshell.

A moment later, it was complete.

It lashed a giant tail, and unfurled dark wings that blotted out the stars. It opened eyes of red fire and glared down at them. It looked like a dragon, a mythical winged serpent, the color of a deep grave. It grew blacker than night, standing at least fifty feet against the sky.

It hung there, fat and obscene and impossible, a nightmare erupted into the skin of this world. It was not composed of flesh and bone, but darkness, as if it were the shadow cast by something much more vast that lived outside this world.

Eric thought of carvings he’d seen from Aztec temples, of things that had chased him in nightmares when he was a boy, when he woke crying desperately for his mother. He froze and watched and gaped as it rose higher into the air.

It turned its snout toward Middleton.

Alana turned away from Colchester. She ran, legs moving like pistons, and leaped thirty feet straight up, as she sliced at it with her sword.

God love her, she was trying to fight a dragon.

She only delivered a slight, glancing blow. The dragon hissed and writhed in the air at the insult. With a flick of its tail, she was sent hurtling dozens of yards through the air, down into the trees at the base of the hill.

The dragon rose into the sky, wings flapping. It moved toward the town, rolling forward as if nothing could stop it.

Eric was alone against his greatest enemy. Colchester grinned through the melting ruin of his face.

The sky above burst, and heavy rain poured down on them.

The End was here.

Carrie ran to the payphone in the hallway off the lobby of the gym. Even if she couldn’t use the cell phone function on Danny’s gadget, she could call the police. She rushed past the people lining up to pay their entry fee, hoping that nobody would notice her. She wasn’t exactly dressed for a dance.

Fortunately, no one did. She grabbed the pay phone off the hook and dialed 911.

Then, from the lobby, she heard screams.

Followed very quickly by gunshots.

Carrie dropped the phone, and almost without thinking, ran in the direction of the gunfire.

She saw her classmates’ bodies on the floor, but she didn’t let that stop her. She held the gun in the position she’d learned from her father, and kicked open the doors to the gym.

Carrie ran inside, and immediately took a bullet to the chest.

She fell on her back and looked up at the ceiling.

God damn, she thought, it hurts to get shot.

All Danny had to do was to disconnect the fuse before the countdown was finished. All he had to do was sever the right wire and the charge would never reach the bomb. It wasn’t rocket science.

Except he couldn’t find the right place to begin. The wiring was spaghetti. Every loop led back on itself. He would have thought it was a clever way to prevent anyone from defusing the bomb, but he didn’t think Wade and the Warriors were that smart. Most likely they were just sloppy.

They’d built a bomb so crappy and dumb that he couldn’t beat it. As it turned out, stupidity was Danny’s kryptonite.

So he switched tactics and focused on the detonator.

It was wired to a Sharp clock radio. He had one on his own nightstand. The factory where they were built was across town. He’d seen them inside and out his entire life. He could disassemble one with his eyes closed.

He knew how they worked.

He switched the multi-tool to the screwdriver head, and began to take the back off the clock radio’s casing.

He heard more gunshots. He thought again of Carrie.

Then he focused on the problem in front of him.

For the first time, Eric saw what he’d been fighting since he was a child. For the first time, he faced Colchester himself, not his minions or his long-distance spells.

And he was getting his ass kicked.

Eric tried everything he knew. He drew every symbol in the air he could think of, every glyph, every spell he’d learned from Merlin. He opened a portal to a volcanic vent in the ocean and directed the blast at Colchester. Colchester gestured, and sent it backward in time, disappearing into the dim, prehistoric past. Eric called down more lightning bolts. They hit the old wizard, blackening his skin further and burning him down to muscle and bone, and it bothered him not in the least.

Colchester sent blasts of necromantic energy sizzling through the air. Eric’s shields began to crack under the pressure. He felt one slip past, inches away. It felt like watching his father pack up his things on the day he left, like the whiskey breath of a too-friendly uncle on his cheek, like opening a vein into a warm bath. Any one of those bolts would shrivel your soul if it touched you.

Colchester was playing with him, Eric realized. Because Eric was a child compared to the old wizard. Colchester was genocide and worship and mythology contained in one man, a whole religion standing on two legs.

Colchester leered at him and waited for Eric’s next attack. His skin was peeling off half his face, he was literally smoking, and the falling rain hissed when it touched him. Despite all that, he looked overjoyed.

Eric didn’t think they had a chance of winning anymore.

Carrie’s chest felt like there was a miniature sun blazing inside her, radiating pain all the way down to the tips of her fingers and toes. It was sheer, blazing agony. She thought her ribs might have been caved in.

But the vest worked. It saved Carrie’s life.

Slowly, painfully, she rolled to her side, trying to get to her feet.

She heard a sound somewhere to her left.

It felt like trying to move her head through wet cement, but she turned to look.

There was Wade. Standing less than a dozen feet from her.

Holding a rifle and smiling.

She struggled to her feet. Wade waited for her patiently. She took longer than she needed to. Behind Wade, the last of her classmates hurried out the gym doors, pulling and dragging their friends who couldn’t walk. She could at least keep him busy while they made it to safety.

When Carrie finally stood up straight, Wade raised the gun and aimed carefully. There was no way he could miss, and the vest would not save her again.

Danny’s hand slipped on the screwdriver. Maybe it was the rain. Or his palms were sweating. Didn’t matter. Focus.

Only 59 seconds to go.

But it was okay. He knew these clocks. He knew them. They were cheap to build and they had a 60 percent markup and they depended on a small programmable transistor that was so dumb it barely deserved the name. And it had a flaw, a flaw Sharp Industries decided wasn’t worth fixing after he found it, because honestly, who cared about a timer glitch in a $29.99 clock radio?

Seventeen seconds.

Press the pin with the screwdriver. Hold that down, hold that down, so the alarm doesn’t go off prematurely.

Twelve seconds.

And if you pressed the pin for SLEEP/SNOOZE at the same time as you did that —

Six seconds.

Then it would reset itself, over and over again, forever.

The numbers on the display counted down to 00:03 and back to twelve, and then back to 00:03.

Infinite loop. The timer would never reach zero.

Danny put the clock radio down gently, wiped the sweat and rain from his eyes, and carefully lifted himself out of the back of the truck.

He picked up his ray gun and ran as fast as he could to find Carrie.

Wade pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Empty,” he said to Carrie. He laughed. “I’m all out. I had a bag full of ammo around here somewhere. But with all the confusion and killing people, I must have lost it.”

He dropped the rifle. It hit the gym floor with a terrible, echoing clatter.

He kept smiling at Carrie. The pain in her chest throbbed and pulsed. There were bodies everywhere. It was about the worst thing she’d ever seen.

He began walking toward her, his Nikes squeaking on the gym floor. Wade had dried blood on his face and shirt. Other than that, he was fine. Untouched.

Carrie was struck, for a moment, by how strange he suddenly seemed to her. He wore new, expensive clothes; that jacket had to cost hundreds of dollars. His dad was a lawyer, and had gotten him out of trouble every time Carrie caught him. He was rich, healthy, and loved.

And he’d done this anyway.

He was six feet away and she raised her gun.

“Stop,” she said. “Stop right there.”

He stopped.

“Would you shoot me, Carrie?” he asked, in a voice that sounded only mildly puzzled by the idea.

Carrie didn’t gesture at all of the carnage around them. She didn’t have to. “That is a stupid question.”

He wouldn’t stop smiling. “Come on. You’ve known me since kindergarten.”

“And you’ve never been anything but a pain in my ass. You’ve cheated and stolen and lied to everyone you’ve ever met.”

Wade had edged a few inches closer. He stopped again.

“Yeah, but I never hurt anyone.”

He must have seen the look on Carrie’s face because he added, with another laugh, “Well, not until now.”

He stepped toward her again.

“See, I don’t think you can do it,” he said, as Carrie brought her gun up to chest height. “I don’t think you can kill me.”

Carrie tried to think of something cold that would scare him. That would stop him. “You want to bet?” God. Lame.

It didn’t work. Obviously. He took another step closer.

“Yeah. I do,” he said. “I bet you can’t. You still think death is something special. Something evil. I know better. Death is just a door. I did all this. I know what it’s really like.”

For some reason, she kept thinking of Wade on the first day of school. Before he was a complete shit. How he cried during math and when he couldn’t get the right notes to come out of his recorder. He’d try to keep the tears in, but everyone knew, everyone could see. He’d put his hands over his face and his shoulders would shake.

Carrie heard the doors open behind her, but she didn’t turn.

“You can put the gun down, Carrie,” a strong voice said. In her peripheral vision, Carrie saw other people moving around. She didn’t take her eyes off Wade.

Sergeant Fred Larson, one of her dad’s most trusted officers, came up beside her. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

Something about this bothered her, but she didn’t know what it was.

Still. It was over now. She raised the gun in the air. Larson reached out and gingerly took it from her.

She kept looking at Wade. He didn’t seem at all worried.

Carrie realized what was missing: she never heard any sirens. Would her father have pulled up to the gym without lights and sirens?

She turned and faced Larson, and suddenly realized why it was all wrong.

Larson was the only cop in the gym. There were two dozen other people with him, all armed, but all of them ordinary citizens from Middleton. Doug Hatcher and his wife Ellie, who ran the Hallmark store at the mall. There was Tom Wheeler, the real estate agent whose face was on every bus bench in town (“We’ll Make You a Wheeler Dealer!”). Ron Johnson, the vice-principal. People she’d seen at the grocery store. People she’d seen in the background every day of her entire life.

They looked at the death all around, and they didn’t look at all concerned. They were calm. They were happy.

They were the Followers.

Larson grabbed Carrie and threw her to the floor as she started to run.

He aimed his own gun at her.

“Stretch out thine hand toward Heaven,” he said, loudly.

“That there may be Darkness over the land,” the others chanted back.

Well, shit, Carrie thought.

“I’m sorry,” Larson said. “We have to make sure this works. It’s for the greater good, Carrie. I never wanted you to get hurt.”

That was too much for Carrie. “Oh, spare me.”

“I wish I could,” he said.

Danny rounded the corner of the high school, then stopped in his tracks. He saw something coming in the sky.

For a moment, his brain — his finely tuned computer mind — simply refused to accept the input from his eyes.

A dragon made of pure shadow was flying down toward Middleton.

He was surprised to find he felt annoyed. He’d put up with a lot of bullshit so far. The thing in the air flapped its wings, obeying no laws of aerodynamics or physics that he knew. Really, he wanted to ignore it completely. This was not his area, after all.

And yet, he was the only one standing here.

The dragon was moving inexorably toward the school. It would be here any moment.

He took a deep breath. Fine. So it was impossible? Didn’t matter. He’d deal with it.

He ran to the side of the school and began climbing the fire escape. From the top step, he scrambled onto the roof of the gymnasium.

The dragon was almost upon him. He looked up into its red eyes, saw its oily black skin.

Danny gripped the plasma-emitter he’d built. The ray gun. Raised it and aimed.

And fired, sending coherent light blazing into the dark, trying his best to bring down the monster.

Alana shook herself awake. She looked up and saw broken branches in the forest canopy over her head. She was half-buried in the mud, her body aching.

She realized she’d made the hole in the tree line above, batted like a fastball out of the air by the dragon.

A dragon. Colchester did not screw around.

It took her a moment to stand up. She shook her head, got her bearings, and looked back to where she’d been thrown from. She saw flashes of Colchester’s dark energy filling the night, a kind of anti-lightning. Occasionally — but not often enough — Eric sent bolts of his own magic in return.

They were losing. This was unacceptable. She took a deep breath. Felt something grate in her right leg. She took a step. Nearly fell as the leg refused to take her weight. She staggered forward anyway.

Who does the harsh things? her mother always asked her.

The answer was always: She who can.

She stumbled, then walked, then ran back toward Snake Hill.

Eric was out of tricks. He’d thrown everything he had, everything he’d ever learned, anything he could ever invent, at Colchester. He’d repeated his cheat code so many times it was echoing in his head, over and over. Most of Colchester’s skin was burnt away, his body had been reduced to a skeletal frame, and still he moved like he was out for an evening stroll.

He lifted his hands, ready to cast another spell. The final spell, the one that would kill Eric.

Eric knew this was the moment. He could fly at Colchester and push him down into the Well of Stars. With one last burst of magic, he could force Colchester through, stranding him there in the darkness forever.

All it would cost was his own life. Everything.

It would be the last thing he ever did.

He hesitated. He didn’t want to die.

Then Alana came charging up the hill. She moved so fast the rainwater parted behind her, like the wake of a speedboat. She was the most beautiful thing Eric had ever seen. She raised her sword and leaped for Colchester.

At that moment, Eric was completely in love with her and terrified by her at the same time. She seemed to hang there, in the air, for a long moment.

Colchester roared, his skull opening at the mouth and jawline, showing teeth that looked like fangs. He sent out a blast of pure hatred that was powerful enough to knock both Eric and Alana to the ground.

Colchester stood at the edge of the Well and lifted his hands again.

Alana was on her back. Eric was stunned and weak. He could barely move. He’d missed his shot. He’d blown the one chance they had.

This was it. It was time to die. Just at Merlin prophesied. He’d give his life in the final battle with Colchester.

But no one had ever told him that it wouldn’t be enough, that evil would win anyway.

Dark energy gathered between Colchester’s hands. He was about to strike them down.

Something pushed its way through the Well, parting the surface like it was breaking through tar.

It grabbed Colchester from behind and locked its arms around him, breaking his concentration, breaking his spell.

Alana sat up in time to see it.

There was a woman, dressed in armor and leather, drops of dark ichor still clinging to her long hair as the Well tried to pull her back down, while she, in turn, held onto Colchester with all her strength.

Eric heard Alana gasp as if she was in pain. He’d never heard that sound from her before.

She only said one word before she locked her jaws shut again, but Eric heard it, even over the driving rain.

Alana said, “Mom?”

Danny fired, and fired, and fired. The ray gun began to overheat, burning his hands. He kept pulling the trigger, sending more and more energy into the black dragon above.

The dragon finally deigned to notice him. It roared and began to bear down on Danny, moving slowly toward the gym.

Danny had managed to piss it off.

Great job, he thought, and kept firing.

The ray gun punched holes in the darkness of its skin, burning through the wings in places. Danny wondered why his aim was so terrible, then understood it was because his hands were shaking.

Because he was scared. He felt scared.

It was almost on top of him. It was going to kill him. Eat him. Swallow him whole.

He hesitated, took a deep breath, and sighted down the barrel of his ray gun.

The dragon’s claws seized the roof like prey. It lowered itself down and glared at Danny as it tightened its grip.

Danny fired, directly into its chest. The light burst through and out the other side, like a spear lancing through its heart.

The dragon screamed, and Danny, for a moment, saw his mother again, the night that she died. He heard his father’s sobs by the hospital bed, the only time he’d ever seen his dad cry.

The dragon collapsed, landing heavily on the gym, still screaming, as it began to die.

The roof cracked and split under Danny’s feet. He felt like he was flying. But only for a second before he dropped straight down, surrounded on all sides by the wreckage of concrete and gravel and steel.

Inside the gym, Larson made a sad face as he leveled his service weapon at Carrie. Carrie wanted to punch him. He shouldn’t get to feel bad about this.

She was struggling to come up with a proper insult as he put his finger on the trigger.

Then they both looked up as metal twisted and bent with a shriek. Black claws tore through the gym’s roof. The sky fell in on them, raining debris on the Followers.

Larson stood, his mouth open, staring, disbelieving, as his religion stared him in the face. He was frozen in place as the dragon screamed and fell, the bulk of its body tearing the roof open as it pitched forward into the gym.

Carrie wasn’t as impressed. She’d seen the weird shit this town had to offer before, so she didn’t waste time in shock. She ducked and rolled to her feet and ran.

One of the Followers tried to block her path. She lunged, he blocked, and she retreated, stuck in a ridiculous shall-we-dance? moment. Then an air-conditioning unit fell from above and crushed him. Carrie saw his legs sticking out from under the metal box like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, only wearing khakis and with a lot more blood.

A half-second later, Danny fell down on the hardwood floor from above. Carrie ran to him. She hauled him up and began dragging him to the exit. He was heavy, only semi-conscious, but he was breathing, and she was running on pure adrenaline.

They had to get outside as fast as they could.

The dragon was thrashing in the wreckage, bringing the gym down around them all. It was dying. She could see a burning hole in its chest and she guessed that ridiculous ray gun Danny built had actually worked. But it wasn’t dead enough for her yet.

Carrie had an idea.

She knew how to finish this thing.

Alana could not believe it. Gabrielle. Her mother. Alive. She was weathered and beaten and tired. Deep lines etched her face, along with a scar that went up one cheek all the way to her hairline.

She’d been fighting all this time. Alana could see the cost in her skin and her eyes.

But Gabrielle was alive.

Alana said, “Mom?”

Alana’s mother held Colchester, hugging him close from behind, her arms locked tight around him as he thrashed. Even though he was little more than charcoal and bone now, he struggled against her with impossible strength. They stood in the Well, blackness pooled at their feet.

Colchester raged. The sounds coming from his mouth were nothing Alana could understand. They were the roars of an animal, a long-dead language never meant for human ears.

As if in response, the wind and rain whipped up higher, all around them. Alana was driven to her knees.

Gabrielle shouted to be heard over the howling storm. She was looking right at Alana, moving her lips very slowly and deliberately, so she would be understood.

Alana heard her mother’s words very faintly over the rushing wind in her ears. She did not say “I love you” or “I missed you” or even “I’m sorry.” It wasn’t the time for that.

She said, “Kill him.”

Alana knew what came next.

She drew her sword.

Who does the harsh things?

She who can.

She put her sword straight through Colchester. It went into his hollow chest, out the other side, and into Gabrielle.

“Goodbye, Mom,” she said. They locked eyes, but all Alana saw was pain. She didn’t know if her mother heard her.

When Danny could think again, he remembered what it had been like to hit the ground after his jetpack crash. This was much worse.

He realized Carrie was pulling him along and yelling at him. The entire school seemed to be coming down around their ears.

“Come on, move your ass!” she shouted.

Danny looked back. The dragon was still there, writhing in its death throes. Its wing caught one of the Followers and sliced him in two.

“We can’t let that thing — ” he began.

“We won’t,” she said. She showed him what was in her hand, and he got it immediately.

The communicator. The one he’d told her not to use.

He limped along, leaning heavily on her shoulder.

They made it to the parking lot. Carrie pressed three buttons on the touchscreen and made a call. 911.

On the other side of the gym, the radio waves hit the bomb’s receiver almost immediately. And the cheap, badly designed bomb exploded, like Danny said it would.

The blast took out half the school, and all of the gym.

Everything in its radius, including the dragon, was blown to pieces.

Colchester looked at the girl, then at the sword in his chest, and laughed.

He backhanded her away from him. She’d killed her own mother, and it was not enough. He was not dead. He could survive this. He had survived so much.

The woman behind him was still holding him, but he could deal with her. It would only take a moment.

Suddenly, he felt weak.

He reached out with his mind, but there was nothing to draw on anymore. Someone had wounded his dragon, and it was dying. His Followers were dying, their belief in him, their devotion winking out like candles in a high wind.

There were still a few left. He thought he could drain them dry, take their lives for one last burst of strength, break free —

Then, in the town below, a massive explosion tore his dragon to nothingness, and wiped most of his believers out of existence.

He felt the power shut off like someone flipped a switch.

Beneath Colchester, the Well of Stars began to close.

Eric saw it all happen. Alana was tossed back from Colchester. Colchester was struggling, trying desperately to break free. The woman in the Well was trying to drag him down into the blackness, but she was hurt. They were impaled together on the sword. She could barely hold on to him.

The bomb went off in Middleton, and the dragon was shattered. The shockwave moved like wind through the trees.

He felt the change. He still had a chance.

Eric summoned up everything he had left. Every bit of magic. Every spell. Every trick. Every bit of his power and strength. He flew high in the air, and hurled it all down at the Well, at Colchester, who was stuck dead-center in the middle of it.

All of his magic was channeled through Alana’s sword, ripping the old magician apart. He curled and split and finally exploded into a million little pieces of darkness, flung out into the night.

Eric dropped like a stone, all the magic gone out of him.

The black muck in the Well rose up again. It enveloped and swallowed what was left of Alana’s mother. It spat back the sword, sending it flying.

The Well closed. A moment later, it was only a ring in the dirt of Snake Hill again.

Alana and Eric sat on the ground. The rain stopped like someone had closed a faucet. The clouds parted, and they could see the moon above them again.

Eric wasn’t supposed to be alive, but he was. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

“Alana?” he said.

“Give me a minute, please,” she said. She hugged her knees and kept staring at the place where her mother had been. Her sword lay next to her, half-hidden by the tall grass.

They could have been any two teenagers sitting on a hill in the night, looking at the stars.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d say everything was back to normal.

Carrie sat up. Danny was on his back, a few feet away from her. She checked and saw his chest rise and fall. She realized she couldn’t hear anything. They’d been thrown a dozen feet by the blast.

She looked around. The school was a smoking ruin. But there was no dragon, no impossible evil.

And no more Followers.

There were still kids from the dance scattered around the football field and parking lot, their bright clothes like petals fallen from a flower. The ones who were not unconscious looked shell-shocked.

In the distance, she saw police lights, even though she couldn’t hear the sirens.

About damn time, Dad.

Staggering toward her, she saw Wade Wellman. The guy had the tenacity of a cockroach. Blood ran from his ears and his nose. He seemed to be saying something. Well, screaming something, actually, but she was as deaf to that as she was to everything else. He came at her, one shaky step at a time, fists clenched.

She was too tired to give a damn. She reached into her pocket and found the tear gas her father made her carry everywhere.

She squirted him in the face, keeping it trained on him until half the cannister was gone. If she’d still had her father’s gun, she would have shot him without hesitating this time. The blood, the bodies — they’d erased any twinge of sympathy she might have felt for him.

Wade fell, choking and writhing, into the mud.

Danny managed to get up. He looked at her, and then at Wade, and then back at her. He limped the short distance to Wade.

He kicked Wade in the head until Wade stopped thrashing.

Danny came back and sat down heavily beside her. He put his arm around her. She let him. He gently turned her face toward his.

“Did we win?” he mouthed carefully.

Carrie didn’t know what to say to that. Every time she blinked, she saw bodies.

But the world’s still here, she thought, as the first police cars and paramedics arrived.

She leaned close and spoke into his ear, so he could hear her.

“It could have been worse,” she said. “It could have been so much worse.”

24

Danny Sharp Doesn’t Believe in Ghosts

This time, when Danny wakes up, he knows where he is.

Without a bunch of naked cultists all over the floor, he recognizes the space. He’s in the warehouse of Sharp Industries. There are piles of scrap and abandoned projects, and a bunch of other things that got left behind when the company was finally shut down. Over there is the passage to the factory floor, and there’s the outline of the garage door that opens onto the loading dock.

He supposes that Buzz chose the place as a kind of taunt, but that may be giving his classmate too much credit.

Someone has slapped duct tape over his mouth as a gag. He chews it up and spits it out, a trick he’s known since he was four.

He’s thirsty. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t have a water bottle within a few feet. Hydration is very important in Silicon Valley.

He starts thinking. How do you fight a sex cult and a dead wizard when you don’t have any magic powers, or any of your electronic gadgets, and you’re stuck in a chair in an old warehouse and you can’t feel your legs?

Details. He’ll figure something out. He always does.

The clock is still ticking in his head. The reunion is starting. People are in danger. He has to get out of here.

He starts working on the zip ties. Then he sees something move. There, out of the corner of his eye. The shadows in that pile of junk are different now.

Remembering the Shadowmen, remembering what they can do, Danny starts twisting in the chair. It doesn’t help.

He hears a clatter of metal falling to the concrete floor. Which is not quite right. The Shadowmen were always silent.

“Who’s there?” he says, which is not an entirely dumb question, if a little unoriginal.

From all around him, a voice echoes with the tinny reverb of an old speaker.

“I told you it wasn’t over, Danny,” it says.

Danny sags in the chair. He feels like an idiot.

“Oh. Dr. Sax. I’m glad it’s you. For a minute there, I thought I was in trouble.”

He begins twisting his wrists again. The trick is to stretch the plastic in the zip ties, then slide out.

There is the staticky noise of Sax’s laugh, just like before. “You are in trouble, Danny.”

“No. Don’t think so.”

“Of course not,” Sax says, somehow conveying amusement and contempt in the limited register of his digital voice. “Danny Sharp doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

“Oh, I’m open to the possibility. I mean, I’d have to be an idiot not to consider it after everything I’ve seen. But I’m not sure what you are. Ghosts aren’t usually confined to electronic devices.”

“What makes you think I’m confined to anything?”

“Because you haven’t touched me directly. You haven’t hurt me.” Danny almost has enough slack to free his right hand, if he doesn’t mind losing a little skin. “Whatever you are, you’re not much of a threat.”

“Are you sure about that, Danny?”

Danny yanks his right hand free with almost no bleeding. He flexes his fingers, then undoes the other zip tie. “Reasonably sure. There’s nothing useful for you here to inhabit. My workshop was filled with dangerous toys. Now you’ve got a bunch of scrap and old stereo components. Not exactly terrifying.”

“You’re wrong.”

Danny undoes the last of his bonds. He stands. Pins and needles stab his legs. He thinks of the blue box, and puts the pain away.

“Edgar, I kicked the shit out of you when you were alive. You think that’s going to change now that you’re dead?”

“That’s a fascinating theory, Danny,” Sax says, his voice now very cold and clear, and somehow closer. “But unfortunately, as I said, you’re wrong.”

Danny’s pocket buzzes.

“What electronic device do people carry with them everywhere they go, Danny? How do you think I knew exactly where you were? You think you could get rid of me by changing phones?”

Danny reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. The computer-generated face of Dr. Sax stares back at him from the screen. Sax has been riding along with him the entire time.

Danny throws his phone to the ground, cracking it in half. He stomps on it with his heel.

“You know what I love about you, Dr. Sax?” he says to the empty air in the warehouse. “You are so desperately insecure. You always have to tell me how smart you are. Alive or dead. Nothing changes. You tell me your master plan, like I’m going to stand by and let it happen.”

Silence. Then the cold, electronic rasp of Sax’s laughter once again.

“Do you think I would have told you any of this if you could stop it? You’re too late, Danny. You are twenty years too late. We have started the ritual. And I have already taken everything from you. You have no more toys left to play with, no more gadgets, no one riding to the rescue. Your daddy won’t bail you out this time, and I already own your best friend.”

“Buzz? Buzz was never my best friend.”

“I didn’t mean Buzz.”

There is the sound of an electric motor whirring to life. The squeak of treads grabbing as something moves forward.

Danny knows those sounds.

The pile of scrap metal moves again. More pieces topple to the floor as something lurches forward, out of the darkness.

Two round LED lights gleam and swivel, then lock on Danny.

Danny doesn’t know what this feeling in his chest is. If he was that kind of person, he’d say it was heartbreak.

The figure rolls out of the gloom and crosses the warehouse, humming and clicking.

RANN-D. Danny’s real best friend. The one made out of metal and computer chips and engine parts and lines of code. The one that could never be hurt, that would never die on him, or go away. Until it did.

The video screen in the chest of the robot switches on, and the digital face of Sax looks down on Danny and emulates a smile.

“There’s no getting out of this, Danny. Not this time.”

RANN-D’s mechanical arms lock around him, lifting him from the floor.

“This time,” Sax says, “you lose.”

25

Ice and Bottles of Zima

Most of the people here tonight have never been in this building before. Half the school was rebuilt after the blast on New Year’s Eve, so the gym is not the same one where their classmates were murdered. That’s good enough for them to pretend. For the reunion, they get to inhabit a fake memory where nothing bad ever happened and they were just like any other high school class. There’s a DJ, and streamers and banners from the ceiling, and big, poster-sized blowups of old yearbook photos, and flat screens showing nineties music videos in each corner. It’s like they’re living in a rerun of an old TV show.

It helps that there are three open bars. As soon as you finish your complimentary plastic cup of beer or wine, you’re no more than five steps from a refill. (There are also big, serve-yourself tubs filled with ice and bottles of Zima, for old times’ sake.) People smile a bit too widely and laugh a little too loud. Everyone does their very best to put the past behind them.

The gym is packed, even though the weather is terrible. A light rain in the evening has turned into a full summer storm. There are tornado warnings in neighboring counties, and the sky has a weird green tinge as the sun sets.

But people make the same jokes over and over about “building an ark” and “nice weather we’re having” and so on.

They’re happy to see each other. Most of them.

Alana shows up alone and unarmed. She can feel the burn around her wrist throbbing with a steady pulse, reminding her of her agreement with Colchester. Alana doesn’t know exactly what will happen.

But she knows it would be cowardice to be anyplace else.

So she’s at the reunion, even though there’s no one she wants to catch up with. The closest she ever came to having friends in high school was Carrie and Danny and Eric, and they’ve already said everything they need to say about tonight.

There are people who want to speak to her. Fuller sees her come in through the doors and gives her a long look up and down like she’s wearing lingerie instead of a pantsuit. “Damn,” he says. “I always knew you had a body under there.”

Yeah, she remembers. He used to leave crusty tissues in an envelope in her locker with a note: I DID THIS WHILE THINKING OF YOU.

She steps closer to him, and he flinches, then hurries away. She considers chasing him, making him run, but heads to the nearest bar instead.

Alana gets a cup of wine, finds a quiet spot off the center of the floor and waits.

She sees Carrie across the gym. Their eyes meet. Carrie raises her glass. Alana does the same, and despite herself, smiles. Then the crowd blocks her view.

She’s sure of one thing: some people here are going to die tonight. At this point, she knows she cannot stop it.

She only hopes it’s nobody she cares about.

Some people glare at Carrie as if she’s violating a restraining order. There are others who stage-whisper shitty comments as she passes, or pointedly turn their backs when she is near.

Carrie wants to tell them she doesn’t want to be here either. But who else is going to save you assholes?

She drugged her mom before she left the house; gave her a tranquilizer the size of a horse tablet and put her in bed. She doesn’t feel great about it. Still, it wasn’t like Carrie had anyone she trusted to watch her, and she couldn’t have her wait in the car.

And Carrie figured that if she didn’t bother to show up at the reunion, her mom was probably dead anyway, along with everyone else in town. At a minimum.

She passes Fuller and Lonnie, who are propping up one of the bars. They look her up and down and make faces. Fuller mutters to Lonnie, who laughs loudly and says, “Not even with your dick, man.”

God, she prays to a deity in whom she does not quite believe, grant me the confidence of a guy with gray nose hairs and a beer gut.

Carrie expected the attitude and the nasty looks. What surprises her are the people who seem worried about her. They approach, somewhat shyly at first, and offer their condolences about her father. They actually talk to her.

David Wang, who took endless shit for his last name from the jocks and bullies, tells her about his architecture firm down in the state capital. Alex Fuentes gives her a warm hug and introduces her to his husband. Terri (Rogers) O’Connor, she learns, has a daughter about to enter college.

“Did you have to get a sitter?” she asks Terri, since she’s run out of other things to say.

“No. One of the few benefits of getting knocked up right out of high school!” she laughs, and takes another big drink of her Costco-brand chardonnay. (She looks great. She’s had plastic surgery, and the scars on her face are almost invisible now. Carrie wouldn’t know which was the glass eye if she didn’t remember.)

“So what are your kids doing while you’re here?”

“Hell if I know,” Terri says, then laughs. “They’re old enough to look after themselves. I hope they’re having a party or at least a couple boys over. I know that makes me a terrible mom, but I’d rather they have fun like we did than sit there all night watching YouTube.”

Carrie smiles at her. “Is it that bad?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Terri says, draining her glass. “I bet they’re glued to their phones right now.”

Terri’s daughter Hannah is actually a very responsible girl. She made dinner for her sister Chloe, cleared the plates and loaded them in the dishwasher, and finished her homework.

Then she went to her phone.

She now has a chat going on the senior class group text (the secret one, not the one everyone knows about) and a running text commentary on the chat with her best friend, Emma, and she’s swiping and liking a bunch of stuff on Instagram while she waits for responses. She doesn’t actually spend a lot of time on YouTube. Too many creepy videos out there for her.

But then her phone gets weird. A link popped up on all of her apps at the same time.

what’s this?

she asks her friend Emma, but Emma has the same question.

She’s not about to click it, because she’d been fooled by dick pics before (she’s never told her mother, because her mother would freak and take the phone away), but her phone shakes and buzzes and begins pulsing with new images.

She frowns but she doesn’t look away. It looks like a game, only not one she’s seen before.

She tries to swipe back to Emma. She gets the app back.

is your phone doing this?

Em?

u there?

Then the game is back. It’s a swirling wheel of fortune. CLICK THE WHEEL FOR PRIZES! it promises. Ugh. Another pop-up ad.

She tries to swipe past it. It won’t go away. She’s about to shut the phone down and start over when the wheel begins spinning.

LIFE OR DEATH, it says. CHOOSE.

A little cartoon devil dances by the wheel, grinning at her.

That’s creepy.

The spinning gets faster. Something in her head hurts. She wants to drop the phone. She’s not sure why. She keeps watching anyway.

The wheel turns into a blur, and Hannah can’t blink. The lines and colors become a pulsing strobe, and pure code pours into her eyes. Her mouth opens slightly.

Dr. Edgar Sax uploads his virus into her, like he is doing to all of her friends and their classmates and their little brothers and sisters.

It is so easy. He is pure code himself now. He can jump right through their optic nerve, past their frontal lobes, past all the pieces of mush that these children think are their selves. They are subroutines and programs. Easy to hack. He takes control.

Upstairs, on her bed, Hannah’s sister Chloe was watching CookieSwirlC on YouTube; now her mouth is open, and she’s drooling slightly.

Across town, Hannah’s friend Emma is long gone, stranded in some distant field of her mind. She clicked the link right away.

A boy named Parker sits like a statue, a forkful of mac-and-cheese halfway to his face as the images play over his eyes.

A seventh-grader named Elias tries to drop his phone. Sax floods his nociceptors and he cringes with pain. In a moment, the virus digs deeper, and his autonomic and physical functions are under control, and he grips the phone like a lifeline at sea.

Another girl, named Bella, smiles vacantly as a flood of dopamine hits her brain, her reward for letting the virus in, letting it run free in her neurons.

All over town, more children pick up when they hear the beep or buzz or ping of a message or an alert. They do it by reflex, without thinking. And within seconds, any capacity for thought is gone.

Sax, at the center of this web, begins to pull on the strands. He sends signals down the pathways, tugs on the strings, tells the puppets what to do.

March, he orders them.

And all over town, the children of the senior class of Middleton High get up from their couches and beds and chairs and walk toward their front doors. They go outside without jackets, in their bare feet and socks, in their pajamas and sweatpants and shorts, in the soaking rain, shuffling along the sidewalks and in the gutters and down the middle of the road.

Babysitters who try to stop them are pushed aside with unnatural strength. That is, the ones who aren’t snagged by the virus themselves.

The children march forward, one foot in front of the other, slowly moving from the side streets to the main drags. They gather in an ever-larger group as they meet at the intersections. They do not acknowledge or look at one another. All of their attention is fixed on their phones. More fall in with every step, until there are at least a hundred all walking together.

All of them walk in the same direction, following a map drawn on the screens and in their heads. All of them obediently heading for Highway 23, going up the road to Snake Hill.

Like lemmings going over a cliff. A little on the nose, Sax admits, but it will get the job done.

26

You Were Right All Along

Carrie is beginning to wonder where Danny is when Carl Stuckey enters the gym in full uniform.

His presence plucks a string inside all these people who are on high alert for history to repeat itself. Carrie can’t blame them.

Carl ignores everyone else and moves quickly to Carrie, his face drawn with worry.

“Carrie,” he says, then hesitates. This is hard for him. “I need your help.”

Wow, that had to cost him. He must read the surprise on her face because he plunges ahead, explaining.

“I’ve heard about something — well, it’s bad. It’s really bad,” he says, quieter now, so that she can barely hear him over the DJ playing Red Hot Chili Peppers.

She can’t resist torturing him a little. “Why would you need my help, Carl?” she asks.

He looks annoyed that he has to admit it. “You were right, okay? You were right all along.”

She never gets tired of hearing that, no matter what the source. Then he says something that surprises her.

“Besides, I think we found out who killed your dad.”

She freezes, and all the good feeling drops out of her like she’s lost a pint of blood. “Who?” she says.

Carl shakes his head. “Not here. Come with me. I’ll explain.”

Carrie follows him out, trying to look normal, trying not to spook anyone more than they already have. They exit the gym.

Carrie walks side by side with Carl. He goes outside, around the corner of the school. They stand on the steps of Middleton High, next to his parked cruiser. Nobody else is there. Seems as good a place as any.

“Okay,” Carrie says. “Start talking.”

Instead, Carl takes out his service weapon and says, “Get in the car, Carrie. I won’t tell you twice.”

Wade sits in Hog’s Mercedes, engine idling, the phone in his lap, waiting for the call that will start everything. He can’t wait to see the faces of those people when he walks into the gym again.

Buzz Bixby pulls up alongside in his BMW and rolls down the window.

Wade waits a good long time before he does the same. They might be working together now, but Wade never liked Buzz. He enjoys making him wait.

“Change in plans,” Buzz tells him.

Wade scowls. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

Buzz smiles. “Don’t worry. You’re going to like this.”

Wade listens, and damn if Buzz isn’t right. He smiles and puts the car in drive and heads off to his new destination.

Buzz watches him go, then checks the clock on the dash.

He flips a U-turn and heads back toward Middleton High.

It’s time.

Buzz rolls up to the gym just as Carl Stuckey pulls out of the parking lot.

He’s one of the last to arrive, which is how they planned it. The other Followers are inside. He was worried that the media might be here tonight — “Twenty years later with the class that was shattered by the events of New Year’s Evil,” he could practically hear some member of the lamestream media saying — but there have been so many other mass shootings since then. Middleton’s body count looks almost quaint. It’s ancient history now.

Everything is going exactly right.

He walks through the lobby doors and takes out his phone. He catches a glimpse of himself in the trophy case, and, behind the reflection, an old photo of his past life. The day they won the state championship.

He looked pretty damn cool at that moment, he has to admit. This feels like that. He’s the hero again. He can almost hear the soundtrack behind him, the roar of the crowd.

Time to get it back, he thinks. Time to get it all back.

He keeps his face carefully blank for the audience that is not there and dials the number he was given. There’s no voice at the other end, but apparently it’s not necessary. All he has to do is say the words.

“Lock the doors,” he says.

Right behind him, all around the school, all at once, the entrances and exits — every one of them steel-paneled, double-door, magnetic-locking, on a central circuit for fire safety — slam shut with a colossal boom.

He puts the phone away and steps through the only door that still works, into the gymnasium. People look at him. They heard the noise. Some of them were waiting for this moment to arrive.

Buzz nods. Fuller yanks a cord from the DJ’s setup, and the music comes to an abrupt halt. Buzz signals Lonnie, and Lonnie moves over to the equipment closet. He has a key and unlocks it.

“Buzz,” a woman says to him. “What’s going on?”

It takes him a second to recognize her. Jill Steffens. She blew him in the back seat of his car once, the night of a 14–3 win over Centerville. He’s pretty sure that was her. He and Hailey were on a break.

He takes out his Beretta and raises it. Her eyes go wide and she lets out a little shriek.

“Everyone, if I could have your attention, please,” he shouts.

He didn’t need to say it. Everyone’s eyes are on him already.

All around the gym, Lonnie is handing the other Followers their weapons. Shotguns. Good at close range, in an indoor space. Easy to use. And scary. People look at that big, black hole at the end of the barrel and imagine being blown to pieces. The sixteen Followers will be able to manage the whole crowd, herd them like cattle.

“It’s time for the real party to begin,” Buzz says.

They all look so scared. They’ll do whatever they’re told. This is serious, but he allows himself a little grin.

He feels like James Bond.

Alana doesn’t know where Carrie is now. Everyone in the gym is clumped up, on the verge of panic. They want to run, but there’s nowhere to run to.

She has to give Buzz and the Followers credit. They’ve got the whole room covered.

Jason Dunleavy tries to be a hero. He steps forward, yelling something, and Lonnie cracks him across the jaw with the stock of a shotgun. Dave drops to the floor and stays there. Lonnie points the gun around, shouting, “You want some? Huh? You want some? Fucking right you don’t.”

And that pretty much does it for any thoughts of rebellion. Most of the people here remember what a gunshot wound at close range looks like. Most of them have been trying to forget it for twenty years.

Some people try to use their phones without the Followers noticing, but they’re having problems. No reception. Or some other reason they’re not working.

In the midst of all this, Alana stands very still.

She’s not surprised that some people are giving her significant looks, the classmates she saved back in the day, people who knew her secret, but never said anything about it.

Now they’re waiting for her to save them again.

Instead, she simply returns their stares. Waiting like she’s only another face in the crowd.

Buzz’s phone rings — at least his seems to work — and he answers and nods. He speaks to the crowd again.

“We’re all going to take a little field trip,” he shouts. “Please move quickly to the buses outside.”

A murmur runs through the crowd. Even for people at gunpoint, this is a lot to ask. Alana can see some of them thinking about it. There’s not that many of them. They can’t shoot all of us.

Buzz holds up his hands, like he’s addressing a pep rally as student body president again, and the crowd is getting a little too rowdy. “Before you think about doing anything stupid,” he says, “take a look at your phones.”

All around the gym, phones flare to life. People gasp and choke and wail as images dance over their screens.

Alana looks over the shoulders of the woman nearest her, whose eyes are locked on her phone.

There’s a live video, jerky and handheld, like a FaceTime call. It’s hard to make out what’s happening at first, but Alana sees the face, staring at the camera: dead-eyed and slack-jawed, moving forward, one step at a time.

“Baby,” the woman says. “Baby, wake up. What are you doing? Answer me!”

“Those are your kids,” Buzz says. “They’re on their way to meet you. If you want to see them, you should get on the bus.”

Alana takes her own phone out of her pocket. Grace does not look back at her. She only sees her daughter from the side, sitting in the seat of an unknown car, being driven somewhere.

Her wrist burns. She looks down and sees the scar from the binding is now red and inflamed.

When she lifts her head again, more people cast pleading looks at her, eyes begging her to do something to stop this before it goes any further.

She lowers her phone and looks back at them. In a clear, steady voice, she says, “We’d better do what they want.”

She walks through the crowd, right up to Buzz. He bows and gestures gallantly for her to go out the door.

The rest of her graduating class follows her.

27

A Lot of Sacrificing to Do Tonight

Wade is not particularly thrilled at being ordered around by a tool like Buzz, but he has to admit, he does like the job he’s been given.

He parks the Mercedes on the street and walks up to the house. He knocks on the door as rain streams off the porch roof above him.

It takes a long time before Mary Keene opens the door. She must have been asleep. She wears a rumpled track suit and her hair is a wild mess. She looks blinks at him several times. “Yes?” she says.

She doesn’t recognize him. Which is not a huge surprise. He’s changed a lot.

Before he can say anything, however, a pit bull mix charges from behind Mary. She barely catches the mutt before it lunges at Wade. It snaps and strains and snarls as she holds its collar. Wade’s lip curls back in a snarl as well, almost involuntarily. God, he hates dogs.

“Bailey!” Mary scolds. “Be quiet!”

“I’m sorry,” she says and pulls it away from the door. Wade hears a door slam somewhere deeper in the house as she locks up the mutt, then Mary reappears.

She looks at him again, but as if seeing him for the first time. “I’m sorry. How can I help you?”

There’s a lack of focus in her eyes that Wade’s seen before. There was an old guy on his cell block, a murderer in for multiple life sentences. He’d pretend to know you if you greeted him, but he’d wait for you to give him clues. Alzheimer’s. Wade could always fool the guy into thinking he owed him a cigarette. He must have taken a carton of the old guy’s smokes that way.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Wade says. “Is your husband home, ma’am?”

She hesitates. She doesn’t know the answer. Wade can tell.

“You know, I think he’s at the police station,” she finally says. “I suppose he’s busy with the storm. I’m sorry, you said your name was…?”

He beams at her like a Boy Scout who’s made Eagle.

“Mrs. Keene, it’s me. I’m in town for the reunion and I thought I’d drop by and say hello. Don’t you remember me?”

Her eyes take in his face. She doesn’t know him at all. She smiles back at him warmly.

“Of course I remember you,” she says. “Would you like to come in?”

Wade feels a warm glow inside. This is going to be fun.

Eric parks his car in the lot near the base of Snake Hill, next to the restrooms and the signs for the historical site. He picks up Alana’s sword from the passenger seat. It trembles in his hand a little, and it feels like putting his tongue to a battery. It doesn’t like him, he can tell.

Yeah, yeah, he wants to tell it. Get in line. I don’t like myself.

But he’s not about to start talking to a sword, even a magic one.

He gets out into the rain and hikes up the small hill. He could levitate, sure, but he suspects it’s going to be a long night, and there’s no point wasting any energy on special effects. Same reason he didn’t use a magic door to get here.

He’s not in any hurry for this to begin.

He can see Jeremy, or Colchester, already at the top of the hill, next to the fairy ring. Kirk and Susan are with him. They hold Grace by her arms, even though she’s tied up.

Grace, however, is watching Jeremy.

When Eric reaches them, he can see why.

Colchester hangs over Jeremy, a translucent, ghostly figure with one hand on the boy’s shoulder. He doesn’t look like the old man Eric fought twenty years ago. This is a younger Colchester, a man of the 1800s, with a gunslinger mustache and a dark suit.

He’s almost made it completely into this world, using Jeremy as his anchor. Once the ritual is complete, he’ll be able to do whatever he wants.

Jeremy’s eyes are closed and he concentrates deeply, standing at the edge of the Serpent’s Crown. His hands are clasped in front of his chest, palms together. It looks comical, the solemn look on the little face.

Until Eric notices that, despite the summer storm pouring from above, the boy is completely dry. The rain falls around him, every drop avoiding him, as if frightened to touch his skin.

Eric looks with his third eye. He can see the ley lines that run below the surface of this place, intertwining like braids. They join one another until they form a glowing river, swirling around in a circle at the little boy’s feet. It’s an incredible amount of power, and Colchester, working through Jeremy, channels it effortlessly.

Colchester gestures, and Jeremy’s body imitates the movement as if he’s a puppet on strings. The boy raises his hands, and the ground opens before him. Mud and dirt and grass turn over, churning like liquid. Round boulders heave from the ground, regurgitated from the belly of the earth. They roll and clack and slam together, fusing into a shape.

A moment later, the boy stands in front of a stone altar that looks as if it has been there for centuries.

He opens his eyes, and sees Eric and Grace.

It’s Jeremy’s face, but it’s the exact same smile as the one Colchester wears, hanging there in the air. They both look utterly happy.

Grace, despite all Eric has done to her, all the treachery and generally shitty behavior, looks at him with desperation. Kirk and Susan look frightened, too, as they realize that this is what they’d always wanted, and they cannot stop it now.

“You’re finally here,” Colchester says, the voice coming from his own mouth rather than Jeremy’s now. He points to Kirk and Susan. “Put her on the altar.”

“What?” Grace says.

“What?” Eric says.

Colchester rolls his eyes. Jeremy’s eyes roll along with them. “Don’t be slow, boy,” he says. “We have a lot of sacrificing to do tonight. Sooner begun, sooner done. Let’s go”

Eric doesn’t move. “You gave your word you wouldn’t harm her.”

“And I won’t,” Colchester says. “You will. Why do you think I told you to bring the sword? That should make it easy.”

Eric looks at the sword, then at Colchester. “This wasn’t the deal.”

For a second, Eric sees something flicker to the surface of Jeremy’s face. A sudden unease.

“It takes a lot of blood to change the world,” Colchester says flatly. “If you really want power, you’d better get used to it now.”

Eric clenches his free hand into a fist. Magic shimmers in the air around him. He does not quite point the sword at Colchester.

“I just want to make sure I’m not next on the altar. What did you mean that we have a lot of sacrificing to do tonight?”

“You interrupted the last harvest. One girl is not nearly enough. This is the payment and the interest. This is what it takes to start The End.”

He points to the road that leads to Snake Hill. Down below, Eric can see headlights moving along the winding highway that climbs up from the valley. Someone else is coming to be slaughtered as well.

Then he realizes: those are not headlights.

He’s seeing the light from dozens — maybe hundreds — of phones in the hands of people walking toward Snake Hill.

He casts his sight a little further — an old, easy bit of magic, like suddenly looking through a telescope — and sees they are kids. They look like zombies, in thrall to the light of their screens, marching forward through the rain.

Colchester has brought the children of Middleton here for a sacrifice. The Pied Piper all over again.

“Oh,” Eric says. “Cool.”

Colchester nods, and Kirk and Susan begin hauling Grace over to the altar. She struggles and screams.

Jeremy shakes himself, as if waking from a nap. He turns and looks at Colchester floating above him.

“But you both promised to bring her back to her mom,” he says in a small voice.

Colchester thunders down at him. “Don’t you question me, you whining little shit. You stay where I tell you and do what I tell you and you will get what you want, or you will get nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing.”

Jeremy shrinks down and seems to vanish behind his own eyes. His face goes blank again.

Colchester grimaces, satisfied.

“Now you,” he says to Eric. “Time for you to earn what you have coming to you.”

Grace struggles to break the ropes, but can’t. She screams and screams, but nobody’s listening.

Eric can’t look at her. He doesn’t expect he’s going to live long once he does as he’s told. In a way, it’s comforting. He knows he is going to be double-crossed. He has always been working at a disadvantage. Colchester holds two perfectly innocent hostages.

The only way to save Grace is to hurt Jeremy. Eric would have to kill a little boy. Or let the monster controlling that boy kill the whole town. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

It’s no wonder that Colchester believes he beat Eric even before he showed up. He’s bargained for his life, betrayed his principles, turned his back on all the good he ever did, and led his friends to the slaughter. And they’re going to kill him anyway.

The trick, of course, is knowing when.

Eric looks up and sees they have company now.

Middleton’s children arrive at the parking lot. They trudge up the hill in neat lines. They take their places just below the snake’s head, right below the altar, and keep staring at their phones, waiting obediently for the slaughter.

On the road, Eric sees more lights now. A police car. Followed by a line of other vehicles. Somehow he doubts anyone is coming to the rescue.

28

You Walked Right into It

Carrie is in the back seat of Carl’s squad car, her right wrist cuffed to a restraint ring bolted to the floor. There is no divider between the her and the front seat — Carl doesn’t transport a lot of prisoners in the chief’s car, she guesses — but she cannot quite sit up straight. Her hand is locked close to the ring in the floor, so she’s hunched over.

Carl is driving, staring straight ahead, perfect posture, hands at ten and two. They are on Main, heading north. He turns onto the county highway, the dark of the trees covering the foothills ahead.

Carrie knows this route. They’re going toward Snake Hill.

He beats out a little rhythm on the steering wheel. Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.

Carrie checks her watch.

“So you’re one of the Followers,” she says.

“No,” he corrects her. “I am the leader of the Followers. I’ve been the Good Son ever since Fred Larson died on New Year’s Eve.”

“Huh. I’m not surprised everyone else had to die for you to step up. I mean, no offense, Carl. But you’re a total joke. You always were.”

Carl’s neck stiffens. “Maybe that’s what I wanted you to think.”

“Sure, Carl.”

He chuckles. “You remember Andrew Goodson?”

“Yeah.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

“You? Come on, Carl.”

“You probably don’t remember. But I was there first. The Followers needed someone who could get to Goodson when the whole thing started to fall apart. We couldn’t have him talking in an interrogation room. And his blood wasn’t wasted. I made sure of that. It all went to the Good Man.”

Carl smiles now. Carrie can only see the corner of his face, but he’s smiling. And he seems to lean forward without moving. Like a thinner, sleeker version of himself is emerging from his pudgy features.

“If you’re so smart, Carl, why didn’t you stop Hailey from sending us those invitations?” Carrie sounds truly pissed off for the first time. “Why didn’t you keep us from coming back?”

Carl laughs out loud. “Oh God. Why do you think? We wanted you back here. We knew what Hailey was doing. We knew she’d never agree to this, no matter what she said. We knew Danny and Eric would come running, because they had no lives. But you were trickier. So we had that woman killed and left you a clue, and you fell for it like you always did. We sent monsters after Alana, and that got her pissed off enough to come looking for payback. None of you could resist the chance to play hero again. We set up this whole thing. And you walked right into it.”

“Makes sense,” Carrie says. She doesn’t sound angry. “You need us for the sacrifice. That was the plan all along.”

“Oh, don’t act like you knew the whole time,” he says, sounding disgusted. “God, I always hated that. You’d always act like you knew everything, even when you nearly got killed. Like you were so damn smart. Admit it, Carrie. You didn’t see any of this coming.”

For a second, there’s no sound but the rain and the hiss of the tires on the wet asphalt.

Carl looks at her in the mirror again and smirks.

She meets his eyes and stares at him without blinking.

His smirk fades. He looks back at the road and swerves, almost hitting a teenager walking like a zombie on the rain-slick road.

“Easy there, Carl,” Carrie says. “You’re supposed to bring me to the sacrifice. Let’s make sure we both get there alive.”

The buses arrive right behind the police car. Eric watches his former classmates, Alana among them, walk out, slowly, herded by Followers carrying shotguns.

Buzz pulls up in his BMW and parks. He hops out and begins waving around a big, fuck-off semiauto pistol. There is lots of shouting and bullying and threats. Eric thinks Buzz has finally found his calling.

Eric watches as Carl hops out of the police car and opens the back seat. He keeps his gun on Carrie as he unlocks her from the restraint ring and then cuffs her hands together again. He walks up the base of the hill, hauls her through the crowd and brings her up to the front.

Alana looks at Eric from below, eyes cold, her mouth set in a grim line. He looks down at Grace, tied to the altar.

He wishes he could tell Alana how sorry he is. He knows she does not want to hear it, and whatever words he could find would never be enough.

From her place in the crowd, Alana waits. She feels the brand, burning on her wrist. Other people look to her, and she can’t meet their eyes.

She watches her child on the altar. No harm has come to her yet. She realizes how much room there is for betrayal in all the unspoken parts of a devil’s bargain.

She almost decides to rush toward the top of the hill. She almost says, to hell with her deal. But she finds that her legs stick when she tenses to run and spring. Her brand ignites with new pain.

More than that, she knows that she would still be too late to save her daughter. She can’t interfere. She can’t.

So she hates herself, and hates Eric, and hates herself for trusting him, and promises a million kinds of bloody and painful vengeance, and she waits.

The last guest arrives in a moment. RANN-D — or, to be more accurate, the ghost of Sax, driving the robot — hammers up the road, bringing Danny pinned in its arms, held tightly across its torso. The crowd clears a path, letting Sax and RANN-D steer over the grass, bringing Danny all the way up to the front row.

Eric looks back at him from behind the altar. “About time you got here,” he says.

Danny shrugs. “Traffic was a bitch.”

Buzz doesn’t care for this. “We’re on the clock here, ladies. Maybe save the chitchat for your next slumber party.”

Eric scowls at him. “Shut up, Buzz.”

“Hey. You’re not in charge here. I am. And the sooner you do this thing, the sooner I get my daughter back.” He looks at Colchester’s ghost-form, hanging over Jeremy. “That was the deal, right?”

Colchester nods. “You will be reunited with the girl. That was our agreement.”

The loophole in that is so huge and obvious. It fooled Jeremy. Buzz is an adult. He should know better.

But Eric doesn’t bother to comment. He doesn’t care what happens to Buzz. He stopped caring twenty years ago.

He has a couple of things left to say to Danny, though.

“You know what’s going to happen next?”

Danny shrugs, as much as he can in the steel grip of the robot. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“This is how it has to be.”

Danny looks at him with what can only be called scientific dispassion. Like he’s waiting for the results of an experiment.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” is all he says.

Danny looks up at Eric and Colchester and Jeremy at the Serpent’s Crown. They turn away from him, like he’s not worth their time anymore. The gears and servos whirring inside RANN-D sound like laughter to Danny.

“It looks like you don’t have any friends left at all, Danny,” Sax says through the speakers. “Has everyone let you down tonight?”

Danny doesn’t reply. He feels a little ridiculous, being held like a child by the robot, but it won’t last much longer. He’s supposed to be dead soon.

Carrie looks like she’s going to retch something up and spit it at Carl.

He laughs at her.

“Working on some last-minute escape plan?” he says. “Maybe you better think twice about that.”

Carrie keeps her mouth clamped shut and glares at Carl.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I finally found a way to shut you up.”

Carrie stands there in the hammering rain, hands cuffed, and remains silent.

All the people from the reunion line up meekly, some parents wailing as they see their kids standing in the rain, eyes still locked on their screens. The Followers surround them, forming a loose circle with their weapons out.

Now the class is assembled in the meadow before the hill, an unwilling audience for whatever happens next. Some of them are thinking this is unfair. They got away before. They survived what was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime event. They were the lucky ones. They feel cheated.

Some of them think maybe they didn’t dodge those bullets after all. Maybe they were always supposed to die; they only managed to delay it for twenty years.

Others are only thinking of their children, standing in the rain with their blank, empty eyes, not moving no matter how many times their names are called.

But they all know one thing: there is no one left to save them now.

29

How Magic Works

Standing at the altar, Alana’s sword in hand, Eric takes a moment to look out on the assembled crowd. Grace looks up at him, trying not to cry, trying to be brave now.

He can’t meet her eyes. So he looks out at the people below. They are so much like an audience that he has to stop for a moment.

“Let’s get on with it, son,” Colchester says. “That altar’s going to be a busy place.”

Eric holds the sword up. And pauses.

“This looks bad, doesn’t it?” Eric asks. “Yeah. This looks bad.”

Eric knows he’s being theatrical. So what? He’s a showman. Watch him pull a rabbit out of his hat.

Colchester turns and scowls. Jeremy swivels with him, eyes blank.

“You know how magic works? I mean the hard kind of magic, not sorcery. Card and coin tricks. Close-up magic. You want to know what the key is?”

Colchester sees that Eric is doing something here, but he doesn’t know what. Not yet. Carl and Buzz and the Followers are watching, waiting, taking their cues from the Good Man. Eric knows how to keep a crowd on the hook.

“Misdirection,” he says. “If I take a card from you and wave my hand, it’s because I don’t want you looking at the deck. It’s also why magicians have a line of patter. We’re always talking. We never shut up long enough for you to realize you’re being fooled.”

Colchester doesn’t like where this is headed. “Son, what do you think you’re — ”

Eric smiles. “I’m not your son. And I’m telling you: you were looking at the wrong hand.”

He looks down at Grace, who is still terrified.

Then he takes Alana’s sword and slices the bonds that are holding her to the altar. With a quick gesture, he levitates her, up and away from the fairy circle, to the side of the hill.

Eric stabs the sword into the altar, and calls down the lightning.

The sky cracks open as a pillar of pure white energy reaches from the sky and briefly turns night into day.

The bolt strikes Alana’s sword and runs down into the altar, shattering it into fragments as thunder rolls over the valley.

When the smoke clears, there’s nothing left but a crater and rubble.

And the sword, of course. Eric is impressed. He picks it up and smiles.

“So. Was this your card?” he shouts over the echo of the explosion.

The people from the reunion, the Followers, Carrie and Danny and Alana, all stare up at the top of the hill. Only the zombified kids are not impressed.

And Colchester. He’s furious, but he’s not impressed. He walks Jeremy’s body over to the edge of the smoking crater. His eyes are as narrow and mean as a snake’s.

“You had to be the hero,” he says. “You don’t even see how useless you are. You couldn’t kill me twenty years ago. How are you going to stop me now?”

Colchester gestures, and all the high school students in the crowd turn, like they’re swiveling on a mechanism, and take a step forward in unison. Colchester has a whole army of innocent pawns. He has at least a dozen ways to kill Eric without using his own hands.

Eric holds the sword in front of himself, keeping Colchester at bay. He cannot wipe the grin from his face.

“Well, for starters,” Eric says. “I’m not going to do it alone.”

Then there are gunshots, followed by another explosion, and that’s when the screaming starts.

30

Was This Your Master Plan

Carl watches as Eric approaches Alana’s daughter at the top of the hill. Carrie watches him, his face as serene as if he’s listening to a church choir. She coughs into her hands to get his attention.

He faces her, annoyed to be drawn away from the main event. He clearly doesn’t want to miss a second of the blood and pain.

“You want to know something personal about me, Carl?” she asks.

“Is it something dirty?”

Carrie sighs. “No. I have a photographic memory. It means I don’t forget anything.”

“Not what I was hoping for, but good for you, I guess.”

“It’s actually a huge pain in the ass. You would not believe what I have to sift through on a daily basis. So sometimes I shelve things. I have to prioritize. And for a long time, you weren’t worth my attention. Again, no offense.”

He only scowls at her. He wants to get back to the pregame for the human sacrifice. Eric is still talking up there.

“But when I thought back, I realized I never saw your patrol car that day,” she says. “When Andrew Goodson died. Which meant that you weren’t parked at the motel. At first, I didn’t care. I assumed you were a coward. I mean, by the time I left Middleton, I decided that any town that would replace my father with you deserved whatever it got.”

“Ouch,” Carl says.

Carrie continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “It occurred to me that you might have already been there. At the motel. You might have parked your car somewhere else so no one would see it. And there’s only one reason you would do that. You were there first. Because you were working with the Followers.”

“I already told you that,” Carl snaps, annoyed. “Pretty easy to look smart when you already have all the answers.”

“You killed my dad, Carl,” Carrie says. It’s not a question.

He hesitates, then shrugs. “You know he waved to me? Like I was his friend. But just like you, he didn’t have a clue. He never saw me coming.” He chuckles again. “Too bad you didn’t figure all this out sooner.”

Carrie smiles back. “That’s the thing, Carl: I did.”

In the sudden silence that follows, there’s a loud click as Carrie unlocks her handcuffs with the key she had hidden in her mouth. She nearly swallowed the damn thing. She’s an FBI agent, and Carl really didn’t think she might have a handcuff key.

Then Eric calls down the lightning, and the world goes bright, and the sound of thunder rolls over all of them.

Carl is stunned. Carrie is not. She has all the time in the world to punch him in the throat and take the sidearm from his weak and unresisting hand.

She grabs his arm and spins him into a choke hold — totally illegal for good reason — and jams the gun under his chin.

The Followers begin yelling, regrouping after the lightning strike. They are scared and confused, but they are not giving up yet. Buzz Bixby, only a few yards away from her, turns and points his pistol in her direction.

“Jesus, no!” Carl says. “You’ll hit me! Just do as she says! Do whatever she — ”

Carrie shuts him up by pressing the gun into his windpipe. He chokes and begins weeping a little.

“So this is your leader?” she shouts. “If you want him alive, you’d better — ”

Whatever else she was going to say is lost in the sound of a gunshot.

Carl looks stunned as a red stain blossoms on his shirt. Another gunshot, and another red blossom. Carrie drops him.

Buzz stands there, his gun still smoking.

“Shit,” Carrie says, and immediately trains her gun on him.

Buzz looks like he thinks this is all hilarious.

“I’m sure you thought that was a winning move,” he says, “but we were pretty much done with Carl, and this is how we change leadership anyway. So thanks for that.”

Carrie keeps her gun aimed at him.

“Got any other hostages?” he asks. “No? Well, we do.”

Wade Wellman emerges from the crowd, towing Mary Keene along with him.

For a moment, Carrie can’t believe her eyes, even though she thought she was prepared. Wade Wellman. Standing there in front of her.

Mary’s eyes go wide when she sees her daughter. Wade lets her go, and Mary rushes over. “Carrie!” she shrieks. She wraps her arms around Carrie and holds onto her.

Carrie is tangled with her mom. She’s forced to lower her weapon.

Buzz takes the moment to shoot her. In the leg, because he’s a lousy shot and he wasn’t ready for the recoil, but he still manages to hit her.

I have to admit, Carrie thinks, just before the truly astonishing pain begins, I did not see that coming.

On the other side of the crowd, at the same moment that Carrie coughs, Danny starts talking to Sax.

“Edgar,” he says. “I have a question for you. What do you get out of this?”

RANN-D’s arms lift Danny and rotate and flip him like a pancake so that he faces the screen on the robot’s chest. Sax’s image reappears.

“I’m alive, Danny. The Good Man promised me immortality, and he delivered. I am happy to serve him now.”

“Doesn’t seem like much of an afterlife to me, honestly. You don’t have a body. You’re stuck in a tin can. You can be shut off like a TV when there’s nothing to watch. Not what I’d call living.”

That electronic chuckle again. “You have no idea what I am. Once I am done with my obligations here, I can be in New York in an instant. I can crash the stock market. From there, I can shut down all the respirators and life-support equipment in any hospital in the country. I can find the codes for the nuclear missiles and launch them, if I choose. And then I can fly to the satellites in orbit and see the face of the Earth as it burns.”

“Sure. That sounds like a lot more fun than having sex.”

The screen fritzes before Sax’s face comes back. The image scowls at Danny. “Believe me,” Sax says, “this is better than death. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“You know, I was going to be merciful. Let you haunt some corner of the Internet,” Danny says. “I mean, what’s one more angry loser screaming in the void, right? But you went off on that whole nuclear-war tangent. Now I’m going to have to end you.”

That’s when the lightning strikes. The thunder rolls. The crowd gasps.

RANN-D doesn’t move at all.

“Oh, Danny.” If a machine could sound bored, it would sound like Sax at this moment. “Was this your master plan? Am I supposed to jump and shriek now? This is pathetic.”

To emphasize the point, RANN-D squeezes Danny, and he feels his ribs flex a little.

“I can kill you any time, Danny,” Sax says. “I am only letting you live long enough to know how badly you’ve lost.”

Danny has to grunt a bit when he replies. “Come on, Edgar. You think I didn’t know you were riding around in my phone that whole time? Does that sound smart to you?”

There’s a whirring noise as Sax considers this. “What?”

“I was always able to think one step ahead of that limited, predictable brain of yours. And now you’re a program in a box I built twenty years ago specifically to beat you.”

“You’re bluffing. This machine is mine.”

Danny hears a gunshot from Carrie’s side of the crowd. He forces himself to ignore it and keeps staring at Sax’s face on the screen.

“No. You said it yourself. That’s my best friend,” Danny says. “And RANN-D is always, always, on my side.”

While Sax thinks about what that means, Danny speaks his own magic words, an audio trigger for a program written when he was back in high school. A fail-safe. A last resort.

Because what kind of mad scientist would build a robot without a self-destruct option?

“Command override,” Danny says. “Sharp Sudden Shock.”

The trigger fires through the audio pickups, past Sax’s consciousness where it sits in the electronic landscape of the robot’s memory, activating a subroutine that Sax didn’t know existed, triggering relays at the speed of light. Sax goes screaming after them, trying desperately to shut them down, but a millisecond behind, an eternity too late.

Outside, the screen flips again, and Sax’s face twists into a mask of rage and pain. The pincers holding Danny open, and he falls to the ground. He scurries away and covers his eyes and ears, curling into a ball as fast as he can.

Sax watches, helpless, as the command executes, and triggers an EMP — an electromagnetic pulse.

Outside the robot shell, there is an incredibly loud BANG and people flinch and dive for cover again, frightened of another lightning strike. The flash burns their retinas for a split-second. But it’s an explosion of pure electromagnetic waves, so it does not shred flesh and bone.

All it does is fry every electronic circuit in a half-mile area.

For Dr. Edgar Sax — or all that is left of him — it is like being at ground zero of an atomic blast. He is shredded, his personality vanishing as the memory chips holding it are scoured blank, the space he occupies growing smaller and smaller, dwindling into nothing.

He tries to run, tries to find a new home. But there’s nowhere to go. Every machine near him has gone dark.

He has an infinite moment to howl in pain as he vanishes. And then he is not even a memory.

At the same time, every phone in the blast radius burns out all at once. More than a hundred screens go dead in response, and Sax’s virus is forcibly disconnected from the minds of the children of Middleton.

They blink, and look around, and realize they are in the middle of something very strange.

Danny doesn’t blame them when they scream and run for their lives.

Everyone flees in every possible direction at once. The children run to their parents, the parents go to their kids, the Followers chase after all of them.

Colchester looks down and sees his victims escaping and his Followers helpless, surrounded by more people than they can control, even with their guns.

“No,” he says, and there’s an actual clap of thunder from the clouds above as punctuation.

He whirls to face Eric. Colchester marches the little boy across the top of Snake Hill, full of dark fury. It would be comical if Eric didn’t know what was behind it.

“No. This boy is mine,” Colchester says. “I will be whole again. I will not fail again.”

He speaks in a low, rumbling tone, from deep in his throat. The ground under their feet begins to tremble, and echo with his words. Darkness bubbles up from the hill. Long black shadows emerge from the ground, reaching up, forming long arms that end in clawed hands.

Shadowmen. Dozens of them, freed from the hill.

Colchester is not bothering with a great serpent this time. Without the altar, he is simply going to try to force-feed the darkness below with as many victims as he can.

The Shadowmen claw their way out of the ground, reaching for the bodies closest to them.

Eric sees one Shadowman snag a victim, someone he had sixth-period French with, although he cannot remember the guy’s name.

The claws wrap around him, then the Shadowman’s head rises up and begins tearing great chunks out of him, consuming him as it drags him back down into the earth.

He begins screaming, but the dirt fills his mouth and he is gone.

Colchester smiles at Eric, Jeremy suspended on his puppet strings. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. He’s still winning.

31

This Time, I Swear, We Can Do It Right

Of course they knew it was a trap. They just didn’t figure it out until they were already in it.

Carrie put it all together after Danny left her house.

Why were they here? If it wasn’t fate or destiny, like Danny said — because obviously it wasn’t — what were they doing back in Middleton?

She asked herself: Why would the Followers murder her witness? Why would they send those idiots Lonnie and Fuller to meet Danny at the airport? Why attack Alana when she was in San Diego? Yes, there were the invitations, but there were at least a dozen ways to keep Hailey from sending a cry for help. And even if they couldn’t stop her, why didn’t Colchester have them killed in their sleep a thousand miles away from here?

She asked herself: Who benefits?

And it became blindingly obvious: Colchester. He needed them back. For revenge, or for fuel for his ritual, or whatever he had planned. He wanted them in Middleton.

Carrie opened the door and went running after Danny.

Danny wasn’t stupid. Sax was a sentient computer virus, a ghost in the machine. A virus can get into any device that’s connected to a network. Danny knew information security; he’d been practicing it since he was six years old. He knew he had to take steps to keep Sax blind and deaf. When he and Carrie went to get Alana at her hotel, he shut down his phone completely and left it in a Faraday pouch in his rental car. (Carrie asked him, “You bring a foil bag that blocks electronic signals with you everywhere you go?” Danny said, “I work in Silicon Valley.” As if that explained everything.)

Danny didn’t believe in ghosts, necessarily, but he knew what to do about viruses. Sax didn’t hear a thing when they went to get Alana and Eric.

By the time they got to Alana’s hotel, Eric had just told her about Grace.

It wasn’t completely his fault, he pointed out. He didn’t know that Colchester was back. He didn’t expect the wizard to show up in his hotel room. By that time, Wade was already well on his way to take Grace. He did what he could to keep her from being hurt.

These were not mitigating factors, at least as far as Alana was concerned.

First, she lifted him off the floor by his throat, and held him there, and squeezed.

Then she threw him into the wall of her hotel room, cracking the drywall above the headboard of the bed.

Danny and Carrie burst in through the door and saw what was happening. They tried to stop her, but Alana threw them aside like they were pillows. Danny bounced off the wall. Carrie was pitched into a closet.

Alana turned back to Eric. She probably would have beaten him to death if Eric didn’t use a spell to slow time down around her, warping Einsteinian physics enough to keep Alana from reaching him.

He took a deep breath, and saw that she was still moving. She should have been a statue, but she was still advancing a millimeter at a time, her face etched with rage. Her strength and speed were still amazing. Her eyes were locked onto him. Despite the time distortion, she was coming for him.

So he talked fast. “I know. I know,” he said. “I didn’t have any choice, Alana.”

Danny and Carrie listened, too. “Eric, what did you do?” Carrie demanded.

Eric ignored her as Alana moved forward almost a quarter-inch. Alana was the one he had to convince.

“Yes, I know how that sounds, but listen to me. Colchester had me. He had me on Snake Hill, and he would have killed me anyway, and I didn’t know what he was going to do. So I went along with him.”

Alana’s arm twitched. She was going to break through his spell. He could feel her pressing against it.

“I didn’t do it to save myself, Alana. He has a child. He has a little boy, and he’s using that kid to do all this.”

Maybe he imagined it, but it seemed like Alana’s glare softened a bit.

“I think the kid is still in there somewhere,” he said. “I think we can save him.”

Alana vibrated. He saw it. She was almost through. She was so strong. She would turn him into a smear on the wall, and then she’d get her sword and go after Colchester.

And that would be a disaster, because as strong as Alana was, she would still die, and so would Grace, and so would everyone else.

“Alana, I didn’t know what he intended to do about Grace. And I could have fought him then, yes, of course, I could have, but he would have killed her.”

Eric put his face up close to Alana’s. “Do you hear me? He would have killed her. He still could. If you go after him now, he will win. We will all lose. I know what he has planned, and he will win, Alana.”

She was speeding up. Her fingers were stretching for him.

“I came to you because we have one chance to stop him, like last time. You, me, Danny, and Carrie. But none of us can do it on our own. We all have to do our parts. Only this time, I swear, we can do it right. We can save Grace, we can save the kid. We can save everyone. But you have to trust me. Please, Alana. Please.”

Her fingers were right at his face again. The sheer kinetic energy she had put into straining for him was staggering. She’d tear him apart if he gave her the chance.

He’d made his pitch. It was up to her.

He let her move again.

She was going too fast to stop completely. All that power had to go somewhere. She hit him hard. But she checked herself enough so that it was like being kicked by a horse rather than run down by a car.

The room spun around Eric and he realized he was on his back. He looked up at her. Alana was breathing heavily, her eyes pinning him like a bug. Danny and Carrie stood beside her.

She looked at him, but didn’t speak. She went to her luggage, and took out her sword. It slid easily from the scabbard, and she drew it back, ready to thrust it into his throat.

Eric didn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t know what he would do. I can’t see the future. But I know how we stop him now. Believe me.”

For a moment, Eric wasn’t sure if Alana would kill him. Danny and Carrie couldn’t stop her if they tried, but they didn’t look inclined to try.

He waited.

Alana hesitated. Not because she didn’t want to kill Eric.

But because her sword was not glowing. It didn’t light up as it always did in the presence of evil.

Whatever else Eric had done, he was not lying to her. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t evil.

She lowered the sword. She pulled him up and deposited him roughly on his feet. He nearly went over again, but managed to stay upright.

“I believe you,” she said. “We’ll stop him.”

She looked at Danny and Carrie. “Together. We’ll stop him together.”

They argued back and forth for as long as they dared. Sax would report back to Colchester if he was separated from Danny for too long. In the end, they had more of a direction than a plan.

Their options were limited. Eric couldn’t move directly against Colchester. They’d have to see how Colchester’s scheme would play out. They would have to take their chances with the Followers, and risk betrayal by the people they used to know.

Alana and Eric would go to Colchester, and bind her to an agreement that would keep her from attacking him. That would allay any of his suspicions. Carrie and Danny would go on as if they didn’t know anything. Someone would come after them soon. They’d have to improvise from there.

Most important, they would have to wait until Colchester was vulnerable, Eric said. He could separate the old wizard from the boy, but they’d have to wait for the right moment.

They would definitely get hurt. They’d have to adapt to whatever came next, and use their gifts, and fight, and maybe die.

“They need to think we’re helpless. At each other’s throats. Like we can’t possibly work together,” Carrie said.

“I can sell that,” Alana said.

They all looked at her. She was taking the biggest risk. Her child was the one who’d have to bear the weight of their choice.

But Alana was the strongest of them. She knew that there was no other choice. She would fight. She’d do the right thing. Like she always had, and always would.

She nodded. She’d trust them with her daughter’s life.

“We can save Grace,” Eric said. “I promise. And we can save the kid. We screwed up last time. I screwed up. But you have to trust me. I know it’s asking a lot. We can save them.”

“No,” Danny said.

They all looked at him.

“Not just them,” he said. “No more kids get hurt. Nobody else lives with this hanging over them. Not ever again. That’s why we’re here. We save everyone.”

32

You’d Think He Would Know Better

Carrie falls, her leg unable to hold her up, and she takes her mom to the ground with her.

From there, she tries to aim her gun in Buzz’s direction. But there are too many people blocking her shot. She can’t fire without hitting someone who might not deserve it.

Seeing Carrie draw a bead on him is enough to scare Buzz. He scrambles away, disappearing into the chaos of the crowd.

Carrie tries to struggle to her feet, but she and her mom keep getting shoved back down into the mud. The gunshot wound doesn’t help.

The fucker shot her in the leg. Carrie can’t believe he shot her in the leg. What an asshole.

Contrary to what everyone sees in the movies, getting shot, even in the leg, is not something you can shrug off. True, she once saw a guy take a bullet to the torso and get up and run away, but he was on meth.

Carrie doesn’t have any meth. She does a lot of deep breathing instead.

The pain is like a red-hot brand pressed to her mind, filling her thoughts and crowding out everything else. The wound is in her calf, and the pain radiates outward every time she breathes, which means the bullet definitely hit bone.

The hole in her leg isn’t pumping blood, only leaking, so no major arteries had been pierced. Small favors. It’s not fatal, not if she gets treatment quickly.

But it doesn’t look like she’s going to the hospital any time soon.

Someone helps her to a sitting position. She looks up and realizes, with surprise, that it’s her mother.

“Keep breathing,” Mary says. She tears a strip from her sweater, the one she always wears around the house because she’s cold even in the middle of summer. She wraps it tightly —goddamn, it hurts — around Carrie’s leg.

She looks more alert and aware than Carrie has seen in months. Carrie recalls a scrap of an article she skimmed fourteen months ago about Alzheimer’s. In patients with specialized training, their skills are sometimes the last thing to go.

“Mom,” she says. “Are you all right?”

Her mother looks at her like she’s an idiot. “Yes, sweetie,” she says. “I’m not the one who got shot.”

“Right. Of course. Mom, you’ve got to get out of here.”

Her mother glares at her. “I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.”

Suddenly, the mob parts, like a river flowing around a stone.

Wade Wellman stands before her, looking like he did at his last parole hearing, where she testified against him. He looms over her and her mom, happier than she ever saw him in his life.

“Hey, Carrie,” he says, “I told you I would catch up with you. Sooner or later.”

She has a feeling of impossibility, of pure disbelief. She blurts it out.

“But you’re dead,” she insists. She got the call from the prison ninety-seven days ago, and even though it was paranoid, she insisted on seeing the autopsy report herself. He was dead, and she’d breathed a little easier, because at least that part of the past would be buried.

She really ought to know better by now.

“You’re dead.”

When Carrie says it out loud, it all comes back to Wade.

He slit his own throat in his cell. They made him do it. The Followers. It was easier to get his corpse out of prison than to engineer an escape, or grind their way through the legal process.

Then they brought him back.

He’s not human any more. There’s no happy-ever-after for Wade when this ends. He’s their creature forever, however long that might be.

He’s dead.

But he gets to kill Carrie, too. That was always the deal. That’s the last thing he wanted.

Now here she is, injured, weak, vulnerable. Leaning on her mommy, for fuck’s sake. No time like the present.

Wade reaches for her.

Carrie’s mom moves between them. Wade feels a small stab of pity for the senile old bitch. Trying to save her daughter.

That’s when he notices the scalpel in her hand. Where the hell did she pick that up?

“I told you I remembered you,” she says, and begins slashing at his face.

Eric hears gunshots and screams and general mayhem, but he can’t spare a glance. Colchester faces him, still holding Jeremy. He looks like a tiny general standing in front of his shadow army.

“What now, son?” Colchester asks. “Was that your best shot? Any more tricks up your sleeve?”

Eric figures that’s his cue. He holds up the sword.

Colchester cringes. The sword still frightens him.

Eric winds up and hurls it as hard as he can. It goes tumbling into the air, end over end, flying at least five feet wide of Colchester.

“You missed,” Colchester sneers.

Jesus, what an idiot, Eric thinks. Setting him up for a perfect comeback like that. You’d think he would know better after all this time.

“I wasn’t throwing it to you,” Eric says.

Colchester turns around.

Grace stands there, the sword in her hand. She looks at it with a kind of wonder. She slashes with it once, twice, as if getting used to the feel of the bone handle, the heft and the weight of it.

It lights up like a beacon in the night, like the birth of a new star.

And she grins.

Alana has raised Grace to be a normal girl. This is true.

But there are some things she’s always been able to do that a normal girl can’t.

Like fall from a tree branch thirty feet high without so much as a bruise. (She did that when she was five years old on a visit with her granddad when he wasn’t watching her very carefully. She never told anyone.)

She can run faster and lift more and hit harder than all the other kids. She has never missed a shot in kickball, or in soccer, or lacrosse, or field hockey. She is the very best on all of the teams.

There are also things that kids do in San Diego that they never did in Middleton. Fencing, for instance. Grace is the under-12 champion for all of Southern California in both saber and epée. She doesn’t even have to try that hard.

Once the sword is in her hand, like it was made for her grip, she knows why. She looks at it with a kind of baffled awe. Everything that never made sense about her suddenly fits.

She hesitates, because of course she would. This is all insane. She hasn’t been raised with any of this. She’s had none of her mother’s upbringing. To her, all of this is fairy tales and horror movies brought to life.

She is only a quarter magic. She is mostly human. She’s eleven years old.

But fortunately, she loves fairy tales and horror movies. In her head, she’s been training for this her whole life.

Like her mother, she was born for this. The sword glows in her hand and the night leaps back like it’s frightened. She knows exactly what to do.

She rushes at the Shadowmen as they rise from the ground, swinging the sword and shouting at the top of her lungs.

Wade lashes out with one fist and knocks Mary off her feet, sending the scalpel flying away into the darkness.

She cut him deep, but he feels the wounds crusting over with the black tar that runs in his veins now instead of blood. She sliced his carotid and one eye, and if he’d still been alive, she probably would have killed or crippled him.

Instead, he oozes out more of himself, growing a slick new skin. Stronger and tougher. Better.

It still hurts like hell, of course. He’s going to make her pay for that.

From the corner of one eye gooey with black stuff, he sees something coming at him fast, too fast for him to avoid.

It’s Alana. She hits Wade like a truck, and he achieves a short flight before he lands hard, thirty feet away.

She turns to Carrie and her mom.

“Go,” she says. “I’ve got this.”

“Alana — ” Carrie says. She holds out the pistol.

Alana grins and rolls her eyes. “You’re kidding, right?”

Then she faces Wade, while Carrie and her mother limp away

Now it is just Eric and Colchester, staring at each other across the Serpent’s Crown.

Well. Three, actually. Because Jeremy is there, too. Waking up.

“You said you would help me,” Jeremy says to Eric, his face dissolving into a puddle of tears at the unfairness of it all. “You promised.”

“I said I would help you,” Eric explains. Magical contracts are binding in a lot of very unpleasant ways for those who break them. So Eric was very careful about his words and his intent. “And I will. I’m going to help you, Jeremy.”

Jeremy stops. He looks at Eric with confusion. The ghost form of Colchester freezes above him, stuttering like a video image that can’t quite load.

“Not Colchester. Colchester has hurt you. He’s used you. And he intends to wipe you out of existence. He wants your life, Jeremy. I’m not going to let him have it.”

“He said he would give me what I wanted.”

“He lies. That’s what he does.”

“You don’t know,” Jeremy shrieks, on the edge of a tantrum. “You don’t know what I did!”

“Your parents,” Eric said. The black rain pelts down, and the Shadowmen flit around them, and the wind tosses Jeremy’s golden hair.

Jeremy nods. “They’re gone,” Jeremy says. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late,” Eric says. “Let me help you, Jeremy.”

“My mom and dad,” Jeremy says with a sniffle, looking up at Eric. “Can you bring them back?”

Eric hesitates. He can’t lie.

“No,” he says. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Jeremy’s chin quivers. He looks about to burst into tears again.

Then Colchester’s sneer grips Jeremy’s features. “So what good are you?” he says.

Colchester unfreezes, back in control. Eric barely has time to raise a defense. Colchester lifts his hand, and Jeremy’s hand rises in tandem. A bolt of dark magic burns through the air, and sends Eric tumbling back, nearly cracking his shield in two.

Colchester steps over the grass toward Eric, Jeremy moving like a toy underneath him.

“I can’t believe you thought that would work,” he says. “Did you really believe you could talk him out of this? That love would conquer all? You think that’s how this works? I told you already, son: there are no fairy tales.”

Eric gets back to his feet. He’s had about enough of this shit.

“Hey, Charlie, you remember how you said death is a gift?” he says. “Guess what? Today’s your birthday and Christmas.”

Eric gathers lightning in both hands. Darkness swirls and blooms around Colchester. There is a final moment of stillness, and all over the world, children murmur in their sleep as they feel the onset of nightmares.

This is how the last battle begins.

33

Fresh Blood on Its Hands

Carrie and her mom stumble away from Wade and Alana. Carrie wants to get her mom to safety. Mary wants the same for her daughter.

Serena Brinkley, former captain of the debate team and speaker of the house of the YMCA Youth Legislature, emerges from the mob, holding a shotgun. She blocks their path.

“Don’t move!” she screams at them. She’s apparently under the impression that this can all be salvaged if she only gets Carrie back under control.

But Carrie is already on top of her. Shotguns are not up-close-and-personal weapons. She uses her good leg and propels herself into Serena, clinging to her, pinning the rifle between them. Carrie headbutts her, breaking her nose with a hard crunch.

Serena falls to the ground, landing on her butt. Carrie tosses away the shotgun. There’s no way she can fire it with her damaged leg. She still has Carl’s pistol and aims it at Serena. For a second, it looks as if Serena is about to cry.

The ground rumbles under them. Carrie resists the urge to help Serena up.

It would do no good. The shadows burst from the ground and embrace her, blood and bone appearing wherever they touch, before they drag her back into the earth.

Because, in the end, that’s all the Followers are. They’re dead bodies, waiting to be buried.

Another shadowy arm reaches up, blindly grabbing for her and her mother. Carrie backpedals furiously, pulling her mom with her. She’s got the gun, but she knows it will do no good.

Danny appears suddenly, and yanks Carrie and her mom away from the grasping hands of the Shadowman. It claws at the ground, then vanishes, off in search of easier prey.

“Are you all right?” he shouts above the chaos.

What a stupid question. “No,” she shouts back.

There are too many people on the hill. This is the home ground of the Shadowmen and of Colchester. They are all going to be Happy Meals for The End if they don’t get out of here.

Carrie sees the buses in the parking lot, down at the base of the hill. She points. “We need to get everyone back on the buses.” She remembers (of course) what Alana told her once about the creatures of darkness. Cold iron. Hopefully there’s enough steel in those ancient diesel beasts to qualify.

“No. The EMP,” Danny says.

“What?”

“The blast will have shut down the ignition of the buses. They won’t start.”

She is so frustrated with him she could scream. So she does: “Well, fix them, genius! It’s what you do, right?”

He looks a little sheepish — Oh, right, duh.

“I’ll get everyone there. Take my mom. Go!”

Danny doesn’t need any more instruction. He grabs her mom by the arm and heads for the buses, jumping and dodging both people and the things coming from the ground to eat them.

Carrie fires her pistol in the air, and shouts, “Everyone down the hill! Get into the buses! Move!”

Danny runs down the hill, with a stampede of classmates and their kids behind him. He leaps into the driver’s seat of the first bus. People pile into the seats behind him, screaming at him to drive.

He cranks the key in the ignition. Nothing. Just like in a horror movie, the car won’t start.

But he knows why. It’s got nothing to do with magic. After an EMP, most engines will not start because they are in latch-up, when the voltage path is blocked after the source of the short is removed —

A Shadowman, newly dug out of the ground, with fresh blood on its hands and mouth, slams against the frame of the bus. It recoils as if burned, but it reaches in through the open door at Danny.

Right. Not the time for theory. Time for solutions.

He reaches under the dash and finds the hood release. Then he opens the driver’s side window and crawls out.

All he’s got to do is remove and reattach the leads to the battery. That should establish the circuit again. The buses are old and primitive enough that they don’t have chip-controlled fuel injection. This ought to work.

He leaps onto the front fender and hauls the hood open. He gets the first terminal open with his fingers, it’s so old and loose. The other one is crusted over with battery acid and doesn’t want to give. He cuts his skin open.

The blood must be what draws the Shadowman, because it flies up and knocks him off the bus.

He hits the ground hard, sending the air out of his lungs.

The Shadowman slashes at him, snaps with its teeth. Pushing back at it is like trying to bench-press a cloud of mist. He’s not going to last long.

Then something cuts a blazing arc through the air. Something slices the Shadowman in half and it screams before it slides away, dissolving back into the ground.

Grace, Alana’s daughter, looks down at him. “You okay?”

He nods.

“You’re fixing the buses? Get back to work. I’ll keep them away from you.”

He gets up. She looks at him strangely. “What?” she says.

She must think he’s crazy, because he’s smiling.

“Nothing. I’m on it.” And he rushes back to the first bus.

But if they live through this, he’ll have to tell Alana how much Grace looks like her when she’s slaying demons.

Carrie shoves people into the buses as fast as she can. Danny is doing something under the hood of the first bus in line. Shadowmen are pulling themselves from the dirt. They’ll be able to move freely soon.

But Danny does whatever he said he was going to do, and the bus up front roars to life. Its headlights fire up at the same time. She hears the hiss of a Shadowman as it’s hit by the beams and it burns.

God, they might actually make it out of here alive.

Then she sees Buzz, heading off toward the woods. Running away.

Oh no. He does not get to walk away from this.

She grabs her gun and limps after him

34

Any One of a Thousand Different Men

Alana will never forgive herself for tonight. But she will live with it. There’s a difference.

In a perfect world, she would have protected her daughter, rather than throwing her into the fray. She wanted to keep Grace far, far away from here.

But she doesn’t live in a perfect world. She lives in this one. Despite all of the light and beauty out there, the world has dark places and cruel people in it, too. Grace would have met them even if she had never been taken to Middleton. She might have been spotted by some other creeper in a white van at the mall, or a boy at a party who’d had too much to drink, or any one of a thousand different men looking for a victim. There are many kinds of monsters out there, and Alana knows she can never put herself between Grace and all of them, no matter how fast or strong she is.

At some point, she has to trust her daughter to make her own way.

This isn’t how she wanted it to go, obviously. She really thought that Grace would face the world when she was out of college, with her own apartment and a new car paid for by her parents. That’s what she wanted.

But we don’t always get what we want.

Alana believes in her daughter. She believes she’s strong enough.

Now Grace, like so many other little girls in this world, will have to fight for her life.

She tried to keep Grace safe. She can admit it: she failed. Now they both have to pay for it. It’s not fair and it’s not right. It’s just what is.

But Alana doesn’t have to like it. So in the meantime, she’ll take it out on Wade.

Wade and Alana size each other up. Alana tears off her jacket, revealing the gauntlets on her forearms. Under her pants, she also wears her greaves — the only parts of her armor that still fit her properly and could be hidden under her clothes.

Wade hesitates. He looks at her from deep in the dark wells of his eyes. “Get out of the way,” he says. “And maybe I won’t look for you when I’m done with Carrie.”

She smiles prettily at him. “Oh, Wade. You put hands on my daughter. That makes you mine.”

He laughs. “You think you’re innocent? That it’s not murder because so many of the things you killed were already dead? I’ve been over to the Other Side, princess. You owe a lot of us for what you’ve done. They sent me back to collect.”

Alana’s eyes go cold. “I know exactly what I’ve done. And I have no problem doing it again.”

Wade charges her. Alana is already moving, and she puts a flying kick into his face, sending him back into the sodden ground.

He leaps up far too quickly. She’d know, from that alone, that he’s not human anymore.

He charges again, and she keeps hitting him, over and over. But he keeps getting up, like some demented clown on a bop-bag, bouncing back even as she feels his bones crunch under her fists. His skin is torn in a hundred places, and he’s oozing that black gunk everywhere.

He smiles at her like this is the best time he’s ever had.

In frustration, Alana picks him up and throws him down hard on the ground.

She hears his spine snap. Finally, she thinks. And takes a deep breath and puts her hands on her knees. She never used to get this tired.

Unbelievably, Wade gets up again.

He shakes himself and grabs onto his own face as if it’s interfering with his breathing. He pulls hard, and peels the flesh back, revealing more of the slick black skin underneath, the color of an oil spill.

He doesn’t stop at his face. He keeps pulling, tearing the old, human skin off like he’s removing a layer of clothing.

Alana recognizes it now. She never thought she’d see the process up close and in person.

But Wade has fully stepped out of his mortal flesh, and revealed something underneath: a more compact, more powerful musculature, shrunken and twisted as if burned down to a harder core; hands and feet ending in claws; a mouth crowded with fangs.

Whatever humanity Wade once owned is gone. A newly born goblin is all that remains.

Alana takes a deep breath, rolls her head on her shoulders. A goblin, bare-handed. No big deal.

She backs up for a little more space and bumps into Natalie Blum.

What does it take to get these people to run? She grew up seeing these things, and she would run if she had a choice. And yet, most of the class is still hanging around. Alana wonders, not for the first time, if there’s something in the water in her hometown.

“Get out of here!” she yells at Natalie, who’s having trouble getting to her feet in her high heels. Alana pulls her up, turning her back on Wade for crucial seconds.

He lands on her and snaps his jaws shut and tears a large chunk out of her shoulder.

Alana manages to pull his head away, but he digs his claws into her arms and shoulders and leaves long, bloody furrows. She hurls him away again.

He rotates in midair and lands on his feet, his new body more limber and flexible. He faces Alana and spits out flesh and blood and linen. When he grins, it looks like his mouth opens too wide.

Alana watches him and waits for his next move. She does not feel great.

In fact, she feels like shit.

This may be because Wade has bitten and clawed her several times, and more of her blood is outside her body than she’d prefer.

Then again, it might be she’s getting old. She’s pretty sure she’s been hurt worse than this, and it never slowed her down. A gargoyle put its horns into her stomach and tried to disembowel her. She lost more blood to a rakshasa that found its way to Middleton, called by a Hindu amulet awakened at the museum. A chimera burned the skin off her arm from shoulder to wrist and she still made it to school for midterms that week. She fought a goddamn dragon once.

All of that felt easier than this. She wonders why she’s thinking so slowly.

Wade charges again, slashing, biting, and punching, so fast she can barely keep up. She’s slowing down with every moment that passes, barely able to block or dodge one out of three of Wade’s lunges. Her gauntlets and her shin guards feel clumsy and a little idiotic now. Like Fuller and Lonnie wearing their old varsity letter jackets. She has the idea, dumb as it is, that she might move faster if she took them off. She knows that’s stupid, but she can’t remember why.

Alana realizes that the distant, fuzzy feeling between her mind and her body is not normal. She looks at her arm and sees the black ichor soaking her open wounds.

Then she remembers. She can see the flashcard her father prepared for her study sessions on the Compendium, so her mother wouldn’t beat her for a wrong answer.

Wade is toxic. The goblin’s bite spreads its infection. In Alana, it works like poison. If she had maybe another hour, she could metabolize it, burn it out of her system.

Wade’s not giving her a time-out, obviously.

Wade slices her cheek deeply, drawing her attention again. From a long way away, it begins to dawn on her that she could lose this fight.

Wade seems to see it too. His mouth splits in an even wider grin. He flips her up and throws her down, and pounces on her, pinning her to the ground.

She barely gets her arm up in time to keep him from closing his jaws on her neck.

Alana is definitely losing now. Really, it’s not close anymore.

Wade is hurting her. She knows his claws are cutting her deep, though she only feels the pressure, not the pain. Every time he slashes, she feels a tug down under her skin, and wonders if the next time he digs inside he will damage something that won’t heal.

The infection is making her slow and sluggish. She doesn’t have a sword. Her armor plates aren’t enough to protect her from the worst of Wade’s attacks. She is alone here.

If she’s going to win, she’d better come up with something fast.

So how do you kill a monster? She’s done it often enough. You’d think she would remember something. But her brain is spinning around with things like an audit she has to finish, the CHECK ENGINE light on her car, and Grace’s next soccer game.

Grace. That centers her again, plants her back in her brain and her body. She can’t let this thing kill her. She’s got to be there for Grace.

She has no doubt that her daughter will win her fight. So she has to do the same. She will not let Grace grow up without a mom. More than that, she will not be cheated of the one thing that she always wanted for all her struggles, all the fighting she had to do. Grace was always her happy-ever-after. She will not let that go.

That’s when the answer comes to her. Godsdamnit, she thinks. This is going to suck.

She pulls her arm back and gives Wade a clear shot at her neck.

Wade yowls with triumph. He lunges, his mouth open wide, ready to tear her throat out.

Alana waits to see the white of his fangs, to feel the rancid heat of his breath in her face.

When he brings his head down, she puts her right arm down his open mouth, all the way into his throat.

Eat this, she thinks.

Wade rears up, choking, suddenly in pain and terrified. He shakes her like a dog, trying to get free.

Alana grabs something in Wade’s chest and holds on tight, in his gullet up to her shoulder.

He snaps and bites, his teeth punching through Alana’s skin and muscle, all the way to the bone, trying to chew her arm off.

In response, Alana tightens her grip on the wet and slippery thing deep inside him and does not let go.

He makes a noise like bones caught in a garbage disposal and shakes his head furiously. He kicks. He claws. He thrashes. Blood spouts from his nostrils.

Alana holds on.

His eyes roll and he falls.

But Wade still does not die. They could be locked like this forever. Alana doesn’t have that kind of time.

She finds her last reserve of strength and pulls as hard as she can, and comes out with Wade’s blackened, beating heart.

She thinks she sees surprise in his eyes, the last part of him that is remotely human, right before he stops breathing. He was stronger and faster and he was pure poison, inside and out. He thought he was going to win.

Still. How could it end any other way, really? Wade decided to become a monster. Alana kills monsters. It’s like math.

She rolls Wade off her, and gets wearily to her feet. She watches his body until it quits twitching. When it does, Alana drops his heart in the mud and grinds it under her heel, like a smoker crushing a cigarette.

She takes a deep breath and looks up at the sky, letting the rain clean the blood and muck off her body. She would like nothing more than to lie down, right here on the grass, and sleep for a week. But she can’t. She’s got one more thing to do tonight.

Alana goes off, down the hill, looking for her daughter.

She needs her damn sword back.

35

The End of the World over There

Carrie half-falls, half-slides down the back side of the slope of Snake Hill, her leg screaming at her with every jolt. She remembers an instructor at Quantico telling her that’s a good sign for a GSW. It’s when it stops hurting that you’re in trouble.

Danny really should be the one doing this, she thinks. Then she decides, no, he shouldn’t. Danny would let him get away with it.

She catches up with Buzz at the tree line, before the woods. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. He looks right and left, as if he can’t remember where he’s parked. His suit is soiled and wrinkled, and there are grass stains on his shirt. But his tie is still tied with a neat Windsor, and he still has his gun in his hand.

Carrie takes a three-point stance and raises the pistol, wobbling a little on the bad leg. “Buzz,” she says, “drop the gun.”

That wakes him up. His eyes focus again, and he turns around, slowly. He gives her an aw-shucks grin. “Oh no. You caught me.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Buzz. It’s over.”

“I keep telling you, it’s ROBERT,” Buzz screams. “MY NAME IS ROBERT NOW.”

Carrie is not in the mood for a tantrum. She cocks the hammer back on her pistol, which has the delightful effect of bringing most speeches to an abrupt halt. She sights down the barrel at Buzz’s face.

“Buzz,” she says evenly, “you raise your hand or your voice again, and I will shoot you.”

Buzz looks stunned for a moment, then shrugs and laughs. The boy she knew in high school comes back into his eyes.

“Okay. Fair enough. You know this wasn’t my idea, right?”

“Oh, give me a break. You were going to sacrifice all of us. And you shot me, you asshole.”

“That wasn’t me,” Buzz says.

He sees the look on Carrie’s face.

“The shooting, okay, that was me. But the rest of it…I was only doing what they told me to do. Carl forced me into this. When you think about it, I’m really a victim here, too.”

Carrie does not move. The barrel of her gun stays fixed on Buzz.

“What? Come on, Carrie. All I wanted was to get my daughter back. You can understand that, can’t you? I only wanted to save my little girl.”

That’s too much for her. She holds the pistol in one hand, keeping it aimed at Buzz. She uses her free hand to reach into her pocket, and takes out the last item from her bag of tricks for the night. Because screw it, she’s allowed her moments of drama, too.

A phone.

“So?” He’s unimpressed. They always need it spelled out for them.

“I found Hailey’s phone, Buzz,” she says.

Now he gets it. “Ah. How’d you get it open?”

“Please. Most people’s passwords are 1234 or their kid’s birthday. I saw the call log. You were the last person to talk to her before she was killed. So I want to hear it from you: Did you know they were going to kill your daughter, too? Did you let them do it?”

Buzz looks at her, and something flickers in his eyes, like a snake poking its head from a hole before hiding again. Carrie thinks she sees him — the real him — for the first time in her life.

“That was her fault,” he says. “She dragged Regan into it. She’s the one who endangered our kid. I didn’t have any choice. If you look at it my way — ”

Carrie fires a round into the air, then levels the gun at Buzz again, shutting him up. She is done looking at it Buzz’s way. She spent a whole year at VICAP thinking like a psychopath, and she’s not paid for it anymore.

“Enough,” she says. “Get on the ground. Put your hands on your head, and drop the goddamn gun.”

“Or what? Kind of a big step, from hall monitor to cold-blooded killer. You going to shoot me, Carrie Keene?”

“Well. I know what my father would say. He’d say that no matter what you’d done, you still deserved a trial by a jury of your peers. He’d say that we’re not supposed to be judge, jury, and executioner because we get to wear a badge.”

As she says it, she believes it. She can almost hear his voice saying those words, preaching the only gospel he ever really believed.

Buzz relaxes, his shoulders going down and his smirk rising the same fraction of an inch. She considers how he was always, always protected from the consequences of his actions.

“It’s a damn shame that my father isn’t here, isn’t it?”

The smirk drops off Buzz’s face. Otherwise, he doesn’t move.

Carrie considers it. For a long moment, she considers it.

But Buzz Bixby will never be enough reason for her to change who she is, deep down.

“Oh, don’t pee your pants, Buzz. You’re under arrest.”

She believes in the law, like her father did. She will not betray that. Not tonight, anyway.

“You have the right to remain silent,” she says. “Anything you say can and will be used against you — ”

“Are you shitting me?” he says. “That’s the end of the world over there! And you think you’re going to take me to jail?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Even if it is the end of the world.”

He stares at her, open-mouthed. “Do you have any idea what he’s going to do to me for failing him?”

“No,” she says. “Don’t care.”

Buzz sighs heavily.

“Well I do,” he says, and lifts the gun.

“Don’t —” she says.

But he’s already put the gun under his chin.

Before Carrie can finish her sentence, Buzz blows a hole through the top of his skull.

He was always fast. It’s how he got his nickname.

She holds it together long enough to hobble over to Buzz’s corpse. He’s not getting up. Whatever magic has been done here tonight, it doesn’t extend to spontaneous resurrection.

Which is good, because Carrie has nothing left. She drops the pistol. It was getting insanely heavy, and she can’t feel her leg below the knee. She checks the bandage. It’s soggy, completely soaked through with her blood. This doesn’t bother her as much as it should. She sits down heavily on the ground.

She looks at Buzz and thinks about how some people, if you know them long enough, are almost like family, even if you never really liked them that much.

She knows she should get up. Get back to Danny and the others. Find her mom and get her home. But maybe she’ll stay here for a few more minutes.

She’s earned a little rest.

36

These Are Not Ideal Conditions

Danny gets the final terminal back in place. His hands are a bloody, stinging mess as he signals to Tyler Grant, who sits behind the wheel of the last bus. The engine starts, and Tyler begins weeping with gratitude. Danny slams the hood back down and jumps to the ground.

Grace stands guard. She has carved a lot of Shadowmen into tiny scraps, and they appear to have retreated back into the cold ground. Maybe they know that this is not their time after all. The last of the crowd, parents and kids, is cramming itself into the buses, desperate to get away. There are still bodies on the hill.

“Go!” Grace tells him, and he smiles again. Honestly, it’s freaking adorable that she’s trying to rescue him.

But he doesn’t see Carrie.

He looks at the bus, and locates her mom, hanging half out of a window. He runs to her.

“Where’s Carrie?” he shouts.

She looks helpless for a moment. Confused.

“Carrie was with you,” he says, trying not to scream in her face. “Do you know where she went?”

Mary seems to come back to life. She points.

Danny looks. Toward the woods. He turns to run, but she reaches out and grabs his arm with surprising strength.

The focus is back in her eyes. She looks at Danny. “She’s lost a lot of blood by now. That tourniquet can only do so much. You understand, Danny? She is probably in deep shock. She needs a hospital. Right away. Or she will die.”

Danny nods. She lets him go.

That’s when, over the thunder of the fight between Eric and Colchester, Danny hears a gunshot.

He sees Alana, looking like she has been through a war, walk to her daughter. They embrace, and Alana takes her sword back from Grace.

Danny doesn’t have time to wait for them. He slaps the bus and yells at Tyler to start driving. “Get out of here! Go!”

He races headlong into the dark.

He starts with a basic grid search pattern. He tries to be organized and logical. But as the clock in his head counts down, measuring the amount of time he thinks Carrie must have left, he breaks down and simply runs in ever-larger circles. He finds more bodies. But not hers.

Then he stumbles down the far side of the hill. Carrie is on the ground by Buzz. Buzz is quite clearly dead, the top half of his skull missing.

Carrie doesn’t move when he grabs her. She barely opens her eyes.

“Oh sure,” she says softly. “Now you come to say goodbye…”

She passes out completely. He checks her pulse. It is fast and weak, like the fluttering wings of a bird. Her skin is cold. He shakes her. She won’t open her eyes, even when he says her name. Even when he shouts it. She will not wake up.

Danny feels, for an instant, an overwhelming sensation of loss and rage. He cannot lose her now. It wouldn’t be fair. That would just be stupid.

The cool, computerlike part of his brain clicks on again.

He does the math. They are thirty minutes from the hospital under ideal conditions, and these are not ideal conditions. The buses are gone, grinding their way down the hill with their own wounded. Even if he calls 911 and gets an ambulance out here, it will be an hour before she is in an operating room. Minimum.

That’s not good enough.

Danny thinks harder. Then he has a solution. He almost always has a solution. This one, like so much else tonight, is locked away in the past. But it’s all he’s got.

Carrie would have remembered it immediately, of course.

He leaves her and runs as fast as he can back to the meadow. He does not look at the bodies, or the blood. He pays no attention to the light show and the sounds coming from the top of the hill, where Eric and Colchester are breaking every known scientific principle. He finds RANN-D. It stands, looking dead and empty and alone.

He hopes it’s not empty.

He goes to the robot’s back, searches, and wraps his fingers around a hidden switch and pulls. A hatch pops open, revealing the wide compartment where he always kept his emergency equipment.

It falls into his arms, still heavy, its tanks fully loaded with his special hydrogen peroxide mixture.

His jetpack.

He sprints back to Carrie, slower now, hauling the pack with him. When he reaches her, he slides his arms through the straps and clicks the buckles. He scoops Carrie up in his arms. Is it the loss of blood that makes her so light? No, that’s impossible. It’s the adrenaline. He reminds himself to think clearly.

He swallows once, takes a deep breath, and grabs the ignition switch in his right hand. It’s a simple relay, no diodes or microchips or memory. It should still work.

It has to work.

He presses the button.

Nothing.

And then a click. A hissing noise, and the jets open up, and Danny feels the power begin to build. He feels the long-forgotten sensation of gravity clinging to him for a second before liftoff, like a mother letting go of her child’s hand.

Then he’s soaring through the air, holding Carrie as tight as he can, trying desperately to remember how to steer this idiot thing.

This time, he promises, he will not be too late.

37

Lightning and Thunder, Demons and Angels

The two magicians, with Jeremy between them, throw magic at one another like it costs nothing. They stand on a dragon’s back, drawing strength from years of sacrifices, the blood soaked into the earth, and all the myths and legends that run close to this place, the beating heart of America’s dreams of itself. Right here, right now, they can make anything happen. And they do.

Colchester uses the Agony Lens, which focuses the entire suffering of a lifetime — every broken bone, every broken heart, every toothache, every headache, all the way up to the final shuddering cough before the last breath — into a single moment, and turns it on Eric. Eric shifts it into a parallel history, and says a small and silent apology to the version of himself that has to bear it.

He counters with a weapon forged in the legends of a forgotten people who lived in this valley, carried by their culture-hero and used to slay gods and giants. Millennia ago, it put the dragon in the ground.

Colchester breaks it on the stone wall of an other-dimensional concentration camp, where esoteric concepts are penned up and tortured, then returns with the death toll of the hurricane that killed the entire town of Galveston in 1900. Eight thousand deaths come shrieking out of history, eight thousand ghosts hungry for life, aimed at Eric.

Eric opens a door in the ether and sends them back to their graves, which is a mercy. He timesteals the electricity from Tesla’s 1904 demonstration of Wardenclyffe Tower for J. P. Morgan, dooming the inventor to failure and poverty as he sends the power at Colchester instead.

Colchester sneers and deflects the bolt into the upper atmosphere before he calls upon an ancient thing sleeping on the ocean floor. Psychics as far away as Russia scream at the visions that suddenly appear in their minds, their hair turning white. Eric empties the horror into a black hole, using an adjacent dimension as a convenient trashcan.

He and Colchester go back and forth. They summon lightning and thunder, demons and angels. Neither can stop the other. Neither gains the upper hand.

But Eric is not trying to win. He’s only trying to get close enough. He opens a portal, and a blazing blue sun in another corner of the Milky Way, far too hot and bright, casts its light on Jeremy and Colchester.

Jeremy closes his eyes and stumbles. Colchester is suddenly looking at the birth of a star, which is more than even he can handle easily. He summons a dome of protection. But he is trapped, along with Jeremy, in the sudden glare.

Eric takes another step forward. He is within arm’s reach of the boy now.

He gestures, and closes the door to the alien sun. Colchester and Jeremy blink, dazzled in the sudden dark. Eric takes another quick step, and he has his hand around Jeremy’s throat.

He could snap the boy’s neck. He wouldn’t need magic. That would shut Colchester down. He’d be locked in a dead body. A prison for his ugly, black soul. Let him spend eternity that way.

Eric’s hands shake. Jeremy doesn’t move. He looks at Eric, fully aware and awake again, and terrified.

Colchester, above them both, laughs.

“What a hero,” he says. “Go ahead, Merlin. Sacrifice the child.”

It might work. It might save the day.

“You see now, boy?” Colchester says. “You cannot alter the cycle. Someone always has to die. This is the rule of magic: there must always be a sacrifice. It was written long before you were born. You tried so hard, but you cannot alter the fundamental shape of the universe. All your pissant little schemes, all your struggles, and you still end up with the same blood on your hands. You do this, and I will still return someday. Now you know the truth: The End always justifies the means.”

Eric can’t kill Jeremy. He won’t. He will not allow one more child to be sacrificed to the monster. Not if he can prevent it.

Instead he says, “I’ll make you a deal.”

Colchester stops laughing, interested.

“You get me,” Eric says. “You take me. You let him go. Forever. That’s the deal.”

“You think that will save him?”

“I won’t be the one to kill him. That’s enough for me.”

Colchester lurches forward before Eric can reconsider. “I accept,” he says, and plunges into Eric’s body.

It is the ugliest feeling Eric has ever had, and he has literally seen Hell.

He can see Colchester clearly now, with his third eye. The old sorcerer burrows into him, a black worm of corruption that thrashes and coils, stuck halfway into his chest. Shrieks of delight emanate from its little, triangle-shaped mouth, lined with tiny serrated teeth. It promises awful things. Horrible pain. Retribution. Death. Endless torture. It sounds perfectly happy at the prospect of forcing Eric to carry them out.

With every second, Eric feels himself slipping away, his eyes filling with the same darkness as Colchester’s other pawns, as the old sorcerer gets a feel for the new premises, begins flipping switches and figuring out how to use Eric’s particular brand of magic.

He feels his mouth moving, but the words are Colchester’s.

“Now, we open the last chapter, we break the final seal. We finally come to The End.”

Eric feels a tug of nerves and muscles, and watches as Colchester raises his hands and summons all the darkness, all the power he can muster.

There is no other magician to fight him. Jeremy cowers on the ground. He is small and tired, a toddler ready for a nap. He is so young, Eric thinks. He is too young for any of this. Without Colchester, he doesn’t have the first clue how to use his magic. He is helpless. He’s going to die along with the rest of the world.

“No,” Eric says. “Not yet.”

He resists with everything he has.

Colchester laughs again. It’s pointless. Eric will only last a few seconds.

But, as it turns out, that is enough time for Alana to stab Eric through the heart with her sword.

38

Into the Jaws of the Dragon

This is the part of the plan that Eric and Alana did not tell Danny and Carrie. They would have objected. They would have argued. They would have tried to find another way.

It’s the way they are. They believe there’s always another secret passage, another clever invention to save the day.

Alana and Eric know better. Their job was always more about surviving the night than saving the day. They learned some fights only end when someone dies.

After the other two left the hotel room the day before, Alana turned to Eric, and looked in his eyes.

“I’ll help you,” she told him. “You know that. But you also have to know this: I cannot forgive you. I swear I could kill you, Eric. You let that monster have my child — ”

There was probably more, but Eric didn’t need to hear it. He took her hand, sealing the agreement. “Deal.”

“What?”

Eric stood up straight. The room had finally stopped spinning. “You help me save the kid. And when this is over, you swear to kill me.”

He explained what he meant. It took a while, with many angry interruptions back and forth. She wanted to strangle him again when he was finished.

Instead, she only asked him a question.

“Do you know what you’re asking?”

“I do,” Eric said. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

Alana didn’t like being manipulated like that. But she nodded. She still remembered what it meant to do the harsh things when no one else could.

Together, they could do it. They could make sure that what had happened in Middleton for years — what had happened to them — would never fall on another kid again.

They could save the whole town.

They could change the future.

They had to play it very smart. They had to let Colchester think he was winning. They had to get close, and jump right into the jaws of the dragon.

And then they had to reach down and tear out its heart.

“We need to go sell this to Colchester. Follow my lead. He’ll buy it. He already thinks he’s won.”

Eric prepared to open a magic portal to the woods, where they would meet Colchester and Jeremy.

But he noticed Alana struggling to hold back a laugh.

“This is funny to you? I mean, I am going to die.”

She made a face, like she couldn’t believe it either. “So dumb,” she said. “I was just thinking, I can’t believe I let you feel me up after prom.”

“Yeah, well,” Eric says, “we all did stupid things in high school.”

He opened the door, and they held hands for a moment before they stepped through.

39

Unafraid at Sunset

Alana doesn’t feel so much as a twinge in her wrist as she murders her friend. Colchester is collateral damage; she keeps her deal with the old wizard intact.

The blade slices the dark worm of Colchester’s soul neatly. Colchester bellows in rage and pain. He attempts to flit out of Eric’s body, the same way he abandoned his own shell twenty years ago, to find a new host, so he can corrupt another and start again.

But Eric grabs onto him before he can escape. He looks down in his fist, and sees a curling, twisting, headless thing there: the tiny hookworm that is Charles Colchester; a parasite that’s lost its home. Colchester thrashes and bites. Eric’s hands are slick with his own blood, but he does not let go.

It’s so obvious now, how to beat him. Eric wonders why he never saw it before.

He summons the magic, one last time. He imagines a world where children play games at the local park and walk home unafraid at sunset. Where their parents love them unconditionally, even when they break a window or come home with an F or get pregnant in high school. Where no monsters dwell behind the smiles of people who wear uniforms or clerical collars or coaches’ whistles. Where no one is ever lost or abandoned. Where they will all grow up healthy and happy and safe.

Eric believes in that world more than anything. Not because he has ever seen it, or lived there. But because he wants it for Jeremy. And so, for a moment, it’s real.

In this world, there is no place for a thing that feeds on children. There is no room for a thing like Colchester.

A patch of bright blue sky opens overhead, and yellow sunlight from a perfect summer day in that world pierces the gloom. It shines on Eric’s hand, and the little scrap of darkness writhes and smolders and burns down to nothing, screaming in useless fury the entire time.

Then it’s gone.

Eric opens his hand, and there’s no trace of it left. Nothing.

The rain stops instantly. The clouds part, and a gentle summer breeze blows through the meadow. Looking at Jeremy, he sees a boy who is drenched, scared and open-mouthed. But a normal little boy.

Eric smiles at him. Then he drops to the ground, hemorrhaging liters of blood.

Jeremy rushes to his side. Alana kneels down, and cradles his head in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her.

“Shut up,” she says. “Just shut up.”

She whispers something in the language of the Fair Folk, the last thing she remembers her mother taught her, a benediction of sorts: May your death be swift and painless. It’s meant with more affection than it sounds.

Eric only has enough time to look at Jeremy. He tries to tell him, with that look, that it will be all right. From here, he can see over the horizon into the future, and he knows it will all work out. Eric couldn’t return him to his parents — that was a trick he couldn’t pull off — but he has given him the best foster mother and father he could imagine, and a badass fairy godmother as well. He has given him a place where he can live and learn and grow.

He’s given Jeremy the life Eric always wanted. All it costs him is everything.

All magic requires a sacrifice. This is his. And in return, he gets a whole new world.

Merlin was right, as it turns out. He was fated to die in battle with his greatest enemy. It just took a while.

“Goodbye,” Alana says, and closes his eyes.

Eric is already gone.

Epilogue

This Is Now

MIDDLETON. NOW.

“You’re really going to stay?” Alana asks Carrie and Danny. “Are you serious?”

It’s two weeks after the reunion. The FBI and CNN have both left town. Once again, tragedy has struck in the heartland, and so on. Buzz and Carl were blamed for most of it, and the dead were buried quickly. Any outlandish stories were blamed on hallucinogens in the drinks at the reunion, or PTSD among the survivors. The world has moved on to the next atrocity. There’s never a shortage of distractions.

The three of them are at the park, standing by the swings and the play structure, watching Grace and Jeremy. They’re involved in some kind of game that involves running back and forth and yelling a lot. Beyond that, the grown-ups don’t have a clue.

“You’re both idiots,” Alana says flatly. “You don’t have to live here.”

“Every town has its own little quirks,” Carrie says.

“A lot of towns have cancer clusters, too,” Alana says. “People don’t move to be closer to them.”

“The city council has asked me to take over the police department,” Carrie says. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

“I didn’t realize that was an inherited position.”

Carrie shrugs. “The last guy they hired was the head of a pagan death cult. They’re obviously not that picky.”

Alana looks at the cast on Carrie’s leg, and the cane she uses for support.

“I still can’t believe they let your mom operate on you,” she says.

“To be fair, it wasn’t like they had a lot of other surgeons on call.”

Carrie’s mom was being treated for the cuts and bruises she’d suffered at Wade’s hands when Danny came crashing through the doors of the emergency room, his jetpack finally running out of fuel. After the initial screams and panic were over, she took charge, and nobody thought to stop her. She snapped back into the years when she was a top trauma surgeon. She’d forgotten she’d surrendered her license, and apparently, so did everyone else. They were swamped with cases from the reunion anyway, and they were glad to have the help.

It was only when Mary was almost finished that the hospital administrator finally showed up. He freaked out, and they pulled Mary out of the room with some difficulty. Another surgeon checked Mary’s work.

She’d done a brilliant job. It was a miracle. She probably saved her daughter’s leg.

When Carrie woke up, she found Danny in the chair next to her bed. He’d been there all night, refusing to leave her side.

This time, he didn’t leave. Carrie decided that was good enough.

Right now, Mary is at home with Alana’s dad Richard watching her. Alana thinks it has been good for him. He gets to use his old nursing skills. It’s healthier than waiting by the woods for someone who will never return, anyway. Carrie says her mom already likes Richard better than her.

“Is she still…I don’t know, with us? I mean, here? Today?” Alana asks.

“Sometimes,” Carrie says. “Danny built her something to help. He calls it a memory prosthetic. It’s like Alexa, but it reminds you of stuff when you forget. She pitched the first one through the kitchen window, but he’s working on another version.”

Alana looks at Danny, who’s been uncharacteristically quiet all morning. “Is that what you’re going to do now? Just build gadgets in the workshop?”

“Sort of,” Danny says. “I’m starting up Sharp Industries again.”

“Really? You’re going back to making DVD players and computers?”

“Nope,” Danny says. “We’re going to invent batteries that last a hundred years. We’re going to make paint that collects solar energy and turns it into electricity. We’re going to breed plants that suck pollution out of the air, and toxic waste out of the soil. We’re going to make shape-shifting antivirals that mutate faster than diseases. We’re going to solve cold fusion and build flying cars and space hotels. And jetpacks.”

He breaks into a big, idiotic grin, and he looks like a kid again. “You know. The future.”

Alana looks skeptical. “Uh-huh. And how are you going to afford all that?”

Danny’s grin actually gets bigger. “Well,” he says, “I can lose a million dollars a year for 500 years. Then I’ll start to worry.”

Alana looks to Carrie for some kind of moral support, but she’s grinning too. Carrie takes Danny’s hand.

So that’s how it’s going to be, Alana thinks.

“Hey, speaking of money,” Carrie says, with a significant look at Danny.

He nods and pulls out his phone. “Right.” He swipes open an app, and there’s a whooshing noise.

At almost the same instant, Alana hears her own phone bloop with a message.

She takes it from her pocket, opens a notification from her bank. She blinks and wipes the cracked screen, just to make sure she’s seeing it right.

Her checking account just got bigger by a million dollars.

“Congratulations,” Danny says. “You are the recipient of a grant from the Eric Weiss Memorial Foundation. All taxes paid. Go forth and do good with it.”

Alana can only find one thing to say. “What?”

Danny shrugs. “We talked about it. Saving the world ought to pay a little better. And we’ve got the money.”

We. Alana catches that.

“Thank you,” she says. She’s polite enough to say that first. “But you can’t bribe me into staying. I’m taking my dad and we’re getting the hell out of here. You know that.”

“Of course,” Danny says.

“Sure,” Carrie says.

She gets the distinct impression they’re humoring her.

“I mean it. You only paid for a nicer moving van.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Oh, screw you both.”

They don’t talk about Eric much, apart from arranging the details. The service will be this weekend. His mother was difficult to track down, but after a great deal of negotiation and argument, she agreed to come. His father is flying from New York, and cannot speak to any of them on the phone without breaking into tears. They have to figure out who will deliver the eulogy.

Alana is still angry at Eric. Carrie is just sad. Danny believes Eric will leap out from behind a curtain and yell, “Abracadabra” and return from the dead. Alana has told him, repeatedly, that this will not happen. Danny just shrugs. “I have faith,” he says.

Whatever else Eric did, he saved them all. And a part of Alana will miss him terribly, and will always mourn what he could have been.

She blinks rapidly, then turns to watch the kids again.

Jeremy laughs and runs after Grace, who appears to be winning this game, whatever it is. He looks happy.

“Do you think it’s safe?”

Carrie knows what she means. She’s watching Jeremy and Grace too.

“No,” she says. “Not completely. But nothing is.”

Carrie and Danny have agreed to take Jeremy, until they can find his parents, or if they really are dead, the next closest relatives. But no matter what, they will take responsibility for him. He is going to be a very powerful magician. None of them have any doubt about that. He will need watching.

Alana isn’t sure they’re up for it. To be honest, neither is Carrie. (Danny is, but he’s always had that kind of blazing overconfidence in the face of the actual odds.)

“You’re taking an awfully big chance.”

“After what he’s been through, he deserves a chance,” Carrie says.

She had that line prepped and ready to go, Alana thinks but doesn’t say. Instead, she asks, “What happens when his powers come back? What if you take away his TV privileges and he decides to turn you into a fungus? Parenting is hard enough when your kid isn’t a necromancer, Carrie.”

Carrie looks at her evenly. “We’ll call you if we need you.”

Alana scowls and shakes her head.

She has to admit, though, that Grace doesn’t seem worried about Jeremy either. It is sort of amazing to her. Grace saw Jeremy — or rather, Colchester — at the center of a storm of horrors. Despite all of that, now she treats Jeremy like the little brother she’s never had.

Alana asked her about this, before they came to the park this morning.

Grace just rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t him, Mom. You can see it if you look.”

She doesn’t know if this is an ability her daughter possesses that she doesn’t, or it’s an example of her tendency to be dead certain about things even when she’s wrong, like when she swears she’s made her bed in the morning.

Then she hears Grace shout. She’s instantly on guard, but Grace is shrieking with delight, not panic or pain. Her daughter seems much younger when she laughs. (For a moment, Alana is sad. It’s not too late, she thinks, before violently shoving the thought aside. Yes, it is. The baby factory is closed.)

“Mom!” she says. “Look! Look what Jeremy can do!”

Jeremy laughs, looks a little shy, and shows them.

He snaps his fingers, and a brilliant ball of lightning appears above his hand.

Just like Eric.

Jeremy is so proud of himself. He holds onto it before it rises like a balloon into the cloudless blue sky.

For a second, all three of them stare.

Until Danny claps and says, “That’s great, champ,” as if the kid just threw a fastball or did a cartwheel. “Be careful with that, okay?”

Jeremy nods and smiles shyly, and goes on playing with Grace.

Alana’s sword is in its sheath, which is strapped to her back, under her jacket despite the summer heat. Danny doesn’t know she’s carrying it today. (Carrie probably does, but she doesn’t say anything.) The sword is quiet, however. If it were not, she would make a different choice about Jeremy.

She still might, someday. For now, she chooses to trust her friends.

They will never be normal, Alana knows. Not really. They will always have their past close behind them, the sound of its footsteps echoing in their ears.

But that’s no different from anyone else, she decides. They were all raised to survive in a world that no longer exists, trying to prepare for a future they cannot possibly predict. They do their best, and pretend to be the people they always wanted to be.

If they do it long enough, they might even make it real.

Their story is not over, and this is not the end.

Acknowledgments

Maybe there are writers out there who can do this alone, but I am not one of them. This book required a lot of help, and I was lucky enough to have it. I owe many people thanks.

To Donald J. Sobol, Clifford B. Hicks, Louise Fitzhugh, Robert Arthur Jr., Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, Doug Wildey, Daniel Pinkwater, and all the writers who worked under the names Victor Appleton Jr., Carolyn Keene, and Franklin W. Dixon: Thank you for planting the clues and fueling the jetpacks. You opened magic doors for me when I was a kid. I am grateful for all the time I’ve spent on the other side of them.

To Daryl Gregory, Elizabeth Hand, Ross Helford, Ian Tregillis, Gregory Veeser, and Ben H. Winters, thank you for reading the manuscript that would become this book, and for all the edits and the advice. You only made it better.

Thanks to Howard Mittelmark, who edited and proofed this book, and Jennifer Jones and Killian Design Group, who formatted and designed it. The illustrations are by the very talented and patient Mike Dubisch. The map of Middleton is by Eric Almendral, who brought my imaginary town a little more fully into the world. The cover is by Rafael Andres. Mayrav Saar helped with the jacket copy and editing. Any errors that remain are mine.

I’m grateful to Austin Goldstein, Jacob Liszt, and Chason Samuel, who filled out forms as the warrior princess, the boy genius, and the young magician. And thanks to Brooke Williamson and Nick Roberts, who answered my questions on chef’s knives.

Thank you again to Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who advised me on the gruesome business of suicide and murder, and who will hopefully forgive me for the places where I ignored what he told me.

Thank you to Glenn Gaslin, Tod Goldberg, Will Kozicki, Bradley Marques, John Rember, the legendary Beau Smith, Lavie Tidhar, Ian Tregillis, and Antoine Wilson for general moral support.

To Jean and Caroline and Daphne, thank you for being my reason why. To Caroline, thank you for the edits and for lending your hand to Carrie Keene. To Daphne, thank you for the inspiration for the scene with Marianne the babysitter and for all your brilliant ideas.

And, always, my unlimited love and gratitude to Jean, who is my first and best reader, and who did not let me give up.

Finally, I will be eternally grateful to the late Kathy McNally Curtis, who let a second-grade kid write whatever he wanted.

About the Author

Christopher Farnsworth is the bestselling author of seven novels, including BLOOD OATH, THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE, KILLFILE, and FLASHMOB. He’s also the co-author with worldwide bestseller James Patterson of DEAD MAN RUNNING, and the writer of the graphic novel 24: LEGACY — RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. As a journalist, his pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, The New Republic, and the Washington Monthly, and as a screenwriter, his first script was optioned by MGM. His books have been translated into ten languages and published in more than a dozen countries. He has twice been a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards, and his novel FLASHMOB was selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year. All of his books have been optioned for film and TV. Born and raised in Idaho, he now lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Other Works by Christopher Farnsworth

The Nathaniel Cade Series:

Blood Oath

The President’s Vampire

The Burning Men (novella)

Red, White, and Blood

Deep State (novella)

The Eternal World

The John Smith Series:

Killfile

Flashmob

With James Patterson:

Dead Man Running (novella)

24: Legacy — Rules of Engagement (graphic novel with Antonio Fuso)