Awakenings

            Kellin caught up with Carolyn and I as we were partway back to the tent, her expression tight and grim.  I stopped walking and looked at her, brows knitting.
            “How many this time?”
            “Four of the seven,” she said grimly, shaking her head.  “Pretty much every other ward.  It’s like someone’s trying to create deliberate gaps in our defenses.”  She shivered, glancing at Carolyn, who frowned.
            “Who would want to do that?  I mean, I know I don’t really understand all of this yet, but that doesn’t make any sense.  Those things out there—the stuff that you’ve got the wards to stop—they’re dangerous.”
            “Of course they’re dangerous,” Kellin said, sighing as she stared toward the tent.  “Maybe it’s time we finally told everyone.  Just so folks stay the hell away from the wards and don’t dick around with them.  I don’t know if it’s something doing it maliciously or doing it because they think it’s somehow satanic or what, but these wards keep getting messed up and if that keeps happening, it’s only a matter of time before something crosses them when it’s not chasing, but hunting.”
            The idea of anything that I’d seen or read about hunting us in our camp made me uneasy, stomach twisting into knots like the shifting leylines.  That had started to settle down a little in the past few days, but they’d by no means stopped rewriting themselves—simply stopped getting as unpleasantly tangled as they had in that first desperate week.
            “Do you really think they’d do that?”
            Thank all the powers that may or may not be that she asked the question so I didn’t have to.  I shoved my hands into the pocket of my sweatshirt.
            Kellin frowned, then nodded.  “Yeah.  I think they’re angry enough to come hunting us here.  Why else would they have attacked Marin down in the ravine, or chased you and Drew and J.T. back here?”  Her lips thinned.  “And then there’s the radio.”
            I stiffened.  “What about the radio?”
            She glanced at me and grimaced.  “I don’t think it exploded—or popped, as everyone’s insisting—because of how Matt and Davon jerry-rigged the thing.  It doesn’t feel right for that at all.”  She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly as she continued, her voice low as we drew closer to the tents.  “There was something oily and wrong about all of it, something dark.”
            Oh shit.  That’s what I was so damn afraid of.  That it wasn’t just an accident.  “Are you saying something attacked my brother?”
            “No,” Kellin said.  “I’m saying that something attacked the radio and Matt getting hurt was a bonus.”  She sighed a little and shook her head, glancing at Carolyn.  “Did your…y’know…did they say anything about what happened?”
            She shook her head slightly.  “No.  None of them were nearby.  It’s safer during the daylight hours for them to be out and about, so not many of them were in camp at the time.  The few that were just knew something bad had happened, but not what.”  She paused for a moment, head half-tilted as if she was listening to something.  “Something about a black cloud and being sleepy.”
            What the hell does that mean?  I wondered, frowning.  “What do you think, Kel?”
            “I think I’m not sure what to think,” she said, shaking her head slightly.  “All I know is that someone’s screwing things up and that’s letting other things penetrate camp, which is something none of us want.”
            “The fairies don’t feel any less safe here than before,” Carolyn said softly.  “But that may be because we’re all here…and they really don’t have anywhere else to go.”  She sighed and shook her head.  “I don’t know.  I’m still trying to figure out how this all works, y’know?  They talk, I listen, but I mostly keep my mouth shut because I don’t know who’s going to freak out if I say something.”
            Kellin shook her head slowly.  “Someday you’re not going to have to worry about that, Care.  At some point, it’s going to be undeniable.”
            Is it?  The thought bubbled up from somewhere in the deepest recesses of my subconscious, a tendril of doubt.  I bit my lower lip, frowning and trying to shake it loose.  Why did I suspect that Kellin was somehow wrong?
            “You think so?”  She asked.
            Kellin nodded.  “Yeah, I really do.  There’s just too much that’s going on for people to stay unaware of it forever.  It’s only a matter of time before they either experience things themselves or we have to tell them.”  She shrugged.  “I don’t know which one to lay better odds on yet.”
            “Hope for the latter but expect the former,” I muttered with a slight shiver.  My stomach settled and I took a deep breath.  “I’ve got a bad feeling.”
            They both looked at me.  “Did you see something?”  Kellin asked quietly.
            I shook my head.  “Nothing in the near future,” I murmured.  Not yet, anyway.  If something comes, it comes.  If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  I shook my head.  “And I’m not about to try to stimulate something, either.  All that usually happens is false positives when I do that, like back when I had the original dream.”
            “That was a long time ago.”  Kellin’s voice was quiet.  “Things are different now.”
            I shook my head slowly.  “I’m still not about to go looking for answers by trying to have Visions.  We don’t know what would happen if I did that.  Hell, I could end up in some kind of semi-permanent fugue state and be lucid less than a few hours a day.  I don’t want that.”
            “No one wants that,” Carolyn said, frowning.  “But do you really think that could happen?”
            “I don’t know,” I admitted.  “But I really don’t want to find out.”
            “All right,” Kellin said, shaking her head.  “I won’t bring it up again.”
            “Good.”  I’m afraid that I don’t have enough control.  Until I can figure out what I’m imagining versus what I’m really seeing, trying to have Visions isn’t going to do any of us a damned scrap of good anyway.

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            Thom found us standing out there a few minutes later.  “What do you think?”  He asked quietly as he came up next to me and slid his free arm around my waist.  I tugged him a little closer, to take some of the weight off of his ankle and onto me, and he obediently leaned against me.
            “It looks like it’ll work?”  Carolyn shrugged a little, sounding as unsure as I was.  This was his area of expertise, not ours.
            He nodded slightly.  “The area below the clock tower would’ve been better, but the drainage isn’t great out there and it’s anyone’s guess whether that tower’s going to stay standing or not.”
            “Oh!  Oh, we didn’t tell you.”  Carolyn looked at Thom and I, smiling.  “When we went out to the Shakespeare garden the other day, we saw the clock tower was still standing.”
            Thom frowned.  “It was still standing the last time anyone saw it, it was just leaning at a thirty degree angle.”
            “No, I mean straight up, ninety degrees from the ground.”  She shook her head a little, still grinning.  “It was pretty incredible.  It looked pretty solid, but none of us have gone out to take another look.  J.T. thought it must’ve been one of those last big earthquakes that shook it square—like maybe it was the ground that was crooked, not the tower.”
            Thom and I exchanged a look and he shook his head a little.  “This is better for now, anyhow,” he murmured, squinting out toward where Paul was herding the sheep with some help from Brandon, who was apparently learning the trade.
            Good, at least it’ll give him something to do other than running around looking for something to do to help.  “How long do you think it’s going to take?”
            “Well, I didn’t really want to start until after we’d gotten the well dug, but since it’s been dry the past few days I was thinking that maybe I’d round up Rory and Davon and start marking where we want to run the heating tubes.  If we get that done, we could start digging and getting things up inside of the next couple days.”  He frowned a little.  “I hate trusting the weather, but as long as it’s holding, we might as well take advantage.”
            “I don’t like trusting it, either,” I admitted, then sighed and shrugged.  “But we don’t have any way of reliably predicting it these days, right?  Not that we could before this happened, but still.”  I put my arm around his waist and squeezed gently, watching his face for traces of pain.  He’d been regularly taking his pills since Jacqueline yelled at him about it, but that didn’t mean I trusted him entirely.  He winced a little and looked down at me.
            “Careful, I’ve got bruises there from getting tackled by your brother.”
            I snorted softly even though my stomach did a complete 180 turn inside of my guts.  That still didn’t feel right, still worried me.  What the hell had happened while Matt was at that radio?  It still didn’t make sense.  If it had exploded in his face, it should have done more damage.  Jacqueline and I had been trying to avoid talking about that, but every look she gave the both of us screamed it.  She knew as well as I did that there was something more to that situation, something neither of us understood.
            Drew had shown Kellin what happened, but if she had any insights based on her inspection of the ruined radio and burnt desk, she wasn’t sharing them yet.  Probably because the problem with the wards had become all-consuming.
            “The pills help with that, right?”  I looked up at him, held his gaze for a moment until he smiled faintly and nodded.
            “They help, yeah.  But when you’re sticking your thumb right into the center of a bruise, Mar, they don’t help enough.  It’s not like I’m numb and floating on a bed of clouds.”
            Carolyn started to giggle.  I choked on a laugh myself as I imagined Thom in a loincloth, stretched out on a puffy, cottony cloud surrounded by little cherubs.  His abs contrasting with the baby fat chubbiness of those little Eros-like angels…
            My face flamed and Thom shook me, looking between Carolyn and I.  “Well…I’m glad that image gave you two a little fit of pleasure.  Guess I’ve still got it.”  He winked and me and I started to laugh, resisting the impulse to slap him in the stomach.
            “Don’t be awful,” I told him.
            “Only when you ask me to.”  He squeezed me, then let go, leaning against his crutch.  “I actually came out here to let you two know that Matt’s getting breakfast started.  Chickens laid enough that there’ll be scrambies, I guess, and Tala said something about maybe frying up some of the smoked bacon, seeing how it turned out.”
            Hot breakfast that isn’t oatmeal sounds amazing.  “We’ll be right down to help.”
            Thom nodded and stole a kiss from me before he started to limp back to the tents.
             A gust of chilly wind blew past Carolyn and I as he headed back in.  I shivered a little.
            “He seems better,” she said.
            I nodded.  “He is better.  Not one-hundred percent and not quite where I’d like him to be, but he’s much better.”  I paused for a moment, then looked at her sidelong.  “I’ll talk to J.T.”
            She hugged me and nodded, tension draining from her body.  “Thank you.”
            I hugged her back, wishing and hoping that someday, I’d feel that same relief.  Deep down, I knew that someday I would, but it was probably a very, very long time in coming.

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            “I’m sorry,” Carolyn said as we walked away from the fire, “I really didn’t expect her to say something like that.”
            I glanced toward her with a slight frown.  “Did you know she could…y’know.  See things like that?”
            She shoved her hands into the pocket of her hoodie.  “Well, I knew she could see the fairies.  Longfellow kind of likes her.  But I didn’t know to what extent she was aware of things, no.  Paul seems kind of nervous about all of it, so I kind of assumed that maybe she would be, too.”
            “Well, at least we know now not to assume.”  I exhaled a long breath and shook my head slowly.  “Hopefully, she won’t say anything like that in front of someone else.  Saying it in front of Tala’s bad enough.”
            “What, because Tala hasn’t…y’know?”
            I frowned a little.  Tala was curious, and smart enough to put the pieces together.  She probably already was and just hadn’t said anything.  “I don’t know, Care.  I really don’t know and I wish I did.  I’m glad Kellin always seems to know what to do about this sort of thing when I don’t.”
            Birtha was barking somewhere off to our right, probably as Paul tried to wrestle her over the ward-lines.  It was a ritual they went through every morning since they’d come here, as if the dog knew that she was safer inside the lines rather than outside.  The sheep didn’t seem to care.  Every morning, he took them over to one of the fields of grass to graze and brought them back again every afternoon.  He’d said the night before that he was going to give them another shear soon.
            “It’s weird to think about you not knowing what to do,” Carolyn said as Birtha’s barking faded.  “But none of us really know what to do, do we?”
            “Now?  In this world, with everything changed?  No.”  I shook my head.  “No, none of us really know what to do or what we’re doing.”
            We passed out of the tent, walking out over the grass and broken concrete, toward the edges of the ward lines and the staked-out perimeter Thom and Rory had put together.  Carolyn stopped shy of the lines, staring out into the muted blue-purple sky in the west, still lightening with the dawn.
            “J.T.’s been having weird dreams,” she said after a moment of silence, her eyes distant.  “He didn’t want to tell you himself, but I know that he wanted you to know.”
            Weird dreams?  What kind of weird dreams?  “Is he okay?  Kellin said he’d been avoiding her.”
            She sighed a little.  “I don’t know, Mar.  I think he thinks he is, but at the same time he knows he’s not.  What happened the other day was weird, and I know that he saw more than Drew and I did.”  She was tense, shoulders hunched as she looked at me slowly.  “He said the dreams reminded him of his grandparents’ house in Scotland, but it all looked older than that.  And the people definitely weren’t modern types.  They’re just weird dreams, he said.  He’s dreaming about ghosts.  That’s what he told me.”
            I frowned.  “What makes him think he’s dreaming about ghosts?”
            “I don’t know,” she said softly, shoulders rising and falling in a shrug.  “That’s just what he said, and I’m worried about him.”
            Ghosts.  J.T. and ghosts?
            “I don’t know what to do.”
            I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed her gently.  “I’ll talk to him,” I said quietly.
            A tremor ran through her.  “Let me at least tell him I told you first,” she said quietly, taking a shaky breath.  “I don’t know that he’s going to want to talk to you about it.  He just thinks they’re dreams.”
            “But he’s bothered enough about them to tell you, Care.”  Though I wonder why he picked you to tell.  Something going on that I’m not aware of?  That wouldn’t have surprised me.  I hadn’t been a good friend the past couple weeks, between Thom and Matt both being hurt.  I was lucky everyone else was so damned understanding.  “Do you know when they started?”
            “Five days ago,” she said quietly.  “After we got chased by those things.”
            I shivered, touching the cold place on my arm.  She watched me, biting her lip.
            “You think they’re connected.”  She paused, watching a shadow cross my face.  “No.  You’re sure it’s connected.”
            “What happened between here and the Shakespeare garden?”  I asked, feeling desperate worry bubble up from the pit of my stomach.  Was Kellin right, had J.T. realized some ability that scared him badly enough he didn’t want to talk about it?  Was he going to turn into another Thom on us?
            “I don’t know,” she whispered, shaking her head hard.  “All I know is that all three of us could see those things, and there was something in the mist that saved us, but I don’t know what it was.  I think he does, though.”  She looked down at her feet.  “I’m sure he does, but maybe he doesn’t know that he does.”
            I stared at her for a moment, then just nodded mutely.  Great.  How are we going to handle this now?  “But he’s not okay.”
            “He’s kind of okay,” she said, then sighed.  “Mostly.  But you should talk to him before Kel does, I think.  He might open up a little more to you.  I think he’s trying not to scare me.”
            “Could he scare you?”
            She was quiet for a long moment before she shook her head and spoke softly.
            “No.  I don’t think he could.”

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            We brought the water back to the fire after Tala calmed down and wiped her eyes.  I couldn’t blame her for her fear, though I wondered how long we were going to keep it quiet, who we were going to keep it a secret from.  I knew that a secret in a community this small wouldn’t last long, even if I didn’t have any plans to tell anyone without her consent.
            God, she was pregnant.  How we were all going to handle that?  It wasn’t just about her, after all, it was about all of us, about us as a community.  Eight months or so, and then we’d have an infant to care for on top of all of us.
            Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying about.  A lot could happen in eight months.
            Carolyn was sitting with little Angie by the fire, and the small girl waved to Tala and I as we brought the water.  I looked around for Matt, who’d been here when we’d left.  Carolyn caught me looking and grinned.
            “He’s with Stasia.  She said there’s eggs—finally.  He got excited and had to see for himself.”
            Tala sighed happily.  “Finally something other than toast.”
            I laughed as I set the buckets of water off to one side, to be rotated in for sterilization in whatever fashion my brother and some of the other boys had engineered two weeks ago.  We’d gotten rain buckets set up, but the storms had tapered off the past few days so we hadn’t gotten to test them much.  That, at least, had given J.T. and Drew time to actually get back to testing for wells with Tala’s help.  We needed one of those fast, so we could stop hauling water up and down from the river and sterilizing it.
            “The rest still sleeping?”  I asked as I dried my hands on the seat of my jeans.
            “Mostly.  A few are up and moving, but most everyone’s catching a few extra minutes of sleep.”
            Angie tugged on Carolyn’s sleeve.  “Miss Carolyn?”
            I smothered a smile as I turned around to get a few mugs for tea out of the bin we kept them in.  The kettle was already on—that was either Matt or Carolyn’s doing.  Cute kid.  Polite, too.
            “Why does Miss Marin have three eyes?”
            I froze, throat closing.  What the hell?  I turned slowly, looking at Angie strangely.  She was looking up at Carolyn, perfectly innocent.  Tala had frozen, too, as she was about to sit down on the other side of Angie.
            Carolyn’s eyes flicked to me before she looked back at Angie, tone carefully neutral.  “What do you mean, Angie?”
            “She has three eyes!  Can’t you see them?  Just like you have all of those fairies with the sparkly dragonfly wings and the butterfly wings around you all the time.”
            I suppressed a shiver.  She can already see things?  Some kind of prescience, or just basic sight beyond the norm?  “Where is it, Angie?”  I asked quietly, curious even though I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.
            She looked up at me and pointed to the center of her forehead, just above her brow-line.  “Right here.  It’s all silvery most of the time.”  She paused for a minute, tilting her head to one side.  “Mr. Thom has it, too, but he looks different.”
            Shit.  And this in front of Tala, who’s pretty well clueless.  What the hell am I going to do, going to say?  The kid’s seeing real things, I can’t tell her she’s imagining them.
            “Angie?”  Tala said quietly as she slowly sat down.  “When you saw the shadow man you told Miss Kellin about, what did he look like?  Did he look like Miss Marin’s eye, or like me?”
            Her nose wrinkled a little.  “He looked real, but not like you.  I could see through his coat, like it was made of really dark smoke.  And he was big and scary and dark and mean.  It was hard to see his face because there was all this black moving around him all the time.  I think he was trying to hide from us, but he wanted something from Paul.  He wanted Paul to help him, but Paul said no.  The man got mad, but he left.”  She shifted a little uncomfortably.  “I told Miss Kellin this already.”
            But Kellin didn’t tell me.  This ward thing must really have her spooked since she apparently forgot.  I frowned.
            Angie looked up at me and gasped a little.  “You’re not angry at me, are you, Miss Marin?”
            “No, no, I’m not angry at you, Angie.”  I shook my head quickly.  “Not at all.  I’m just surprised, that’s all.”  I tried to keep my smile gentle.  “Not everyone can see things like you do, Angie.”
            She drew her knees up against her chest.  “Paul used to tell me that all the time.  He couldn’t see them, either.  Can he see them now?”
            I frowned again.  Good question.  Kellin wasn’t back for me to ask, so all I could do was shrug.  “I’m not sure, Angie.  Maybe.”
            “Can you see like I do?”
            I shook my head.  “No…most of us see a little different, but that’s okay.  But maybe you shouldn’t talk about it too much.  Some people might get a little scared.”
            “Why?”
            Her innocence broke my heart.  Briefly, I thanked every power that was or might have been that I’d been a little older than this when I first started becoming aware that there was a world beyond normal sight.  I reached out and brushed her hair back from her face.  “Because some people are afraid of things they can’t see.”
            “Like monsters under the bed?”  She asked, eyes big and round.
            I laughed, nodding.  “Right.  Like monsters under the bed.”
            “They weren’t really monsters.  Just dust bunnies,” Angie said, nodding sagely.  I almost laughed again.
            “Right.  But you were afraid of them anyway, right?”
            She paused, then nodded.  “Yeah, I was.  Until I knew what they were.”  Understanding dawned in her eyes.  “Oh!  I get it.”
            Thank you.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Thank you, whoever’s out there, for making her as bright and as sharp as this.  I hoped, going forward, we’d be so lucky.

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            We made our way in silence back up the trail and to the ward lines, at which point I took Kellin’s bucket from her.  “Go double check them.  I can handle this.”
            “You sure?”  She eyed me for a moment, looking at the buckets, the way my arms trembled a little as I held them.
            I nodded.  “Yeah.  Go check the wards.”  The buckets were heavy, but they weren’t any heavier than any of the digging equipment I’d hauled around during field school, or the furniture I’d moved around while working for camps and conferences.  It wasn’t like I was going to have to haul them very far, anyhow.
            I’d gone another ten feet before Tala grasped my arm, took one of the buckets out of my hand, and set it aside.
            “I need to talk to you,” she hissed in an urgent whisper, relieving me of the other bucket and setting it next to the first.
            “Tala, they need the water back by—”  She pressed a finger against my lips.
            “Your brother can wait for the goddamned water, Mar.  I need to talk to you now.  It can’t wait.”  She grabbed me by the elbow and tugged me away from where the camp was waking up, toward the shadows of the collapsing dorms behind the tents.  I stared at the back of her head as she dragged me over.
            What’s got her all knotted up?  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her upset like this.  I wasn’t sure if I ever had, really.  “Tala, what’s so damn important?”  I asked her quietly as we eased into the shadows.  Tala pressed her back against a slab of concrete, brows knitting.  She hugged her arms across her body, looking back toward the tents to make sure someone wasn’t about to overhear us.
            “I’m scared, Marin.”
            Aren’t we all?  You dragged me over here to tell me that?  I swallowed that response and frowned at her, watching her closely.  There was a certain kind of terror in her eyes, the look of someone who doesn’t know what they’re going to do, isn’t sure what their options are.  My stomach dropped a little.  “Of what?”
            She glanced toward the tent again and didn’t look at me as her voice dropped to a bare whisper.  “I’m pregnant, Marin.  Pretty sure I am, anyway.”
            I rocked back against my heels, staring at her for a moment.  She risked a glance at me and must not have liked the look on my face, because hers crumpled.  She slumped against the slab, covering her face with her hands.
            “I don’t know what to do!”
            I took her by the shoulders, stepping closer again.  “Calm down,” I said quietly, drawing her into a hug.  She threw her arms around me and sobbed into my shoulder.  I winced a little, hugging her tight.  “How do you know?”
            “Four pregnancy tests in ten days is how I know,” she whispered through her tears.  “I’m three weeks late, Mar.  That and positive tests…what else could it be?”
            She definitely had me there.  I squeezed her.  “It’s okay, Tala.”
            “How am I supposed to do this without Kurt, Marin?”
            I hadn’t doubted for an instant that the baby was Kurt Davison’s—Tala had been dating him for the past two years and we’d been wondering when he’d pop the question.  He’d been back on the other side of the state the weekend the world ended, getting ready for an interview at one of the local news affiliates there on Monday morning.
            Who knows if he’s even alive or dead?  I winced at the thought, glad she couldn’t see it.  I squeezed her more tightly.  “You’re going to be okay, Tala, because you’ve got us.  We’ll help you, I promise.”
            She leaned against me, crying into my shoulder—whether in relief or despair, I couldn’t be sure—and I just held her, mind awhirl.  What are we going to do?  How are we going to handle this?  I never dreamed that we’d have to face something like this so soon.  And for her to be alone, without Kurt…I don’t know that I’d be able to handle her kind of situation.  I don’t think I could do it without Thom.
            I rubbed her back until she started to calm down, hiccupping as she pulled away and looking at me with red-rimmed eyes.
            “I’m just so terrified, Mar.  Why did this happen?”
            I exhaled and shook my head.  “Jac would tell you that God’s got some kind of plan.  I’d say that things happen for a reason.”  I held her at arms’ length.  “You’re going to be okay, Tala.  I promise you.”
            She wiped her eyes and sniffled, staring at me for a long moment, then nodded slowly.  “Okay.  But I’m going to hold you to that.”
            I laughed and hugged her again.  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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            “I swear to you, Marin, every day I go to check on them, and every day there’s something wrong with them.  I don’t know who’s tripping over what or doing what wrong…but something keeps screwing up one or two wards.”
            I frowned, arms crossed tightly beneath my breasts as I watched the sun start to creep up beyond the trees and broken buildings.  Kellin and I stood near the edge of the ravine, near the ward-lines, water buckets near our feet.  She’d stopped to check the ward nearest to our descent point, finding the edges of the circle broken and half the herbal components gone.  “What do you think it is?”
            “What or who,” she said, frowning as she fished a piece of chalk out of her pocket along with a zipper baggie of herbs.
            “It’s been windy lately.  Could be that the herbs keep blowing away, maybe leaves or something are disrupting the circles.”
            Kellin grimaced.  “I wouldn’t be so concerned if I thought it was something as simple as that, Marin.  I think this is deliberate.”  She glanced up over her shoulder at me.  “But who would be doing it?”
            Don’t know.  Jac wouldn’t touch anything like this, and from what Rory said, based on Thom’s reaction to the one he almost tripped over, Thom wouldn’t be screwing around with them, either.  Who would?  Leah?  Stasia?  One of the staffers that doesn’t know any better, or thinks it’s voodoo mumbo-jumbo, Antichrist-worthy, demon-summoning evilness?  I suppressed a snort.  If anyone thinks it’s that, they’re not going to like it when we run that copper cabling Rory brought back around the camp and bury it in a ring around us.  The copper, along with a little sprinkling of salt, would act as a protective circle around our settlement’s perimeter.  We’d probably still need wardings, but the circle would certainly help—or so I was hoping, based on some of the reading and practice I’d done in the past.
            Of course, if I was wrong, it wasn’t like we’d paid for the copper anyway.
            I finally shrugged.  “I don’t know.  How are we going to find out?”
            “I don’t know.”  She frowned, shaking her head as she started to clean up and reset the ward.  “I guess we just have to be hyper-vigilant about them, so nothing can violate the wards again.  They’re supposed to keep us safe.”
            “And they can’t do that if they’ve screwed up, not really.”  I grimaced, looking around slowly.  They had stopped the winged creature that chased Drew, Carolyn, and J.T. back here, but not for long.  Whatever the three had done to get rid of the thing, though, had worked quickly enough that I hadn’t even managed to realize what I was feeling before it was gone.  It was only when Carolyn told Kellin and I later that I realized what had happened at the wardline, what the sound I’d heard was.  “Why do you think Carolyn keeps saying it was something she did that stopped it?”
            Kellin rechalked the marks on the stones, eyes lidded for a moment.  She didn’t answer until she was done dumping energy back into the ward, straightening slowly from her crouch after she’d finished.  “I don’t know.  Protecting someone, maybe?”
            I snorted.  “Which one of them, Drew or J.T.?  Or someone else?”  Hell, I don’t even have a full handle on what happened there.  “I don’t know who or what she’d be protecting, Kel.  The fairies?”
            “From the way the Shakespeare garden looked, I’m not sure they’d have that kind of power.”  Kellin scooped up her bucket, looking at me.  “You didn’t sense anything?”
            “I didn’t have time.  By the time I realized I was feeling anything, it was all over.”  I shook my head a little, chewing my lower lip.  “I was with Jac and Matt, and they didn’t seem to hear anything, not like I did.”
            “Probably because they’re not Awake yet.”
            “Maybe,” I said, frowning slightly as we started down the winding path toward the river, where we’d draw water.  “Have you talked to J.T. about what happened?”
            “He’s been kind of avoiding me.  What about you?”
            I grimaced.  “Same.  It’s weird, that’s never happened before.”
            “Sounds like he might be the one Carolyn’s protecting.”  Kellin glanced back over her shoulder at me, hitching one shoulder in a shrug.  “I don’t understand why, either, but I don’t know what he could’ve done.  You have any clue?”
            I thought about that for a moment as we picked our way down the still-muddy path down toward the river, which was still running high.  Some of the paths were flooded, and that’s where we’d been getting cleaner water, as the runoff from the ravine flowed down into the river.  I finally shook my head.  “I haven’t noticed any sensitivity to anything in him before.  All I know is that he’s never though I was crazy, even when Thom started to think I was.”  I shrugged.  “Maybe that was because he knew there was something going on beyond his perception.”
            “Mmm.”  We stopped near one of the streamlets flowing toward the river and Kellin crouched down to fill her bucket.  “He’s been jumpy the past few days, too.  Watching things that aren’t there.”
            I snorted humorlessly.  “In his defense, so have the cats.  And Birtha.”  Birtha was one of three full-grown sheepdogs that Paul and Angie had brought back with them.  She was a sweet dog, more interested in her newborn puppies than anything, and got along well enough with the mother cat we’d adopted.
            Kellin’s tone was gentle, but firm.  “You and I know full well that animals are as sensitive if not more sensitive than we are to anything unseen.”  She finished with her bucket and then took mine.  “How’s your arm?”
            I rubbed the lingering cold, sore spot on my arm.  “Still sore, still cold.  No change.”
            “Did you feel anything when you heard the sound?  Or when the radio went?”
            “I was concentrating on something else at the time.”  I grimaced, trying to think.  I’d had trouble gripping tools right before the radio exploded and Matt was hurt.  If I’d felt anything while I was sitting with him and Jacqueline afterwards, I couldn’t remember it.  “I might have felt something and not realized it,” I finally said, shaking my head a little.  “I need to concentrate on sensations more—I’ve been getting distracted easily lately.”
            Kellin grunted and handed me my bucket.  “I’m not really sure any of us can afford that.”
            I inclined my head and shrugged again.  “Probably right.  But that doesn’t change the basic facts.”
            “Not one bit.”  She sighed as we started back up the path.  “We’ll just have to watch, I guess.  Keep an eye on who gets near the wards.”
            “It’s all we can do, Kel.”
            “I know.”

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            Something felt wrong as the horses clicked over the concrete toward camp.  Kellin shifted uncomfortably in her saddle, glancing sidelong at Tala, who’d ridden back with her to round up Rory and the flatbed.  Tala tilted her head, looking at Kellin funny.
            “What’s wrong?”
            “I don’t know,” Kellin said, brow creasing as she looked around slowly as their horses continued to move beneath them.  “But something isn’t right.”
            “Something?  Something like what?”
            Kellin almost regretted saying anything—almost.  She bit down on her tongue.  Now’s as good a time as any.  She heard what the little girl said about the shadow man, and she just looked confused, not horrified, not like the kid was crazy.
            “Kel?  What, do you just have a Han Solo style bad feeling about this?”  Tala edged her horse closer as they drew nearer to the rubble of Mackinac Hall and their camp beyond it.
            “Something like that,” Kellin muttered, trying to shake the pins-and-needles feeling that shot from her toes to the top of her head.  Something was out of joint, something that hadn’t been when they originally left this morning.
            Could something have punched through the wards?  I don’t know how.  We set those as strongly as we could at the time, and used the herbs to help strengthen the protections…  She frowned to herself, glancing at Tala.  “Things just don’t feel right.”
            Tala pursed her lips.  “Are you sure you aren’t imagining things?  I don’t know about you, but having a shotgun pointed at me a while ago kind of rattled my nerves, even if Paul did turn out to be a nice guy protecting his baby sister.”  She shivered.  “Next time something like that happens, it’s going to be too frickin’ soon, y’know?”
            “Yeah,” Kellin agreed, not really listening.  She was focused on the feeling of nearby cold and shadow, on the pins and needles feeling that was getting stronger as they approached the camp’s ward lines, the lines she’d checked and rechecked before setting the wards in their current configuration.  Something had gone wrong, but what?  She nudged her horse into a trot over the last few dozen feet they needed to cover.
            “Kellin?”  Tala actually sounded concerned now as she kicked her horse to keep up.  “You’re not imagining things, are you?”
            “No, I don’t think I am.”  I just have no idea what happened, that’s all.  She set her jaw and stayed mounted until they crossed the ward lines.  The pins and needles feeling all but vanished, leaving in its wake a vague numbness she barely noticed.  A shudder went through her as she reined up and dismounted, looking around slowly.  Her eyes fell on a gouge in the turf.
            Tala followed her gaze as she dismounted more slowly.  “What’s that from?”
            “Don’t know,” Kellin said quietly.  “But I’m going to go find out.  Will you take care of the horses?  And find Rory?”
            “Doesn’t look like he’s here,” Tala said, looking toward where the flatbed was usually parked.  It wasn’t there.  “Maybe he went somewhere.”
            Kellin grunted.  “Probably to get more crap from the home improvement store.  Take care of the horses, huh?”  Kellin held her reins out toward the other woman.  Tala just nodded as she took them.
            “Sure.  Want me to keep an eye out for him?”
            “Yeah,” Kellin said.  “And take him back to the farm when he gets back and unloads.  I don’t want you guys out there after dark.”
            “What, because of some shadow man that the kid and her brother saw?  One she maybe imagined?”  Tala frowned briefly, eying her for a moment.  “…you don’t think she imagined it, do you?”
            “I’m actually pretty sure she didn’t,” Kellin murmured, meeting Tala’s gaze.
            Tala opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again, apparently reconsidering what she was about to say.  “What do you think it was, then?”  She asked.
            “I’m not sure, but if my suspicions are correct, it’s not a good thing, I’ll promise you that much.”  Kellin shook her head.  “If you really want to know, I’ll tell you later, after dinner.”
            Tala hesitated before nodding.  “Right.  Okay.” She chewed on her lower lip, then gestured toward the two horses.  “I’ll get these guys taken care of, then.”
            “Good,” Kellin said, then started walking toward the tent they were all living in.  Tala lingered behind with the horses for a moment before she started to lead them down to the tent where they were keeping the building supplies and the livestock.
            Drew was the first person she saw, and from the look of relief on his face, something bad had happened—possibly worse than she’d ever suspected.
            “What’s wrong?  What’s happened?”  She asked, closing on him.  He gave her a level look as he took her by the elbow.
            “We need to talk,” he said quietly, and that was all he said until he’d tugged her further away from the ward lines, into the very heart of their camp.  The nearer she got to the center point of camp, the further away the feeling of numbness became.
            “Drew,” she said softly as he brought her toward the spot they’d been keeping the radio, “tell me what happened while we were gone.  Where did that big gouge in the grass come from?”
            Then she saw the remains of the radio and blinked.  Hairs stirred on her arms, then laid back down again as she forced her expression to impassivity.  There was power here, but it was the barest remnant of it, like the memory of a dream fading upon waking, a faint echo of what had been.
            “This wasn’t the only thing that happened,” she said, staring at the remains of the radio.  There was something oily and black about it, impure and unclean.  At the same time, though, she could sense the barest traces of some kind of protective force, clean, strong, but almost completely obliterated and masked by the darkness.
            “No,” he said quietly, towering over her, arms crossed against a broad chest.  “They’re getting stronger, Kel.”
            “What is?”  She asked as she edged closer to the blackened desk, carefully moving aside the toppled chair that sat in front of it.  Sense of that positive force is stronger around the chair than the desk…
            “The black shadows.  The winged things.  They’re getting stronger, and bolder.”
            “What do you mean?”
            “That’s what the gouge was, Kel.  One chased Care and J.T. and I.”  Drew’s voice stayed quiet, as if he feared someone would overhear.  “It crossed the wards.  It shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
            A chill shot down Kellin’s back, as if someone had suddenly replaced her spine with ice.  “No,” she said slowly.  “No, they shouldn’t have been.”  She backed away from the desk.  “I have to check the wards.”
            “I’ll come with you.”
            She almost told him no.  Something made her think that she should’ve, but she simply nodded.  “All right.  Let’s go.”

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            The sun went dark for no reason.  Thom’s heart thudded against his ribs, skipping beats as he dropped what he was doing.  His instincts said this was bad.  The hairs stirring on the back of his neck told him it was worse.
            Someone was shouting near the southern edge of the walls, down near the ravine.  He wasn’t sure who it was; he was still too far away from the voice.
            He ducked outside, into the bright, white cold of winter.  The sky was clear, but the sun was dark.  That could only mean one thing.
            Pain blossomed in his arm in a line, blood welling from a slash that seemed to come out of nowhere.  He bit back a curse.
            He could hear someone—Carolyn?—shouting that they were inside.
            They.  The shadows without form, the things that he used to be able to see in all of their ugly glory.  He couldn’t anymore, now they were just formless shadows—when he could perceive them at all.  Sometimes he couldn’t, and it’d been getting steadily worse all winter.  He and Marin didn’t talk about it.
            Marin.  Where was she?
            He grabbed the first person rushing past him.  Leah, her eyes haunted as she ran not toward the walls, but from them.  “Where’s Marin?”
            “At the ward lines,” Leah answered, then tugged free and disappeared between shelters.  Thom suppressed a curse and turned to run.
            Something hit him square between the shoulderblades, pitching him forward.  All the air rushed out of his lungs and he hit the ground.
            He could’ve sworn he heard something laughing above him.

            “Thom?”
            He snapped back to himself at the sound of J.T.’s voice, looking blearily up at his friend.  “…where were you?”
            “We were walking,” J.T. said.  “Didn’t mean to miss food.  That oatmeal?  This late in the day?”
            “For Matt,” Thom said, forcing a smile at Carolyn as she sat down next to him and put the hot water kettle on the fire.  He looked up toward J.T. again.  “You might want to have a look at him.  The radio kind of exploded while he was using it.”
            Carolyn winced.  “That must’ve been the sound we heard.”
            J.T. nodded, grimacing.  “Yeah…how bad was it, Thom?  Could they…did they handle it okay?”
            Thom swallowed a wry smile, nodding.  “Jac and Leah did fine, but you may want to have a look.  Matt’s going to have I-75 on his hand for the rest of his life, I think.”  Thom saw J.T. wince and shook his head a little.  “Really, Jay.  They did a good job.  Jac’s got him resting now and Marin’s with him.  I said I’d watch the fire until someone relieved me.”
            Carolyn glanced at Thom as she got ready to brew up a pot of tea.  “How’d it happen?”
            Thom shook his head.  “I’m not really sure.  A lot of static, then the radio went and Matt’s stumbling away from it, screaming.”  He rubbed his chest lightly at the memory, wincing.  The pills he’d swallowed had taken the edge off his discomfort, but they still hurt from catching Matt full-on in the chest.  “I’d heard the static and was on my way to check what the hell was going on.”  He glanced down at his hands.  Dried blood was still caught in the deeper cracks in his palms, under his nails.  He grimaced.  “…y’think you two could watch the fire for me?  I need to finish cleaning up.”
            Carolyn stared at him, then looked at his hands.  Her eyes widened.  “Oh.  Oh Thom.”
            He shook his head quickly.  “Right place, right time.  I helped control the bleeding until Jac got there, then I helped control Marin after Jac got there.”  He set aside the stick he used to tend the fire and started to get his feet under him.  “Just didn’t get as cleaned up as I’d have liked.”
            J.T. studied his friend, then nodded slightly.  “You okay?”
            Thom shrugged with one shoulder as he started to hobble away from the fire.  “Will be.  Ribs hurt, but that’s because I caught Matt on the way to the ground.  I’m sure it’ll get better later.  Pills took the edges off.”
            “So you finally took them?”
            He winced.  Everyone must’ve known I wasn’t.  Damn.  “Yeah.  Jac made me feel like an ass because I hadn’t been.”
            J.T. grinned broadly.  “Good.”
            “Et tu, Jay?”
            His friend waved a dismissive hand as Carolyn handed him a mug of tea.  “If she didn’t make you take them soon, I was just going to start force-feeding them to you.  Go on, get out of here.  We’ve got this.”
            Thom grunted and started limping away.  Their voices came to him as he headed for the laundry buckets, where he could use some of the spent water to scrub his hands.
            “He didn’t hear what happened out there?  We were, like, thirty feet away.”
            J.T.’s voice was grim.  “He was a thousand miles away when we got over here, Care.  Marin doesn’t hear anything when she gets that look, why should he?”
            Thom winced, unable to smother it, and started moving faster.  He didn’t want to hear any more.
            His skin prickled, then the feeling vanished.  He shivered, looking around slowly.  Nothing.  No one near, except for J.T. and Carolyn behind him by the fire.  Quiet, empty.
            He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, bowing his head for a moment and leaning heavily against his crutch.  How was he going to do this?
            How can I believe in what she—and the rest of them—can see or do without accepting it myself?  He swallowed the bile rising in his throat.  I don’t know.  But I don’t have a choice.  I’m not losing her.  I can’t.
            He kept walking.

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            All he could think was that they weren’t supposed to die here.  This wasn’t right, it wasn’t their time.  J.T. held Carolyn tight against his chest, teeth grating at the shrieking sound.  The creature that leapt at them hit something solid, then rebounded, claws scraping against the sidewalk.  It hissed, low and threatening, glaring at them with red and gold glinting in its marble-like eyes.
            I don’t know what it hit, but I’m glad it did.  He glanced at Drew.  Maybe it was something he’d done?
            A gray mist started rising all around them, cold, cloying, carrying the scent of dirt, dying flowers, and freshly cut grass.  J.T.’s skin prickled and he held Carolyn tighter against him.
            “Now what?”  He muttered.
            The mist closed around them, feeling momentarily more like a shield and embrace than sudden weather.  Carolyn stiffened and Drew’s eyes popped open as the mist thickened around them to impenetrable gray-white.
            “What is this?”  Carolyn gasped quietly, fingers digging into J.T.’s arm.
            A shrieking, keening sound echoed through the mist, lancing through them down to the very marrow of their bones.  They all heard a wet, crunching sound to their left, followed by a roar that cut off abruptly, as if sliced by a knife.
            The image of a bone-white face swam up out of the mist in front of J.T.  Washed-out lips parted and a voice whispered, “Run.”
            He didn’t recognize the fact right away, but he knew the voice.  Constance Baile.  They’d done the greenshows last year together, when he’d played Othello and Titus Andronicus and Caesar.  He sucked in a breath.
            Constance was dead.  They’d found her body that first day and buried her with the rest, at one end of the trench nearest to the theatre.
            “Run,” the voice repeated, a little more urgently, then the face disappeared into the mist.
            J.T.’s heart started again.  He spun, bringing Carolyn around with him, shouting hoarsely to Drew.  “Move!”
            Carolyn stumbled the first few steps, gasping in pain, and J.T. scooped her up and threw her across his shoulder.  She started to protest, then went silent as their footsteps pounded over the pavement, the mist thickening behind them into mottled gray and black even as it thinned ahead.  The shadow creatures howled in frustration and rage.  The wind-shriek sound died away as they made it to the base of the clocktower, the mist clinging to them only in bare tendrils.
            “What was that?”  Drew gasped, half hunching over with hands on his knees to catch his breath as J.T. let Carolyn down on the lawn beyond the clocktower.
            “I don’t know.”  J.T. shook his head.  “I really don’t know and I’m not really sure I want to find out.”
            An angry sound echoed from the dip they’d fled from.
            Shit.
            “I think we need to keep running,” Carolyn said, grasping J.T.’s arm again.  Her gaze flicked toward Drew, who’d straightened at the sound.  “Will we be safe if we make it to the others?”
            “I think so.”
            J.T. looked back at the mist behind them, which twisted and roiled, flashes of shadow and red sometimes visible at the edges.  “Let’s move.”
            They’d run about four steps before something shot upward out of the mist, black and red and howling angrily.  The mist seemed to shriek and J.T.’s heart slammed against his ribs.
            What the hell is all of this?  The mist, the monsters?  It’s like we’ve stumbled into a real-life LARP with killer special effects.
            The angry howl of the shadow creature came closer and he quit sparing the time to think, he just ran.
            They might have gone too far around, looping up around the shattered buildings along the campus’s main drag rather than trying to cut between ruins and the ravine to get back to the camp.  The creature was gaining on them, launching on updrafts, ink-black wings spread against the sky.
            The mist was chasing, too, spreading in wisps and tendrils, but the creature stayed well above its reach.
            J.T. could’ve sworn that he saw faces in the mist, angry, screaming.
            Hunting, like the shadow-creature chasing them.
            They rounded the corner of fallen Mackinac Hall, Drew scrambling over the edge of the rubble and almost falling.  J.T. grabbed his arm and pulled him straight again as he ran past, Carolyn still gripping his other hand.
            The creature behind bellowed wordlessly, almost in challenge, the sound echoing off trees and ruins.
            “Almost there,” Drew panted.
            Just beyond the edge of camp, they passed through a wall of some kind, one that J.T. had never been aware of before.  It felt like he’d just run through a wall of water.  Whatever that was, that’s why Drew thinks we’ll be safe.
            He moved a few meters further, then spun around, letting go of Carolyn’s hand, turning back to look at the creature chasing them.  It kept coming, diving toward them.  J.T. tried to push Carolyn behind him.
            If Drew’s wrong, we’re as good as dead.
            The creature shrieked in pain as it crossed the point where J.T. had felt the wall, but instead of stopping, it crashed into the ground, skidding a little ways beyond it toward J.T., Carolyn, and Drew.
            “Dammit,” Drew cursed.
            “Carolyn, run,” J.T. whispered, not daring to look back.  “Get to the tent and get help, we’ll hold it here.”
            She never had time to move.  The thing was starting to pick itself up on the ground, hissing.  It was bleeding, though, red-black dripping down its face, from one wing, but it disappeared before it ever hit the ground.  It bared its teeth at the two men, growling.
            Then the mist came.  It swirled in, crossing the invisible line with little more than a shudder, then wrapped itself around the creature.  J.T. swore he saw its eyes widen for a brief moment, then the mist closed fully around it.  A howl started to rise, then cut off abruptly.  The mist was sucked backwards, like a backdraft in reverse, and the creature was gone, only the marks in the turf from its landing suggesting that it had even been there.
            “You’re not strong enough to fight this yet,” a voice whispered to J.T.  Constance’s voice again.
            A shudder ran through him.  Carolyn’s fingers slid into his.
            “Is it over?”  She whispered.
            J.T. shook his head a little.  “Maybe, for today, anyway.”  He swallowed hard, looking at her, then at Drew.  “What was it?”
            Drew looked back at him and shook his head slowly.  “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
            Something tells me I was a lot happier when I was just believing in Marin and the others.
            Carolyn’s fingers tightened around his and she gave him a brave smile.  He smiled back.
            “Hey guys,” Leah said from behind them.  “Everything okay?”
            Drew looked at her and started to laugh before he shook his head and headed back into the tents.  Leah frowned, looking at Carolyn and J.T.
            “…what’s with him?”
            Carolyn smiled weakly.  “Everything’s fine, Leah.”  She squeezed J.T.’s hand.  “We missed lunch.  I’m going to go get something, okay?”
            “I’ll come with you,” J.T. said, then nodded to Leah.  “Be careful going for the water.”
            She grinned, nodding.  “Always.”
            He watched her walk away with her bucket.  The sun was shining again, through the clouds.  The mist was gone and all was quiet.  He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.  Carolyn tugged on his hand.
            “Coming,” he murmured, turning back toward the tent.  His fingers tightened around hers, and they headed back to the tent together.

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            Drew had never actually seen one of them before.  He’d sensed them, sometimes heard them, but never seen one—they’d always been beyond his ability to see.  After seeing the creature once, he never wanted to see it again.  The black creature was nearly seven feet tall, cloaked in tattered shadows, but it had been crouched behind them when they’d turned, when they’d started to run, its ink wings half curled around its muscled form, two inch claws scraping against the concrete.  He’d never heard them make a sound like that before.
            The creature had actually left gouges in the pavement.  In a normal world, in the world they’d all known, that shouldn’t have been possible.
            As if the Grays didn’t tip us off to things being messed up something royal.
            Breath burned in his lungs as they ran.  We might be able to outrun it to the ward lines.  If we make it, we’ll be safe.  We just have to make it there.  They’d have to go the long way around, though.
            “Cut left,” he barked.
            “Little Mac’s faster!”  Carolyn shouted back.
            “You want to risk that?”  Drew asked.  “It’s not stable, if it’s even still there..”  He grasped for her arm and spun her to the left, toward the path that dipped between the library and a finger of the ravine that curled around half the Lakes plaza, ending just shy of the library.  Carolyn stumbled a few steps before she caught her balance again, running down into the dip and then up, toward the clocktower plaza beyond.  Drew pitched after her, J.T. bringing up the rear.
            Drew heard the beating of wings off to their right, over the tendril of the ravine on that side.  He looked up, seeing the dark shape not twenty feet above them—a second of the creatures to join the first already chasing them.
            They smell blood in the water.  Shit.  How many of them are going to show up?  A glance to the left answered his question.  At least two more.  Damn!
            “Faster!”
            Then Carolyn went down, catching her foot on a crack in the pavement.  Drew tumbled over her.  J.T. somehow managed to vault them both, stumbling a few steps after landing.  He scrambled back to pull both of them to their feet.
            The predators closed in on their prey.
            There were five of them, Drew realized—five of the ‘black winged things’ as Marin described them.  He’d only been this close once, just once, nine months ago with Thom and Marin, and he’d been certain then that they’d only narrowly escaped that encounter intact.  Marin said that pendant of hers was a small price to pay for our hides…but I’ve got nothing in this situation of equal protective quality.  He could taste his own fear, and the malice and hunger of the shadows beat against him, making his head throb with each heartbeat.  It was hard to breathe, facing that kind of hate.  Somewhere beneath the malice, though, there was joy mixed with their rage—the joy of the hunt, maybe.
            Or revenge.
            Revenge?  Revenge for what?  Drew swallowed, watching the circle close as he got his feet underneath him again.
            A strange, translucent white mist blew up around J.T., swirling briefly and dissipating rapidly.  Drew saw J.T. blink once, then twice, freezing in the process of pulling Carolyn upright.  His eyes widened.
            “Fuck,” he breathed.  “Those are some ugly bastards.”
            “You can see them?”  Drew asked without thinking as he made it to his feet and pressed closer to J.T. and Carolyn.  The five shadow creatures had encircled them and were easing closer, bloody, dark fangs gleaming in the sun.
            “Not until a second ago,” J.T. said, slowly looking around, wrapping one arm protectively against Carolyn and pulling her against his chest.  She didn’t protest, leaning against him and favoring a twisted ankle.  “Got any ideas?”
            I ran out of ideas once I realized there were five of them.  I don’t know what we can do—how can we fight these things?  Can we fight these things?  Drew shook his head slowly.  “No.  No, I think I’m fresh out.”
            “Great,” J.T. said grimly.  “Well, it was great knowing you two.”
            A shrieking rose, like the wind between the trees and buildings, but everything was still except for the three of them, except for the creatures coming at them.
            The lead creature dove toward them.
            Drew closed his eyes and prayed that it would be over quickly.

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