“Whooooo oh whoooooo is Sunny Nwazuuuue?” she heard an ancient male voice suddenly sing. Scraaaaape. “Whooooo oh whooooo is Sunny Nwazuuuue?” the voice said again. Then another scraaaaape.

It had seen her. It had known she was there all along. The bronze toad was just a bronze toad. A decoration. An ornament in a room that was more a giant trash container than anything else. Sunny knew this. She’d just needed something to grasp because they’d given her nothing. They’d thrown her down here, and they hadn’t even given her a gun, a protective stone, a hard stick, nothing. She had her juju knife, but she didn’t know any protective charms against djinni or ghosts.

She glanced up at the ceiling. The giant red spider was still there and even from where she was, she felt more positive than ever that it was watching her. But the other smaller ones had dissipated. Maybe they were all over the basement now . . . including on the floor. She looked down and wasn’t surprised to see one scurrying across the sandy marble.

Suddenly, the entire room reeked so strongly of sulfur that it hurt to breathe. Sunny jumped up and took off toward the stairway that led out of the library basement, coughing. She hadn’t moved much in hours and her muscles were stiff, but she ran up the stairway like a champion. Her sandals slapped the concrete. She didn’t dare glance back. Thus, she couldn’t have been more shocked when she found herself stumbling right back into the Obi Library basement. Her sense of direction and gravity reeled for several moments as she came to understand what had happened.

“What?!” she screeched.

“Whooo oh whooo is Sunny Nwazuuuue?” The voice vibrated, coming from every direction and within Sunny’s head. She pressed her hands over her ears as she frantically looked for a place to hide. There! A small space between two fallen bookcases. Maybe she could hole up in that space for two days, a day and a half, whatever amount of time she had left here. About to run for it, she shivered and looked to her left. This time she did scream. Because she’d been about to run, her leg muscles were like a tightly wound spring. She tried to change directions by a few degrees and her legs tangled. As she went down, she didn’t take her eyes off the pile of bones. The skull had its jaw broken. There was a foot at the top. A hand tumbled down and landed facing upward like a dead white spider.

Phoom! The dried old bones suddenly burst into quiet smokeless flames.

Sunny hit the ground, and her hip was an explosion of pain. Still, she managed to roll to her side and pull her juju knife from her pocket. She did a quick flourish and caught the cool invisible pouch in her hand as she lay on her side. Then she drew a square in the air while muttering into the pouch the words Chichi had taught her. The only difference was that she spoke them in her native tongue of English instead of Chichi’s native tongue of Efik. “Bring a thick barrier. Hold strong, too. From the very air I breathe. It must hold true!”