And it burned.

Shane reacted fast. He grabbed a shotgun from her and pushed her toward the car; she dived in, and he got in after, rolled down the window and put the barrel out as he tried to pick out targets through the artificial rain. It was the draug; it had to be. Michael took the third shotgun and mirrored him on the other side of the car. The downpour of sprinklers—mixed with actual rain now— sounded like hail as it hit the roof and hood of the car, and Myrnin cranked up a dial on the boom box. Claire heard it as a thick mist of static.

“Get us out of here,” Myrnin said grimly. “Quickly.”

Michael tried. He put the shotgun in his lap, rolled up the window, and started the car.

It caught, roared, sputtered, and died with a rattle of broken metal.

There was a second of silence, with only the static and rain to fill it, and then Myrnin said, with soft viciousness, “Damn.”

“So? What are we doing?” Shane asked, without taking his eyes off the constant artificial rain pouring down outside the car, running in rivulets, dripping down the paint. It was splashing in on him, and when he wiped the drops off, Claire could see the red welts that were left. “This is not the time to freeze, man. I’ll take any kind of plan.”

Myrnin hesitated, then … grabbed at Claire. He was fumbling at her, and she was so stunned that she started hitting him—with no result, of course—as he patted down her pockets and shirt, quick light touches as he muttered, “Sorry, sorry, beg pardon, sorry …” And then he pulled back with her cell phone in his hand. He squinted at the screen, awkward still with the technology.

There was a shadow forming in the rain outside, dark and ominous. A human-shaped shadow that took on form and substance.

It smiled at them.

“Yeah, happy to see you too,” Shane said, as he aimed. The stunning smash of the shotgun’s roar whited out Claire’s hearing for a moment, and she missed what Myrnin was doing until the keening noise in her ears began to subside again.

“—School,” he was saying, or at least she thought he was. “What? Yes, Shane is target shooting, and we are going to die. I just thought you should know.” He listened for a moment, then said, “That is not comforting, you know.” Then he hung up the call and handed the phone back to her.

Shane, and now Michael, were still focused on the shapes forming outside. More than one this time. Shane had exploded the first one, but they’d responded by making more.

“Why are the sprinklers on?” she asked. “We shut off the water! The cutoff valves!”

“Except one,” Shane pointed out. “That’s right, isn’t it? We left one open.”

“You what?” Myrnin whipped around in the seat to look at him with a wide-eyed stare.

“Partly open,” Shane clarified. “At least, I think—” He looked uncertainly at Claire. She nodded. “Yeah. Partly open.” Why didn’t he remember that clearly? She saw growing panic in his eyes. “There’s no pool in the building, is there?”