Suddenly Jessica felt lost, filled with the certainty that she was failing out of school, was leaving her old friends forever, going to a place where reality was warped and strange. The panic of finding a new classroom after the tardy bell had rung paralyzed her, cold as the stares of a thousand unfriendly strangers.

Everyone in Bixby hated her, she suddenly knew.

Open your hand, Jess, a distant voice implored.

She obeyed unthinkingly, hoping to please the voice in her head, her fingers releasing the flare. Her only weapon fell from her grasp.

Then, like a phone line going dead, the cold disappeared, all her terrors vanishing in the space of a heartbeat. And again the screaming sound filled the air, slow and piercing and mournful, like the Bixby firehouse’s noon siren.

Jessica looked down; the flare’s burning end had cut the tendril as it had fallen, releasing her from the creature’s spell.

“Thanks, Melissa,” she whispered, kneeling to retrieve the flare. She held it in front of herself, charging toward the thing wrapped around the mouth of the cave.

Tendrils began to writhe as she approached, slithering from the arms and legs of the small, pale figure in the cave’s entrance, abandoning their grasp of the stone spire. A smaller set of extremities whirled around the thing’s matted center like the blades of a helicopter, hissing with the sound of escaping steam. It rose slowly into the air.

Jessica hurled the flare directly at the creature and in the same motion reached into her pocket for another. As she worked to light it, the darkling thing burst into flame above her, the smell of dead rat and rotten eggs filling the air. It unleashed its mournful howl again, still rising, then flying across the sky. The flame seemed to be riding the creature, somehow unable to consume it. And then the burning mass passed over the horizon of trees.

Jessica held the new flare out, lighting the mouth of the cave. The small figure had fallen to the ground and lay huddled and sobbing. Another pale face appeared out of the darkness.

“Beth?” she said, squinting through the smoke of the flare.

“It’s me—Cassie.” The girl took another step into the light, then knelt next to the fallen figure, turning her face up.

It was Beth, so pale she was almost unrecognizable.

Jessica dropped the flare and fell to her knees. “Beth!”

For a moment the only answer was a wild fluttering of eyelids. Then Beth sucked in a sudden, sharp breath, and her eyes opened.

“Jess?” she answered.

“I’m here. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Sure. What a nightmare. Was I screaming or just…?” Beth’s eyes opened wider as she took in Cassie, the burning flare, the red-tinged blue time all around them. “What the hell, Jess?”

“What are you doing out here?” Jessica cried.

Cassie’s expression was dazed, but she answered calmly. “We snuck out tonight. We figured something was going on out here at midnight.”