“It won’t be as vivid when I’m myself again, remembering how it was,” she murmured, exhaustion tugging at her. “Except . . . Jesus. A first for me. Not sure about Diana because she’s gone there for years. Most of her life. So maybe not so . . . so horrible to her.”

“Try to sleep,” he urged again, feeling her shivering fade, her body warming, beginning to relax. To go limp, really, boneless, the way she did when she was tired like this.

She hadn’t been there many times, but whenever she came back she was always cold and utterly exhausted, with haunting smudges of weariness and stress that were bruised shadows under her bright eyes, unable to share some of his excess energy as she otherwise could in order to replenish her own, even through physical contact.

And always she was almost imperceptibly thinner.

She had told him that was his imagination. That she could hardly get physically thinner because her spirit had wandered into a strange place for a little while.

Still.

“Victims,” she murmured. “Past or present . . . dunno. Couldn’t tell. But victims. Murdered . . . all of them. Horribly murdered. Tortured. Walking . . . stumbling . . . toward us. Knives still in them . . . One of them . . . more of them . . . making awful sounds. And the . . . the thing is . . . the thing that was so . . . so horrible . . . they weren’t gray . . .”

He thought sleep had finally caught her, ending the story for now, but then she breathed something against his throat, a final word, hardly a sound, but he caught it.

“Salem.”

And then she was asleep.

—

Salem

IT WAS DAWN when the crows began to gather.

Despite their size, they moved with eerie quiet, alighting with hushed wings on the winter-bare branches of the big tree their leader had chosen.

One. Three. A dozen. Two dozen. More.

Several flapped their wings with that strange hushed quiet, but most waited, still and silent. They gazed off toward the small town nestled in the other end of the valley, still shadowed from the morning’s light by the mountains rearing, dark and massive, above the quiet buildings and streets.

Gradually, a restlessness rippled through the birds as they waited. Heads turned, bright black eyes scanning the area nearby before fixing once again on the distant town. Wings lifted and beat the air.

One crow spoke softly, not the sharp, hoarse caw that humans heard, but a sound that played up and down the range of notes, peculiarly intelligent. The others took up the sound one at a time and passed it along, each bird adding a note, a query, an exclamation.

The sun was still well below the peaks of the eastern mountains when their leader joined the other crows. She was larger than the rest, her black eyes brighter, her wide wings soundless as she took the space waiting for her on a broad lower branch of the tree.