The dark clouds creeping over the city exploded, thunderheads crashing, raindrops biting with October’s chill teeth, flash-flooding the pavement, gushing down the gutters, overflowing the grates, and sweeping all my customers away.

I cataloged books until my vision blurred. I made myself a cup of tea, turned on the gas logs, cozied up to the fire, and paged through a book on Irish fairy tales, hunting for truth in the myth, while picking at a lunch that was the UK equivalent of Ramen noodles. I haven’t had much of an appetite since I ate Unseelie. Not for food, anyway.

Last night Barrons and I hadn’t said a word to each other all the way back to the bookstore. He’d dropped me at the front and watched me walk in. Then, he’d given me a smile that was all teeth and nastiness, and driven straight into the Dark Zone, managing to say “Fuck you, Ms. Lane,” without even bothering to open his mouth. He knows how much his refusal to tell me why the Shades don’t eat him irks me.

I want to be so fearless. I want to be so bad and tough that all the monsters leave me alone.

I tugged Alina’s journal entry from my pocket and read it again, more slowly this time.

Her worst fear had come true, and here I was, left alone with a lifetime of things unsaid and undone. I’d never gotten that hug. I knew I needed to push past the emotional punch and focus on the Haven’s prophecy, the five, and the new questions her journal entry raised, but I was detoured by memories. There’d been so many nights that I’d sprawled on my bed, talking to Alina on the phone. Mom was always making good stuff, filling the house with the mouth-watering aroma of yeast, caramel cream sauces, and spices. Dad was always yelling at the Braves with old man Marley during baseball season. I would have prattled aimlessly about boys and school and my idiotic complaints about whatever I used to complain about, believing the whole time she and I were immortal.

What a shock when life ends at twenty-four. Nobody’s ready for it. I missed my rainbow quilt. I missed my mom. God, I missed—

I stood, crammed the page back in my pocket, and pruned my dark thoughts in the seedling stage before they could sprout. Depression gets you nowhere but tangled in an overgrown garden that can choke the life out of you.

I moved to the window and stared out at the rain. Gray street. Gray day. Gray rain, splashing grayly on gray pavement. What was that Jars of Clay song on my iPod? “My world is a flood. Slowly I become one with the mud.”

As I stared, unblinking into the grayness, a brilliant shaft of sunlight splintered the rain, directly in front of me.