I’d blinked, trying to dispel the illusion, and finally was able to see lights again, but the illusory blackout had seemed so real that I was afraid it was a premonition of things to come.

I pulled the Viper into the garage and parked in its allotted space, too tired to even halfheartedly appreciate the GT parked next to it. When the floor trembled beneath my heel, I stomped my foot and told it to shut up.

I opened the door to step out into the alley, flinched, slammed the door shut again, and stood there on the cusp of hyperventilating.

The garage where Barrons houses his fabulous car collection is located directly behind the bookstore, across an alley approximately twenty-five feet wide. Multiple floodlights on the exteriors illuminate a path between the two, affording safe passage from the Shades on even the darkest night. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet devised a means of perpetual light. Bulbs burn out, batteries die.

Several of the lights on the façade of the garage had outlived their usefulness during the night: not enough that I’d noticed in the glare of the Viper’s headlights and the soft spill coming from the bookstore’s rear windows, but enough to have created a sliver of opportunity for a truly enterprising Shade, and unfortunately, I had one of those shadowing my doorstep.

I was tired, and I’d been sloppy. I should have looked up and checked the spotlights on the buildings the moment they’d come into view. Thanks to the burnt-out bulbs, a thin line of darkness now ran down the center of the alley, where the light cast by the adjacent buildings failed to meet, and the massive Shade that was as obsessed with me as I was with it had managed to pour itself into the crack, creating an inky black wall that soared three stories high and extended the entire length of the bookstore, barring me from crossing the alley.

I’d opened the door to find it towering over me, a greedy, dark tsunami, waiting to come crashing down and drown me in its lethal embrace. Although I was 99.9% sure it couldn’t do that—that it was trapped in its menacing wall-shape by the light on both sides of it—there was that petrifying .1% doubt in my mind. Each time I’d thought I’d known its limits, I’d been wrong. Most Shades recoiled from the mere possibility of the palest, most diffuse light. Just waving one of my flashlights in the direction of the Dark Zone usually caused them to scatter.

But not this one. If light was pain, this enormous, aggressive Shade was getting tougher, its pain threshold increasing. Like me, it was evolving. I only wished I was as dangerous.

I reached inside my jacket, fisted a flashlight in each hand, and yanked the door open again.