Things had gotten considerably more urgent.

Come nightfall, I knew, I was going to have to find a way to take her on.

Chapter Thirty

I huddled in my grave as the sun rose. I would have thought I’d be more nervous about a personally lethal, fiery cataclysm sweeping over the world, but I wasn’t. When dawn came, it was like listening to a big truck roll by outside—dangerous if you were in front of it, but nothing but background noise if you weren’t. My grave was peaceful.

I tried to track that feeling, to identify that sense of contentment I enjoyed down in the ground. It took me a few moments, but then I understood: It was like being in my basement apartment during a winter storm. Outside, the wind howled and the snow and sleet fell, but I was home with Mouse and Mister piled onto the couch for warmth, sipping a cup of hot chicken soup in front of a big fire in the fireplace, and reading a good book.

It was the same thing, resting in my grave. Peace. I wasn’t going anywhere and it made me happy. If only I’d brought a book, my day would have been perfect.

Instead, I just leaned back against the earthen wall of the grave and closed my eyes, soaking in the quiet. I would be trapped here until sundown. There was no sense in chewing my own guts out worrying about what would happen that evening.

I drifted through my memories, sad and joyous and just plain ridiculous.

I thought about Elaine and me in high school. We had lived like superheroes: two young people with incredible powers who must hide themselves from those around them, lest they be isolated and persecuted for their different-ness.

I hadn’t really been interested in girls yet when I met Elaine. We’d both been twelve, bright, and stubborn, which meant that we generally drove each other crazy. We had also been best friends. Talking about our dreams of the future. Sharing tears or a shoulder, whichever was needed. At school, we both found the subject matter to be tedious beyond bearing—in comparison to the complexity of Justin’s lessons, acquitting ourselves well in the public-school curriculum had been only nominally more difficult than sharpening a pencil.

It was difficult to relate to the other kids, in many ways. We just weren’t interested in the same things. Our magic talents increasingly made television a difficulty, and video games had been downright impossible. Elaine and I wound up playing a lot of card and board games, or spending long, quiet hours in the same room, reading.

Justin had manipulated us both masterfully. He wanted us to bond. He wanted us to feel isolated from everyone else and loyal to him. Though he put up a facade about it that fooled me at the time, he wanted us to work through our nascent sexuality with each other and save him the bother of explaining anything—or the risk of either Elaine or me forming attachments with someone outside our little circle.