I will watch. I will watch, because evil will use any weakness. The moment I stop, that’s when they’ll slip in.

Anders

Door number four swings open before I can knock a third time.

“Anders.” Flynn looks out of the lesson room at me. He looks the same as always. Tan, T-shirted, ageless. His face is just a little more surprised than usual. “I didn’t expect you today.”

“It’s . . .” I look at the clock hanging out in the waiting room. “It’s Wednesday. Three o’clock.”

“Yeah, I know it’s Wednesday.” Flynn gives me a tiny smile. “I just thought, with everything—you know—you might not show. Should have known better.” He steps back, letting me through. “Come on in.” The door clangs shut with me on the inside.

I set Yvonne’s case down. But I don’t sit. I can’t.

I need to ask him about that woman, the one in the black Audi, but I can’t get there yet. Instead, I hear myself blurt, “Last Things broke up.”

Flynn looks less surprised about this than about me showing up for my lesson. “Ah,” he says. “Whose idea?”

“Not mine.” I pace across the room, toward a wall of concert posters. “And maybe it’s just a hiatus.” Panic twists in my stomach. “But that might not even matter. Not if I can’t play anymore anyway.”

“What do you mean, if you can’t play anymore?”

“Like, my hands won’t work. They won’t do what I want them to.” I clench and open my fists. “Everything’s screwed up. Everything.”

“Well,” says Flynn, calmly, slowly, “maybe you’re just a little too tense. No offense, but you seem pretty stressed out.”

This is exactly what I needed to hear. A nice, normal, fixable explanation.

“Yeah. I have been. I am.” The words give me my next opening. I pace back across the room. “You’ve heard about that girl, Frankie Lynde, right?”

“Yeah. Crazy stuff.” Flynn sits in his chair and leans back, crossing his legs in their worn blue jeans. “Every kid I teach is pretty freaked out about it.”

“Well, she and I were kind of—hanging out.” The words clunk out of me. “Like, not together, really, but . . .” I trail off.

“Right,” says Flynn slowly. “Yeah. You told me about that.”

Of course I did. I tell Flynn almost everything. Months ago, at my lesson, when I opened Yvonne’s case and a note with pink hearts on it fell out—a note from some girl I’d never even talked to—and Flynn started laughing, giving me crap about all the girls throwing themselves at me, I admitted something about Frankie. I remember blushing and smiling and trying not to look like a total dork, and feeling my heart thumping harder the whole time. Now my heart feels like a dead grenade.

“Anyway.” I swallow. “On Saturday night she was at the Crow’s Nest, and we ended up having this huge fight, and everybody overheard.” I have to stop and swallow again. “And that’s the last time anybody saw her. So, of course, people think I have something to do with—with her—disappearing.”