My heart thunders. I look around, the adrenaline burning through me, but there’s nothing to fight. No one to save.

Oh, Anders. . . . You are going to be so, so sorry.

I can’t save my band. I can’t save Frankie. I can’t even save my fucking cat.

“Goblin!” I shout again.

The sound of my voice disappears into the wind. But there’s something else out here, I can feel it. Something wrong. Something nearby.

I hear a snap.

My heart almost shoots out of my chest.

I spin around but there’s no one there. The trees just whisper, shifting in place like an audience that hears your music but doesn’t care. My brain is playing tricks. I’m an idiot. I’m pathetic. Paranoid.

And then—

“I have your cat.”

The voice comes from right beside me.

I think I jump straight into the air.

I don’t know how she got there without my hearing or seeing her, but there she is.

Stalker girl.

She’s wearing her usual baggy, dark clothes. She’s dry this time, so her long, white-blond hair floats around her in frizzy ringlets. It looks like curled fiberglass.

It’s so weird, so much like I summoned her with my thoughts, that I almost blurt out a laugh. Why is she here? Why isn’t she at school? How does she know exactly where to find me?

I’m flipping through one question after another. And then I notice that she’s holding a big gray cat in her arms.

Goblin.

He’s alive.

I make some other noise, something that’s not any kind of laugh at all, and throw out my arms.

The girl passes him to me.

Goblin grabs hold of my shirt. He puts one paw on either side of my neck and sniffs at my mouth, like he’s checking me for ID.

“Goblin,” I whisper. I’m fighting not to cry. “Hey. It’s you.”

Mrrrk? says Goblin.

He feels bonier than usual, but he’s whole. Not mauled by wild dogs. Not bleeding from an open gash. I’m so stupidly, overwhelmingly grateful that I’m on the edge of sobbing, right here, in front of this delusional girl in her giant flannel shirt.

“Where was he?” I ask, still checking Goblin over, using the excuse to keep my face down.

“He was stuck in an old caved-in basement in the woods,” says the girl. “He must have fallen in during that storm.”

Her voice is soft and polite. It has a faint accent. Then I realize that she’s just speaking so precisely that it sounds like she has an accent. She sounded the same the other night, I guess, but I was too startled and angry at the time to really notice. And it was too dark to get a good look at her. She looks a little foreign, too, or a little old-fashioned, with that long pale hair and soft face and no makeup.

Maybe I should be angry that she’s here, in my yard, almost scaring me out of my mind again. But she’s the opposite of threatening.