Wendy squeezed her eyes shut.

What was happening to her?

Surrounded by torn pages and red ink, she felt trapped. The shadows, the drawings, the murmurings—everything was creeping in.

Wendy dropped the acorn into her bedside drawer. She leapt out of bed and yanked the fitted sheet free. Some of the red had bled through and stained the mattress. She bundled everything up into a heap and ran into the bathroom, where she shoved it to the bottom of her hamper and out of sight, along with her ruined nightshirt.

She couldn’t have her parents seeing what she’d done. Wendy was the only one who did laundry around the house. This was the perfect place to hide it until she could sneak it out into the trash.

As she shoved the bundle of sheets and torn pages under her dirty clothes, Wendy caught a glimpse of her hands. They were smeared with red. Some had even gotten under her fingernails.

At the sink, Wendy turned the hot water faucet on full blast. With shaky hands, she scrubbed furiously at her hands with soap and a facecloth.

That tree. It had been so familiar to her when she had seen it in her drawings. There was something there, some sort of connection she couldn’t place, but after seeing it with her own eyes, she couldn’t deny it anymore. She knew that tree. She had seen that tree in person. Been next to it.

To call what she’d experienced a dream just wasn’t true. It was more than a dream. She could smell the earth and feel the cold of the snow. The forest looked just as it had that winter when Wendy and her brothers had gone missing in the woods. It wasn’t a dream; it was a memory.

A shudder ripped through her from head to toe, her hands jolting so hard that she dropped the bar of soap. She scrambled to grab it out of the sink and began working on the red slashes of marker up and down her legs.

A memory. She’d spent years with a gaping hole in her mind where those six months had been ripped out. Wendy had been dropped into a flashback, however brief.

And the boy in her dream—there was no doubt in Wendy’s mind it was the same person who had approached her in her driveway right before Alex went missing.

It was Peter, but it also wasn’t Peter.

It had his face, but a horrible, nightmarish version.

Was that Peter’s shadow? Wendy had assumed that his shadow was just that—a black, amorphous thing. Could it take a solid human form? Did Peter know?

She needed to find him and tell him. If Peter’s shadow could walk and talk, and knew where she lived—