He ran his tongue over the top row of perfectly even human teeth, pausing on the incisor. “I’m getting used to these.”

“Good thing,” Sal said. “Because after this move, you’ll be stuck with them.”

My heart stuttered, and I forced myself to breathe through it.

I knew what I was giving up—and giving up for a mission that would likely fail—but if I let myself stop to think about it, I might lose my nerve. And then Nowhere would lose everyone.

Rip.

Yank.

Hack.

Shave.

Clunk.

We worked in silence for the better part of an hour, and soon the sun was sinking toward the hills behind the cottage. The barbecue would be winding down by now, the band taking the stage. Full dark was less than an hour away.

When the fence was nothing but splinters and the gate had fallen, flat and harmless, to the lawn, I zipped up the last duffel bag and hauled it over my shoulder, sagging a little under its weight.

Sal saw me struggling and told me to wait. A moment later, he returned with a long, wide loop of leather in roughly the shape of a beauty queen’s sash. Except, where “Miss Congeniality” should be, there were smaller loops of leather just right for holding stakes. Sal draped it over me, dropped a few stakes in the holders, and relieved me of the duffel.

“Suits you,” he said, mustache twitching. It was the first hint of a smile I’d seen on his face since I’d explained to him, at a rapid-fire pace, what was about to go down in Nowhere and the part Reg and I had played. “Come on, let’s load up the truck.”

“Streets are blocked,” I said. “We have to go on foot.”

Sal squinted at the western sky, now blazing with sunset orange and red. “We’ll take it as far as we can, then walk the rest.”

But it was more like running than walking, as Sal’s truck only got to the line where cornfields met tree-canopied streets before the glut of parked cars made travel on wheels impossible. We emptied the flatbed of all the stakes we could carry, and then the three of us—sister, brother, slayer—charged into town, racing against the coming dark.

The streets outside of Hope High were thick with people when we arrived. Ghosts, zombies, and other supposedly immortal beings licked the barbecue from their fingers and grooved to the music blasting out of speakers set up along the curb in front of the school gymnasium. We squeezed down the narrow gap between two floats to join the action and took quick stock of the scene.

The sun was below the treetops now, and shadows grew long on the street. There was more light pouring from the open gym doors than the sky.

“Do you see Poe?” Reg stood on his toes, scanning the crowd.