Chapters (48)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Books by Erin Jade Lange
- Back Ad
- About the Publisher
I shook my head. No Poe, no Dexter, and no twins.
I started to look around for Lina too, but a tall boy, vaguely familiar from the halls at school, stepped into my view. He held a red cup, and, judging by the way he was weaving back and forth, I suspected it had more than soda inside.
“I get it!” he said, waving his free hand toward my bandolier of stakes. “You’re like . . . a fairy princess meets Chewbacca!”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
We stepped around him and didn’t look back as he called out, “But wait, was Chewie immortal?”
“Reg,” I commanded. “Look for Lina. She’s supposed to be running the coffee cart. We’ll need her help.”
Sal sniffed and shifted the backpack full of stakes on his shoulders, but he made no comment on Lina.
“I’ll walk the perimeter,” he said, sounding more soldier than senior citizen, for once.
When they were both gone, I searched the faces around me. I spotted a Peter Pan, a few leprechauns, and a ton of vampires—just not the real variety. The sun was setting, but it was possible we still had time to disperse the crowd, let them at least get a running start. We just needed to create an exit path.
Most of the floats were parked on the side streets, but a dozen or so had been arranged to create a kind of wall around the street party. I knew from my time on the planning committee that this was intentional: use the floats and trucks to keep cars off the road, so it’s safe for pedestrians. Unfortunately, all it had done was create a neat little pen for all the human prey. Getting out would be slow and cumbersome, with people scrabbling over the tops of floats and bottlenecking at the skinny pathways in between. I had chased enough humans to know when their escape routes did not look good.
My searching gaze landed on the pickup full of pugs. During the parade, they had been yapping and panting and scrambling to get a view over the side of the truck walls. But the lot of them must have been dozing now, because just one lone pug with a fat, wrinkled face and gray whiskers poked his head over the truck rim, drool sliding from his long tongue onto the Northern Iowa Pug Rescue sign.
Sorry, pug. I’m in the people-rescuing business tonight.
Actually, I wondered if I could do both. What were the odds the pug truck driver left the keys in the ignition? Or any of these other floats and trucks? We only needed to move one or two to make an exit big enough for a crowd to fit through. I was about to jump behind the wheel of the nearest float, when the last rays of sunlight blinked out.