“We’re not there yet. I don’t use it like him, but I can feel the ley line, too. I use it if I scry or read cards.” Glancing behind him, Adam led Declan out of Harvard Yard to Oxford Street. There, he slowed his pace, but Declan could not yet see anything unusual. It was all quaint and scenic: red brick, white trim, black trees, blue skies. “I couldn’t really do any of that after coming here. Like I said, the city was dead. Those tarot readings you saw were just for show. I was just reading people. Parlor tricks. Fake magic. But lately I’ve been feeling these … I don’t know. Pulses. Like power surges. Or heartbeats.”

Declan wasn’t sure he liked the sound of the last bit. Power surges sounded clinical and manageable. Heartbeats sounded living, and living things were unpredictable and hard to control.

“And then something really happened last night,” Adam said. “Look here.”

They faced a more modern building labeled SCIENCE CENTER. Casting a furtive glance up and down the street, Adam crouched beside a concrete bench built into the wall. Reaching beneath it, he scraped out a large handful of debris.

Then he showed it to Declan.

To Declan’s surprise, it was not leaf litter, but beetles. Some were small, ordinary-looking insects, black and unremarkable. Others were huge and spotted, with the portentous grace of elephants. Some had massive forked antlers. Others were brilliantly blue, with galaxies of stars glittering through the color.

Declan did not have to be told they were not native to Cambridge.

“These are the Rockefeller beetles. Some of them. Do you know what those are? There’s one hundred thousand of them on display in the Museum of Natural History just over there.” Adam plucked one from his handful and showed it to Declan. The bullet-shaped beetle was ferociously green. It also had a perfect little hole straight through it when he held it up to the sun. “That’s where the pin would go, to hold it to the mount.”

“Dreams,” Declan said.

Adam nodded grimly.

“Whatever happened, this pulse, it was strong enough to wake up these dreams. Long enough for them to find a way out of their cases in the museum to get over here. Not long enough to keep them awake.”

“How did you find out about this?”

Adam carefully swept the beetles back under the bench. “I was doing readings and I got lost in one of the cards when it surged. After I got myself back, I came out looking for where it was coming from, just in time to see them crawling across the road here.”

Lost himself. Got himself back. There were entire emotional tomes in between those words.