My wife was sitting up in bed, breathing fast, scanning the room nervously. Sweat was running down her neck. “Nightmare…I think.” She found her glasses, put them on, then stopped, puzzled. She placed one hand against the black lines on her neck, then snatched it back as if she’d burned herself. She looked at me, eyes wide with surprise. “Something’s wrong. Something’s here. I can feel it.”

“What?”

“It’s like an alarm is going off on my skin.” She sprang out of bed, whipped off her nightgown and began pulling armor out from under the bed.

“Crap.” None of us understood how any of this metaphysical stuff worked, but we knew some of the Guardian’s abilities had been passed on to her. If those evil lines were saying something was wrong, she didn’t have to tell me twice. “Crap, crap, crap.” I rolled out of bed and started getting dressed. I always left my clothes where I could find them fast even in the dark. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell.” No matter where we were, or what we were doing, Julie always kept a loaded rifle under the bed. This one was her Inside Gun, a heavily customized Springfield SOCOM with a short sixteen-inch barrel and a red dot sight. It was a stubby version of her regular rifles. She had it out and leaning against the nightstand before she’d even started putting her socks on. “I just feel like something really bad is here.”

“And people keep calling me the psychic,” I said as I tied my boots. “Should we wake everyone up?”

“Give it a second,” Julie said. “My neck’s stopped tingling. Maybe it’s nothing.”

I kept gearing up, all the while hoping it was a false alarm. If Julie was wrong, maybe it had only been a bad dream caused by the celebratory bratwurst. Nothing would happen, we’d eventually go back to sleep, and laugh about it in the morning. Well, probably not laugh, since being marked by magic related to the foul Old Ones was never a laughing matter, but at least we would go back to sleep. Then I realized how freaking cold it was.

“Feel that?” Julie asked, and I could see her breath come out as steam.

“Yeah…” I read the numbers on the thermostat. The digital display said it was sixty-eight. Then it blinked and showed the time as 4:15, then it blinked again. Twenty-four degrees. “Holy moly.” There were a few times in my life when I’d experienced this kind of rapid, unnatural temperature drop. None of them had ever been indicators of upcoming good times. “We’ve got incoming.”