In short, it was a gamble either way.

“Do it now and buy us time,” Rastin urged. “Buy me time. There is something I will need for the cleansing. It will take some doing to get. And you said yourself you might not be as you are for much longer. The next mask. Are you willing to wager you will be as cooperative as you are with this one?”

“I . . .” I said, because his argument was sound. And yet pure lunacy. “I make no promise.”

“I don’t need one,” Rastin said as he took two retreating steps from me, his form fading out even as he did so. “If you truly care for her, then I know you will do it.”

With that, he flickered away. Leaving me, for the time being, on my own.

If not alone.

TWENTY-NINE

Stephanie

I opened my eyes to the whispery shuffling of paper.

A cursory glance to my digital clock told me I’d slept beyond the dream with Erik and through most of the night. Apparently, though, Charlie hadn’t.

She sat on the floor with her back to me, her tin of crayons open beside her.

In the glow of the nightlight that I’d moved from her room to mine, she colored furiously something I couldn’t see.

“Mmph.” I pinched my eyes shut for an instant, as if I could squeeze an hour more of sleep into the span of a second. Then, slowly, I leaned forward to peer over Charlie’s shoulder and froze at the monstrous scarlet image marring the sheet of white copier paper.

“Charlie. What is that?”

She paused in her scribbling to glance back at me, then lifted her finger to point at my closet door. Which stood open. Wide open.

It had been closed when we’d gone to bed. I’d made sure.

“You . . . you saw that?” I asked her. “That thing came out of the closet?”

“No,” said Charlie. “He said he can’t come to our side yet.”

Our side? Yet?

I froze, my insides icing over. “Is that Zedok?”

“He said he was,” replied Charlie with a shrug. And her nonchalance was the most disconcerting part of all of this.

I tilted my head at her, my bleary mind trying to distill her words into something that made sense. Like Erik’s though, none of them did.

“I thought you said you’d seen him before,” I pressed.

“I did,” replied Charlie. “But he didn’t have a skeleton face then.”

Tossing the covers off, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and hurried to shut the closet. Then, leaning my back against the door, I frowned down at the drawing.

“How long did you talk to him?” I asked Charlie. “What else did he say?”

“He watched you sleep for a long time,” she said, peering up at me, her eyes shadowed beneath by small dark circles. “I asked him if he was Zedok, and he said yes. Then I told him he didn’t look like Zedok.”