“I can’t, okay?” he shouts back. His hair is plastered to his forehead and he shoves it off like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Those scorpions—I can’t—” He shakes his head and his voice drops. “It’s like someone reached into my head and pulled out all my fears and let them loose in the world.”

I laugh, a little wildly, because I know just what he means. But our fears are exactly the problem. If we can’t pull it together—if he can’t pull it together—we’re dead.

My hands are still on his shoulders. I shake him. His gaze drops, and he looks at my left hand like he has no idea how it got there. “You’ve got to try—” I start, but he cuts me off.

“Marty,” he says. The word sounds strange, like a foreign language, like it means more than itself. I realize it’s the first time he’s called me anything other than Callahan.

He’s still looking at my hand. I follow his gaze.

On the back of my left hand—the hand I used to wrench the scorpion off him—my knuckles are crisscrossed with jagged black streaks like veins of lightning. Slowly, I take my hand off his shoulder. I turn it over. In the middle of my palm is a perfect, dime-sized circle of dead white flesh. Angry red skin encircles it, making an ugly bull’s-eye, and black veins creep from its edge toward my wrist and fingers and over the back of my hand.

The strange coldness, the eerie feeling of something still writhing in my palm. It wasn’t a memory.

It was venom.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I RAISE MY EYES AND STARE AT ELLIOTT. THE YELLOW glow of the flashlight turns his face to a skull, all sharp shadows. “Marty,” he says again, and then the pain hits me.

It’s an inferno. The whole world is a burning building and I’m trapped inside. The agony intensifies, going from an unbearable burning to an ice-cold acid. My body bows in on itself and I drop to my knees. The flashlight clatters to the ground. I curl around my injured hand, my breathing jagged like I’m going to scream.

I do.

Elliott is on his knees in front of me. He grabs me by my good arm. He shakes me, and the scream cuts off, but the silence is almost as bad. The night seems to twist around me.

He searches his pockets frantically, pulls everything out. Aspirin, bandages, gauze. None of which will help a Being sting. He searches through my pockets next. There’s nothing except my key and that stupid stuffed fox, which only reminds me of that first Being back in the garage, the one with the foxlike muzzle. The one that felt like my fears brought to life.