The cop gave them breathalyzer tests and called their parents to pick them up. He said it was the worst excuse for speeding he’d ever heard. A werewolf? Seriously? It was almost Halloween. It had to be a joke. Someone wearing a mask.

Eric knew it wasn’t. His third eye ached in the center of his forehead, telling him something was wrong, out in the night.

And, as if on cue, the first victims showed up in the emergency room.

They were slashed and bitten and developing weird, rabies-like symptoms. Eric heard about them at school. Kids in his class who’d been out on Shadow Bluffs. One rumor said that Brad Cohen and Ashley Burke had been dragged out of Brad’s Mustang, that the thing had pulled the door clean off its hinges.

Late that night, when his mom was watching Leno, Eric went to his room. He should have been studying for midterms. Instead, he dressed in a black sweatshirt and his darkest jeans. He found the quiet place inside himself, drew a glyph in the air, and reached for his door. When he turned the knob, a portal opened onto a dim corridor in the hospital. He’d spent a lot of time there during the vampire summer of ’96. (That finally ended when he staked the head vampire — a hematologist, believe it or not.) He crept down the hallway and into the rooms of the monster’s victims.

They sweated and snarled in their sleep. They burned with fever, and their charts said they would eat nothing but rare, red meat.

They were infected. They would spread the disease when they rose up, the next full moon. This was the darkness crawling out into the light, bringing a little more of the Other Side into this world.

Unless he stopped it at the source.

So he gestured and opened another door, and walked out onto Shadow Bluffs.

He found the beast almost immediately. It wasn’t hiding. It was hunting.

There was a crunching noise behind him in the dark. Footsteps in the dead leaves. Eric felt cold. Fear suddenly coated him like ice.

He’d felt this before. The things he fought carried it, an almost tangible cloud that floated around them, covering everything with horror and dread. Eric had seen it turn people into gibbering, sobbing, hysterical wrecks. It was like being trapped in a nightmare. It could paralyze you if you weren’t careful.

Eric shook it off, and forced himself to turn and look.

The Middleton Monster appeared at the edge of the tree line, about a hundred yards away from him. It took slow steps at first — quiet and careful, making sure that this was no trap.

Then it went for him.

Eric forced himself to stay right where he was. All he had to do was stop 220 pounds of werewolf from turning him into dinner. He needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat.