He turned to Alana, who’d been silent this whole time. “And you’re, what, a refugee from Narnia?”

Carrie rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Danny.”

But Alana answered him patiently, as if she were talking to a toddler.

“I fight monsters,” she said simply. “There are things out there. Predators. They’ve been sniffing around our world forever. It’s my job to kill them. To keep them where they belong. In the dark.”

“Look,” Danny said, “I don’t want to insult you, but you know how that sounds, right? I mean — ”

Alana reached across the table and took his hand, forcing him to look her in the eyes.

“I am Alana of the Bright,” she said. “I carry the sword. I carry the burden. I keep the watch against the dark. It is all real. All of it.”

Danny swallowed. He couldn’t think of a smartass reply, as if the HEP was glitching. He saw something in her stare, something deeper and older than he’d ever expected to find in the eyes of a teenage girl.

“We don’t have time for your disbelief, Danny,” she said. “I can take you outside and show you how I can bench-press a car, or I can beat the holy living crap out of you without breathing hard, or I can crush every bone in your hand by gripping a little bit harder.”

He tried, experimentally, to pull his hand back. She didn’t let him.

“Or you can take my word for it,” she said. “Right now.”

Until that moment, Danny had never thought much about Alana. She was the slightly weird girl who wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans and carried that stupid duffel bag around with her wherever she went. He saw her, but he never really saw her.

Now he saw her.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Alana released her grip on his hand.

“Danny,” Carrie said quietly. “You know they’re not lying. You know that Middleton isn’t like anyplace else. You’ve seen things. You’ve told me. What about the Black Triangle? What about the Organization Men? What about — ”

Of course Carrie remembered those times. She remembered everything. He hated to think about them. They all left him with too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions.

“There were perfectly rational explanations — ”

“Mad scientists have tried to kill you, Danny. That’s not normal. All of us — everything we’ve done, everything we can do — you know we’re different, and there’s got to be a reason for it. This is the reason. This is why we’re here.”

Danny didn’t argue. Not with Carrie. “So what does it mean? What’s supposed to happen?”

“Charles Colchester,” Eric said. “He’s going to feed us all to his god.”

“Colchester? Come on. His family built this town. And he’s about a hundred years old.”