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Quote

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Prologue

That Was Then

MIDDLETON. THEN.

Danny was the last to arrive, as usual. He pulled up to Eric’s house in the new Beemer he bought to replace the ElectriCar.

Eric went out to greet him in the driveway. He hadn’t been sure Danny would make it. Not because he thought Danny was scared — Danny didn’t get scared, not that Eric had ever seen. But he was the one still insisting there must be some kind of rational explanation, hanging onto his skepticism like it was a cross that might keep a vampire at bay.

(That didn’t always work, though. Eric knew from experience.)

So maybe Danny did get scared, after all.

Now he was here, unloading stuff from the Beemer’s trunk as if there’d never been any doubt he’d show. Eric helped him carry the duffel bag inside. Eric’s mom was spending the holidays with her new boyfriend at a crystal healing retreat in Sedona (she’d told Eric it was her Christmas gift to herself).

The girls were in the living room. Alana was wrapping her fists in long, leather cords, carefully fitting the iron spikes of her cestus over her knuckles. Carrie was strapping herself into a bulletproof vest, stolen from a locker at the station. They didn’t have any women’s sizes, so she looked like Eddie Murphy wearing his fat suit in The Nutty Professor.

Eric dropped Danny’s bag on the floor.

“Careful with that,” he snapped.

“Sorry. What is it?” Eric said.

Danny unzipped it and began assembling something out of the components inside, his movements quick and sure. “Dangerous,” he said. “I’d like to avoid anything exploding before we actually want it to explode.”

Carrie stepped over to take a closer look. “Seriously, what is it?”

Danny attached a pistol grip to a long barrel, then slapped in a battery pack.

“We know light hurts them, right? I figured a burst of coherent light should be enough to scatter them completely, just like a real shadow. So I pulled apart one of the industrial lasers in the lab and mounted it to a — ”

“Jesus Christ, Danny, are you saying you built a ray gun?” Carrie asked.

He gave them his usual look, as if he was gazing down from the great height of his mountainous IQ. “No,” he said, insulted. “It’s a PEW. A Plasma Emitter Weapon. It pushes light through a series of ruby crystal diodes to exponentially increase the output of — ”

He stopped when he saw the looks on their faces.

“Fine. It’s a ray gun.”

Eric looked at it, frowning. “What does it… do?”

Danny hefted the device and pointed it at the ceiling. “Hopefully, burn those things into oblivion.”