I look around, take an inventory of the room. Everything—down to the precise angle of my bedside lamp, my John Green novel open to the same page, my Aztec-pattern bedspread with its interlocking circles of colour—everything, is how it ought to be.

This is my room.

But it’s also not. There’s something off about it. It looks the same but it feels—irrationally, at a deep molecular level—different. A cold current goes through me. A pang in my gut. I feel a fierce and inexplicable sense of loss. An absence of something. Of someone.

And that’s when I remember.

Bea.

Snick!

Clear as day, I hear it again, the sound that woke me—something hitting the glass of my window from the outside. I flip open my iPad on the bedside table: 4:00 AM.

I spring out of bed and stumble, wide-awake now, to the window.

Snick!

I stand and listen. Motionless. Silent. But I heard it. I know I heard it.

Get a grip, Ana. It’s the wind. Branches, blown against the glass.

Then I think of Bea again. And my heart constricts.

I rip the curtains apart and leap back at the sight of the new moon and the crooked shape of the yew tree. Pallid moonlight turns the world two-dimensional. The garden looks like a kid’s drawing, all flat shapes and rough lines.

And no waiting creatures. But there is this: perched in the yew tree, cut out against the blue-blackness of the sky—a shadowy figure.

The floor drops out from under me. It just falls away.

It’s him.

12

Dark-eyes. In my garden. At four o’clock in morning. Sitting in a tree. I’m not sure which of these facts is the more remarkable, since I’m still trying to make sense of a world just as messed up and upside down as it was when I fell asleep, hoping to wash all the weirdness away. He’s cupping something in his hand. Pebbles.

“Will you let me in?” he says, opening his hand and letting them fall. They skitter down the trunk. “I’m cold out here.”

“You,” I manage.

“Yup. Me.”

“You followed me.”

Course I followed you, he answers, as if it’s the most idiotic question he’s ever heard and, before I can get my head around this, I realise he didn’t open his mouth to speak. He thought the words to me. Again.

“So?” he says, out loud this time. “You gonna ask me in, or not?”

I stare at him, gobsmacked.

“Well?” he says.

“You came after me.”

“That’s more or less what happens when you follow someone, Ana Moon.”

“Wait…you know my full name?”

“As of tonight, I know a lot more than just your name.”

“But—”

“There’s no time. If you want your friend back, you better let me in.”