“It was a bad night,” Danny says, her voice split open at the seams. “The hermit took me for a spin.”

Danny: The Night Before

Ididn’t fall asleep, even after Mom’s soft snore blanketed the cottage. The moon rose in the window, through the bottom square and then the top one. I flipped slowly from one side to the other like I’d trained myself to do when I felt restless. The feeling had vanished when I first got to Tempest, but it was coming back night by night. Waxing into fullness, like the moon.

My feet worked lightly against the thin standard-issue hotel sheet until I thought I might wear straight through it. I wondered how many miles I would have gone by now if I’d let myself stand up. I didn’t stand up. I didn’t let my thoughts wander through a forest of vanished girls and dead boys. I pulled darkness and nothingness over my mind like a blanket, like ten blankets.

That’s when the hermit, or what was left of him, slipped into me. He didn’t wait for an invitation, as if letting him share my mind once meant that he could do it again. I didn’t know what he wanted or where he was taking me as my limbs swung toward the edge of the bed, heavy as wet sand.

I had worked so hard to stay put, and now I was passing Mom’s bed without really meaning to. I was walking out through the screen door to the porch, down the steps, gathering splinters in my feet.

The woods greeted me with a forgiving bed of pine needles. I felt myself swell back into the proper place, shoving the hermit to the edges of my body, my mind, and I almost turned around and walked back to the cottage. But the fog breathed toward us, and the hermit pushed me forward. His fear slid through my mind like a shadow of my own. He knew where he was going, and he was afraid to lose this chance.

I was afraid to lose everything. My control, my mom’s trust, my life. An ocean of panic rippled inside me, but the hermit didn’t feel it, or the hermit didn’t care. He believed he was doing something that needed to be done.

The fog closed in around us, and it would have smothered us, but the hermit wouldn’t let it, and he wouldn’t let go. He pushed me until I was running. He pushed me until I couldn’t take a full breath.

And then, blackness.

At first I thought I had passed out.

Then I saw every shade of darkness, and light coming in through an enormous scar.