Ebb shrugs. “It can’t hurt to try.”

The night is quiet around us. I wrap my story around my flashlight, secure it with the rubber bands I find in a still-intact kitchen drawer, and we wait. It’s not exactly embroidering a dress, or painting arrows, or weaving a net—but I’m only eleven, and rubber bands are the best I’ve got.

I turn it on, but nothing really happens—just a normal beam of light.

“Maybe we need to let the magic settle in,” Ebb suggests.

So we wait for something magical to happen.

Ebb just floats around the yard because ghosts don’t sleep. But I start to doze, and dream of the Memory Thief and the Time Witch, huddled over a fire, holding my baby brother between them and laughing.

I wake to a sound of growling nearby, a shape moving toward me across the lawn, jaws open wide.

I let out a cry, jerk back, and—in the dark—grab my flashlight and turn it on, swinging the beam toward the sound. I only realize it’s the rabid possum a moment before it happens:

As the beam of my light hits the ghostly little creature, something changes. A shape, small and impossibly fast, shoots right from my flashlight toward the possum like a lightning bolt. It lands on the back of the possum, who lets out a snarl, then explodes in tiny sparks, and disappears.

The next moment the shape from the flashlight is coming back toward me—sailing through the air gracefully, made of bright blue light. I realize in wonder that it’s a tiny, luminous bluebird—small and quiet as it perches beside me on the grass. It looks up at me and lets out one tiny chirp.

Ebb has zipped close to me, and now hovers a few feet away.

I turn to gape at him, and he gapes back at me.

He looks at the flashlight, then at the little bluebird perched at my side.

And smiles.

CHAPTER 25

“Well, go on. Use it again,” Germ says.

It’s the following night and the three of us are together now: Germ, Ebb, and me. We sit in my abandoned living room shivering, staring at my Lumos flashlight, which I’ve placed in the middle of us. The moon is a new, tiny sliver above.

I slept most of the day, exhausted while Germ went to school. And now, with everyone back at the trailer asleep, Germ and I have snuck over here together, bundled against the cold.

I study the flashlight, biting my lip. “I’m scared I’m going to hurt someone with it,” I say.

“It probably only hurts bad guys,” Germ says.

“You try it,” I say to her. “You’re good with aim and stuff.”