And the heartbeat that followed me through this day, the thirty-first of October, is back, my eardrums pounding with it, filling my rib cage as I turn again, and again, staying to the path in the vain hope that it will keep me safe this time, that I won’t end up on the banks.

Tired, cold, trying to convince myself it isn’t becoming night around me, that I don’t need the phone flashlight, not yet, I stare half-blind at the trail, where anything could be familiar, or completely unknown.

When I turn a corner and it’s there, a huge, dark, immobile shape in the center of the path, I can’t register surprise. Because it was always leading to this.

I stop, weaving slightly on my feet, a daytime creature on this nocturnal plane, all my defenses stripped away.

He waits. I stare, my lips cold and stiff. “I’m not afraid of you.” I hear the words in my head, not sure if they reach him. “I don’t believe in you.” Back up a few steps.

For a long, long time, no movement. Then, something unexpected—a burst of light, like a lightning storm in his hand. Whiff of ozone. I back up. Turn. Run.

Pain forks into my lower back, an electrical impulse that takes out everything, my body gone below the waist. I fall.

Twenty-Seven

A WEIGHTLESS PAPER shape circles an orb of light. Tickaticktick. Settles, whispers its wings, lifts off.

Focus on the moth. An exercise in concentration. I’m coming back, shedding the soft gauze of semiconsciousness, feeling a bolt of pain screwed into my lower back, my dry cotton mouth. Squeeze my eyes shut, look again. The filament in the bare bulb overhead burns like the tip of a white-hot soldering iron.

I take a breath, reach for my back, expecting to find blood, shredded skin—but what my fingers explore is a swollen lump above the waist of my jeans, like I was bitten by something small and extremely venomous. No light here except the bulb over the cot I’m lying on, and, in the far corner, the seething red grate of a small potbelly stove. The walls and ceiling are rough-hewn, exposed beams, unfinished.

The muscles of my torso jump and twitch in some delayed reaction as I realize I have no idea where I am. I remember Bree, running away from me. A hand, playing lightning between its fingers. Not lightning. Electricity. A Taser.

There’s a motor running steadily outside, and another sound, murmuring and soft, like flowing water, or a conversation so distant that the words lose all form. I sit up stiffly. Someone’s taken my coat.