Patrick cleared a path for us through the tight alley, smashing Hosts with the butt of the shotgun, preserving ammo. Feet pounded across the rooftops on either side of us, Hosts stalking our movement overhead.

One leapt and struck Alex on the way down. She spilled, losing her grip on her hockey stick. The Host rose, looming over her. Even from behind I could tell that it was Mrs. Wolfgram. She held a length of rope coiled around both clawlike hands. I could see straight through the back of her head.

Mrs. Wolfgram pounced.

Before she could land, she was knocked violently to the side, hammering into a brick wall and crumpling to the ground. Patrick stood over Alex now, gripping the shotgun like a baseball bat.

He held out his hand for her.

Alex reached up and cupped her fingers around Patrick’s, and he lifted her to her feet as though she was weightless. Her momentum carried her forward into him so that both hands pressed to his chest, and then their faces were close and she was looking at him with her lips slightly parted.

Over by the wall, Mrs. Wolfgram jerked herself to her feet, her limbs broken and angled in all the wrong directions. Patrick swung the shotgun up past Alex and said, “Cover your ears.”

Her hands rose to the sides of her head. The barrel flared. Mrs. Wolfgram smacked back against the brick wall, a chalk outline gone vertical, then slid wetly to the ground and lay still.

Alex had kept her eyes on Patrick’s the entire time. I couldn’t blame her. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The footfalls on the roofs overhead quickened. Shallow breaths reverberated down at us off the walls. We huddled a moment, our eyes flashing around, reading the shadows.

“We gotta get to the square,” Patrick said.

“But there are so many there,” Rocky said.

“At least we can see them. We’re gonna cut right through the center and head for the high school.”

“The school,” I said. “Why the—”

Dark forms flashed off the roofs, striking the ground behind us, bouncing low on their haunches, then rising.

We bolted.

Exploding out of the alley, I felt vulnerable all over again. The rising sun cast the square in an otherworldly light, everything washed in sepia tones like in an old photograph. Hosts everywhere paused from their work, then started for us.