“What are you doing here?” Mary asked.
The whole room was waking up, kids asking what was going on. Zadie, the helper who’d been yelling, said, “I think something’s wrong, Mary.”
Two more kids pushed through the front door. They smelled of something that wasn’t pee.
A boy ran in, shrieking. He had a livid burn all over the back of his hand.
“What’s going on?”
“Help us, help us!” a boy cried, and now it was all chaos, more kids streaming in the door. Mary recognized the smell now, the smell of smoke.
She pushed none too gently past the new arrivals. Outside, she coughed as she drew a lungful of smoke.
Smoke was everywhere, swirling, hanging ghostly in the air, and an orange glow reflected from the shattered glass of town hall.
Off to the west a tongue of fire suddenly shot into the sky and was swallowed by its own smoke.
No one else was in the plaza. No one but one girl.
Mary rubbed the sleep from her eyes, stared at her. Not possible, not possible, not real, some leftover fragment of dream.
But the girl was still there, face in shadow, a glint of chrome steel glinting from her braces.
“Have you seen him?” the girl asked.
Mary felt something die inside her, dread and horror like the impact of an explosion in her mind.
“Have you seen the demon?” Brittney asked.
Mary couldn’t answer. She could only stare as Brittney’s arm began to elongate, to change shape.
Brittney winked. Cold, dead blue eyes.
Mary ran into the day care. She slammed the door behind her and leaned back against it.
TWENTY-SIX
13 HOURS, 43 MINUTES
THE SMOKE ALTERED the familiar streetscape for Sam. He was turned around, unsure for a moment of where he was or which direction was which. He stopped, heard footsteps running behind him, and spun around, hands up, palms out.
But the footsteps headed away.
Sam cursed in frustration. The town was burning down and the smoke made it all but impossible to find the enemy.
He had to do this now, during the heat of battle, before Astrid intervened and forced him once again to sit helpless, waiting for her to invent some system they’d never be able to put in place.
This was the night. This was the time to do what he should have done a month before: finish off Zil and his insanity.
But he would have to find them first.
He forced himself to think. What was Zil up to, aside from the obvious? Why would he decide to burn the town down? It seemed bold for Zil. It seemed insane: Zil lived there, too.
But Sam’s thoughts were fractured by the recurring image in his mind of Drake. Out there somewhere. Drake who had somehow come back from the dead.
Of course they’d never seen his body, had they?
“Focus,” Sam ordered himself. The problem right now was that the town was burning down. Edilio would be doing whatever he could to save those who needed saving. Sam’s job was to stop the terror now.