Mary felt a sudden sharp sadness. She felt herself sinking into the tile floor, shrinking as her mother watched, no longer making sandwiches.

Her mother held the knife covered with peanut butter and raspberry preserves. Globules of red, red fruit dripped from the edge of the knife, which was awfully large for making sandwiches.

“It won’t hurt,” her mother said. She held the knife out for Mary.

Mary jerked awake.

The girl on her lap had fallen asleep and peed. Mary was soaked by it.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, get off me! Get off me!” she yelled, still half in her dream, still seeing that knife floating, handle toward her, dripping.

The girl fell to the floor and, stunned, began to cry.

“Hey!” someone yelled from the main room.

“I’m sorry,” Mary mumbled, and tried to stand up. Her legs gave way and she sat down again, too suddenly. As she fell she reached for the knife but it wasn’t real, though the little girl’s cry was, and so was the voice yelling, “Hey, you can’t come in here!”

On the next try Mary managed to stand up. She staggered out. Three kids, faces dull with terror.

Not her age group. Too old.

“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.

But where was Zil?

And was he with Drake?

Could the timing all be coincidence? No. Sam didn’t believe in coincidence.

Again, a movement glimpsed through a veil of smoke. Again Sam raced toward it. This time the figure did not disappear.

“Don’t…,” a young voice cried out, and then choked and hacked. A boy who looked to be maybe six years old.

“Get out of here,” Sam snapped. “Go to the beach.”

He ran on, faltered, turned to his right. Where was Drake? No, Zil. Where was Zil? Zil was real.

And all at once he was at the beach wall. He practically tripped over it. He had sent the six-year-old off in the wrong direction. Too late to do anything about that. The kid wasn’t the only lost one tonight.

Where were Dekka and Brianna and Taylor? Where were Edilio’s soldiers?

What was going on?

Sam saw a group of kids rushing along the sand in the direction of the marina. And for a moment he almost thought he saw Caine. He was hallucinating. Imagining things.

“Freaks out!”

Sam heard it clearly. It seemed very close. Maybe a trick of acoustics.

He tried to penetrate the dark and the smoke but he saw nothing now, not even the hallucinated Caine.

BLAM!

A shotgun blast. He saw the bright flash.

He ran. His feet hit something soft but heavy. He flew and landed facedown. Mouth gritty with sand he climbed to his feet. A body, someone in the sand.