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“Where’s Trevor?” she could hear herself murmur. The wind whipped through her hair. She reached up to brush the loose strands from her face and gasped when a whole lock of thick black hair seemed to slide right off her scalp. What landed in her palm was brittle and badly singed. She screamed.

Luce stumbled to her feet. Crossed her arms over her chest and looked around. Still the cool, dark woods, still the sense of the hovering black shadows, still the neat row of cabins—

The cabins were on fire.

The cabin where she swore she’d just been with Trevor—Had she? How far had they gone? What had happened?—was now engulfed in flames. The cabins to the left and the right were just starting to catch fire from the blaze in the middle. The night air reeked of sulfur.

The last thing she remembered was the kiss—

“What thehelldid you do with my boyfriend?”

Rachel. She stood between Luce and the burning cabins, a bright red flush dotting her cheeks. The look in her eyes made Luce feel like a murderer.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

Shawna pointed at Luce. “I followed her. I thought I would catch the two of them screwing around”—she covered her face with her hands and sniffled—“but they went inside, and then…the whole thing justexploded!”

Rachel’s face and her body went slack as she swiveled back toward the cabin and began to wail. The awful sound rose in the night.

It was only then that Luce realized, with a horrified clenching in her chest: Trevor was still inside.

Then the roof of the cabin caved in, spitting out a plume of smoke.

By then, the nearby cabins had really begun to burn, but Luce could feel a darkness hovering, huge and implacable. The shadows, once confined to the woods, now swirled directly above. So close she might have touched them. So close she could almost hear what they were whispering.

It sounded like her name,Luce, repeated a thousand times, circling her and then fading endlessly into some dark past.

ARRIANE’S DAY OUT

“Wide load! Coming through!”

Arriane wheeled a large red shopping cart down the housewares aisle of the Savannah Salvation Army thrift store. Her thin arms gripped the handlebar as she heaved the heavy cart forward. She’d already loaded it up with two polka-dotted lamp shades, a sofa’s worth of tacky pillows, nine plastic Halloween lanterns filled with long-expired candy, half a dozen cheap patterned dresses, a few shoe boxes full of bumper stickers, and a pair of neon roller skates. So by this point it was difficult for Arriane, who stood scarcely five feet tall, to see where she was steering.

“Step aside, toots, unless you have no need for your toes. That’s right, I’m talking to you. And your toddler.”

“Arriane,” Roland said calmly. He was one aisle over, flipping through a milk crate crammed with dusty vinyl records. His pin-striped blazer was unbuttoned, showing a Pink Floyd T-shirt underneath. His thick dreadlocks hung down slightly over his dark eyes. “You really know how to keep a low profile, don’t you?”

“Hey!” Arriane sounded wounded as she tried to maneuver her shopping cart in a hairpin turn and wheeled down Roland’s aisle. She stopped in front of him and jabbed an electric-blue-painted fingernail into his chest. “I take my work here seriously, pal. We have a lot of goods to procure in just two days.”

Arriane’s words seemed to remind her of something that filled her with sudden joy. Her pastel blue eyes ignited and a wide grin spread across her face. She gripped Roland’s arm and shook him, causing her long black hair to tumble from its messy bun. It flowed down to her waist and shimmered as she cried, “Two days! Two days! Our Lucy’s coming back to us in two freaking days!”

Roland chuckled. “You’re cute when you’re excited.”

“Then I must be the mayor of Adorableville right now!” Arriane leaned against a rack of old stereo equipment and sighed a happy little sigh. “I live for her arrivals. I mean, not in the same way Daniel does, obviously. But I do feel a certain speck of delight at the prospect of seeing her again.” She rested her head on Roland’s shoulder. “Do you think she’ll have changed?”

Roland was back to flipping through the box of records. Every third or fourth one he tossed into Arriane’s shopping cart. “She’s had a whole other life, Arri. Of course she’ll have changed a little bit.”

Arriane threw down the Sly and the Family Stone album she’d been examining. “But she’ll still be our Lucinda—”

“That does seem to be the pattern,” Roland said, giving Arriane the are-you-crazy look she got from most people—including everyone else at the thrift store—but not usually from Roland. “At least, it’s been that way for the past several thousand years. Why would you even have to ask?”

“Dunno.” Arriane shrugged. “I passed Miss Sophia in the office at Sword and Cross. She was hauling around all these boxes of files, muttering about ‘preparations.’ Like everything had to be perfect or something. I don’t want Luce to show up and be disappointed. Maybe she’ll be different, really different this time. You know how I feel about change.”

She peered into her shopping cart. The tacky pillows she’d thrown into it in case this Luce, like the last Luce, could be cheered up with a raging pillow fight—suddenly, they just looked ugly and childish to Arriane. And the roller skates? When were they ever going to use roller skates at a reform school? What was she thinking? She’d gotten carried away. Again.

Roland tweaked Arriane’s nose. “At the risk of sounding banal, I say just be yourself. Luce will love you. She always does. And if all else fails,” he said, sifting through the booty Arriane had tossed into the cart, “there’s always your secret weapon.” He held up the small plastic bag of drinking straws with paper umbrellas glued to them. “You should definitely bust out these guys.”

“You’re right. As usual.” Arriane smiled, patting Roland on the head. “I do throw a mean happy hour.” She slung her arm around his waist as the two of them wheeled the heavy cart down the aisle.