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“Do you think there’s a tear nearby?” I asked Kato.

“I do. In fact, I think there are multiple tears here.” Steel sang as he drew his sword. “The tears’ combined magical energy must be what drew all the Cursed Ones here.”

Their red eyes locked on to us. And then they charged.

With one hand, Kato pulled me behind him. And with the other, he wielded his enormous sword, striking and slashing at the Cursed Ones with effortless ease. I’d never seen anyone fight like that, not even the Knights on television. And he didn’t even have any magic right now.

“We need to figure out how to get them to lead us to the tears in the veil,” Kato said as the Cursed Ones retreated to a safe distance, just beyond his sword’s reach.

They were still too close for comfort. And if the gleam in their eyes were any indication, they weren’t giving up so easily. Their tongues slid across their drool-dripped lips, as though they were imagining what it would feel like to tear us to bits. We might have been immune to the Curse, but that didn’t mean the Cursed Ones couldn’t hurt us. They were bigger, stronger, and tougher than the Knights—and way more vicious too.

Two of the Cursed Ones split off in either direction.

“They’re trying to flank us!” Kato darted toward the ones on the left, slashing out with his sword to drive them back toward the others.

“But battle strategies require intelligence.” I watched him rush toward the Cursed Ones on the right, attempting to corral them too. “I thought they were mindless things incapable of intelligent thought.”

“They are.” Kato sprang into action as the Cursed Ones split up again—except this time, they ran in four different directions. He couldn’t keep up. “I honestly don’t understand how they’re doing this. Theyshouldn’tbe smart enough to think.”

“Actually, I don’t think they’re thinking,” I realized, flicking my hair out of my face. “I think they’re reacting.”

I blinked when one of the Cursed Ones pulsed with an eerie blue light.

I pointed to it. “That one’s glowing.”

Kato turned to look. “I don’t see anything.” When he spoke again, his voice held a note of impatience. “It’s really frustrating not having any magic right now. Butyoucan see the glow?” Surprise echoed in his voice.

“Yes,” I replied. “Why? Shouldn’t I be able to see it?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he asked, “Is the Cursed One glowing blue?”

“Sort of. It’s like a blue-grey.” I blinked. “And now the glow is gone. Weird.”

Another flicker of light drew my attention.

I turned and pointed at the Cursed One on the other side of Kato. “Now that one is glowing.”

He pivoted around. “Also blue-grey?”

“No,” I told him. “This blue is way more blue. It’s like ultramarine blue. Annnd now the glow is gone again.”

Kato nodded like all of this made total sense. “I think what you’re seeing is the Cursed Ones’ halos light up when they get close enough to a tear in the veil. The tears are Dreamweaver magic, and Dreamweaver magic is blue.”

My brain went into overdrive, trying to sort through all of that new information he’d squeezed into just two sentences.

“The blue-grey glow you described, it means that particular tear in the veil has gone bad,” Kato said.

“Bad how?”

“Like I said before, tears in the veil don’t stay open forever. And shortly before one is about to close, it kind of inverts. It reverses direction,” he explained, likely in response to the totally confused expression I knew was etched into my face. “So if we went through that tear, instead of sending us back to our dimension, it would shoot us deeper into the shadows. Where there are more monsters, more fog, and no hope of escape to our dimension.”

“Ok, let’snotdo that,” I said.

“Agreed. That’s why we need to go through one of the tears you described as ‘ultramarine blue’,” he told me. “Those tears are still good, still fresh, so they will lead us home.”

“So, it sounds like all I need to do is watch the Cursed Ones until one of them glows bright blue, and then we run through the tear next to it, and we’re home free?”

“Basically, yes,” he replied. “But I’m afraid we don’t have the time to wait for one of the Cursed Ones to drift close enough to a good tear, not if one of the tears has already turned bad. I cast the spells to create the tears all at the same time. Of course spells don’t always decay at exactly the same rate, but it’s usually pretty close. If one tear has already gone bad, we have to assume the other ones will soon follow.”