I was very nearly asleep when the phone rang.

Wednesday, July 6, 2:19 a.m.

Panic smashed through me, turning ice water to nausea in my belly. I fell out of bed and grabbed for the phone on the way to the floor, fumbling the receiver and putting it to my ear with shaking hands. “Hello? Jesus. What’s wrong? Hello?”

“Joanne?” It was a little boy’s voice, so out of place my foggy brain couldn’t comprehend it for a moment. “Joanne?” he asked again.

“Yeah, this is—yeah.” I rubbed my eyes frantically, trying to wake up. “Who is thi—is this Robert?”

“Yeah.” A gulp, precariously near a sob, sounded in the word. “Joanne, Mommy went to sleep like Daddy did. Erik is sick and tried to wake her up and we can’t get her to wake up. Can you help us? Please?” Robert was nearly twelve, the quaver in his voice swallowed down in an attempt at adult bravery, but Mommy and Daddy went a long way toward telling me just how scared he was.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Robert. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Are your sisters okay?”

“Clara’s still sleeping. Me and Jacquie are awake. And Erik keeps saying he’s gonna throw up.”

“Okay. You guys all get a blanket so you stay warm and keep Erik company in the bathroom so he can throw up in the toilet if he needs to, okay?” I pulled clothes on as I talked, exhaustion burning my eyes. “I’ll be there as fast as I can. Just hold tight, Robert. I’ll be right there.”

“Okay.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “What do I do if somebody else goes to sleep?”

Billy’s sleeping image flashed through my mind. And I’d gone out to have fun instead of trying to find answers. I was never going to forgive myself. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Robert. It’ll be okay. I’ll be right there. You did good, calling me. I’ll be right there,” I promised again, and hit the door at a run.

The Hollidays’ home had a wonderful front yard that’d seen better days. Trees and bushes were mashed, and a section of the picket fence had been replaced but not yet repainted. The front porch, similarly, was of fresh raw wood, though a can of stain sat on the corner of the railing, making a dark cylindrical spot against the lightness of the wood. Billy’d repainted the new boards above the front door where the frame had been torn apart and fixed, since the last time I’d been over. Even in the middle of the night and half repaired, it looked like the sort of place where a person would want to raise a herd of children. Billy and Melinda were doing just that, with four already and a fifth on the way.

There was a white Mercedes SUV parked behind Billy’s car. I parked Petite behind Mel’s minivan and didn’t think anything of the SUV until I rang the doorbell, expecting Robert to answer. Instead, Brad Holliday, bearing the wild-eyed combination of alarm and anger people do when they’re woken up at two-thirty in the morning, flung the door open and stared at me. Even straight out of bed, he wore the heavy ring that had helped annoy me at the hospital. It was on his right hand, wrapped around the edge of the door above his head, and I wondered if he wore a wedding ring on his left hand. I hadn’t noticed earlier.

We stared at each other a few seconds, equally surprised, before I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was another adult here,” and he started berating me for small-hours visits.

Robert appeared in the hall behind him and interrupted with “I called her, Uncle Brad,” before ducking under Dr. Bradley’s arm to take my hand and pull me into the house. Brad got out of the way, surprised into silence by his nephew’s arrival on the scene. I gave Brad a fleeting, semi-apologetic smile, and hugged Robert.

“Told you I’d be here as fast as I could. How come you didn’t get your uncle instead of me?”

Robert shrugged against my ribs. “You’re the one who got the Thing out of the kitchen.”

“Yeah.” I ducked my head over Robert’s, an arm around his shoulders as I pressed my mouth against his hair. I didn’t want to call it a kiss. Kissing sounded all girlie and uncomfortable, the wrong sort of thing to impose on an eleven-year-old boy. Comfort could be imparted by mouth presses, too. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

“The thing in the kitchen?” From the tone of his voice, I couldn’t tell which was worse for Brad: asking, or not knowing.

Robert shrugged under the weight of my arm, matter-offactly. “There was a Thing in the kitchen a couple weeks ago. A big snake thing. Joanne got rid of it. That’s what happened to the front of the house,” he added, as if it cleared everything up.

Brad’s mouth went thin and tight. “Robert, that was an effect of the earthquake. I’m sure your father explained that to you.”

Robert and I exchanged glances and the kid sighed. “Yeah, Uncle Brad. I know.” He didn’t actually say, “Whut-ev-aaar,” as people his age were prone to doing, but it sounded loud and clear in his voice. I swallowed hard to keep a smile from jumping into place.

“You think what put your Mom to sleep is the same kind of thing as the, uh, Thing?” I really needed to work on my Mystical Stuff vocabulary. I wondered if I could find a handbook. Robert shrugged against my ribs again and started leaning in a time-to-move way. I shuffled down the entry hall with him, hanging a right through the living room so we could go upstairs to the bedrooms.

“It’s not the same kind of Thing,” the boy said, “but it’s the same kind of Thing.” He cast me one quick look to see if I understood, concern that I wouldn’t clear in his eyes. But since we seemed to be speaking exactly the same language, I was able to give him a reassuring smile and another quick hug.

“Yeah. I think you’re right. I’d like to know how you know that, though.”

“I dunno. It just feels the same. The air’s kind of cold and wet-feeling. Kinda like it is when…” He looked back at his uncle, who couldn’t get past us as we climbed the stairs together, and said, evasively, “When Dad does his thing.”

“You can tell when he does that?” I asked, surprised. Robert gave me a look that suggested I wasn’t too swift.

“Yeah. Can’t you?”

“I’ve never tried,” I admitted. And a child shall lead them popped into my head, the phrase a title of the painting that had led me to answers about the Wild Hunt back in January. I gave the top of Robert’s head a crooked grin. “You’ll have to teach me, if you can.”

“Sure,” Robert said, with all the nonchalant ease of a kid who hadn’t stopped believing in six impossible things before breakfast. For a startled instant I thought of another little boy, not much older than the one at my side, and wondered whether he, too, would have held my lack of ability to sense what was apparently obvious in such casual disdain.

“Is this conversation supposed to be making any sense?” Brad snapped. I let go of Robert’s shoulders to turn and look down on the doctor. Way down, since I was two steps above him and had several inches of height on him, anyway. Not that I was enjoying it. Honest.

And the strange thing was that was all it took. I’d been going to round on the guy, give him a lecture on things I was only beginning to believe in myself, and all of a sudden it simply didn’t matter. Bradley Holliday had his own reasons for not believing in the esoteric, just like I’d had, and just like me, nothing anybody said was going to change his opinion. I knew enough about pissing into the wind not to start doing it, at least this once. Brad didn’t look in the least bit qualmed, but he subsided, anyway, and the breath I drew in to scold him with slipped out as nothing more than a slow exhalation. I could feel Robert’s round-eyed gaze of admiration as I turned away from his uncle and climbed the rest of the stairs.

Erik, the youngest, met us at the upstairs bathroom door, clutching his sister Jacquie’s hand. The boy had the sour scent of an ill child, and Jacquie looked green around the gills. “He threw up. Twice. On me.”