Getting to her feet, she brushed herself off. Her mom would be worried when Maria got back so late, but without a phone, she didn’t really have a choice.

She put one foot in front of the other, and began the long walk home.

The spiders watched her as she went.

As long as the walk was, Maria would have done it all over again, right now, with her eyes closed, if it meant she didn’t have to open the front door. But her legs ached and her eyes stung. If she wanted to get to her bedroom, she had to pass through the living room first. Maria took a deep breath and opened the door.

“Where in the world have you been, young lady?” her mother shouted, jumping up from the couch as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. She was fully dressed, even down to her hiking boots. Normally she’d be in sweatpants and a T-shirt by now.

“I had to walk all the way home from Claire’s party. Maybe if I had a cell phone —”

“Oh, no, you are not blaming this on me. You were supposed to be at the store, and then you were supposed to come home. Derek’s dad called me in a fit at seven because you two were supposed to have walked straight to their house. And then, he called me to say that Derek showed up with no idea where you were.”

“That’s because he left me,” Maria said quietly.

“Left you where?”

“I told you, at Claire’s party.”

“Don’t you lie to me, Maria! I know for a fact you were not at Claire’s party. I had to go pick up your brother from her house after there was some kind of accident. He’s back in his room now, and if you’d like to bring him out here and ask him whether you and Derek were at that party, be my guest.”

“What, so you and Rafi can gang up on me, like always?” Maria said, her voice rising in a shrill crescendo. She felt ridiculous now in her black party dress, torn and dirty from her trek through the woods. It suddenly seemed like she was playing pretend, wearing the costume of an older girl from one of her stories. Right at this moment, she felt like she was eight years old.

“This has nothing to do with your brother,” her mother said. “This has to do with you not being where you were supposed to be and not telling anyone where you were.”

“You have no idea where Rafi is half the time! ‘He’s just over at Rob’s house,’ or ‘Oh, he’s outside, playing in the park,’ which could mean anywhere. You’re just mad at me because you think I’m weird, just like you thought Grandma Esme was weird. You think if I’m gone, I must be up to something bad.”

Her mother sighed and slumped back down onto the couch. She rubbed her temples like Maria was giving her a headache. Finally, in a voice that was quiet but no less severe, she said, “Go to your room. You are grounded until I say otherwise.”

“Good!” Maria shouted, now trying to sound unhinged on purpose. “I love being grounded!”

She stormed down the hallway, stopping when she found Rafi peeking his head out of his room. He looked scared.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“What do you care?” Maria snapped. She threw open her door and slammed it behind her. She paced back and forth in front of her bed, which usually calmed her down but now only worked her into more of a rage. She came to a halt in front of her mirror and glared at her reflection. She cut quite a frightening figure in her ragged black dress. There was a smudge on her face that looked like ash.

She wasn’t playing dress-up. She really was the shadow queen, evil powers and all. And shadow queens didn’t let mothers or brothers tell them what to do. What did Mom and Rafi know about being an outcast? What did they know about being abandoned by their friends?

Maria’s thoughts continued down this spiral until her exhaustion finally caught up with her. She lay down on top of her comforter and fell into a sleep riddled with nightmares. Over her head, the spiders kept spinning, adding rows and layers to their web, unnoticed.

The whispers in her head finally woke Maria up, rising and rattling over one another like distant rain. She’d gone to sleep wearing the ring again. The correlation seemed obvious. If she took off the ring now, she would stop hearing the spider voices.

She didn’t take off the ring.

The whispers were growing steadily louder. The closer Maria listened, the more she could make out individual voices from the cluster. None of them were speaking in words, exactly, or at least no words Maria knew. But their meaning was clear. They wanted Maria to follow them.

Stepping down from her bed, Maria found an unbroken line of them, crawling up and down the wall, in and out of the bedroom, so that they looked like a stream with currents flowing in both directions. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight and completely dark; Maria could see the spiders as if they carried their own kind of light.

She got dressed quickly, then tiptoed down the hallway and into the kitchen. The spiders had found a crack in the wall by the sliding glass door that led into the backyard and the park beyond.

So that’s how they’ve been getting into the house.

Quietly, carefully, Maria slid open the door and followed the spiders outside.

She reached the imaginary line where her yard ended and Falling Waters began. When her mom had forced her to play outside as a little girl, she used to pretend that this was the boundary between the good kingdom and the evil kingdom. Tonight, she wasn’t half as afraid as she used to be. It was like she was walking under a spell — a spell that made her brave. Whether it was a good spell or a bad spell didn’t seem important.

In no time, Maria was crossing the gravel path near the stream that fed the waterfall. Her feet crunched on leaves and palm fronds as she stepped off the main path and into the dense woods. The ground grew damp, and the spiders led her downstream to where the water was faster and more treacherous. Maria hardly noticed that her black flats were getting ruined. She was too focused on following the spiders to the very lip of the waterfall, where she found a progression of worn, smooth stones she’d never noticed before. Taken together, they almost looked like a staircase, leading down the rock face behind the waterfall and into the sinkhole far below.

The spiders showed her the way.

The rock steps were slick and uneven, but Maria took them confidently, one at a time. She followed the stairs down until the waterfall rushed over her head, then blocked the outside world altogether. When she reached the last stair, she lifted her eyes from her feet, and there, cut into the rock face, was a hole that looked like the mouth of a cave. Even her mom probably didn’t know about this.

Maria followed the spiders deeper into the hole, her eyes taking in the dark details of the cave without a problem. Faded graffiti filled the walls, with letters and hearts spelling out a history of brave or reckless people who had discovered the cave before her. Tiny animal bones littered the ground, all of them completely covered in spiderwebs. The voices in Maria’s head reached out in hunger.

Finally, Maria could walk no farther. The cave had narrowed into a dead end, where she found a collection of boxes and debris. None of it was covered in the dust and cobwebs that smothered everything else, and there was a plate of half-eaten meat sitting atop one of the boxes. If it had been here awhile, it would have already decayed.