“Thought you were pretty smart, did you?” Misty sounded annoyed. “Rob! Here! I’ve got them!” She gestured with her firearm (Teddy couldn’t see it well enough to tell what kind of weapon it was) as she pushed through the connecting door, forcing them back toward Teddy’s bedroom. “I oughta just go ahead and put a bullet in each of you right now.”

“Kind of messy,” Teddy said before she could stop herself. “I vote for lightning strikes on top of the lighthouse.”

Oscar had grabbed her hand again and squeezed hard enough that she gasped. When she chanced a look at him, she saw he was furious—and worried. She squeezed back, still feeling optimistic—quite a bit less than a few minutes earlier, but still. They weren’t dead yet.

After all, a bullet might be a sure thing, but a lightning strike wasn’t.

“Get ’em up top,” Rob snarled when he appeared from Teddy’s bedroom. “Storm’s getting nasty—it’ll be the perfect way to take care of ’em, then no one can nail anything on us. They won’t even be suspicious enough to check things out.”

As if to punctuate his words, a wild flash of lightning lit the room, followed too closely by a loud crash of thunder.

Teddy’s optimism flagged slightly. As if he understood, Oscar tightened his grip on her fingers.

“Up we go,” Misty said, gesturing with her gun as she prodded them back the way they’d come, through the room in which they’d waited, and to the base of the hundred and sixty-eight stairs. “No, wait. You go first,” she said, pointing at Oscar. “I’ll keep your girlfriend nice and close to me. Rob, you come up behind.”

And with that, Teddy had her arm gripped tightly by the taller, far-fitter-than-she Misty, and a gun pointed at her as they began to climb.

Please don’t trip, she thought, imagining what would happen if she or the gun-toting Misty did so. A bullet in this small, cylindrical space, and so close to her body… She shivered.

All right, just concentrate on getting up there in one piece.

“So, you decided to try and haunt us out of here,” Teddy said. “The scream, the ghostly green projection, and so on. But you only did it outside—why not ever inside? That probably would have been more effective, to be honest. And how did you get the door up top to lock and then unlock? And the freaky chill?” Teddy slowed her pace a little to catch her breath and so she could talk.

“One of you was always here,” Misty said. “You never left the damned cottage, so we couldn’t set up anything in here. It wasn’t hard to break in when we finally had the chance. But we’d have gotten more serious if the other stuff didn’t work to get rid of you—but this here is a much better solution. Keep moving.”.

“So.” Teddy puffed. “The first night we were here—well, technically the second night, but it was the first night we were up on the lighthouse—how did you even know we were going to be up—”

“Shut up,” growled Rob from behind them. “Just stop talking and keep moving. This isn’t a goddam book club.” He shoved at Teddy, and she barely caught herself from taking a header into the steps in front of her.

After that, she kept her mouth shut because, one, she was getting out of breath, and two, there was the nerve-racking element of the gun near her side. She probably should be more terrified, to be honest, but Teddy had done enough research for her books to know that oftentimes in the most trying and desperate of situations, one’s mind became cool and calm. It was only later that it fell to pieces.

Still. She felt clammy under her arms and her stomach was in knots. She could only see Oscar from behind, so could only imagine what he was going through.

The storm battered the exterior of the lighthouse. Lightning flared, sending shocks of illumination through the random windows in the tower, and rain—no, hail—pelted the glass. Thunder rumbled angrily, and Teddy fancied she could feel the circular stairs swaying a little beneath her feet from the force of the wind.

There were only another dozen or so steps to go. Her legs were trembling—not so much from the exertion of climbing, but from sudden nerves.

“All right. You and me first, mister,” said Misty as they reached the door to the lantern room. “You stay here,” she added, giving Teddy a little shove toward Rob, who was two steps below her. Misty turned back to Oscar, aiming the gun at him. “Keep it slow and easy—no funny stuff—or you get a bullet in your side. I hear that’s a long, painful death.”

Oscar cast Teddy a quick look behind him—a meaningful one, as if he was trying to tell her something—and her heart swelled with emotion as she watched him take the last step up, cradling his hand as Misty followed right behind him.

Then, just as he opened the door, she realized what he’d wanted to tell her—to remind her.

The bats.

He opened the door and ducked quickly into the lantern room as the bats erupted.

Misty screamed and jolted backward, but Teddy had already slipped up next to her by the door. She pushed past Misty, pulling her out of the way and using her frightened momentum to shove her off the top of the steps. Teddy ducked into the lantern room, keeping low beneath the flurry of bat wings. Oscar slammed the door behind her as she heard the shouts from Misty tumbling into Rob as they fell down the stairs.

“Great,” Teddy said as she heard the sound of a gun firing followed by the ugly sounds of people falling. “Now what?”

“We get the lantern working, Teddy, and send an SOS. Lock the door. They’ll be back.” Oscar was already moving toward the massive pod of lenses in the center of the room.

“There’s no lock,” Teddy shrieked in a whisper, wriggling the knob as if she might manifest one.

Oscar swore and spun, looking around for something to blockade the door—but there was nothing up there but a broom.

They both saw it at the same time. “I’ll wedge the handle under the door. It’ll help keep it from swinging open,” Teddy said, conscious of Oscar’s injured hand. She heard the sounds of angry footsteps pounding back up the stairs. “Now would be a really damned good time for Stuart Millore to show up and have his revenge,” she muttered as a huge, horrible flash of lightning lit the sky as if it was noon.

“After all, they did murder you, didn’t they, Stuart?” she said.

The violence of the storm raging about the lighthouse was a sight she’d never seen, and it set the hair on her head standing straight up. Being this high, inside a room completely sided by glass—it was both awe-inspiring and terrifying to see the power of the storm.

And Rob and Misty wanted to put them outside, up here, in that maelstrom.

Oh God, we might actually die.

The door heaved a little as one of their attackers crashed into it, and Teddy swallowed back a scream. She had to find something else to stave them off. Misty and Rob had only a small space to work with on the other side; just a tiny landing and the very dangerous steps—but there were two of them, and they were much stronger than she was.

Even with his bad wrist, Oscar had somehow climbed down inside the center of the lenses, and she could barely make out his figure behind the beehive-shaped, rippled glass. In a moment of wild incongruity, it struck her that he looked like a caterpillar inside a beautiful glass cocoon.

Suddenly, light flared from behind one of the lenses. It filled the darkness, blinding Teddy because she was near that side. She stumbled away, moving to the opposite side of the lantern room as the door heaved again. This time, it was accompanied by the sounds of splintering.

Come on, she thought. I know it’s not that easy to break through a damned door!

But she saw nothing that would help her strengthen the door any further.

“Now would be a good time for a miracle,” she said, putting her weight against the door as it heaved again.

It occurred to her, randomly and hilariously, that Misty and Rob hadn’t even tried to open the door by turning the knob—they’d gone directly to breaking the door down, and thus the broomstick wasn’t doing much good at the moment.

Oscar had the light flashing from behind the Fresnel lens—shockingly fast work!—and Teddy counted the dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dots he was somehow making with the lantern. But the door was weakening, and even the SOS might not help them—the Coast Guard, even if they saw it, wouldn’t be able to get to the lighthouse in time, would they?

When the door gave way, Teddy stumbled back and fell to the ground as Rob barged in.

Scrambling to her feet, Teddy ran around to the side of the lantern room where the light was the brightest, facing away—out into the dark storm—and hoping Rob would be blinded if he came after her.

But before she got far, strong hands grabbed her and threw her to the ground. Teddy hit her head on the glass wall, and saw stars along with the lightning blossoming in the night sky.

“Get out of there now or I’ll shoot her,” Misty ordered Oscar, brandishing her weapon. “Turn that damned light off.”

“All right, all right, don’t shoot,” Oscar said. “Small quarters in here—the bullet could ricochet and hit any of us,” he added, climbing out from behind or beneath—Teddy wasn’t certain—the lenses.

“Outside,” Rob said, yanking Teddy to her feet by a hank of her hair. “Now.” She cried out in pain and moved along as quickly as possible.

Rob reached for the glass door. Just before he touched it, it burst open with a gust of rain and chill.

But it wasn’t just rain. It was ice.

And Teddy’s breath immediately frosted, hanging in the air like a dense cloud.

The world turned eerily frigid.

And that was when she saw it: the amorphous blue-green shape, billowing just outside the doorway.