PRESENT DAY

She awoke with a gasp, her heart thudding, the blood beating in her own ears like the school’s drum line. Coated in sweat, she laid her head back down on her pillow and tried to remember her dream, but it was already fading into nothingness. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t recall even the faintest of details.

Just fire and water.

Nights were the worst. Especially those moments where she was almost-asleep-but-not-quite-awake, where she could get lost in the nether region of her dreams. There in that abyss, she was suddenly limitless—unafraid, unstoppable, all-powerful like a super hero—in a world without the constraints of time or space. Until the nightmares started about a fire, shadows, and water.

Thud! Something hit her window frame and shattered her reverie. Wendy was once again a mere seventeen-year-old, scared and vulnerable. Coldness permeated her semi-dark room, sending goose bumps across her arms and perpetuating the feeling that she was being watched…hunted.

Wendy sat frozen in her own bed and stared in terror at the shadow moving on the wall. She berated herself for leaving the curtains open and leapt toward the window to close them. Her heart beat loudly in her chest as she scanned her room for movement.

Nothing.

She heard a soft clicking noise and a ringing. Gathering her courage, she pulled open one white curtain—just an inch—and looked outside to see what the noise was. The front yard was empty. Just as quickly, she let the curtain fall back in place, the clinking of the metal rings against the rod making her already frayed nerves worse.

The medicine she’d been on hadn’t been working as well as she’d hoped. She took the orange bottle labeled Clozapine from her dresser drawer and shook the white pill into her palm. Something her doctor had prescribed to help with her “momentary spells,” as her adoptive mother called them.

No. She didn’t want this. She put the pill back in the container and shut it back in her drawer.

Mary and George Owen, with their young son John, had found her washed up on a beach, half-dead and with no recollection of where she’d been or what had happened to her. She knew only her name. That family didn’t give up on her: they paid for her hospital care, and when no one came forward to claim her, they fostered her until they were able to officially adopt her. That had been a blissful seven years ago, and other than the vivid nightmares and the occasional hallucinations, she had been able to lead a normal teenage life.

Too wired to sleep, she left her room and tiptoed down the hall to check on her sixteen-year-old brother. John was splayed across his bed, one foot sticking out from the covers and dangling off the mattress. Undisturbed, he slept. Not plagued by her malady or fears.

Out of habit, she crossed his bedroom and closed his blue curtains, cutting off the moonlight. The rest of the house was next. She checked all the doors and locks before heading back to her room.

Not once did she hear the ringing again, but the beeping was another matter. She tried to follow the sound, but it seemed to be coming from outside the house. Her mouth was dry with fear.

It was probably only a handheld video game that John had left on, and the battery was slowly dying.

Dressed only in her long nightshirt and shorts, she went to the back kitchen door, where the sound seemed to get progressively faster the closer she got to the door. The thud-thud-thud of her heartbeat kept pace with the beep-beep-beep of the noise. Slowly—painfully slowly—she unlocked the deadbolt and pressed her ear to the door.

The noise was just on the other side of the door.

She tried to peek out the kitchen curtain, but she didn’t see anything.

“Okay, Wendy, you can do this. Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” she whispered. “Be brave for once in your life.” Her shivering hand slowly turned the handle. She threw open the kitchen door to confront…silence.

The cool September breeze blew at her nightshirt, and she stepped barefoot out onto the patio. Her fenced-in yard was empty.

A large shadow flew overhead.

She spun back to the safety of her house, terror consuming her. Wendy slammed the kitchen door and threw the deadbolt, trying to control her trembling legs and runaway heart. It took a few moments before she was able to gather her strength and convince herself that she was once again imagining things.

Wendy hurried back to her room and slid under the now cold sheets. She pulled the comforter up over her head and tried to lull herself back to sleep. It was no use. She knew she’d lay awake all night again, and would probably do horribly at school tomorrow.

She was the only teenager she knew of who was still scared of shadows.

“You’re the worst, Peter,” Tink chastised. “You almost blew our cover.” She took off the specter goggles and let them dangle from her neck. “Then we’d be back to square one—having to wait for them to show up again and lead us to a morphling.”

“I had to. The shadow was at the window.” Peter ran his hands through his auburn hair. “They don’t usually act this way. Usually they just watch. It was going to go into her room.” He looked back at the two-story brick house and studied it for movement. He was worried about the girl who’d come out into the night seemingly unafraid, and then run scared at the sight of a shadow. If only she knew.

She was right to be scared. She was probably their target. He needed to get to her before something worse did.

He walked his blonde sidekick down the road to her parked scooter. He kicked a rock out of the way and watched as it skipped across the paved road and landed harmlessly in a neighbor’s empty yard.

“But you didn’t know it was going to do anything,” Tink challenged. “You didn’t have to go shooting off and throw a rock at her window.”

“They’re bad news. You know that where the shadow appears, trouble follows. Your shadow box went crazy at her house. It’s a dead zone. The shadows are gathering here, and they’ll be back.”

“We don’t know that a morphling will come, though. They’ve been unpredictable of late, and I’ve been sitting out here in the cold all night. I’m calling this a false alarm.” Tink closed the antenna on her mechanical box, turned the power off, and stowed it in her bag.

“If it’s not a dead zone, why do the shadows keep gathering?

Tink shrugged her shoulders noncommittally and flipped the cover of her crossover bag closed. “Glitch.”

“You’re saying your machine—that you built—is faulty?” He crossed his arms to look down at her. Tink was his best friend, a little hotheaded at times and extremely protective, but she was also a bona fide tech genius. There was no way she’d admit that it erred.

“Maybe.” She sniffed, as she got on her scooter and turned it on, cutting him off when he was about to press again.

“I just can’t shake the feeling—”

“Fine,” Tink interrupted. “I’ll have some of the boys put on watcher detail for both of them. But I think we should let this one go. They have a family, so for now, they’re protected. And being here is a waste of our time. We’re sent to help those that can’t protect themselves. Remember that, Peter.”

He hated that she was right. Tink didn’t look back as she drove off into the night. Peter turned, conflicted, to stare at the white house. Something big was coming—he could sense it. And there was this feeling in the pit of his stomach that told him, no matter how prepared he was, it wouldn’t be enough.