Town was creepy at night.
It was always a little weird, since everything shut down around nine and the only two stop lights in town switched to a single blinking yellow light. But with the addition of blown-out windows and the abandoned cars, it looked more like a set from the zombie apocalypse. Lucia kept expecting someone to lurch out of one of the dark storefronts and moan at them.
“I wonder if my power could sense zombies,” she said.
Aaron lay on his bed, fighting the worst headache he’d had in weeks.
The vision was still a jumble in his head, but he’d sorted out the gist of it. The girl from the school needed his help. He’d seen her hiding in dark places, fleeing from shadow to shadow. An overwhelming aura of fear drenched every image, every sound and scent. That, and a sense of loneliness so intense it burned like a physical pain.
What he didn’t know was how to find her.
Molly stared.
Somewhere through the deafening panic, she found a thread of sanity. “You’re my grandmother,” she said. It was an idiotic thing to say, but finding her voice seemed to jumpstart her brain.
“Yes, dear,” she said. The words sounded right, but the woman at the table was anything but grandmotherly. For one thing, she wasn’t nearly old enough. Evelyn Lakefield should have been in her seventies, and this woman barely looked old enough to be her mother. The resemblance to that thirty-year old photograph was uncanny. Identical, except for a few slight signs of aging: crow’s feet around her eyes and a crease over her nose that suggested a permanent frown. A few stray white hairs. And not a trace of frailty, either in her poise or in the sharp, knowing glimmer in her eyes.
