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  As my shoes morphed underneath me, I started to lose my balance, and by the time I caught it, I was skating at top speed toward Zo, who had at least half a block on me. Moments later, Annabelle and Delia were skating at my side.

  “You couldn't have thought of this the last three times we were running?” I huffed. “And what about giving a girl a little warning? You almost killed me!”

  Delia flipped her hair behind her shoulder. “You're welcome,” she said pointedly.

  As I skated, the wind in my face, closer and closer to the address Zo had pinpointed as the boy's location, the sound of my own heart beating grew louder and louder in my ears. We were skating toward something, I could feel it; something I didn't want to see. Something that we weren't ready for.

  Alecca.

  Was it really her? Had she attacked Amber? Was she attacking this little boy?

  As if from a great distance, I could hear Delia prattling on to Annabelle about designer Rollerblades, but soon, my mind drowned out everything except the sound of my own beating heart and the feel of the wind on my face. Under my skin, blood surged through my veins.

  The blood runs thin.

  My heart pumped, the blood coursed through my flesh. The wind beat against my face.

  Blood. Blood. Blood. It's in the blood.

  Slowly, the sound of my beating heart changed, taking on a new rhythm until, finally, I could hear the soft, sweet sound of low-pitched humming. The eerie, almost intoxicatingly simple tune grew louder and louder with each beat of my heart.

  It took me a moment to realize that I was skating toward the sound.

  Two voices hummed in unison: one young and high, and the other so pure and ancient that just the sound of it hurt my bones. Louder and louder, faster and faster, the voices grew, until there was only one voice. That voice.

  I flashed back, seeing Amber as she'd been on the balcony: eyes looking at something no one else could see, humming a song that no one else could hear.

  The song rolled over me and got fainter and fainter, until it was replaced again by the sound of my own rapidly beating heart.

  Blood. Blood. Blood.

  I could feel my breathing quicken, and as the world came back into focus, I concentrated on not blading straight into a quickly approaching mailbox. My heart quieted, but I could still feel the blood coursing through my veins.

  Blood recognizes blood.

  “OMG” Delia's tone was almost flat.

  “What?” I asked. She didn't respond, and in the next instant, I heard the sirens.

  As we rounded the corner, I ran smack into Zo, taking her down to the ground with me as I fell. She didn't move, and for the longest time, we just lay there, our limbs entangled and our eyes locked on the ambulance in the driveway.

  “No,” Zo said finally, her voice calm and stubborn. “We can still make it”

  My whole body numb, I followed her toward the house. She was right. The boy couldn't be gone already. I'd heard him humming; I was sure of it. The humming had only just stopped. How could they have called an ambulance already? How long had I been absorbed in the sound of the humming, the intoxicating rush of my own blood?

  The moment Zo stepped foot on the sidewalk in front of the house, she skidded to a stop, her feet frozen to the ground and her body stiff. I grabbed her arms and found myself in the middle of her vision.

  A little boy. Dark hair. Dirty cheeks. Sloshing in the bathtub, water spilling over the sides.

  Angry. Wanna play ball. Water sloshing.

  Want. Want. Want.

  Then he's playing ball, with the guys, and I am him. No water, no sloshing, just the field and the guys, and the bat in his (my?) hands.

  Come. Come. Come. The song, subtle, starts as the roar of the crowd, but soon it works its way to his (my?) lips. Come. Come. Come.

  He's humming it, and I'm humming it, and there's another voice, that beautiful, terrible voice, humming to him, to me. Come. Come. Come.

  I feel the words to the song more than I hear them, the notes themselves bearing no resemblance to anything like language. Just sound. The sound of the crowd, the swing of the bat.

  Then I'm out of the boy's body, and I see him, sitting in the tub, his eyes aimed upward, looking at something no one else can see. What's he looking at?

  Eyes. I see them now: blue, blue eyes, humming.

  A gray cord snakes out in beat with the song, wrapping itself around his body, and more follow, one after another after another. Like tentacles, they move through the air, catching on to his body, weaving themselves

  together until there's a net behind his body, and then they lunge forward.

  No, not lunging. Someone pulling. Not a net. A web.

  And he hums, and she pulls, and I can almost see her now, silver white hair cascading past smiling lips as she hums to him, hums to him.

  And he hums to her, and he's slipping. She pulls the cords, pulls them, and in the next instant, he slips, out of his body, and he's there, floating toward her, and his body's now below, sinking. Sinking.

  And then they're gone.

  I gasped audibly as I felt myself thrown out of the vision. My feet soared out from underneath me, and I landed hard on the ground. Zo stood motionless next to me, and I wondered how much she'd seen.

  Over her shoulder, I saw the medic race into the house, thought of the little boy they were too late to save, and knew what I should have known all along.

  “Alecca” The word escaped my lips. I'd known that she wouldn't stop at taking half a life force. I should have said something earlier. The thought, however illogical, was the first thing that leaped to mind. I'd had my suspicions on my way here. If I'd said something, anything…

  “Zo?” Annabelle's voice was soft.

  “We're too late,” Zo said flatly. “He's gone. He stared and hummed and hummed and stared until he drowned”

  I wished she'd swear. When Zo swore, I knew she'd be all right, but she just stood there, her mouth clenched shut.

  “Alecca,” I said again, not bothering to rise from the ground. It was so plain, so clear now. Adea's warnings, Zo's visions, the way the cords pulled the people right out of their bodies. I screamed at myself internally. Why hadn't it occurred to me before now that when we'd saved Amber from those cords, there was someone pulling them? That it was all tied together?

  And now, a child was dead. I knew, even without Zo telling me that he was gone, that he'd slipped below the surface of the water and hadn't come back up for air.

  Alecca had killed him.

  Just like she was going to kill everyone at the dance. It was what I'd been afraid of all along. Marissa, Alex, and the others weren't just unconscious in the vision. They were dead.

  “Don't you understand?” I asked the others, mixing up what I'd said out loud and the emotions surging through my mind. “Amber. This boy. Alecca. The dance” I couldn't seem to make a coherent sentence.

  “She's doing it,” Delia said, interpreting my babbling. “Whatever almost happened to Amber, whatever happened to this boy, Alecca's doing it” Delia gulped. “It's what she's going to do at the dance”

  “She pulls them out of their bodies,” I said softly. “I don't know how, but she does it. She pulls their …their “

  “Life force,” Zo said dully, parroting back the term Keiri had told us earlier.

  “She pulls their life force out of their body and absorbs the power” I looked down at the ground. “She eats it” I knew it was true before I said it; knew it was true when there was no way I should have known.

  Annabelle spoke softly. “We should go,” she said. Without a word, she put her arm around Zo. “It's almost sundown, and there's nothing we can do here”

  Delia reached an arm down and helped me to my feet.

  “My house is closest,” Annabelle said.

  Zo shook her head. “Maybe we should all just go home,” she said.

  Annabelle looked at her sharply. “We have things to discuss,” she said.

/>   “Do you think discussion's going to help him now?” Zo asked between clenched teeth. I wondered if she was seeing her earlier premonition through new eyes, and my stomach rolled at the thought. “Do you really think we can discuss away any of this?” Zo's voice was rougher, lower now.

  “If we don't figure out how she's doing it,” Annabelle said, “how are we supposed to figure out how to stop it before tomorrow night? And what if she comes after one of us beforehand? Keiri said the young have more powerful life forces, and—”

  “As long as we're home, we're safe, re-mem-ber?” Zo asked, drawing out the last word and fighting off Annabelle's embrace. “Besides, what's to figure out?”

  Annabelle said nothing for a moment, stunned, but then she turned toward me. “What did you see?” she asked.

  Zo glared at her.

  “If we're going to be walking home,” Annabelle said, taking the glare as an accusation, “we may as well get the facts straight while we walk. At least that way, we'll all be free to think about it overnight”

  Zo said nothing, and I knew she'd be thinking about nothing else tonight.

  “Speaking of walking, maybe we should, you know, not,” Delia put in hesitantly. “We'll get there faster blading, and I, personally, don't want to be out after dark when Alecca's girls-with-tattoos radar clicks and she comes to pull her freaky mojo on us, too”

  Zo set her mouth in a grim line, and Annabelle stopped moving and grabbed her cousin's arm. “You are not facing off against this thing alone,” she said. “And you're not going to stand outside and wait for it to come for you”

  Zo didn't respond, and all I could think about was what she'd seen, what I'd seen, and the fact that I'd never met a person more confrontational or stubborn than Zo.

  Annabelle bit her bottom lip and then made a decision. “It's time to go home,” she said, looking Zo in the face. “You'll stay there until morning”

  “It's time to go home,” Zo repeated. Annabelle kept her eyes locked on her cousin's, and I knew she was putting everything she had into this mind meld.

  “We shouldn't be out after dark”

  “We shouldn't be out after dark”

  “You can't do this alone”

  “I can't do this alone”

  I so didn't want to see what Zo would do if and when she ever figured out exactly what Annabelle had done to her tonight.

  “So about that totally unfortunate supernatural curfew,” Delia said.

  Annabelle looked at Zo a second longer and then nodded.

  “Let's go,” she said.

  Delia held her hands out to Zo's shoes, turning them into blades, and then we were off, talking as we skated downhill and toward our houses.

  “Take me through this again,” Annabelle told me, and because I hated myself for not saying something about my suspicions earlier, I walked her through it again.

  “It's like they're in some kind of trance,” I said. “She gets a hold on their minds, and then they're humming, and she's humming, and with every note of the song, she lashes out at them with this weird smoky string thing, and soon, they're wrapped up, and she pulls back on the edges of the string” I paused. I wasn't the fighter Zo was, but whatever I felt in the pit of my stomach at the thought of all this, it wasn't a feeling I recognized.

  “She pulls back on the strings,” Annabelle prompted.

  I took a deep breath. “So she pulls back on the strings, and it catches the person up in it and pulls them out of their body”

  Annabelle wrinkled her forehead, trying to get an image of what the process looked like.

  I tried to explain it better. “It's like their body's empty,” I said. “No one's home. Instead, there's this ghost-looking person being pulled out of the body. They're kind of transparent, but once the transparent person, the life force, I guess, is out of the person's body—”

  “The soul spider,” Delia said suddenly.

  I turned to look at her and almost Rollerbladed straight into a tree.

  “The prophecy,” Delia reminded us. “The soul spider battles the end of life and death in bed” She paused. “Well, not in bed, but”

  “The soul spider part,” Zo finished for her, not looking at any of us.

  “She weaves a web,” Annabelle said, working it out in her mind. “Of course. The Fates were said to spin the thread of life, to weave together the events a person would live. The spider, the weaver. It makes perfect sense”

  “So she weaves a web of those tentacle thingies,” I said, “and then “

  Soul spider.

  That thing I'd seen her pull out of the person's body, it had looked just like the person, and without it, the boy had been nothing more than a shell.

  It wasn't just their life force.

  Annabelle spoke my thoughts, her face going even paler than usual. “She's pulling their souls out of their bodies”

  “A soul sucker,” Zo spit out, and the phrase sent chills up my back that nearly threw me off balance. “That's just great. I'm so glad we talked about this, because now that we know she's sucking the souls out of innocent little kids' bodies, we know exactly how to make it better before she soul-sucks the entire sophomore class” The sarcasm in her voice was almost palpable.

  “We will figure something out,” Annabelle said. With a long look in my direction, she veered to the left, turning toward her house and away from ours. Why did I feel as though she was going to spend all night sorting out the most logical and reasonable ways to attack a problem involving a soul-sucking fairy princess Fate?

  Delia, Zo, and I skated the rest of the way home in silence. We paused in front of Delia's house as she turned our shoes back, and I noticed for the first time that her Rollerblades bore a remarkable resemblance to her high heels, with wheels added in strategic spots. It was so Delia that, had I not just seen someone's soul sucked out of his body, I might have laughed.

  Even though the sun was just moments away from setting, I hung behind as Delia went into her house.

  “We're going to get her,” I told Zo.

  She stared at me for a moment. “You can't know that,” she said.

  “Can't I?” I asked. Zo said nothing. “I'm descended from Guardian lines, aren't I?” I didn't let Zo answer. “I am, and I say that we're going to get her” I paused until Zo looked at me. “I promise”

  Finally, she nodded. She and I didn't make promises very often, but when we did, we never broke them. Not to each other.

  I turned to head into my house.

  “Hey, Bay?”

  “Yeah?” I looked back around.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she said simply. “Into the vision. The other times I was alone, and this time … I was glad I wasn't, so thanks”

  As Zo walked into her house, I stared after her. I hadn't felt her presence in the vision, and it hadn't really occurred to me that she'd felt mine.

  Time runs thin.

  The sun was setting.

  Blood runs thin.

  I stood there, watching, until Zo was safely inside her house, and then I ran up my driveway, just as the last trace of the sun disappeared from the horizon and night fell over the city. I reached my hand to the door.

  Time runs thin.

  Blood runs thin.

  Blood recognizes blood.

  My hand closed around the doorknob and twisted it. As I closed the door behind me, I let out the breath that I hadn't known I'd been holding.

  “Bailey!” My mom's voice made me jump. “What in the world are you wearing?”

  I followed her scandalized stare down to the “shirt” Delia had transmogrified for me that morning and groaned.

  Even in the midst of a megacrisis, real life kept right on coming.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting. I'd been here before, not that it had done me a heaping lot of good, but as long as I was standing on the Seal, as long as I was wherever it was that Adea and Valgius had been bringing me, I was going to get some answers. They owed me that much.


  “It's a delicate balance” Adea's voice was barely more than a whisper.

  Just what I'd wanted: more cryptic platitudes. In the far corner of my mind, I added “in bed” to the end of her statement, but forced myself to pay attention to what she said.

  “The mortal realm, our world, they exist in a careful balance. Our power comes from your world, your lives, and to your world, our power flows back. We weave your lives; you sustain our powers” Adea paused, and even though her blue eyes gave no hint of it, I couldn't shake the feeling of great sadness that I felt emanating from her body.

  Valgius picked up right where his lover had left off. “There has always been a balance, between life and death, mortal and Sídhe. And we, we three, were once the keepers of that balance”

  “Until Alecca caught the two of you playing tonsil hockey” I clapped my hand over my mouth. I so hadn't meant to say that out loud.

  Adea inclined her head slightly. “But still, there was balance. She went her way, took her power and her connection to the human race, and bided her time, trapped in a prison of her own making, under the sea”

  To earth I go

  From air I breathe

  I command myself

  Unto the sea…

  Alecca's spell echoed in my mind. She'd left this world willingly, and for some unfathomable reason, she'd trapped herself in the ocean.

  “And because she was trapped,” Valgius said quietly, “so, too, were we”

  That made Alecca's plan a little more fathomable.

  “Trapped by the very balance we'd sworn to protect”

  I followed Adea's gaze to the Seal beneath my feet. For the first time, I found myself staring at it. There was something familiar about the pattern etched into the stone surface, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

  Without warning, the ground beneath me shook, and I could feel the Seal shifting under my feet.

  “She grows stronger,” Valgius said. “With each soul she takes, she grows stronger, and when she grows stronger, we grow weaker” He strained to speak. “Just one soul, but so young, so powerful, and now, our words, our knowledge, are no longer ours to give. She will take another and another, and soon, she will come for us”