Mind blown, I sat there in a bit of a daze. He was going to give it to her.

“I have it,” he said.

He was going to give it to her.

He was just going to hand over the knife that would be used on Eric.

Nope. That was a big fat nope from me.

I edged out around the other side of the gravestone. The two men, mirror opposites of each other, had stepped toward Crash and Hattie. Belly to the ground, I crept along the side of the circle.

I made it to Eric without anyone but Crash seeing me.

He could have made a noise. He could have given me away. But instead he pulled the knife out and held it in his hands, balancing it on one fingertip. “Demon steel is valuable, Hattie. How did you get the demons to help you?”

I wasn’t waiting for her explanation. Time would be of the essence here. I pulled the turquoise-handled knife from my leg sheath and cut through the ropes holding Eric in a quick slash, which was when all hell broke loose.

“Eric, run!” I yelled, and the bigfoot was up and moving, like the sort-of-ghost that he was. Which was what I’d been banking on.

Ten minutes was all they had to catch him a second time. The albino came at me first, and I stumbled backward, my heel catching the edge of a grave marker set low in the ground. “Robert!”

The skeleton lunged forward, slashing at the albino, who screeched as Robert’s clawed fingers raked across his face.

I rolled to my belly, not feeling anything but pure adrenaline. I just had to keep Eric clear of them for ten minutes. We could do that.

I bolted into the dark, barely dodging the first couple of markers. We needed more protection than a single skeleton and me.

“Eric!” I tried to call quietly, but it was hard to hear over the fire raging in my lungs and the adrenaline that made my heart pump hard enough to concern me. Like, this would be a terrible time for it to stutter and stop.

A furry hand wrapped around my wrist and yanked me to the side. I yelped, and then I was smothered in long, musky-smelling hair. “They can’t see us if we hold still,” he whispered into my ear.

I wasn’t so sure about that. Call it one of my good guesses, but if Crash could see Robert like I could, then I suspected he’d also be able to see Eric when he was playing ghostie. “Crash can.”

“Turd toast,” Eric whispered, his arms tightening around me as footsteps ran by us.

“Find them,” Hattie called out. “They won’t go far. A scared bigfoot and an even more terrified little girl. Breena, come out, you don’t understand. Without his death, I will die soon. You don’t want that, do you?”

I didn’t answer her, because she was not the Hattie I remembered. If it had been Missy out there, I would have believed it far easier.

I looked up at Eric, getting my first glimpse of him in his other shape. He looked a little like the Wookie from Star Wars. Only his fur was a bit longer, and his face was more human, less animal. He blinked down at me and his glasses drooped. His bowtie was still on too, nearly buried in all that fur.

Neither of us dared to say anything, but I knew what I had to do. “Stay,” I mouthed the word as I peeled his arms off me. I could draw them away from him. I could still keep him safe. Because Hattie was wrong.

I wasn’t afraid.

I was fed up and tired, but I wasn’t afraid, and I most certainly wasn’t a little girl to be patronized.

I crouched even though my legs protested. I pushed myself through the pain, knowing I had to for Eric. And maybe a little for me too.

I slipped away from him, circled around and back toward Hattie. She was still shouting at her helpers. I didn’t see Crash there with her, but she held the knife he’d made from demon steel.

I stood and walked toward her, pulling my own knives. “You crossed the wrong person this time, Hattie. My gran told me once that you were a bit crazy, but I would never have thought you’d stoop to killing.”

Her pale gray eyes swept over me. She put one hand on her hip, and the other pointed the demon-steel knife at me. “You think that you can stop me? You have no idea what you’ve walked into. When I told you to leave Savannah, that it wasn’t safe, I gave you the chance to be safe. I can take your memories away for good. I can let you go back to the normal world.”

I stared her down. “My gran watched over Savannah until she died.” A sense of understanding flowed over me. “She loved the shadow world and devoted her life to protecting everyone in it. And I’m taking her place.”

The air around us sighed, as if the graves and those in them understood what I’d just declared. That I would protect those who could not protect themselves, so they wouldn’t end up dying early.

Hattie’s lip curled. “The shadow world was what killed her, Breena. She didn’t die a quiet death—she was a long time from dying, and yet she was taken. Early. That was no cancer that ate her away, but a poison.”

Some people would beg to differ. Gran had lived to a hundred and two. And I knew exactly what Hattie was trying to do.

Footsteps came up on either side of me. I didn’t run, didn’t turn to look at her two henchmen. “Then I’ll find them, whoever hurt my gran,” I said, “after I stop you.”

“You can’t stop us.” She smiled and tucked the knife away. “You and the Hollows, such fools to only see what is in front of you. To see what I let you see.”

She turned her back on me and snapped her fingers. “Come, boys, the time has passed.”

I breathed out as the two figures brushed by either side of me. The albino bumped me, but I’d already set my stance to hold steady. I barely moved.

Time, it had all come down to holding them off just long enough.

Eric was safe.

No one had died, which in and of itself was a miracle in my books, given all the weapons, magic, and bad guys floating around.

So why did it feel like we’d lost?

25

I found Eric still huddled up to a small child’s statue in the back of Bonaventure Cemetery, clinging to the stone as if the girl would protect him. Maybe she had, because he’d survived a night that I wasn’t sure any of us would make it through.

His dark fur helped him blend into the night, but I still found him.

“Hey, they’re gone.” I held a hand to him. He stood, took a step, and put his hand in mine. The furry mitt completely covered my own hand. “They ran out of time?”

I couldn’t tell if he was happy, sad, or what. Between the dark and the fur covering his face, I couldn’t even guess. “I guess they did. You okay?”

“Maybe. It seems strange that they would just give up. They didn’t fight you?”

I shook my head. “No.” I didn’t like that his own feelings echoed my instinct. “But the timing is off now. Midnight is past, and this”—I waved a hand at the sky to encompass whatever was going on that made tonight special— “won’t happen again for a long time.”

I tugged him forward, tucking my arm in the crook of his elbow as if on a stroll through the cemetery, just checking in on the old ancestors.

Of course, it didn’t occur to me that we’d walked right into a trap.

As we approached the circle where the ceremony had been set up, we both slowed. “That would have been bad,” Eric said.

I nodded, the skin along the back of my neck prickling, and I yanked him to the ground without really understanding why.

There was a whistle, and something flew through the air, landing with a thunk into a tombstone. The knife quivered where it stuck into the marble. My first thought was holy crap, that was a sharp knife, followed quickly by the realization that Eric and I were in serious trouble.

Hattie and her henchmen circled around us. Eric stayed on the ground.

“What the hell?” I yelled at Hattie. “Just because he got away?”

“You need to learn to read the stars, little girl,” Hattie cackled at me. “And think twice the next time you trust what you see on your phone. A little spell that spread to all your devices, and you thought it was earlier than it was. You can thank the smith for that.”

The only person who’d been near my phone besides me . . . was Crash. When he’d held me tight, he’d have been able to put a spell on the phone before I got into the car. I swallowed hard. Feish’s sadness when I’d said we’d have tea rolled back to me. Because she thought I’d be dead.

And it would be because she’d not been able to warn me about what was going to happen with Hattie. She couldn’t warn me what her master was going to do. But why would Crash put the spell on me? What did he gain?

There was no time for me to wonder too much. I still had a job to do. I just didn’t know how much time we had.

“Eric, any idea how long we have to hold them off?”

Hattie circled, and I moved with her while I waited for his answer.

“Thirty minutes by the line of the moon.” He let out a whimper.

So be it.

Maybe everything hurt, maybe I was older and slower than the others in the Hollows, but they weren’t here, and I was. “I’m not going to hold back, Hattie.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’d hurt an old lady?”

I barked a laugh at her. “You’d hurt a child you used to babysit?”

“Take the bigfoot,” she said to her men. “Do your best not to kill her.”

That was when I said a line I’d waited my whole life to say. I crouched into a fighting stance and pulled out my knives.

“You’ll have to go through me first.”

The two men came at me so fast that all I could do was stumble back out of their way. As long as I kept them busy, they couldn’t complete their ceremony. All I had to do was stop one of them.

“Eric, go!” I yelled as I took a swipe at the henchman with the midnight dark skin. A slash of red opened across his cheek and he let out a low hiss and bared his teeth at me. Teeth that were not human, but narrow like needles, as if his teeth had been filed down.

I took another swipe and another, and I realized they were just toying with me. Hattie laughed as she watched us play this game of cat and mouse. At least until my back was pushed up against a wrought iron fence surrounding one of the tombs. It dug into my waist, and I went over backward, the points of the tops of the fence dragging along my flesh and opening me up.