For some reason, he’d lately had dreams where one of his sisters—sometimes Lisa, sometimes Kayla—replaced Jane and suffered the terrible onslaught instead, screaming in agony. He woke up in a sweat every time, and seeing it play out that way humanized the ordeal, made it more real. No matter what she’d done in the past, Jane was still a person, just like Lisa and Kayla.
His actions haunted him, consumed him with guilt. He wished—
Womp!
Tick stumbled to the ground, crying out as one of his elbows banged against the rock-hard dirt of the road’s shoulder. He twisted onto his back, fear ripping through his body. He searched around with his eyes, tried to figure out what had happened. It’d been like a wave of hardened air had slammed against him, knocking him down with a sound like the thump of a million bass drums . . .
Womp!
He braced himself as a massive surge of energy swept across the road and past him. He expected his hair and clothes to whip in the wind, but nothing stirred. He almost felt the energy . . . inside his body. As if someone had injected charges of lightning into his bloodstream.
Womp!
Tick squeezed his eyes shut. He felt a surge of heat in his chest, an intense pressure that enveloped his body, then it disappeared. Terrified, he scrambled to his feet, stumbling in a circle as he searched around him. There was nothing unusual in sight, nothing out of the ordinary.
Womp!
Tick took a step backward, wrapping his arms tightly around him, tensing as the wave of force hit again. With each surge of energy, he felt heat within his heart and veins, like a raging fever. Heat. Pressure. Squeezing. But only for an instant. Then it was gone again.
Gasping for breath, he stood as still as possible, peeking through squinted eyes, waiting for it to happen again. His mind churned, trying to imagine what it could be. In some ways it felt like the attack of Chi’karda he’d had when everything had gone crazy in Reginald Chu’s research chamber.
Similar, but different.
This wasn’t coming from him. He was feeling it coming from somewhere else.
A blast of panic shot through his nerves. From somewhere else . . .
Womp!
The wave hit again. Tick sprinted for home.
Chapter 3
A Strange Guest
Lorena Higginbottom sat in the chair where she always waited for Atticus to come home from his visits with Mr. Chu at school. Her constant worrying over the boy had done strange things to her. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. She rarely laughed anymore. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—the worry turned into utter misery, engulfing her like a horrible, eating cancer.
Her boy. Her one and only boy. Mixed up with the Realitants and plagued with a burden of power that no one understood yet. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with him.
She’d gone through all the usual phases. The denial, the blame, the guilt, the despair. She’d run the whole gamut of emotions over the last few months, and it had all come to a head this morning. When her husband, Edgar, had left for work, and Atticus had disappeared into his room to study, she’d sat in her room, crying, sobbing, a sorry sack of gloom and grief. It had taken every ounce of willpower in her body to pull her anguish back inside and hide it away. But she did, for Atticus’s sake.
With a smile on her face, she’d seen him off to his appointment with his former and favorite teacher. She’d been sitting in her chair ever since, counting down the minutes until he returned. I should’ve gone with him, she thought, just as she did every single time Atticus left the house. But she couldn’t. She knew that. She and Edgar had long since agreed that they couldn’t exist in a constant state of terror and fear. Atticus needed time alone, time to grow, time to learn how to bear his burden. Still, he was only a child, only fourteen . . .
A rattling sound from the back of the house snapped her mind alert.
Like a shot of pure caffeine, adrenaline rushed through her body, and she jumped out of the chair before any thought had time to form. Wondering why Atticus would come home the back way—and feeling the slightest fear that it might not be him—she ran out of the room and down the hallway, into the kitchen, toward the door leading to the patio behind their home. The rattling noise continued. Someone was pulling at the knob, twisting it back and forth in vain because it was locked.
The trickle of fear turned into a gush; she pulled up just short of the patio door.
“Atticus?” she called out.
No answer. But whoever was out there quit trying to open the door.
“Atticus?” she repeated, louder.
Still no answer.
The door had a large window, currently covered by the drawn yellow curtain. Alarmed, she grabbed the side of the stiff material and pulled it back an inch, peeking outside.
The thing standing on her back patio wasn’t her son.
When his house finally came into view, Tick somehow found another burst of energy and ran faster. The loud thumps and waves of energy had stopped, but he couldn’t rest until he made sure everything was okay at home. A fresh spurt of panic squeezed his insides, and he picked up the pace yet again.
He was only two houses away when he noticed a car coming down the road from the other direction. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that it was his dad’s.
Then his heart almost stopped beating altogether when the car suddenly accelerated, the engine screaming, the tires squealing. The car swerved off the road, over the curb, and onto his front lawn. It shot across the grass until it reached the driveway, picking up speed instead of slowing down.
Tick watched in horror as the car slammed into the garage door with a thunderous crunch, then disappeared in a pile of shredded wood and dust.
In her head, Lorena couldn’t reconcile the thing she saw through the door’s window with any semblance of reality she knew or felt. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie—a man-shaped, shimmering ghost made out of clear liquid, its rippled surface glistening. The face had no features, but it seemed to be looking at her all the same.
For a bare instant, she actually considered unlocking and opening the door. The creature seemed so harmless, so peaceful, the water rippling like the gentle, lapping waves of a Caribbean beach. But her hand froze halfway to the latch, and a shudder of fear snapped her out of her hypnotized state. Her mind kicked into gear, reminding her that creatures made out of water were not normal, that although she’d lived a life believing only in things that were normal, not supernatural, seeing this creature probably changed things forever.