Gaby hurried forward, blinking hard to re-adjust her eyes. Two figures stood by the fence: the taller one held the floodlight, following the shadow with it, while the shorter one stood beside it hurling stone after stone. The shadow-hound was driven further and further back, until it slunk out of sight.

“Eyes,” said a male voice, as Gaby reached them at the fence. From his height and build, Gaby knew already it wasn’t Will. His eyes flickered over to her, and he nodded briefly, then swept the whole area in front of them with the floodlight, side to side, concentrating on any shift in the shadows it picked out.

It was Nick, and he’d grown considerably since Gaby had seen him last. The Colven children tended to run along one of two models: short, slim, and brown-haired, or stocky and blond. Nick belonged to the latter group, and at fifteen he’d been downright pudgy. Kind but quiet, he’d let his twin sister do most of the talking and socializing, while he puttered in the workshop their dad never had time to work in, making odd gifts and useful gadgets for his mother and siblings. Gaby had always envisioned him as a kind of round-faced Hephaestus, taking pride in the works of his hands, never in himself.

Something had changed; that was evident at the first glance. He had grown into his size, but more than that, his entire aspect was different. With his face set and attentive as he scanned the shadows, his shoulders taut and poised for action, his long blond hair tied back, he looked more like a Norse hero than a Greek blacksmith. What had happened to give him such confidence? What had they all been doing?

Gaby turned her gaze to Julia, curious what the last three years had done to her. But she was startled to see her standing there, still with a stone in either hand, with her eyes screwed shut. Gaby opened her mouth to ask a question, but before she could speak, Julia said, with her eyes still closed, “Okay?”

“Okay,” Nick responded, and flicked off the light. Gaby blinked again in the sudden darkness, but Julia swept by her with a touch on the arm.

“Follow me,” she said, “quickly.” Gaby followed without a word, and Nick came behind her.

“We’ll talk in a minute,” Nick said under his breath, and Gaby nodded her understanding. Her eyes were still adjusting, but Julia moved forward confidently, and Gaby understood why she’d had her eyes shut.

They were skirting the edge of the cemetery, staying close to the fence. As they rounded one corner, the streetlights grew brighter, and Gaby saw that they had come around to where the side of the cemetery bordered the main road. Down on the street, several yards ahead, an ancient white van was parked. They walked until they were even with it, then paused.

Gaby instinctively scanned the ground for shadows, and saw that the other two were doing the same. “I see two,” whispered Julia, in a voice as light as a breath. “Ten and one-thirty.” Nick’s head moved to the left, then to the right, and he nodded. Clock directions, Gaby realized, and looked herself to where ten o’clock and one-thirty would be, if the van was at twelve. Across the street, at one-thirty, the line of a building’s shadow was interrupted by an irregular blob halfway up. To their left along the grass, the faintest of shadows moved slowly, no faster than a tree blown by wind, but solid and steadily in one direction. Gaby would have taken twice as long to spot either one. She wondered again what these two had been doing the last three years. She wondered, also, why the hound on this side of the street wasn’t chasing them yet. It was as near to them as the van was, less than ten yards away, but it moved as if it was still looking for a scent.

Julia leaned close to Gaby. “We have to be fast,” she whispered. Gaby nodded again. Julia and Nick looked at each other, then set forward at a run. Halfway to the van Julia looked over her shoulder and hurled a stone. Gaby’s spine crawled as she heard the yelp—it couldn’t have been more than three yards away, and they had more ground than that to cover to reach the van. She sped faster, her eyes set ahead, as if by force of will she could draw herself forward, faster than her body could run. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Julia throw the other stone. She couldn’t help glancing back. The shadow recoiled for a second, then it was after them again. It was going to close on them before they reached the van. Julia had no more stones. Gaby racked her brain for some other strategy, but there was no time.

“Nick!” Julia said sharply.

Nick, running next to Gaby, shoved the floodlight into her hands as he turned. They were barely six feet from the van, but the hound was closer than that. As it closed on Nick, he dropped on one knee to meet it, holding his forearm in front of him like a shield.

Julia and Gaby reached the van, and Julia flung the passenger door open, sliding all the way to the driver’s side. Gaby scrambled in after her as she started it up, revving the accelerator as it sputtered into life. Gaby looked back to Nick.

It was a strange and eerie sight: he was kneeling in the grass, both arms in front of him, almost as if he was embracing the air, with shadow spilling over him and a strangled snarling sound coming from somewhere. Then the strain in his shoulders broke; he rose swiftly, his foot pressing down on something near the grass, with a horrible cracking sound. Julia revved the accelerator once more, and he broke away, running toward them and sliding into the van as Julia took off down the street.

Nick, breathing hard and leaning his head against the back of the seat, said, “Slow it down. We don’t want cops.”

Julia eased off the accelerator. “We don’t want a breakdown, you mean.” Nick only grunted, and Julia looked at Gaby with a wide smile. “Hi!” she said. “Welcome aboard.”

Gaby found herself entirely at a loss for words. She looked back at Julia, not even smiling, too full of unanswered questions to make any response. Julia’s smile faded. “I’m really sorry we weren’t there right when you came. We had to go around the other side, to dodge the security guard. We didn’t expect you to be so late…” She trailed off, waiting for something, and Gaby made herself speak.

“It’s okay,” she said, though she didn’t know if it was. “I—it’s okay.”

“We should be glad we found her at all,” said Nick. “I never thought it’d work, just going to all those places and leaving notes.”

“You—so you did go around to all the likely places,” Gaby said.

“Yeah. It was Will’s idea, of course. He gave us a long list of places to try. I thought it was a little over-confident, even for him.”

“So…” Gaby tried hard to keep the tremble out of her voice, “where is he? Why did—why didn’t he come himself?” To her horror she felt tears rising in her eyes. She looked down at her lap and hoped they wouldn’t notice.

“He had somewhere else to be,” said Julia shortly.

“Jules,” said Nick admonishingly.

“Well, I’m kind of annoyed!” said Julia. “And I can understand if Gaby is too. We came all the way down the coast to find her, and he’s not even here when she appears!”

A bubble of laughter caught Gaby in the throat: here she was battling tears of fear and desolation, and Julia was annoyed at him. She swallowed away both the laughter and the tears. “I’m not annoyed. I’m sure he had a good reason.” She said it almost as a question, and made herself restate it. “I’m sure he did.”

“There was somebody he had to meet,” said Julia, “somebody very important, apparently. He left a letter for you, it’s in the back.” She relented after a minute. “He really was very upset that he had to go. I’ve never heard him swear so much.”

Gaby took a deep breath. A letter in the back. She would get that much, at least, very soon. She almost asked when he’d be rejoining them, but decided she’d rather not hear just yet. “How long were you waiting there?” she asked instead.

“Four or five hours. We wandered around inside till it closed, then just prowled the perimeter, keeping out of sight of the guards. It might not have been the best place to choose, but it was the first cemetery we saw in the guidebook, and we thought at least you’d know it.”

“Five hours?” Gaby said. “How? How could you stay in one place so long?”

Julia smiled. “We’ve learned a thing or two about our doggy friends since we last saw you. One thing is that they can’t scent very well around a graveyard. Can’t detect you at all if you’re well inside it, and can’t find you nearly as fast if you’re near one. That’s come in very handy.”

“Oh,” said Gaby. “Why?”

Julia shrugged. “Even my all-knowing baby brother hasn’t figured it out yet. We don’t know a lot more, to tell you the truth. We know how to deal with them, but not much about them. They’re definitely made to track, not to fight—that’s one thing.”

“Made?”

Julia nodded. “That’s what Will figures. He said he thought they were made by people somehow—I don’t know if he meant in a lab, or what. I’ve given up asking him to explain things like that in detail. You’ll probably have better luck. Anyway. They’re great trackers, as you already know, but they’re not attack dogs. They’re not used to being hit. Though they’re a little more used to it now,” she said with satisfaction. “It took us a while to figure this part out—you can’t hit them unless you know they’re there. Not vaguely, but exactly. You have to know where they are, and know that your stick or stone is going to connect. Otherwise it goes right through them.” She glanced sideways at Gaby, as if waiting for a protest.

“Really?” said Gaby. “That’s interesting.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “Code for, ‘I have all kinds of ideas about that that I’m not going to tell you.’”

“What?” said Gaby. “No. I do have ideas, I guess…” she trailed off. She didn’t know what exactly was bothering Julia, but she was grateful to and impressed with both of them, and she wanted to ease the tension in the air. So instead of working through her ideas silently, as she usually did, she thought aloud. “If your state of mind matters… you have to know they’re there to have any effect… that’s kind of like the way dreams work.” She lapsed into silence for a moment, not entirely comfortable with the direction her train of thought was heading.

“How do you mean?” asked Julia.

“Well, you know how you can manipulate things in your dreams.”

“Not really,” said Julia. “They just happen to me.”

“Oh. Well, some people can. If you’re having a dream that’s starting to go bad, you can change it. You just decide it’s going to be different. And some people—” she couldn’t quite make herself say, ‘Will and I’—“some people can go further than that, and change the entire shape of the dream. Even when—well, sometimes it’s more difficult than others. But if you’re managing your own thoughts, your state of mind, you can make pretty much anything you want happen.” She paused again, realizing that the distinction which was so obvious to her wouldn’t make any sense to Nick and Julia without more context. She started over.

“Will and I dream a lot. More than… most people. It’s almost like a second world for us.” She refrained from mentioning that they could also move into dreams other people were having. She didn’t feel she could go that far without Will’s agreeing to it. “It’s hard to explain, but that’s one of the things that makes us different. Anyway, the big difference between Luia—between the dream world and the real world, is that in the real world, your state of mind doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters to you, and it matters to other people, but it doesn’t matter to things. You could decide that the wall over there—” she pointed to the median barrier—“isn’t really there, and drive at it, but you’d still hit it.” She realized she was stating the obvious. “But in the dream world, it’s not like that. You could decide the wall wasn’t there, or even that it was there but it wouldn’t stop you, and you could just drive through it. If you knew what you were doing. What you think about it makes a difference. Which isn’t surprising, since that whole world is pretty much made of thought.”

“Fine,” said Julia. “I’m with you so far. But what does that have to do with the dogs?”

“I’m still working that out. Only… it makes sense, somehow, that there’s some kind of connection. I don’t know. It was just… that was my first reaction, when you said that about the dogs. That it’s like the dream world.”

“What did you call it? Luia?”

“Yeah,” said Gaby. “That’s what we call it. We just made the word up. It’s useful to have a name for things.”

“I guess so,” said Julia. “But what do you think it means, that the dogs work like the dream world? Are you saying they’re not real?”

“Real?” asked Gaby. Her definition of real and unreal was a little different from theirs, and she had to think for a minute about how to phrase it. “Well, how’s your arm, Nick?”

Nick, startled, looked at the arm he’d been cradling in his lap. The fabric of his sleeve had suffered several small tears, and there were two smears of blood across it. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve had worse. We’ll patch it up when we get home.”

“But it’s marked,” Gaby said. “If it weren’t ‘real,’ it couldn’t have an effect like that. Not on substances, not on fabric and skin. We were considering that possibility, actually—Will and I were. The possibility that they were just illusions, just meant to scare us. But then, when Hannah fell…” She let the thought die, knowing it needed no completion. Hannah’s mangled and bloody hand had proven definitively that the dogs had substance.

The others stayed silent. Struck by a sudden, shocking anxiety, Gaby said, “How is Hannah? She—made it okay, right?” Gaby had last seen Hannah Colven at the doorway of an emergency room. They had dropped her off, not daring to stop and face the inevitable questioning, the possibility of being held overnight at the hospital or at a police station. Hannah, nineteen, could call one of her older sisters for help, while the rest of them got as far away from her as possible, hoping that would keep her safe. They’d assumed she was all right. They’d had to. Only her hand had been injured, and if they each, individually, worried that the hospital might burn down overnight, they’d kept it to themselves.

“She’s fine,” said Julia. “Her hand’s badly scarred, but she’s fine. She’s living with Claire now. She won’t talk about it, any of it. Ignores you if you bring it up.”

“Well,” said Gaby awkwardly. “I’m glad she’s all right.” They both remained silent, and Gaby sensed there was something she still wasn’t getting. “So they’re real enough that when they bite you, you bleed. But they’re not real enough that you can hit them without meaning to.” She lapsed into automatic silence until she remembered that she was trying to think aloud, for their sakes. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what kind of creature that makes them. Something in between.” She waited for either of them to say something. “Does that make sense?”

“What?” asked Julia. “I’m sorry, I missed it.”

“What’s up?” said Nick at once, responding to some new tone in her voice.

“I think we’re being followed.”