"Do it, Meghan," Ryland said, his voice soft. "I promise you he's not like the others."

I dropped to my knees in front of her. She recoiled, her face filled with loathing. "Please help me," I said. "Please." I felt a tear trickle down my cheek.

She stared at my cheek, her eyes filled with confusion. "It can cry?"

"Spawn can cry, sugah," Ryland said in his southern drawl. "And you know my sense of smell. I tell you that tear is as genuine as it gets."

She reached a cautious hand toward my face and stopped. Then she went to a pouch at her side and retrieved a tiny corked vial. Held it to my cheek and retrieved the tear, stoppering the tiny glass container and putting it back in her pouch. Women. Crazy. God love them, they're all insane.

"This procedure will not be painless," she said after a moment. "In fact, you might die." She gazed at Stacey's moaning form. "This late in the infection will require a lot of blood."

I held out my wrist. "Do what you need to do." I gave Ryland a look. "If something happens, will you…" I faltered as Elyssa's sweet smile and fierce violet eyes filled my thoughts. "Please tell Elyssa I love her."

Ryland gripped my hand and stared at me. "I will."

"Move that cot closer," Meghan said, pointing at the other cot across the room.

I did as she directed while she consulted a thin tablet computer with the picture of an orange on the back of it and gathered some surgical tools which looked more akin to torture devices. My heart thudded as I lay down next to Stacey.

"Tie him down, Ryland," Meghan said, handing him thin silvery twine.

"I don't think that'll hold me," I said. "And even if it did, this cot would give out first."

"You can't break diamond fiber." She nodded at the cot. "And it's made of the same material. Do you think I'd be using flimsy garbage when I treat beings with such strength on a regular basis?"

I felt dumb, but that was nothing new. "I don't know much yet. I'm the new kid on the block."

A very tiny smile crept on her face until she seemed to realize it was there and replaced it with a grimace. Ryland wrapped the diamond fiber tight around my chest, arms, and feet, touching the areas where he wanted it to knot and watching as the thin twine seemed to weld itself together. I tested the bonds and found myself fully immobilized. The urge to panic crested like a silent scream in the back of my throat but I beat it back, trying to calm myself by thinking of Elyssa.

"I can only put you in a light trance," Meghan said, pointing her wand at me. "Anything more will make this harder than it needs to be."

I flinched reflexively as the wand pointed in my direction. She said a word and peace settled over me. Her face and the room around me dimmed to gray. I blinked a few times and light returned to the world. I stood in a bright green meadow. Sheep bleated and tore grass from the fresh-smelling earth, chewing it while giving me somewhat indifferent looks. A lamb, his wool snow white and fluffy, ran up to me, his cute little legs still wobbly. He rubbed against my knee, bleating happily.

"Hey there, little guy," I said bending down and scratching his ears.

More lambs joined him, their adorable little fluffy bodies rubbing against my legs, like wooly cats. A chirp sounded in my ear and I turned to see a bright yellow sparrow on my shoulder. It cocked its head at me and warbled out a sweet song. A group of squirrels ran to the end of a long tree limb and stopped a few feet from my nose, chittering and dancing with each other. Pure joy lifted my heart and the tingle of magic sparkled in the air. I opened my mouth to sing when a dark gray cloud blotted out the sun.

The lambs scattered, their bleats frightened and panicked. The squirrels vanished into the tree, and the little bird flashed away in a streak of yellow.

A jagged bolt of white lightning stabbed from the cloud, nailing the bird in midair and reducing it to a puff of burnt feathers. Another fork of lightning engulfed the large oak tree where the squirrels had gone. It flashed into bright sickly green flames. Blazing squirrels leapt from the tree, their tiny bodies sizzling and frying to a crisp as the air filled with the odor of burnt fur.

"No!" I yelled as I looked at the next targets of the malicious cloud. "Leave the poor little lambs alone!"

Thunder rumbled like a mocking laugh and hundreds of tiny tongues of electrical energy stabbed earthward, toward the lambs.

I shouted a word. It was one I had never heard before, sounding something like "Rathi-Da". A sparkling wave of blue energy seemed to shoot from my mouth, its force drawing the jagged bolts of lightning like magnets. It absorbed them all and settled into the earth in a shimmering sheet of azure electricity.

I stared for a moment wondering what in the hell I'd done. Then it occurred to me to wonder where in the hell I was. I didn't remember coming here. This place wasn't familiar in the slightest. I'd been helping Stacey and then—ah, that was it. Meghan. The trance. I was asleep, sort of. I glared up at the now oily-black cloud and extended my middle finger.

"My dream, my rules." I willed the cloud to vanish but nothing happened. Another noise caught my attention far into the distance. I turned, but nothing was there. A charge filled the air, the feel much different than the lightning. My hair crackled with static. My clothes stuck to my body. Pinpricks touched me everywhere.

And then there was agony.

Every cell in my body seemed to erupt at once. Shimmering red globules emerged from the pores on my skin, each one crackling and sparking like tiny red planets. I screamed for what seemed an eternity, my body arching, bones cracking and popping with the strain. My mind tried to blank out, but it couldn't. Something held it awake. The black cloud vanished, sucked away by some invisible vacuum cleaner. The tree and green meadow went next along with the bodies of the unfortunate squirrels and the frightened sheep and lambs I'd saved from ghastly deaths.

A gray blankness settled in, coating my mindscape in a dull layer of fog.

"You filthy monster," Elyssa said, her blade pressed against my throat as she pinned my arms to the ground with her knees. Blood trickled down my neck and all I could see was her tear-stained face and the starry sky of night to either side.

"Get it out of here," Leia said, appearing to Elyssa's left.

"Kill it," said Thomas, as he emerged from her right.

"I'll always love you, son," Mom said, appearing behind Thomas. He grunted and stumbled forward before falling flat on his face, a bloody dagger protruding from his back. Leia and Elyssa didn't seem to notice. Mom pulled an intricately curved wand and touched it to Leia. The flesh melted from her face and body like ice in a sauna, leaving a bloody red slush and a bleached skeleton standing where she'd been.

Mom came behind Elyssa, whose eyes were still locked onto me.

"No," I said. "Mom, no, I love her. Don't hurt her."

"We will stop them," Mom said. "David, it's the only way." She touched the wand to Elyssa.

I screamed as my true love's body exploded into flames, the heat searing my chest as she toppled onto me. Blood and ashes filled my view.

I stood outside the door. Outside the red door. Red streaks ran down the sidewalk. All the way to the street. I spun and saw a woman. Her legs were gone below the thigh, trailing bone and sinew and so much blood it painted the ground red. I raced to her and knelt.

"What happened? Where's mommy?" I pressed a hand to my throat and found it smaller than it should be. My hands were tiny. What had happened to me?

"They must be stopped," she said. "But the others don't want to stop them. They don't want to…" Her blue eyes glazed over and the last bit of color drained from her face. As the light of life left her eyes, the world faded to black around me. I stood and stared as a plastic sword appeared in my hand.

A baby screamed from far away and I was home, standing in the same familiar hallway I'd walked a million times, except now it was impossibly long. Pitch black waited at one end, bright light at the other. I ran for the light, for the screaming baby. My sister.

Justin, you're going the wrong way.

I spun, my toy sword clutched tight as if I could fight an army with it, eyes searching for the source of the voice. "Who said that?" My voice sounded tiny and childlike. I looked at the light. A dark shadow passed over it. The outline of a man with a top hat, his hands reaching for something, cast a sinister figure. A woman's screams drowned out the baby's wails.

The dark holds salvation.

"My sister is in the light!" I screamed. "Save her!"

The dark holds the light.

"You're crazy!" I ran for the light. The hallway stretched before me. The blurry family pictures lining the walls fell as I ran past, the glass in their frames shattering and cracking. I looked back. The hallway disintegrated behind me as a black void raced at my heels. I screamed and ran for all I was worth. My legs wobbled. I staggered. Excruciating pain lanced into every molecule of my body, but I couldn't let it slow me down. I had to save Ivy, my sister. I had to keep the Conroys from taking her.

But I couldn't.

A burning itching sensation caught fire in my feet and spread in a wave over my entire body. I fell. Turned on my back and stared at the vortex of oblivion churning up the hall behind me. And then it sucked me into its maw and I was falling, falling into blackness so deep I might as well have been blind.

After what seemed an eternity of floating, my body blazing and itching like I'd just rolled naked through poison ivy and then coated myself with iodine, the pain vanished. This place was silent. Not even the sound of my breathing punctuated the stillness. I tried to speak, but my attempts met only the absence of sound.

A bright light pierced the dark. It streaked from above, slowing as it grew closer, a heaven-sent beacon in the dark hells of oblivion. As it grew nearer I expected to see wings unfurl and a beautiful angel reach for my hand to guide me from this place. Instead, a familiar face smiled at me from the brightness, her beautiful eyes ablaze with love. I tried to rise but couldn't. She came to me, the brightness shimmering around her like a halo.