I either moved the phone away from my ear or risked losing an ear drum.

“Get the hell out of the house. Now,” Gloria yelled, and Gloria never yelled.

“What? Why?”

I took another bite of my sandwich. I’d been standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what I could do—if anything—in the event that the police really did have my confession on tape. Call a lawyer, maybe? Make arrangements for Winston?

“You have company coming,” Gloria said. “You need to get out of the house.”

“I want to finish my sandwich. Is that okay?”

“Move, move, move!” Gloria barked like a drill sergeant. “You’ve only got minutes.”

“Is this a long trip? Do I need to pack?”

“Forget your clothes. You can’t let them catch you. You have somewhere else to be.”

My skin shivered. “You found her.”

“But that won’t mean anything if you don’t get out of that house!” Gloria kept screaming.

I dropped the sandwich and grabbed my keys.

“Leave your car,” Gloria said. “I’ll meet you where you met Brinkley last. And leave the dog.”

With this final warning she disconnected the line. The place I met Brinkley? She must’ve meant the trail behind my house. I heard sirens in the distance and I about shit myself. Those sirens might not have had anything to do with me, it could’ve been a fire for all I knew, but it was motivation enough to drop the keys and run for the back door.

I was almost out the kitchen door when I saw Winston lying in a heap of wrinkles by his food dish. Dinner wasn’t for another two hours but he was very patient when it came to food. The sirens grew louder and I knew I should be running, but I couldn’t leave him.

“Gloria’s going to kill me,” I said, scooping his chubby butt up. I ran out the back door, cut through the yard and hit the trail at full speed.

It wasn’t easy running with forty pounds of pug pressed against my chest. Winston didn’t appreciate it either, all his huffing and wheezing told me so. I apologized to him a million times explaining that I couldn’t rely on the FBRD or the local police to feed him. They would’ve taken him for evidence for all I knew.

We had to stick together, for better or worse.

I traveled much farther down the trail than Ally and I had until I saw Gloria’s car. My legs and lungs were on fire and my biceps threatened to give out on the pug, but we made it.

I had to balance Winston in one shaky arm while I opened the back door and put him in the car. I fell into the front seat panting. “God, I need to work out more. Lift weights, anything.”

“I knew you were going to bring that damn thing,” she said, throwing the car in reverse and speeding away before I even had the door shut.

“I couldn’t leave him.” I whined. “He’s my baby.”

“Well who’s going to take care of him while you’re off saving the world?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

I gave her a pouty lip.

“Honey, you don’t want to leave your baby in my care,” she said. “I disappear into my head for days at a time. I might come out to find that he’s died of starvation or pissed on my floor.”

I chewed my lip nervously. “Maybe Lane will watch him. We’re dating now. I think.”

Gloria didn’t respond.

“So where are we going?”

“Somewhere they won’t look,” she said.

“They have to know I’m not home if they know what I said over breakfast. They’re probably following you instead.”

“Where is your cell phone?” Gloria asked.

I showed it to her. Her response was to snatch it from my hand and throw it out of her window. It hit the pavement with a sickening crack.

“Oh my god,” I screamed, my head out the window. “I had a million pictures.”

“Cell phones are traceable,” she said.

“And my contacts.”

“You had to ditch it.”

“Then why did you let me take it to St. Louis?” I asked.

“I forgot,” Gloria said.

I must have looked cynical. Gloria snorted.

“Contrary to popular belief, I am human.”

“You’re saving my ass now. That’s what counts,” I said, but I was pretty irritated. “So where’s Ally?”

“I’ll show you,” she said.

During the drive, I made another attempt to use the shocky thing. After all, I might need that trick soon. When I failed to change my vision or go electric, I asked Gloria a few questions for ideas. She hypothesized that it was connected to emotions, a stress response. So I tried to think of things that made me sad, and when that didn’t work, angry. Neither worked.

By the time we pulled up at Lane’s comic bookstore, I’d accomplished nothing.

I hit the floorboard of her car. “Jesus Christ, Gloria. This place isn’t exactly secret. It’s attached to my office.”

“No one is watching right now,” she said. “And we’ll only be here for a little while.”

We entered the store and Lane knew immediately something was up. I kept spastically looking over my shoulder until I put a fat blob of pug in his arms.

“What happened?” He ushered his two regulars—the only current patrons—out the door and locked it. He flipped the sign to read CLOSED.

“You know all that stuff I told you over breakfast?” I asked. “My house is bugged and so now that’s all on tape. Like police tape.”

I let that settle in.

“I’m pretty much running from the law,” I added, tugging my ponytail. “For, like, the rest of my life.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“It wasn’t my idea.” I pointed at Gloria who wandered the store. My cheeks burned a little hotter. “You could get in trouble for aiding me, you know.”

He smirked. “I’ve always had a problem with authority. We have that in common.”

I was blushing so hard I thought my head might explode. “About earlier—”

He stopped me. “I get it. We’ll take it slow.”

“Oh God,” I said. “Like no sex?”

“I need a minute to decide what I’m comfortable with and what I’m not,” he said. “I’m not saying no.”

I opened my mouth to argue that depriving me of sex would not be his best approach in securing fidelity—but he pointed at Gloria.

“Go talk to her and find out what’s going on,” he said, nudging me with a smile. “I’ll watch the pug.”

“But are we okay?” I asked him.

“We’re okay.”

I kissed his cheek. Then set off to corner Gloria at the anime display case. She looked particularly interested in the girl with a big sword and pink hair.

“Is that what you want Santa to bring you this year?” I read the box. “A Juko doll?”

Gloria jumped, jittery. I recognized her behavior.

“How much caffeine have you had?”

“Too much,” she said. She must have been pushing herself hard to get the answers Ally and I asked her for. To Gloria, this meant no food or sleep, for however long it took. I’d seen her emerge from a pitch black room after days of silence and drink a gallon of soda straight from the bottle. The caffeine scattered her focus enough to cut off the visions. “About Ally—”

She shifted the sketchbook under her arm as if it were a burden to hold. I didn’t realize she’d carried it in from the car. I was too busy hefting around the pug.

She flipped open the book. “This is it.”

The page was nothing but a black charcoal smudge across the entire page. It might as well have been blank.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Darkness,” Gloria said, concerned. “Ally’s future is darkness.”

My heart pounded. “She’s dead?”

“Not yet.”

Yet, yet. Gabriel’s words came back to me. She isn’t harmed yet.

Gloria flipped through several sheets colored solid black. “She’s here, somewhere right here.”

The following five pages were various aspects of downtown. The river, the buildings, the church bells.

“Not here in the office,” Gloria said, turning the page. Clearly she was irritated that I wasn’t as perceptive as she was. “But she’s close.”

I was thinking hard and chewing my lips.

“She was coming back to talk to the police,” she added.

“You saw that in your vision?” I asked.

“I got a call from her brother,” she said. “He’s driving down from Chicago to represent you and Ally. Ally told him she’d found the girl.”

“If fake-Brad Cestrum was pretending to be a priest, they must be at the Church,” I said.

“Could be,” she said. “I hear those bells like they are right on top of me.”

Please be alive, I thought. Please, Ally. Please.

Gloria leaned forward. “I have a confession.”

She spat the words at me as if she’d been holding her breath.

“I hear people go to church to confess, but I don’t think that’ll get us in,”...