“Get a grip, Savich. We’ve got the Tuttle brothers, or rather we’ve got one brother dead and one sister whose arm was just amputated at the shoulder. The last thing we need is a dose of the supernatural.”

“You could maybe call me Mulder?”

“Yeah, right. Hey, I just realized that Sherlock here has red hair, just like Scully.”

Savich and Sherlock rolled their eyes and followed their boss from the men’s room.

The boys claimed they’d seen the Ghouls, could speak of nothing else but how Agent Savich had put a bullet right in the middle of one and made them whirl out of the barn. But the boys were so tattered and pathetic, very nearly incoherent, that indeed, they weren’t believed, even by their parents.

One reporter asked Savich if he’d seen any ghouls and Savich just said, “Excuse me, what did you say?”

Jimmy Maitland was right. That was the end of it.

Savich and Sherlock played with Sean for so long that evening that he finally fell asleep in the middle of his favorite finger game, Hide the Camel, a graham cracker smashed in his hand. That night at two o’clock in the morning, the phone rang. Savich picked it up, listened, and said, “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

He slowly hung up the phone and looked over at his wife, who’d managed to prop herself up on her elbow.

“It’s my sister, Lily. She’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good.”

2

Hemlock Bay, California

Bright sunlight poured through narrow windows. Her bedroom windows were wider, weren’t they? Surely they were cleaner than this. No, ait, she wasn’t in her bedroom. A vague sort of panic jumped her, then fell away. She didn’t feel much of anything now, just a bit of confusion that surely wasn’t all that important, just a slight ache in her left arm at the IV line.