He nodded.

“Something’s going to change,” I said.

He nodded again, and we went silent once more.

Sometime between eleven thirty and midnight, a scream erupted from the older child’s room.

Yardly and I both looked up, blinking.

“Kat,” he said.

“What the hell,” I muttered.

A few seconds later, the little girl started screaming, too, that same painfully high-pitched tone I’d heard the night before.

And then Megan started screaming, too.

“Dammit!” Yardly said. He drew his gun and was a step behind me as I pushed open the door to Joey and Tamara’s room.

Megan was crouched in the circle of salt, swaying. The lights were flickering on and off. As I came in, Joey sat up with a wail, obviously tired and frightened.

I could see something in the circle with Megan, a shadow that fled an instant after the lights came up, slower than the rest. It was about the size of a chimpanzee and it clung to her shoulders and waist with indistinct limbs, its head moving as if ripping with fangs at her face.

Megan’s expression was twisted in pain and fear. I didn’t blame her. Holy crap, that was the biggest boogeyman I’d ever seen. They usually weren’t much bigger than a raccoon.

“Meg!” Yardly screamed, and started forward.

I caught his arm. “Don’t break the circle!” I shouted. “Get the kids out of here! Get the kids!”

He only hesitated for a second before he seized Tamara and Joey and hauled them out of the room, one under each arm.

I went to the edge of the circle and debated what to do. Dammit, what had this thing been eating? If I broke the circle, it would be free to escape-and it was freaking supercharged on the dark spiritual equivalent of adrenaline. It would fight like hell to escape and come back the next night, bigger and hungrier than ever.

Nasty as the thing was, Megan still ought to be able to beat it. She was a sensitive, feeling the emotions and pieces of the thoughts of others thanks to a naturally developed talent, something that would manifest as simple intuition. It would mean that she would have developed a certain amount of defensive ability, just to keep from going nuts in a crowd.